Where Does the Term Tar Babies Come From

Detail of the embrace of Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Sometime Plantation, By Joel Chandler Harris. This 1880 book helped popularize the story of Bre'r Rabbit outwitting Bre'r Fox, but versions of the tale exist around the world. At centre, they're all about who controls access to food and subverting the powers that be, a new book argues. University of Due north Carolina at Chapel Hill hide caption

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Loma

The tar baby story in which Bre'r Rabbit outwits Bre'r Play a joke on is a archetype trickster folk tale. Merely like all fables, it is a double-barreled affair, with entertainment firing in tandem with a serious message. The question the story addresses is a fundamental one: Who controls access to food and water? Or, more crucially, who controls access to food and water when the rules accept been turned upside down past giant forces like colonialism, slavery, global trade and the loss of the eatables to enclosures?

Far from being a unproblematic folk tale, the tar babe story is "a collective work in political philosophy," says Berkeley professor Bryan Wagner in his fascinating new volume The Tar Baby, A Global History.

The Tar Baby

A Global History

by Bryan Wagner

Wagner explores how hundreds of variants of this tale, passed on through the oral tradition, are nowadays throughout the world in regions equally far-ranging as the Philippines, Republic of india, Africa, Corsica, Colombia and Brazil, besides as among several American Indian tribes. No one can say for certain when or where it first originated, but in the U.Southward., the most popular version comes from Joel Chandler Harris' 1880 collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.

Harris, a white announcer who worked equally a teenage paper apprentice on a Georgia plantation during the Civil War, heard these stories from African-Americans, while spending many hours in conversation with the inhabitants of the soon to-be-erstwhile slave quarters. Entranced past this sociology, he created a genial only stern character named Uncle Remus – the stereotype of the dialect-speaking "venerable old darkey" – who tells these stories to a rosy-cheeked child referred to as "Miss Sally'due south little boy."

The post-war setting of the storytelling is a romanticized snapshot of plantation life. Ensconced in his small cabin, Uncle Remus holds forth while he's either cooking his dinner (such as a 2-pound yam baked in ashes), drinking coffee from a tin can mug, using a hog'due south bristle as a needle to mend his shoes, or weaving horse-collars from strips of tree bark, every bit his audience of 1 listens enrapt.

The volume was a sensational all-time-seller. It was praised past everyone from Marker Twain and Rudyard Kipling to President Theodore Roosevelt, who invited the inordinately shy Harris to the White Firm, declaring, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put." But Wagner warns that the "disproportionate attention" given to the Uncle Remus version "has obscured the story'southward actual range."

1895 version of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A.B. Frost. Wikipedia hide caption

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1895 version of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A.B. Frost.

Wikipedia

An archetypal trickster tale, the tar infant story describes how a fox entraps a rabbit past using a tar figure. The rabbit gets stuck to it in five places – forepart and hind feet and caput – after mistaking information technology for a existent person and pummeling it for not replying to his polite greetings. Trapped only tactical as always, the rabbit begs the fox to roast, hang, skin or drown him merely please not to throw him into the briar patch. Of class, the pull a fast one on does precisely that, hoping to inflict maximum pain on his enemy, without knowing that rabbits are born and bred in thickets. The rabbit skips out every bit "lively ez a cricket in de embers" to alive another solar day.

The allegorical symbolism, rooted in slavery and its inequalities, is not difficult to decipher: The rabbit is the underdog who constantly has to outwit his more powerful (just dim) primary in club to steal his nutrient to survive. Legally, the food belongs to the "master," but morally, the enslaved have a right to it, besides. "The briar patch," says Wagner, "is a symbol of the commons, the unenclosed, unowned land that provides refuge and resources that sustain the life of the customs."

Illustration of the Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby Wikipedia hide caption

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Wikipedia

Today, the term "tar baby" is interpreted by many as a racial slur, and politicians have gotten in trouble for using information technology. Only in its original context, it was a metaphor for a sticky situation that got worse the more ane tangled with information technology.

