Brer Rabbit and the Witch-Rabbit

Introduction to an African Trickster

This Storybook is about the shared adventures of Brer Rabbit and Mammy-Bammy Big-Money, the witch-rabbit.

Brer Rabbit you probably know... or you might think you do. You might have heard the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, and you might have been to Disney's Splash Mountain which features a "briar patch" as part of the ride.

What you probably don't know is that Brer Rabbit, the greatest trickster in American folklore, came to this country from Africa. The stories of Brer Rabbit are African stories, told by the slaves forcibly brought to this country beginning four hundred years ago. For that long history of American slavery, take a look at The 1619 Project at the New York Times; 1619 is the year when the first slaves were forced to American shores.

Brer Rabbit has many names in Africa: among the Nyanja people he is called Kululu; in Swahili he is Sungura, and so on. In America, slaves from different cultures across Africa began to tell these stories in English and in English creoles like Gullah, and he became simply Brer Rabbit, or Brother Rabbit, outsmarting his fellow creatures such as Brer Wolf and Brer Fox. The white masters forced the slaves to give up their African languages, their African names, their African religions, but they could not stop the spread of these stories.

As a result, there are hundreds of Brer Rabbit stories that have been collected by amateur and professional folklorists in the United States, and most of those same stories are found in Africa as well. If you are interested in browsing through African and African American story collections from the 19th and early 20th centuries, I have bookmarked the individual stories at Diigo. Each title in the Diigo listing links to a story text online, and you will find thousands of African stories, Caribbean stories, and African American stories all bookmarked there. You will find other trickster characters in those stories too: there is Anansi, the trickster spider, and also Brer Turtle, who is quite a trickster in his own right (as when he beat Brer Rabbit in a race). For this Storybook, though, I will be focusing on stories about Brer Rabbit.

In particular, I will be focusing on stories about Brer Rabbit and Mammy-Bammy Big-Money, the witch-rabbit who lives in a dark and dangerous swamp, a place where none of the animals dare go, except for Brer Rabbit. I wanted to bring the witch-rabbit into the picture because she is the embodiment of female power in these African American stories; working together, she and Brer Rabbit make a formidable team. The powers that the witch-rabbit wields belong to the Vodun traditions of West Africa. You probably know that word as "voodoo," and the witch-rabbit also practices "hoodoo," a related type of African American folk magic.

The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus

The stories in this Storybook are adapted from the Brer Rabbit stories collected by Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist in Georgia who was born in 1848; he collected the stories from former slaves, mostly in the 1870s and 1880s. Instead of publishing the stories as he heard them and crediting the storytellers who shared their stories with him, Harris decided to make the stories his own. To do this, he invented a fictional storyteller, Uncle Remus, whom he imagined as a contented slave, fondly sharing the Brer Rabbit stories with the young white master. These "Uncle Remus" books were enormously successful and made Harris an international celebrity. He published six books of Uncle Remus stories during his lifetime, plus two books published posthumously. Harris also created spin-off products, such as rhyming versions of the Brer Rabbit stories, plus stories he made up about Uncle Remus and his fellow slaves, all of which present a sentimental view of "the good old days" on the Georgia plantations.

The Uncle Remus framing of the Brer Rabbit stories is something that many readers find repugnant, and I share that feeling. Inspired by Julius Lester's retelling of the stories without the Uncle Remus frame (bonus: Lester's book also has beautiful illustrations by Jerry Pinkney), I spent last summer working through all 180 stories that Harris collected, removing the Uncle Remus frame. You can see the results here: Brer Rabbit: Tales of a Trickster.

For this Storybook, I will share with you the four stories that Harris collected which feature both Brer Rabbit and Mammy-Bammy Big-Money. Here they are: Brer Rabbit Gets Some Smarts (in which you'll see Brer Rabbit playing his tricks), Taily-Po (a scary story, perfect for Halloween), and Brer Rabbit and His Famous Foot (which is indeed about a lucky rabbit's foot), and Brer Wolf and the Witch-Rabbit (you can imagine who is going to win that contest!).

I hope you will enjoy the stories. :-)

Brer Rabbit's Smarts

Taily-Po

The Rabbit's Foot

Witch and Wolf

The story illustrations (left to right) are by Milo Winter, A. B. Frost, and J. A. Shepherd (two illustrations).

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