An unaccompanied black adult female at a matinee performance of Song of the South is about as out of place as Big Bird at a cockfight. However, having encouraged the students in my course on black media images to see the film during its fortieth anniversary run, I felt obligated to reexamine it myself. So there I sat, surrounded by exuberant white pre-schoolers and their parents, watching as animation and live action seamlessly interchanged on the screen in Walt Disney’s adaptation for Joel Chandler Harris’ classic collection of Afro-American folktales

Turner, Patricia A.

English

University of Massachusetts Boston: ScholarWorks at UMass

Trotter ReviewVolume 1Issue 1 Trotter Institute Review Article 61-1-1987Reel Blacks: Everything is Not SatisfactualPatricia A. TurnerUniversity of Massachusetts BostonFollow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_reviewPart of the African American Studies Commons, American Film Studies Commons, AmericanLiterature Commons, and the Film and Media Studies CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the William Monroe Trotter Institute at ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been acceptedfor inclusion in Trotter Review by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contactlibrary.uasc@umb.edu.Recommended CitationTurner, Patricia A. (1987) "Reel Blacks: Everything is Not Satisfactual," Trotter Review: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 6.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/trotter_review/vol1/iss1/6economists and other social scientists. Many analystshave found that equalizing black-white educational at-tainment would do little to decrease racial income in-equality. S&W, however, appear to show that educationand wage income are positively correlated. However thefinal verdict on this is not in.There is little doubt though that the black South toNorth migration had an impact on black male wages andincome. But as S&W admit, this was a one-shot deal andits effects are dissipating rapidly. In fact S&W claim thatthe improvement in the quality of black education wasthe result of the migration to better schools in the North.They are therefore somewhat pessimistic about any fur-ther advances in black school quality and end their studyby prescribing a return to the economic growth rates inthe general economy similar to those that prevailed in the1960's as the mechanism for further reductions in blackpoverty.The major mischief done by such upbeat accounts ofblack economic progress undergirded by a few selectivemeasures is to give both the general public and those un-familiar with the field a false impression that all is welland coming along nicely in the black community, andfurther that there is no real need for special efforts such asaffirmative action to ensure that progress. This is a viewmany are all too happy to accept. See how quickly AlbertShanker embraces the notion. 7 Note also that the Shankerarticle says, "White-Black Income Gap Narrows" when itis really only the gap in black-white male wages that aremeasured in S&W.The authors of Closing the Gap call the half-emptyglass "half-full," with emphasis on the "full" and the"half in sotto voce.REFERENCES'Smith, James P. and Finis Welch. (1986, February). Closing theGap: Forty Years of Economic Progress for Blacks. Santa Monica,CA: Rand Corporation.2Freeman, Richard B. (1973). Changes in the Labor Market forBlack Americans, 1948-1972. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.3Smith, James P. & Finis Welch. (1978, March). Race Differences inEarnings: A Survey and New Evidence. Santa Monica, CA: The RandCorporation.4 Butler, Richard & James Heckman. (1977). The Impact of Govern-ment in the Labor Market Status of Black Americans: A Critical Re-view of the Literature and Some New Evidence. Unpublished manu-script.5 Hill, Robert B. (1978). The Illusion of Black Progress. New YorkNational Urban League.6 Darity, Jr., William A. (1981) Illusions of Black Economic Prog-ress. The Review of Black Political Economy, (Summer).'Shanker, Albert. Education is the Key to Economic Equity. (1986,April 6). The New York Times, p. E7.Jeremiah P. Cotton, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Eco-nomics, and Research Associate at the William Monroe TrotterInstitute, University of Massachusetts at Boston.Reel BlacksbyPatricia A. TurnerEverything is Not SatisfactualAn unaccompanied black adult female at a matineeperformance of Song ofthe South is about as out of placeas Big Bird at a cockfight. However, having encouragedthe students in my course on black media images to seethe film during its fortieth anniversary run, I felt obli-gated to reexamine it myself. So there I sat, surrounded byexuberant white pre-schoolers and their parents, watch-ing as animation and live action seamlessly interchangedon the screen in Walt Disney's adaptation for Joel Chand-ler Harris' classic collection of Afro-American folktales.A late nineteenth century journalist for the AtlantaConstitution, Harris, an amateur folklorist, set himselfto the task of collecting and preserving the folk tales that16he had heard slaves tell during his childhood. Scholarswho have investigated these tales now agree that Harris'collection represents the most significant compilation ofgenuine slave folklore available from the nineteenth cen-tury. African antecedents can be found for more than halfof the tales. The chief protagonist in these tales is thetrickster Brer Rabbit, who uses his wit, guile, and spunkto sabotage the efforts of ostensibly stronger animals inthe forest.In presenting these stories to his public, Harris em-broidered the core tales with a frame story about a docile,aged slave who spends his evenings telling the tales to ayoung white boy. It is easy to understand why Harris feltthe need to add this seemingly innocuous frame story. Hewas writing from the South in the aftermath of Recon-struction. He clearly needed to present the tales in a waythat would be palatable to his white readers. Recasting thestories in the 1940s, Walt Disney was clearly also con-cerned about reactions of his white audience.The Slaves' StoriesBy focusing on the frame story, Harris and Disney per-form a grave disservice to these tales and to Afro-Ameri-cans. During the era of slavery the trickster tales consti-tuted the largest component of slave oral literature. Theywere not merely moral or entertainment stories for chil-dren but, instead, functional narratives for the adult slavepopulation. In slave reminiscences collected by the Fed-eral Writer's Project in the 1930s, countless elderly slavesrecalled the days in which the Brer Rabbit stories wereshared among the adult slaves when whites were far out ofhearing range. While adult slaves may have occasionallyshared the tales with a white youngster, such a tale tellingsituation was the exception and not the rule. With hisquick wit and unrelenting verve, Brer Rabbit was the per-fect hero for a people who had to rely on verbal facilityrather than physical strength in order to exercise any con-trol over their day-to-day lives. In the world the slavesmade, Brer Rabbit exemplified the most successful slave,the one who could minimize his work load, maximize hisfood intake and all the while escape punishment. Brer Foxor any other enemy in the forest symbolized the mastersand overseers who were so persistent in their attempts toharness the wily rabbit.Disney's 20th century recreation of Harris's framestory is much more heinous than the original. The days onthe plantation located in "the United States of Georgia,"begin and end with unsupervised blacks singing songsabout their wonderful home as they march to and fromthe fields. Disney made no attempt to render the music inthe style of the spirituals and folk songs that would havebeen sung during this era. No indication is made aboutthe status of the blacks on this plantation. Joel ChandlerHarris set his stories in the post-slavery era, but Disney'sversion seems to take place during a mythical time whenblacks lived in slave quarters on a plantation, worked dili-gently for no visible reward, and considered Atlanta a via-ble place to set out for.Kind old Uncle Remus caters to the needs of the youngwhite boy whose father has inexplicably left him and hismother at the plantation. An obviously ill-kept blackchild of the same age named Toby is assigned to look afterthe white boy, Johnny. Although he makes one referenceto his 'ma,' Toby's parents are nowhere to be seen. Theblack adults in the film pay attention to him only when heneglects his responsibilities as Johnny's playmate-keeper.He is up before Johnny in the morning in order to bringhis white charge water to wash with and to keep him enter-tained.The boys befriend a little blond white girl, Jenny,whose family is clearly meant to represent the "whitetrash" of the neighborhood. Although Johnny coaxes hismother into inviting Jenny to his fancy birthday party atthe big house, the black Toby is curiously absent fromscenes surrounding the party. Toby is good enough tocatch frogs with, but not good enough to have birthdaycake with. When Toby and Johnny are with Uncle Remus,the gray-haired black man directs most of his attention tothe white child. When Johnny's mother threatens to keepher son away from the old gentleman's cabin, Uncle Re-mus is so hurt that he starts to run away. Thus blacks onthe plantation are seen as willingly subservient to thewhites to the extent that the needs of their own childrenare overlooked. In the world that Disney made, the blackssublimate their own lives in order to be better servants tothe white family. If he had truly understood the messageof the tales he animated so delightfully, he would haverealized how distorted the frame story is.False History LessonEven following its 1946 release, Song of the Southsparked controversy. Each time it has been re-released thesame debate begins again. Critics sympathetic with theviews of black Americans bemoan the fact that yet an-other generation of white youngsters are being subjectedto a patently false history lesson. On the other hand, Dis-ney fans applaud the film for its technological excellence.Black film scholars are accustomed to this argument; it isthe same one that is dragged out whenever Birth ofa Na-tion or other racist films are revived.This year many critics have rationalized their enthusi-asm for the re-release of Song of the South by citing it asone of the few children's films available. Certainly I agreethat good children's films are few and far between. None-theless Song of the South projects an erroneous and per-haps dangerous view of one of the most complex eras ofAmerican history. If studios are unwilling to permanentlyshelve it as they promised to do in the 1970s, perhaps theywould consider editing the frame story out and leavingthe fully animated sequences in tact. They could replacethe narrative with newly animated versions of other talesfrom the Harris collection. The cartoons are not offen-sive, but the frame story is not satisfactual.Patricia A. Turner, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Black Stud-ies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. She is a spe-cialist in African American Folklore. An earlier version of thisarticle appeared in the Boston Globe.17

Reel Blacks: Everything is Not Satisfactual

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Reel Blacks: Everything is Not Satisfactual

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