understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer
Fox did not understand himself. He
realized his opponent Fox was so
malicious that he couldn’t resist giving
Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he
desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit
tricked Fox, gambling that he could not
bear the thought that a smaller and lesser
animal was enjoying himself so much.
Levine argues that over the course of
their long persecution, African-
Americans took the lessons of the
trickster to heart:
The records left by nineteenth-century
observers of slavery and by the
masters themselves indicate that a