David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

the doll and escapes. Fox is defeated.
Rabbit sits cross-legged on a nearby log,
triumphantly “koamin’ de pitch outen his
har wid a chip.”
Trickster tales were wish fulfillments
in which slaves dreamed of one day
rising above their white masters. But as
the historian Lawrence Levine writes,
they were also “painfully realistic
stories which taught the art of surviving
and even triumphing in the face of a
hostile environment.” African-
Americans were outnumbered and
overpowered, and the idea embedded in
the Brer Rabbit stories was that the
weak could compete in even the most
lopsided of contests if they were willing
to use their wits. Brer Rabbit