Last month, Sheila Arnold stopped by the International Storytelling Center to celebrate the launch of her new collection, “Br’er Rabbit Tales: Then and Now,” with a wide-ranging performance.
The genre, long a staple in the American South, was first brought to life for audiences in Jonesborough by the iconic storyteller Jackie Torrence, who died in 2004. But the history of Br’er Rabbit goes back much further than that, starting with the African trickster tales that enslaved people brought with them on the boats to North America.
“The stories came over in people’s hearts and minds,” says Arnold. “They didn’t have them written down. They told the stories so they couldn’t be taken away.”
Over time, these subversive trickster tales became better known as watered-down children’s fare. Br’er Rabbit’s origin story was obscured and complicated by Joel Chandler Harris, a divisive folklorist who preserved the tales by collecting and publishing stories that had, until his time, been an oral tradition.
Harris devised a fictional narrator for the series, Uncle Remus, and wrote in an exaggerated African American dialect, encoding racial stereotypes that were then made worse by the Disney film adaptation “Song of the South” (1946). Seemingly overnight, the “author” of the Br’er Rabbit stories had become a white man who presented plantation life, and by extension the institution of slavery, as an idyllic chapter in American history.
Diane Ferlatte, a storyteller with a Grammy-nominated collection of Br’er Rabbit stories, points out the absurdity of presenting Br’er Rabbit in this way. “In Chander’s stories, the slaves were happy to be slaves,” she says. “They were happy to tell these stories. Slavery was fun.”
The loss of context twisted the meaning of the stories themselves. In a 1981 essay, the novelist Alice Walker described Chandler’s work as an act of harmful theft. “As far as I’m concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage,” she wrote. “Our [African American] folklore has been ridiculed and tampered with. And this is very serious, because folklore is at the heart of self-expression and therefore at the heart of self-acceptance.”
Since then, storytellers such as Torrence, Arnold, and Ferlatte have helped to restore the genre’s historical context and cultural relevance.
“Uncle Remus is a made-up person,” Arnold points out, noting that the appropriate attribution belongs to enslaved people. Recognizing the real “authors” of the stories helps modern listeners understand their playful, inspirational messages. “Br’er Rabbit stories are important because they talk about how the weakest can still use their wit and their intelligence to overpower the ones with strength,” Arnold says. “The weak can find a way to win; the powerful just to have be outmaneuvered. Those are the lessons. These are stories about how you survive.”
Torrence’s connection to the genre was more personal. She had first heard the Br’er Rabbit stories when she was a child from her grandfather, a farmer. He had learned the stories from his own father, who had been enslaved. Torrence came to regard Br’er Rabbit not just as central to African American culture and history, but also at the heart of the American folk tradition itself.
Ferlatte, who was a close friend of Torrence, points to the practical nature of the folk stories, which were used by enslaved people as a tool to help process terrible situations.
“It’s important to understand how people might have felt telling these stories,” Ferlatte says. “They didn’t have a lot of power back then. There wasn’t much to laugh about. When they did get together, these stories gave them comfort.”
The subversive political nature of the stories has been somewhat obscured over time, but the message is there for listeners who pay attention.
“Br’er Rabbit talks about resistance,” Ferlatte says. “In these stories, if you’re not strong, you better be smart.”
This mischievous character is ultimately an underdog, and the rabbit’s little victories are meant to inspire us even as they make us laugh.
“I love telling Brer Rabbit stories,” Ferlatte says. “They make me feel a little powerful myself.”
Sheila Arnold and Diane Ferlatte will be featured storytellers at the 2025 National Storytelling Festival, October 3-5. Learn more about the Festival on the ISC website. Tickets are on sale and available here.