Tar Babies and Tar Baby Items for Sale

Detail of the encompass of Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, By Joel Chandler Harris. This 1880 book helped popularize the story of Bre'r Rabbit outwitting Bre'r Flim-flam, but versions of the tale be effectually the earth. At center, they're all well-nigh who controls admission to food and subverting the powers that be, a new book argues. University of North Carolina at Chapel Colina hibernate caption

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University of N Carolina at Chapel Hill

The tar infant story in which Bre'r Rabbit outwits Bre'r Fox is a classic trickster folk tale. Only 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 key ane: Who controls access to food and water? Or, more crucially, who controls access to food and water when the rules have been turned upside down by giant forces like colonialism, slavery, global trade and the loss of the eatables to enclosures?

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

The Tar Baby

A Global History

past Bryan Wagner

Wagner explores how hundreds of variants of this tale, passed on through the oral tradition, are present throughout the earth in regions equally far-ranging as the Philippines, India, Africa, Corsica, Colombia and Brazil, equally well as amid several American Indian tribes. No one tin can say for certain when or where it start originated, merely in the U.Due south., the nearly popular version comes from Joel Chandler Harris' 1880 collection, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.

Harris, a white announcer who worked every bit a teenage newspaper 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-former slave quarters. Entranced by this folklore, he created a genial simply stern grapheme named Uncle Remus – the stereotype of the dialect-speaking "venerable quondam darkey" – who tells these stories to a rosy-cheeked child referred to equally "Miss Sally'due south picayune 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'south either cooking his dinner (such equally a two-pound yam baked in ashes), drinking coffee from a tin mug, using a hog'due south bristle as a needle to mend his shoes, or weaving horse-collars from strips of tree bark, as his audience of one listens enrapt.

The book was a sensational all-time-seller. It was praised past everyone from Marking Twain and Rudyard Kipling to President Theodore Roosevelt, who invited the inordinately shy Harris to the White House, declaring, "Presidents may come up and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put." But Wagner warns that the "asymmetric attention" given to the Uncle Remus version "has obscured the story's 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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Wikipedia

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

Wikipedia

An archetypal trickster tale, the tar infant story describes how a fob entraps a rabbit by using a tar figure. The rabbit gets stuck to it in five places – front end and hind feet and head – afterwards mistaking it for a real 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 course, the play a trick 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 as "lively ez a cricket in de embers" to live another day.

The allegorical symbolism, rooted in slavery and its inequalities, is not hard to decipher: The rabbit is the underdog who constantly has to outwit his more powerful (only dim) master in lodge to steal his food to survive. Legally, the food belongs to the "master," but morally, the enslaved accept a correct to information technology, too. "The briar patch," says Wagner, "is a symbol of the commons, the unenclosed, unowned land that provides refuge and resource that sustain the life of the community."

Analogy of the Br'er Rabbit and the Tar-Babe Wikipedia hide caption

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Wikipedia

Today, the term "tar babe" is interpreted past many as a racial slur, and politicians have gotten in trouble for using it. Merely in its original context, it was a metaphor for a sticky state of affairs that got worse the more one tangled with it.

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

The story as well sheds lite on what Wagner calls "the impact of science on the conflict over natural resources." The crude tar-and-turpentine figure which Brer Fox rigs up and calls "a contrapshun," is a piece of technology that gets the better of the rabbit'due south "thinkin' masheen." At that place is as well an unmistakable parallel between this contrapshun and a tar fence described in Frederick Douglass's autobiography.

Douglass recalls how his plantation owner in Eastern Maryland built a tar fence to keep "hungry swarms of boys besides as the older slaves" out of his fruit garden abounding "in fruits of about every description, from the hardy apple of the n to the delicate orange of the south." Given the chronic hunger they endured, inappreciably whatsoever enslaved person, writes Douglass in a marvelously ambiguous line, "had the virtue or the vice to resist it." Only the tar debate worked. Those establish with tar on their body were deemed guilty and brutally whipped. "The slaves became every bit fearful of tar as of the lash," writes Douglass. "They seemed to realize the impossibility of touching tar without beingness defiled."

Information technology's almost like the tar infant tale come up 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 every bit 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 gummy, black material would have held special meaning for slaves who had experienced tar as a police force technology. But, of grade, there are many, many other ways in which tar takes on a special symbolic resonance in the story."

In the diverse global versions, the nutrient the rabbit is out to snag changes, depending on the produce of the region. "For instance, there 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 now Tanzania concerns a ripened field of dhurra (or sorghum). A version common across Due west Africa concerns maize, yams and beans. But ofttimes, the resource in question is non location specific. Water, for instance, is probably the most mutual resources in dispute."

The tar-baby figure changes, likewise. In some stories, it holds a cake, a bottle of whiskey or a deck of cards to tempt the hedonist rabbit, while in a Due west African version, the tar baby is a gum doll with a plate of yams in its lap.

The most perplexing aspect of this folk tale is that in many variants the rabbit is portrayed as a costless-passenger. Asked to help dig a customs well, he says he prefers to live off the dew on the grass – and so proceeds to steal water from the well. Asked to till the soil, he refuses, but and so proceeds to steal a cabbage hither and a turnip in that location. If the rabbit represents the underdog, how is he too, to use Wagner's phrase, "a selfish hustler"? Even more curiously, why is he and so likeable?

"In that location is no question that we are meant to identify with the rabbit," says Wagner. "This is something that is confirmed again and once more by the people who are telling and hearing the story. It'southward therefore puzzling that the opening scene of the story is structured in a way that makes it impossible to identify with the rabbit. The rabbit makes an understanding with others to share a resource in common, and then he breaks the agreement, taking everything for himself, leaving his honest neighbors with zip. In other cases, the rabbit refuses to piece of work, and and so steals from his hardworking neighbors, leaving them to go hungry. One might presume that slaves telling the story, for case, would have strong reasons to identify with the fox, who works difficult and has the fruit of his labors stolen from him. Nevertheless over the course of the story, the line of identification with the rabbit becomes increasingly clear, as we cheer his escape at the story's conclusion. One thing I try to do in the volume is to explicate the mystery of our identification with the rabbit, which is non, I fence, every bit unproblematic equally it has oft seemed."

It is, indeed, a subversive fob: We larn to identify non with the flim-flam, whom the system would deem virtuous, just the rabbit who ultimately has the moral high ground.

Ambiguous, layered, and rich in meaning, Uncle Remus was right when he admonished his young listener that there 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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