Bred and Born in a Briar Patch by Paul May

Blackberries have played a big part in my life. Every autumn when I was a child my mother would head up to the golf course with me and my three younger sisters in tow. We were all sent off with containers to pick blackberries but I know that my mother picked ten times more than we did. As I remember it, we didn't mind. I enjoyed figuring out which clumps of fruit offered the best chance of reasonable picking with the least scratches. I expect there was an element of competition with my sisters, although now I think about it I remember there was a pushchair involved, so at least one sister was too young to be helping. A hillside in South Bucks on a sunny autumn afternoon wasn't a bad place to be, even if you ended up with badly-scratched, sticky, purple-stained hands.

Then we'd all go home and it was bramble-jelly time. This was a mysterious process that involved a lot of straining blackberry juice through muslin into a preserving pan. Eventually there was a lot of boiling and jar filling, and finally, if the jelly set properly, there was this slippery purple stuff to spread on toast. I was never that keen on it, and it always seemed like such a complicated procedure that I've never been tempted to try it myself. But the blackberry-picking talent might be inherited because, many years later, my two-year-old son was an enthusiastic picker of hedgerow blackberries.

I have no idea when I first heard or read the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, but I must have been very young. It was probably a retelling by Enid Blyton. I had most likely just started to read and I remember that I didn't know what a 'briar patch' was. I think the tar-baby was also a mysterious object, and the combination of slight weirdness and humour meant that the story has been stuck in my mind ever since. In case you don't know, Brer Fox sets out to catch the annoying Brer Rabbit by placing a figure painted with tar in the middle of the road. This tells you that Brer Fox knows Brer Rabbit all too well. When Brer Rabbit tries to start a conversation the Tar Baby naturally doesn't reply, and eventually Brer Rabbit gets so annoyed that he punches it, first with one hand, then the other, then he kicks it until he's well and truly stuck.

Brer Fox is waiting of course. He threatens Brer Rabbit with various dire fates but Brer Rabbit just keeps telling him to do whatever he likes as long as he doesn't throw him in the briar patch. Which is what Brer Fox finally does, only for Brer Rabbit to use the thorns to pry himself free and laugh at Brer Fox with those immortal words: 'Bred and born in a briar patch, Brer Fox. Bred and born in a briar patch.' 

By the time of the 1946 Disney movie, Song of the South, those words had been reversed to 'Born and bred.' The film, like just about everything to do with Uncle Remus, fell victim to controversy. It was a mix of live action and animation and was set during the reconstruction period after the end of the Civil War, but following accusations of racism (much disputed) Disney have never released the film to home video or Disney+. You can, however, watch the very fine animated sequences on Youtube. The film also won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, the song being Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. There was also an Academy Honorary Award for James Baskett who played Uncle Remus. This was his final film.

This is from the British edition of around 1883.
The illustrations were by Frederick S Church and 
James Henry Moser. I think this is one of Moser's.

The Brer Rabbit stories are Trickster tales, and the version I knew as I grew up first found its way into print at the hands of Joel Chandler Harris, a nineteenth century journalist and writer from Georgia in the USA. As a young man, Harris went to work on a newspaper that was produced on the Turnwold Plantation and distributed widely throughout the Confederacy during the Civil War. When Harris wasn't working he spent his spare time listening to the stories and conversation of the slaves on the plantation. It was these stories and conversations that he later used as the basis for Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, first published in 1880, which was where the Brer Rabbit stories appeared. Brer Rabbit sounded like this:

"'Skin me, Brer Fox,' says Brer Rabbit, sezee, 'snatch out my eyeballs, tear out my years by the roots, en cut off my legs,' sezee, 'but do please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat briar-patch,' sezee."

This was the first time that an attempt had been made to record the speech of African-Americans in the South. The book sold in huge numbers and was influential in many ways. Those speech patterns were used by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn. Twain admired Harris and his work, and even tried to persuade him to accompany him on speaking tours, but Harris had a stutter and didn't enjoy public speaking. Instead, Twain included readings from Harris's work in his performances. Kipling and his friends at school were obsessed with Uncle Remus. Beatrix Potter grew up with the stories and produced illustrations for them, even as she was working on Peter Rabbit. AA Milne, too, used elements of Harris's work, and I've already mentioned Enid Blyton's retellings. Adult writers were also influenced—William Faulkner, T S Eliot, James Joyce, for example. And, more generally, that whole genre of children's fiction which is concerned with talking animals, from Sam Pig to Farthing Wood and Watership Down, owes a debt to Joel Chandler Harris, and through him to those stories told by slaves that were, in their turn, derived from Trickster tales from Africa.

Harris's retellings were controversial. There was general agreement that his transcriptions were an accurate record of the way people spoke. The problem of course is that Harris was a red-haired white man of Irish extraction who made a lot of money from the stories. Alice Walker accused Harris of 'stealing a good part of my heritage,' and you can read plenty of discussion of these matters online. The arguments about cultural appropriation continue, but Harris's influence on the development of children's literature in the twentieth century is indisputable.

That quote from Alice Walker reminds me of an incident that occurred a few years ago in Bekonscot model village, where I'd gone with my grandson. We were looking at an area that had been recently remodelled when a nine-year-old boy approached with his mother. He was expecting to see whatever had been there before, and was appalled at what he saw now. 'But . . . they've stolen my childhood!' he cried.

But to return to blackberries and briar patches. The thornless blackberry I planted on my allotment would have been useless to Brer Rabbit, but it has unbelievable quantities of blackberries on it every year and they couldn't be easier to pick. What's more, the first of them ripen at the start of July here in London. I'm fairly sure it's a variety called 'Merton', in case you want one. But bear in mind that when the description says 'vigorous' it means what it says! The nurseries seem to want to sell these things in sets of three, but you would need a LOT of space for three of them.

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July 2021