Encyclopedia of African American History

170  Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Present

a nap. He jumps into a bucket pretending to soothe his paw

but falls down the well, and Brer Fox, convinced that Brer

Rabbit is playing another ruse, and sure to fi nd out that he

is hiding some treasure, wants to join Brer Rabbit; the lat-

ter pretends to be fi shing, Brer Fox jumps into the bucket,

falls down into the well, and both his inquisitiveness and

weight extirpate Brer Rabbit from the gap. In “Th e False

Message, Take My Place,” the Rabbit was caught by a man

and is hanging in a small bag at the end of a tree branch. But

he soon convinces the Wolf to take his place so that the lat-

ter may reach Heaven faster. Th e message here is that access

to Heaven has to be deserved.

According to Michael P. Carroll, the binary personality

of the trickster oscillates between the image of “clever hero”

and the one of “selfi sh buff oon.” Th is association of antago-

nistic characteristics illustrates the ambivalent behavior

that the trickster is liable to opt for. Th is is a contrasting but

seemingly complementary binary pattern. Brer Rabbit in-

validates social prejudices, such as negation toward African

American culture, a process that is already embodied and

launched by the tale itself.

See also: Africanisms; Animal Trickster Stories; Black Folk

Culture

Valerie Caruana-Loisel

Bibliography

Carroll, Michael P. “Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and the Trickster: A New

Perspective upon an Old Problem.” American Ethnologist 8,

no. 2 (1981):301–13.

Carroll, Michael P. “Th e Trickster as Selfi sh Buff oon and Cultural

Hero.” Ethos 12, no. 2 (1984):105–31.

Cumberdance, Daryl. 400 Years of African American Folktale from

My People. New York: Norton, 2002.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Lon-

don: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (1917–2000) was born on

June 17, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, to a former schoolteacher

and the son of a runaway slave. When she was a young

child, her family moved to the South Side of Chicago, the

city that infl uenced Brooks’s work throughout her career.

By the age of 13, she had published her fi rst poem, and as

a young adult, Brooks corresponded with some of the most

character is indeed able to change his appearance or his
voice or even become invisible in order either to mislead
others or to protect himself. Brer Rabbit can also take an-
other’s identity and pretend to be someone else. Th e trick-
ster tale can be considered as a contrapuntal type of answer
to the quandary of invisibility and of nonrepresentation.
Indeed, Brer Rabbit precisely illustrates the way one might
use prejudices’ face values such as symbolic invisibility and
nonrepresentation in order to achieve one’s goals. Brer Rab-
bit also relies on his victims’ vices in order to lure them.
For instance, in “Some Are Going, and Some Are
Coming,” the Rabbit traps the Fox by revisiting on him the
blurring vision he was just trapped by at the bottom of a
well. He targets the Fox’s gluttony. In “Brer Rabbit Earns a
Dollar a Minute,” the trickster bets on the Bear’s belief in
getting money eff ortlessly. In “Brer Rabbit Falls Down the
Well,” the eponymous character’s laziness leads him to act
as if he had been hurt by a briar in order to be able to take

Artist’s rendition of Brer Rabbit of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle
Remus stories, 1899. (Library of Congress)

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