Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 241all this. In the preface to one of his novels, Red Rock (1898), for instance, Page
declared that his story was set “in the vague region partly in one of the old Southern
states and partly in the yet vaguer land of Memory.” But the self-consciousness did
not prevent a slide into the nostalgic and stereotypical. On the contrary, what these
postwar tales of the prewar South are notable for is their formulaic quality and their
allegiance to a dreamland of “old courts and polished halls,” verdant lawns and
broad acres where, as Page put it in another of his novels, On Newfound River (1891),
“an untitled manorial system” ensured that “peace and plenty reigned over a smiling
land.” Implicit in this elegiac portrait of the “high times” and “serene repose” of life
in slave society was a critique of progress. Sometimes it was not just implied. In
Gabriel Tolliver (1902) by Joel Chandler Harris, for example, the reader is pointedly
told that “what is called progress is nothing more nor less that the multiplication of
the resources of those who, by means of dicker and barter, are trying all the time to
overreach the public and their fellows in one way and another.” And, consistently,
the Old South is seen through the receding narrative frames of the memorialist, the
elegiast. “Dem wuz laughin’ times,” declares one of the most famous of these elegists,
Harris’s Uncle Remus in Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation
(1905), “an’ it looks like dey ain’t never comin’ back.”
As the character of Uncle Remus indicates, these tales of life in the South entered
into dialect through the use of African-American characters and narrators. This
opened up the chance, at least, of a more critical, interrogative approach to slave
society and its postwar residues. Some of that chance was taken up by Harris. Harris,
whose Uncle Remus stories drew on African-American folk sources, knew only too
well why the slaves, with little means of open resistance, had celebrated the success
of weak but wily characters like Brer Rabbit over the stronger but slower Brer Fox,
Brer Wolfe, and Brer Bear. And in such stories as those in Uncle Remus: His Songs and
Sayings (1880) and Nights With Uncle Remus (1883), he drew a contrast that had
similar and similarly hidden social and ethnic implications. Brer Rabbit is the
trickster who succeeds by playing the part of simpleton, by assuming a deceptive
candor and humility. Brer Fox and others are the tricked, whose flaw is precisely
their belief in their mastery, their own superior power and wisdom. The best of these
tales have a subversive energy that is further informed by the colloquial vigor of the
character’s speech and the call and response, repetitive narrative structure – which
gives the reader the sense of this tale being embedded in a much larger, older
storytelling tradition. But like Allen, Page, and other Southern storytellers who
devoted them selves to accounts of life down on the old plantation, Harris could not
divorce himself from the romantic, nostalgic impulse. White Southerners of the
privileged class remained resolutely noble, in his eyes. African-Americans, during
and after slavery, had the charm and the endearing craftiness of children: children
who, like Brer Rabbit, needed some restraint, some imposed order, if they were not
to engineer chaos. The fundamental tone and rhythm of these tales were, in fact,
registered in two character types particularly popular in these stories: black men or
women so involved with old times so loyal to their memory that they refused to
acknowledge their emancipation – or the ones that did and who felt themselves lostGGray_c03.indd 241ray_c 03 .indd 241 8 8/1/2011 7:54:18 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 18 AM