SOURCE: "Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. I, No. 1, December, 1968, pp. 20-41.

Turner is an American educator, poet, and critic specializing in African American and Southern literature. In the following essay, he proposes that Harris's depiction of African Americans is largely distorted, proceeding from an idealized notion of slavery and plantation life.

Most readers identify Joel Chandler Harris with only one Negro—Uncle Remus, who blends wisdom and childishness in proportions which have endeared him to generations of white and black American readers. To presume that Uncle Remus is Harris's archetypal Negro, however, is to misunderstand Harris's use of Remus and to minimize the powers of observation of an author who recognized and reproduced physical, mental, and emotional differences in slaves and freedmen.

For example, Aaron, the Arab (The Story of Aaron, 1896, and Aaron in the Wildwoods, 1897), has a well-shaped head...