In preparation to read Morrison's Tar Baby, we will look at the African folk tale of the rabbit and the fox, and the story of the tar baby, as it entered American literature through the work of a white folklorist, Joel Chandler Harris.  First, see a photo of the first Uncle Remus volume published by Harris in 1881:  Legends of the Old Plantation.  Next, link to an electronic version of the tar baby text and the continuation of the tale  as Harris wrote it, an  introduction to Harris's project, and an  analysis of the Tar Baby story as it works within the larger context of the Uncle Remus tales in Harris's version.  In addition, please read texts at the following links:
a contemporary re-telling of the Tar Baby story
a page that gives a contemporary oral version of the tar baby text along with storytelling techniques and links to helpful notes.
a brief article on  Harris
and
a  biography and photograph of Harris.

Finally, read the following study guide by me:
Joel Chandler Harris was a white journalist who wanted to record the folktales of African-American slaves.  He began publishing the stories, as narrated by a character named "Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta, GA Constitution in 1878.  The story of Bre'r Rabbit and the Tar Baby, which became an international favorite, appeared in 1879, and a book-length collection of Uncle Remus stories first appeared in 1880. Harris insisted that he was only a "compiler," that he did not mold or shape the stories in the retelling.  He truly wished to be a folklorist, a recorder of what he heard, rather than an author in the full sense of the word.  Nevertheless, the frame story of Uncle Remus telling the tales to a young white boy was Harris's invention, and it obviously affected the way in which Harris retold the stories he collected from black men and women.  Harris said that the character of Uncle Remus was a composite, based on three or four old black men whom he had known and whose personalities he had "walloped together" in writing the stories.  (I take the quotation from Stella Brewer Brooks' introduction to an edition of Harris's Uncle Remus [New York: Schocken Books, 1965], xi).  Here are two helpful passages on the stories and on Harris's effect on them.  Both are taken from The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit as told by Julius Lester (New York: Dial Books, 1987).  The first passage is from the book's introduction by Augusta Baker, former Coordinator of Children's Services at the New York Public Library and Storyteller-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina:

My lasting memories of my grandmother are of her telling me stories. . . .  I howled with laughter when Brer Rabbit asked the Tar Baby, "and how does your symptoms segashuate?"  My grandmother did not attempt to use the dialect of Joel Chandler Harris because, even though she had been born on a Maryland plantation in 1862, she did not speak the way Harris interpreted slave speech.  Her mother had told her the stories and she told them to me. . . .

. . . in college, . . . I learned about the importance of these stories as true American folklore.  Dr. Harold Thompson, a leading American folklorist, gave a lecture on people from the West Coast of Africa who had been captured and sold as slaves.  Some were settled in the southern states where they took stories from home about a hare--Wakaima--and adapted them to their new surroundings.  Wakaima became Brer Rabbit and the clay man became the Tar Baby. . . .

In 1937 I found myself in the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library located in the heart of Harlem as a children's librarian.  One of the prerequisites of this position was to tell stories.  I soon learned that these black boys and girls needed to be introduced to the humor and hidden philosophies of Brer Rabbit and his cohorts. . . .  Many of them were sensitive to the slave setting that showed Uncle Remus telling the stories to the little white boy, so I eliminated that frame.  It became obvious that the tales stood on their own as their African counterparts about Wakaima did

. . . Despite the drawbacks in Harris's text, I still loved the stories and appreciated Brer Rabbit as a cultural hero and a significant part of my heritage.  However, I was telling the stories less and less often because of the dialect. . . .  [She explains how she would _tell_ the stories in her own words, but how she was still frustrated that there was no accessible and suitable written version for the children to read.  She presents this rendition by Julius Lester as the solution.]

The Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris represent the largest single collection of Afro- American folktales ever collected and published.  Their place and importance in Afro-American culture is singular and undisputed.
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All of the tales were collected from blacks.  Often Harris collected two or three versions of the same tale, and then chose the best version to publish.  If he doubted a story's Afro-American roots, he did not use it.

Harris's other concern was language.  Possessing a remarkable ear, he recognized that the tales could not be divorced from the language of the people who told them.  Thus, he made a conscious and diligent effort to put this language on paper.  In the absence of actual recordings, the Uncle Remus tales as put down by Harris are the most conscientious attempt to reproduce how the slave talked, at least in one area of the South.
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As a character, Uncle Remus represents the "faithful darky" who, in Harris's words, "has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery."  He identifies wholly with his white master and mistress, espouses their value system, and is derisive of other blacks.  There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus.  Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s reveals that there were many slaves who fit the Uncle Remus mold.

Uncle Remus became a stereotype, and therefore negative, not because of inaccuracies in Harris's characterization, but because he was used as a symbol of slavery and a retrospective justification for it.  This reflects the time in which the Uncle Remus tales appeared.
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It would be unfair and inaccurate to ascribe unseemly motives to Joel Chandler Harris in his creation of Uncle Remus.  A writer should be judged on his total oeuvre.  Int his context, Harris's work is varied in its depictions of blacks and their attitudes toward slavery.

If there is one aspect of the Uncle Remus stories with which one could seriously disagree, it is the social setting in which they are told.  Uncle Remus, and sometimes other blacks, tell the stories to an audience of one--a little white boy, the son of the plantation owner.  While such a setting added to the appeal and accessibility of the tales for whites, it leaves the reader with no sense of the important role the tales played in black life.

The telling of black folktales, and indeed tales of all cultures, was a social event bringing together adults and children.  That folktales are now considered primarily stories for children is an indication of our society's spiritual impoverishment. . . .
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The purpose of my retelling of the Uncle Remus tales is simple: to make the tales accessible again, to be told in the living rooms of condominiums as well as on front porches in the South.
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The Uncle Remus presented here is a voice.  I hesitate to call it my voice, because it is also the voice of a people, the black people of Kansas City, Kansas; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Nashville, Tennessee; and the state of Mississippi.  The first three places are where I grew up, and the latter is where I feel most at home and closest to my roots as a black person. . . .