Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation

Step inside the cabin on a stormy night. An old man sits beside a curious boy, and the rain hammers the roof as the fire burns low. This is Uncle Remus, and he has stories to tell. Over seventy tales unfold through the voices of four enslaved storytellers: Uncle Remus, Aunt Tempy, Brother John, and Honey. Here is Brother Rabbit, the trickster who outwits every creature in the Briar Patch. Here are origin myths explaining why the possum's tail is bare and the terrapin's shell is cracked. Here are ghost stories to make the candle flicker. Harris captured something vanishing: the oral traditions of African-American folklore, the wit and wisdom passed down through generations, rendered in dialect that has provoked debate for over a century. These are the tales that inspired Mark Twain, that Zora Neale Hurston mined for her own work, that gave American literature its most enduring trickster. Read them as cultural artifact, as colonial document, as entertainment, or as window into a world where the clever and the powerless survive through cunning alone. They remain unsettling, essential, unforgettable.