Once the stories were done we took a tour of the historic home of Joel Chandler Harris, the journalist and author who put the Uncle Remus stories to paper and made them immortal. The legacy of Joel Chandler is controversial as he was a white man telling black stories he'd heard from enslaved men.
However, he did it with good intentions. He never hid where the stories came from, or who told them to him. In my opinion he gave those black men voices that no other whites were willing to hear, and intelligence that no other whites were willing to accept. Because the Brer Rabbit stories are clever, and one would have to be extremely clever and talented to create them, remember them, and retell them in entertaining detail. Without Joel Chandler they would have been lost to time as the enslaved men who told them could not read or write (because they weren't allowed to learn, and had Joel tried to teach them so they could write down their own stories he would have been violently murdered or exiled from the south thus loosing these stories to time). 
I honestly wish more of the Old South wisdom had been harvested from the enslaved peoples and written down by someone the same way so many Native American stories have been captured and shared through time. It is a tragedy that those ancient stories have been lost because there are so few who remembered them and passed them on.
If you know or remember any of these Old South folk wisdom please let me know! I'd love to learn and listen to the lore of my ancestors.
