Free Joe (Intended Irony)
The title story “Free Joe” is a tale steeped in irony, but only some of it is intended. Joe is a slave who is freed by his master just before the master commits suicide after having lost everything but Joe playing poker. The cruel irony, however, is that Joe comes to learn that being a freed black man in slavery-era Georgia is not everything one might expect it to be. Joe, rejected by both the free white society and the enslaved black community because he belongs to neither, winds up losing everything just like his former master and dies not much longer thereafter.
Free Joe (Unintended Irony)
While the author intended the tragic ending of Joe to be an ironic commentary the unexpected consequences of being a slave emancipated by his master, the story is no longer seen in quite the same light as an exercise in pathos as it once was. Underlying the intended irony is an unintended irony that is no longer possible to miss due to an evolution in intellectual understanding of the reality of slave life. While some academic criticism has worked very hard to find intention irony in one of the story’s most problematic lines:
“all his efforts were in the direction of mitigating the circumstances that tended to make his condition so much worse than that of the negroes around him—negroes who had friends because they had masters”
It seems a course of argument doomed to humiliating failure. Plainly stated: there is really no viable means of making any argument that takes into context the entire body of work of Joel Chandler Harris in which the end result is that Harris was being ironic with his suggestion slaves viewed their masters as “friends” except under the most unusual and atypical of circumstances.
“Trouble on Lost Mountain”
Harris has much more success with crafting a tragically ironic ending with his tale of “Trouble on Lost Mountain.” The absence of the author’s troublesome relationship with the reality of slavery and plantation life seemingly freed him to put all his considerable literary talents into crafting a beautifully tragic romance that ends on a note of cruel irony almost impossible to bear. Without giving way details, suffice to say that it is this story which is today more likely viewed as the most emotionally moving story in the collection rather than complicated tragic irony that befalls Free Joe.
"Azalia"
The collection ends on a truly breathtaking note of irony:
“It is not the purpose of this chronicle to follow General Garwood to Boston. The files of the Boston papers will show that he went there, and that, in a quiet way, he was the object of considerable social attention. But it is in the files of the "Brookline Reporter" that the longest and most graphic account of the marriage of Miss Eustis to General Garwood is to be found.”
What’s the irony here? Garwood was a general of the Confederacy and throughout the story he voices many views and opinions that under the most generous of terms can only be described as extraordinarily unenlightened on the subject of slavery. Even at the time of publication, some of the things that come out of the General’s mouth would likely have been shocking to many. On the other the Miss Eustis whom he eventually marries is highly respected Bostonian whose father was notable not just for being a diehard abolitionist, but an abolitionist who stuck to his principle even in the face of norther opposition. Their marriage is the most ironic working out of the theme of reconciliation between North and South that is presented in these stories.
Southern Dependence on Northern Economics
The underpinning of prevalent theme of reconciliation between North and South in these stories is an economic dependence of the South upon the North. While it is dubious that Harris intended any ironic commentary on the issue of slaves seeing masters as their friends, it is also equally dubious that he was not fully aware of the irony that so most of the stories in this collection create a metaphorical master/slave relationship between the relative economic relations in post-war America. While the South is situated as a place of old businesses being destroyed to make way for new, the North is situated as the source of not just money, but education. The businessmen who come to invest in the South are notably not presented by Harris as carpetbaggers leeching off the needs of those who survived the war, but are instead presented as intelligent, engaging and decent people. This atypical presentation could only be viewed as an ironic statement directed toward those Southerners who—in distinct opposition to Harris—were either outright opposed to reconciliation or viewed the idea with a deep-seated and never-ending distrust and suspicion.