Wagner says this story is "key to our understanding of cultural traditions that slaves brought from Africa to America." It shows that "slaves were neither deracinated nor submissive" but learned survival strategies.

The story too sheds light on what Wagner calls "the touch of science on the conflict over natural resources." The rough tar-and-turpentine figure which Brer Fox rigs up and calls "a contrapshun," is a piece of engineering science that gets the better of the rabbit'southward "thinkin' masheen." There is also an unmistakable parallel between this contrapshun and a tar debate described in Frederick Douglass's autobiography.

Douglass recalls how his plantation owner in Eastern Maryland built a tar fence to continue "hungry swarms of boys also as the older slaves" out of his fruit garden abounding "in fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple tree of the north to the delicate orange of the south." Given the chronic hunger they endured, hardly any enslaved person, writes Douglass in a marvelously ambiguous line, "had the virtue or the vice to resist it." Just the tar fence worked. Those found with tar on their body were deemed guilty and brutally whipped. "The slaves became as fearful of tar as of the lash," writes Douglass. "They seemed to realize the impossibility of touching tar without being defiled."

It's almost similar the tar baby tale come to life, and raises the question of whether the American version is a chemical compound tale that originated in Africa just was partly constructed in America as a response to slavery.

"The fact that tar was used as a law technology under slavery undoubtedly has some relevance to the story," says Wagner. "The fox uses the tar baby to trap the rabbit, and this sticky, black textile would have held special significant for slaves who had experienced tar as a law technology. But, of form, there are many, many other ways in which tar takes on a special symbolic resonance in the story."

In the diverse global versions, the food the rabbit is out to snag changes, depending on the produce of the region. "For instance, in that location is a story from Southward Carolina in which the boxing is over a field of black-eyed peas," says Wagner. "In Oaxaca, the dispute is over chile. A story from what is at present Tanzania concerns a ripened field of dhurra (or sorghum). A version common across West Africa concerns maize, yams and beans. But often, the resource in question is non location specific. Water, for example, is probably the most common resource in dispute."

The tar-baby effigy changes, besides. In some stories, information technology holds a cake, a bottle of whiskey or a deck of cards to tempt the hedonist rabbit, while in a Westward African version, the tar baby is a mucilage doll with a plate of yams in its lap.

The most perplexing attribute of this folk tale is that in many variants the rabbit is portrayed equally a free-rider. Asked to aid dig a customs well, he says he prefers to live off the dew on the grass – and and then gain to steal h2o from the well. Asked to till the soil, he refuses, but then proceeds to steal a cabbage here and a turnip there. If the rabbit represents the underdog, how is he also, to use Wagner's phrase, "a selfish hustler"? Even more than curiously, why is he so likeable?

"At that place is no question that nosotros are meant to identify with the rabbit," says Wagner. "This is something that is confirmed once again and again by the people who are telling and hearing the story. It's therefore puzzling that the opening scene of the story is structured in a mode that makes it incommunicable to place with the rabbit. The rabbit makes an agreement with others to share a resources in common, and and then he breaks the agreement, taking everything for himself, leaving his honest neighbors with nix. In other cases, the rabbit refuses to piece of work, so steals from his hardworking neighbors, leaving them to go hungry. I might assume that slaves telling the story, for example, would have strong reasons to place with the fox, who works difficult and has the fruit of his labors stolen from him. Yet over the class of the story, the line of identification with the rabbit becomes increasingly clear, as we cheer his escape at the story's determination. One thing I try to do in the book is to explain the mystery of our identification with the rabbit, which is non, I fence, equally simple as information technology has oftentimes seemed."

It is, indeed, a destructive play a trick on: Nosotros learn to place non with the fox, whom the organization would deem virtuous, but the rabbit who ultimately has the moral loftier footing.

Cryptic, layered, and rich in pregnant, Uncle Remus was right when he admonished his young listener that in that location is much more to these fables than "fun, fun, fun, en giggle, giggle, giggle."

Nina Martyris is a journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/11/527459106/tar-baby-a-folktale-about-food-rights-rooted-in-the-inequalities-of-slavery

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