Br’er Rabbit

Also Known As: also Brer Rabbit, Brother Rabbit; Buh Rabbit in the Gullah tellings of the Georgia coast, Compair Lapin in Louisiana Creole; “Br’er” is a spoken contraction of “Brother”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: African American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He wins every contest that can be settled by talking and loses most of the ones that cannot.
Role in Mythos: He is the small, unarmed, perpetually outmatched neighbour who survives a world of fox, wolf and bear by making them do his thinking for him.
Relation to Humans: The people who told these stories were enslaved and their children were not, and in both generations the rabbit stood in for the teller rather than for anything worshipped. Nobody prayed to him; they laughed at him, learned from him, and understood exactly who the bear was meant to be.

He comes down the big road at a pace the storytellers spell out rather than describe, lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity, sassy as a jaybird. Ahead of him something small is standing in the dust where nothing small should be standing. It has a hat on. It does not move. He stops on his hind legs, astonished, and does the one thing that will ruin his morning: he says good morning to it, and waits for an answer.

The thing in the road is tar mixed with turpentine, and Brer Fox is lying low in the bushes watching the whole performance. Brer Rabbit remarks on the weather. Nothing. He asks after its health in a phrase nobody has ever satisfactorily translated, whether its symptoms seem to segashuate. Nothing. He offers to shout, in case it is deaf. He announces that it is stuck up and that he intends to cure it. Then he hits it, and his fist stays where he put it, and the tar takes his other hand, and then his feet, and then, because he cannot stop, his head. Brer Fox strolls out of the bushes looking as innocent as a mockingbird and laughs until he cannot laugh any more.

That scene is the most travelled few minutes in American folklore, and the rabbit at the centre of it is the most travelled character. He is a rabbit the size of a rabbit who lives among neighbours the size of neighbours, and the tales treat this as unremarkable. Brer Fox keeps a house and a garden. Brer Bear has a temper and no imagination. Brer Wolf digs a spring in a dry season and guards it. Miss Meadows and the girls keep a porch worth showing off on. Into this settled, mannered, faintly suburban animal world walks a creature with no claws, no size and no allies, whose entire arsenal is that he talks better than anyone else and knows it.

His people came across the Atlantic. The hare who outwits the lion is one of the oldest working figures in the folklore of Bantu-speaking southern and central Africa, and Anansi the spider is his Akan cousin from further west; both crossed in the holds of slave ships and both went on being told. Florence Baer’s source study of the Uncle Remus corpus found roughly two-thirds of the tales tracing to African originals, with a smaller number drawn from European and Native American traditions and reworked to fit. Emily Zobel Marshall has traced how differently the two cousins fared in the New World: Anansi kept his swagger in Jamaica, while the rabbit was gradually combed, softened and handed to children.

The combing was done in Georgia, and it has a name and a date. Joel Chandler Harris, a white journalist at the Atlanta Constitution, published “The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus” on 20 July 1879, and the book followed in 1880 as *Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings*, thirty-four tales wrapped in a plantation frame. Harris did not invent any of it. He had heard the stories between 1862 and 1866 as a teenaged printer’s apprentice at Joseph Addison Turner’s Turnwold Plantation in Putnam County, from enslaved men and women whose names he mostly did not record, and he later admitted that the kindly old narrator he called Uncle Remus was a “human syndicate” he had walloped together out of several of them. The frame is his. The dialect spelling is his. The stories belong to the people who were not paid for them. Harris knew enough to write in his own introduction that it takes no scientific investigation to see why a teller would choose as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and to add that what triumphs in these tales is not virtue but helplessness.

Other collectors were working the same ground in the same years, and their versions are the better evidence for what was actually being told. Charles Colcock Jones Jr. printed a Gullah text from the Georgia coast in 1888 in which the season is a drought, Buh Wolf digs the only spring for miles, and Buh Rabbit steals from it every night while swearing to Buh Wolf’s face that he lives off the dew on the grass. There is a lovely small moment before it all goes wrong: his cooking pot starts to scorch, and rather than fetch his own water he picks up his calabash and hops off down the trail to somebody else’s spring, the way he has every morning that week. Alcée Fortier collected the Louisiana Creole cycle in 1895, where the rabbit is Compair Lapin and his gullible foil Compair Bouki carries a name that is simply the Wolof word for hyena. Zora Neale Hurston, who grew up with these stories and did not need a frame for them, put her own field collection into *Mules and Men* in 1935.

