The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story
An archetypal trickster tale, the tar baby story describes how a fox entraps a rabbit by using a tar figure. The rabbit gets stuck to it in five places – front and hind feet and head – after mistaking it for a real person and pummeling it for not replying to his polite greetings. Trapped but tactical as always, the rabbit begs the fox to roast, hang, skin or drown him but please not to throw him into the briar patch. Of course, the fox 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 (but dim) master in order to steal his food to survive. Legally, the food belongs to the “master,” but morally, the enslaved have a right to it, too. “The briar patch,” says Wagner, “is a symbol of the commons, the unenclosed, unowned land that provides refuge and resources that sustain the life of the community.”
Today, the term “tar baby” is interpreted by many as a racial slur, but in its original context, it was a metaphor for a sticky situation that got worse the more one tangled
The meanings in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” range from a simple bit of moral advice about not losing one’s temper and not having too much pride to complex interpretations from mythology, folklore, psychology, and sociology.
On one level, the clever rabbit is an obvious persona for the black slave; inventive, sly, wise, and successful, the physically inferior rabbit inevitably triumphs over the strong, slower, more stupid animals, especially Brer Fox, a worthy opponent, as seen in this story. In Brer Rabbit’s world, the weak at least have a chance. The story of the tar-baby, however, offers an interesting variation on the idea of the slave’s identification with Brer Rabbit, for the rabbit demands respect from the black tar-baby as the whites expected it from the blacks. This role reversal lets the reader turn against Brer Rabbit and root for the silent tar-baby. In the conclusion, however, the reader once again applauds Brer Rabbit and his clever escape.
“The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” is not only an entertaining fable for children but also an insightful glimpse into the history, psychology, and folklore of plantation slaves. The lines between black and white, good and evil, comedy and tragedy are blurred and changing. Brer Rabbit, hero and rogue, and Brer Fox, villain and benefactor, meet before the silent audience of the tar-baby (whose role is also ambiguous), shift roles, and rearrange themselves again into the traditional, unresolved conflict between the strong and the clever, the powerful and the powerless.
Story Origin:
- THE WONDERFUL TAR-BABY STORY, was written by Joel Chandler Harris, in 1881. Derived from West African folklore, the tar baby story had become a fundamental part of the African American oral tradition by the time Harris heard it while growing up on a Georgia plantation. In numerous forms it would exert a lasting effect on American culture generally. As a trickster who outwits more powerful adversaries, Brer Rabbit influenced familiar cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny.