Dummies in the Attic

Disney is content to pretend that its 1940s feature Song of the South doesn't exist. Most contemporary critics have denounced the film—and its appropriation of slave narratives—as blatantly racist. But what of Joel Chandler Harris, the white author who created uncle Remus? Is his legacy tainted? Not if his great-great-great grandson has anything to say about it.

On the side porch of the Wren’s Nest, an elegant Queen Anne Victorian house in Atlanta’s West End, an old man and a little boy slump in lawn chairs, their hair matted with cobwebs, their hands hanging limp at their sides. But the Wren’s Nest staff doesn’t bat an eye. “They were up in the attic for a long time, being eaten away by moths,” explains Lain Shakespeare, who at age 25 is already the executive director of the Wren’s Nest museum. “They’re part of Wren’s Nest’s history—and I thought it would be a cool thing to show people.”

Despite the literary lineage his surname implies, Lain is the great-great-great grandson of author Joel Chandler Harris, who built this house and lived here until his death in 1908. The dummies, a gift from Walt Disney, were set up in the parlor to celebrate the 1946 Atlanta premiere of Song of the South—at the time, considered Disney’s greatest creative achievement, a seamless blend of live action and animation based on Harris’ versions of the Brer Rabbit tales and the bankable appeal of the stories’ narrator—Harris’ own creation, Uncle Remus.

Like the film itself, these musty effigies of the movie’s stars must have looked stunning in 1946. But, also like the film (widely criticized for its cheery portrayal of blacks in the Reconstruction-era South, and never released on VHS or DVD in the States), the pair haven’t aged well. In fact, lately they’ve been nothing but trouble. Lain strained his back while excavating them from the Wren’s Nest attic last fall. And the years spent stuffed up there only compounded their inherent creepiness—they’ve startled more than a few museum visitors. Still, Lain can’t get rid of them. In a way, they’re family. So, at least for now, they remain on the porch where Harris himself used to relax.

In Harris’ hometown of Eatonton, 80 miles southeast of Atlanta, a similar figure once sat in the front window of the whites-only Uncle Remus restaurant. Author Alice Walker, also an Eatonton native, dreamed of shattering the glass and rescuing the old man from his rocking-chair prison. “Joel Chandler Harris stole a good part of my heritage,” she wrote in her 1981 essay “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus.” “He placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all of our children, the stories that they would have heard from their own people and not from Walt Disney.”

Walker’s sentiments are powerful and likely echoed by Americans of all races whose parents’ storytelling primacy was usurped by Disney—though it’s unclear if she realized Harris had been dead almost 40 years when the film was released. (Walker, on sabbatical, was unable to be interviewed for this story.) Still, criticism of Harris’ work rarely implicates the author so directly. Instead, vague suspicions fed by ignorance have saddled his legacy with the undeserved burden of being labeled racist.

Harris’ family is all too familiar with this. “I’m tired of it,” says Lain’s mother, Annette. As Harris’ great-great granddaughter, she has long witnessed the disconnect between the perception and reality of his legacy, which dates back to audiences in his lifetime who personally confused him with Uncle Remus. “It makes me cry,” she admits, tears welling in her eyes. “People are not educated about Harris’ intentions, and it hurts my feelings.”

Besides the stuffed figures languishing on the porch and a few anachronistic newspaper clippings displayed in the parlor, little about the house indicates Harris’ relationship with Song of the South. Wren’s Nest docents skirt the subject during their tours, and the museum’s staff of professional storytellers feels no pressure to fill its performances with the tales Disney made famous.

“We change a lot of minds when people come into the museum with preconceived notions,” says Lain. “Not because we present a biased opinion, but because we introduce people to the complexities of interpreting history.”