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was born and raised in the briar patch, born and raised in the briar patch.” And he gets away.
    No matter how many times I heard this story as a child, I always expected Brer Fox to be able to use this considerable intelligence to help himself, rather than expend all his energy trying to harm Brer Rabbit. But my parents’ point, and that of the story, was: This is the nature of Brer Fox, and a smart rabbit will never forget it.
    Needless to say, my parents had never read these stories anywhere. They had come down to them orally and were passed on to their children orally. Since none of us ever read Joel Chandler Harris, we experienced his interpretation and the stories of our own folk culture in other ways.
    In Eatonton, Georgia, to this day, there is a large iron rabbit on the courthouse lawn in honor of Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus. There is now and has been for several years an Uncle Remus museum. There was also, until a few years ago, an Uncle Remus restaurant. There used to be a dummy of a black man, an elderly, kindly, cottony-haired darkie, seated in a rocking chair in the restaurant window. In fantasy, I frequently liberated him, using Army tanks and guns.* Blacks, of course, were not allowed in this restaurant.
    The second interpretation of our folklore that we experienced was the movie Song of the South, an animated story of Uncle Remus and the little white children to whom he told his tales. Our whole town turned out for this movie: black children and their parents in the colored section, white children and their parents in the white section. Uncle Remus in the movie saw fit largely to ignore his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage—indeed, our birthright—to patronizing white children, who seemed to regard him as a kind of talking teddy bear.
    I don’t know how old I was when I saw this film—probably eight or nine—but I experienced it as vastly alienating, not only from the likes of Uncle Remus—in whom I saw aspects of my father, my mother, in fact all black people I knew who told these stories—but also from the stories themselves, which, passed into the context of white people’s creation, the same white people who, in my real everyday life, would not let a black person eat in a restaurant or through their front door, I perceived as meaningless. So there I was, at an early age, separated from my own folk culture by an invention.
    I believe that the worst part of being in an oppressed culture is that the oppressive culture—primarily because it controls the production and dispersal of images in the media—can so easily make us feel ashamed of ourselves, of our sayings, our doings, and our ways. And it doesn’t matter whether these sayings, doings, or ways are good or bad. What is bad about them and, therefore, worthy of shame, is that they belong to us.
    Even our 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. It is full of the possibilities of misinterpretation, full of subtleties and danger. And in accepting one’s own folklore, one risks learning almost too much about one’s self. For instance, if you read these tales, you will see throughout them various things about us that we have to accept because they are true reflections, but they’re painful. My view is that we needn’t pull away from them because of the pain. We need simply to try to change our own feelings and our own behavior so that we don’t have to burden future generations with these same afflictions. There’s a lot of self-criticism in the folklore, for instance, and things that are really, sometimes, unsettling.
    Joel Chandler Harris and I lived in the same town, although nearly one hundred years apart. As far as I’m concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me feel ashamed of it. In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an