Out of the three stories we read this week, Joel Chandler Harris' story 'The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story', though it was the shortest, was by far the hardest to read! I had to read and re-read, then re-read again just to wrap my brain around one sentence! Let me tell you, it was a long and tedious process! This story became the bane of my existence for three days.
Words like "ter wuk", "wid", "gwineter", "segashuate", to name a few, would creep into my thought process at odd times and shut everything down! (I’m still unsure about what ‘sezee’ means. Is it supposed to be ‘says he’? ) What in the world did these words mean? How do they translate into the English language that I know? It was like my brain would come to a screeching halt and refused to compute what I was reading. I would then have to drop everything and re-read this story AGAIN. It was the classic 'love-hate' relationship! It was like the story was written in a foreign language but I couldn’t put it down. I don't know what frustrated me more; not understanding the dialect, or the dialect itself. Harris definitely had the 'old south' genre down pat! You could tell that the time he spent on the Turnwold Plantation with "Uncle" George Terrell and the others, had given him insight into this unique language and lifestyle.
So I decided, that when all else fails, read the story out loud in a southern accent, (well, a southern accent to myself, but to others, not so much) and see where that takes me! What I discovered by using this method, albeit a method of madness, was, ‘WOW! It worked!’ Then, throw in the power of deduction and reasoning, and there you go. I began to see the story that Harris wanted us to see.
I say ‘see’ because once I got past my own self imposed barriers, the story started taking shape. I was able to see the imagery and the humor that Harris was writing in this story. Here’s a tale being told by a ‘black’ man to a ‘white’ boy about an undercover fox trying to be ‘sly as a fox’ and a rabbit with an attitude, playing in the middle of the street. That seems easy enough (ha!). Then, the story shifts to give us none other than a cliffhanger at the end! So I say to myself, “Are you kidding me?!” All the while staring at the words before me, feeling perplexed and stupefied, with a mixture of disgust and unbelievability, all wrapped up in nice, neat, little package. I went through all of that for a cliffhanger. Wow.
So, I ask myself, what was the reason and moral of this story? I’m sure there is one. Maybe it is that we should not let the way other people talk, or the way they look, get in our way of hearing their story; for everyone has a story. Maybe it’s saying that if someone comes up to you and says “Hi’ you need to say “Hello” back to them or you’ll get socked in the face. I’m sure if I really thought about it, I could come up with a moral to this story. However, I’m just happy that I was able to survive Harris’ writing.
If you ever asked me what I thought about Joel Chandler Harris, I would probably roll my eyes and groan. I would then tell you that he either had a diabolical sense of humor toward his readers or he was a complete genius and knew exactly what he was doing. Come to think about, it is probably both of these things. A classic ‘love, hate’ relationship!
