Visual Vernaculars of the First Uncle Remus Tales

Abstract

The visual images in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (1881), I argue, communicate truths between raconteurs on the page and listeners at nineteenth-century bedtimes, transmitted in folk rhythms we sacrifice when we deaccession the illustrations. Artists’ pictures “voice” an author’s shared language of an African American who has survived slavery and a Caucasian too young to have experienced it. Legends encode plantation generations’ gender and sexual politics in symbolic, anthropomorphic subtexts the boy may comprehend, but the mistress, if she listens, does not have cause to question. The same ink seemingly constitutes typography of the author’s prose, lines of the artists’ works, and the Tar Baby’s essences, integrated into descriptions and depictions. We seek to equalize history and erase paternalism when we deaccession these illustrations, but we also risk attempting to keep time with Remus, without keeping these pictures timed to the historical text itself.