Dummies in the Attic

Joel Chandler Harris was born in Eatonton sometime around 1845 to an unwed mother and an absentee Irish-laborer father. He grew up flame-haired and stocky, a stammer conspiring with his Irish-bastard status to render him shy and standoffish. But an unlikely love of the written word drew him to a job as a printer’s apprentice at The Countryman newspaper, published by Joseph Addison Turner (on whose Turnwold plantation there were far more books in the library than slaves in the fields). Harris felt comfortable there, and many nights after work he would slip into the slaves’ quarters and lose himself in the stories of wily rabbits, foxes, bears and lions that they spun by firelight.

The stuttering boy reveled in the storytellers’ prowess as much as the tales themselves, and his memories of those nights remained vivid long after he’d left Turnwold and established himself as a newspaperman in Atlanta. When he arrived there in 1876, he began his 24-year career at the Atlanta Constitution. As associate editor, he filled the paper’s editorial pages with missives on the political and social issues then ravaging the Reconstruction-era South. “An editor must have a purpose,” he wrote once, and so he became the newspaper’s staunchest advocate for the suffrage and education of blacks and former slaves. “He never supported integration, yet he supported racial justice for blacks when other editors of his day did not,” explains Cheryl Gooch, Professor of Communication Arts at Clark Atlanta University, who has spent the last three years researching Harris’ journalism career. “He had an enduring view of education as a means of uplifting formerly enslaved people.”

But it was Harris’ less urgent work for the Constitution that ultimately made him famous. In 1876, he inherited the newspaper’s “Uncle Si” column, which featured stories told in dialect, a style popular with readers at the time. Harris changed little except the column’s name, but its popularity soon spiked. His source material—the Turnwold slaves’ tales of sly Brer Rabbit and his critter friends—was unprecedented, as was his ear for dialect, honed in spite of his own speech impediment. These elements merged sublimely in the column’s new narrator: a fictional former slave named Uncle Remus.

The column’s popularity led Harris to compile Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings in 1880. Over the next 18 years, he authored seven more volumes of stories. He certainly wasn’t the only one publishing adapted slave narratives at the time—Alcee Fortier and A.M.H. Christensen both released popular collections—but Harris outsold everyone else. His work earned the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who became a personal friend and once proclaimed, “Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature.” At the time of his death, only his close friend Mark Twain was selling more books

The ongoing success of the Uncle Remus stories allowed the Harris family a comfortable life in Atlanta, and within a few years Harris had transformed a modest West End farmhouse into an elegant, magnolia-flanked Southern manse, which was christened the Wren’s Nest after a family of songbirds was found nesting in the mailbox. Harris died in his bedroom there in 1908. In 1913, his widow dedicated the house as a museum to her late husband’s legacy. And in 1946, the dummies moved in.