The tar trap itself is older and wider than any of them. A South African version appeared in the *Folk-Lore Journal* in July 1879, the same month as Harris’s newspaper debut and with no possible connection to it: there the drought is the same, the animals dig a dam, the jackal fouls it, and the mountain tortoise volunteers to be smeared head to foot in bee-glue and stand at the water’s edge looking like a convenient stepping stone. The jackal treads on him, threatens him, bites him, and ends up fixed by head and feet while the tortoise answers every threat with the same flat “Do as you like.” A Jataka tale has a young prince strike an ogre with fists, feet and head and stick fast at each blow. Folklorists file the whole family as tale type 175, and versions have been recorded from the Bahamas, the Santal Parganas, Spain and the Philippines.

What saves the rabbit is never strength, and it is never quite honesty either. Pinned in the tar, facing a brush pile and a promise of barbecue, he starts begging: roast him, hang him, drown him, skin him, snatch out his eyeballs, cut off his legs, only please do not throw him in that briar patch. Brer Fox, who wants to hurt him as much as possible, takes him by the hind legs and slings him into the middle of the thorns. There is a considerable flutter in the bushes. Then a voice from up the hill, and there he is on a chinkapin log with his legs crossed, combing the pitch out of his hair with a chip, calling back that he was born and bred in a briar patch. In the Gullah telling he flings the same line over his shoulder in different words: this is the place my mother brought me up.

His powers are all one power wearing different hats. He can make an enemy’s own appetite do his work, as when he talks Brer Fox into carrying him saddled, bridled and blinkered up to Miss Meadows’s house so he can ride past the porch with his spurs in the fox’s flanks. He can turn a punishment into a homecoming. He can be sincerely, humiliatingly wrong about a lump of tar and still walk away from it. His weaknesses run from exactly the same root. He is caught in the first place because he cannot let a stranger ignore him, and the tar is only a rude silence he cannot leave alone; his vanity gets him bridled to a fence more than once; and when he meets a creature as patient as he is quick, Brer Terrapin, who simply waits, he loses. He is not brave and does not pretend to be. He steals, lies, and lets other animals take the beating he has earned, and the stories are entirely unembarrassed about this, because a hero who could afford scruples would have been no use to the people telling it.

The twentieth century was harder on him than Brer Fox ever was. Disney’s *Song of the South* in 1946 took the frame and kept the wrong half of it, and the studio has since withheld the film from home video and streaming in the United States and last released it theatrically in 1986; the ride it inspired, Splash Mountain, was rethemed and reopened as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in June 2024. Alice Walker, who grew up in Eatonton like Harris, wrote that he had in effect stolen a major part of the Black folk legacy from the people who made it. Julius Lester retold the whole corpus between 1987 and 1994, dropped Uncle Remus entirely, and put the dialect back into a plain English that lets the rabbit be funny without being a costume. Bugs Bunny is his descendant, and so, at a longer remove, is Peter Rabbit. The old road with the tar figure in it is still there under all of them, and the rabbit is still walking down the middle of it, talking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Br’er Rabbit?

Br’er Rabbit is a trickster hero of African American folklore, a small and physically defenceless rabbit who defeats larger animals such as Brer Fox, Brer Bear and Brer Wolf through talk, flattery and misdirection. His stories were told by enslaved people in the American South and carry roots in the hare tricksters of Bantu-speaking Africa and in Anansi tales from the Akan of West Africa. “Br’er” is a spoken contraction of “Brother”.

What is the Tar-Baby story?

Brer Fox builds a figure out of tar and turpentine, sets it in the road and hides. Brer Rabbit greets it, gets no reply, takes the silence as an insult and punches it, and is held fast by first one hand, then the other, then his feet and his head. It is the best-known tale in the cycle and belongs to an international tale type recorded across Africa, India, Europe and the Americas.

How did Br’er Rabbit escape the briar patch?

He was never in danger there. Stuck to the tar and facing execution, Brer Rabbit begged to be roasted, hanged, drowned or skinned rather than thrown into the briar patch, so Brer Fox threw him into the briar patch. He climbed out unharmed, sat on a log combing the tar out of his fur, and called back that he had been born and bred among those thorns.

Did Joel Chandler Harris create Br’er Rabbit?

No. Harris was a white journalist who collected the stories from enslaved storytellers at Turnwold Plantation in Georgia in the 1860s and published them from 1879 onward under the invented narrator Uncle Remus, whom he described as a composite of several real men. The tales were African American oral tradition before he wrote them down, and other collectors, including Charles Colcock Jones Jr. in Gullah and Zora Neale Hurston in Florida, recorded independent versions.

What is Br’er Rabbit’s weakness?

His vanity and his mouth. He is trapped by the Tar-Baby only because he cannot tolerate being ignored, and he is repeatedly outmanoeuvred when he is too pleased with himself to notice a trap. Against Brer Terrapin, who is patient rather than clever, his speed and quick talk are no help at all.