Brer-Rabbit.com

I was poking around Wikipedia earlier, when I came across the page for E. W. Kemble. Kemble was an American illustrator who did some illustrations for some of the Brer Rabbit stories. He also did the original illustrations for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn has been one of my favorite books since I first read it as a teenager. I have always been attracted to a good satire, and this book fits the bill and then some. But there is also the fact that characters at the end refer to each other as ‘Brer’ and ‘Sister’ – a fact that, as you can guess, caught my attention from the first time I read it.

I found out later that Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris were not only contemporaries, but friends as well. These days of Wikipedia, it’s easy enough to find that yes, Harris and Brer Rabbit did impact Twain’s works, but at the time just the idea that this widely studied and regarded book was  referencing stories society seems so intent on forgetting ever even existed was amazing to me.

Then again, Huckleberry Finn also has drawn its own line of fire through the years,consistently being put on lists of banned books. But the best satire does draw controversy. Huckleberry Finn, though, is still considered an important piece of work today. So why can’t we treat Brer Rabbit the same way?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.