The Trickster's Gospel: Retelling Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby

On the Political Genius of Black Folklore

Detail of the cover of Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, By Joel Chandler Harris. This 1880 book helped popularize the story of Bre’r Rabbit outwitting Bre’r Fox, but versions of the tale exist around the world. At heart, they’re all about who controls access to food and subverting the powers that be, a new book argues. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the deep South, Br’er Fox was already in a temper before the sun finished climbing over the pines. The road was quiet that morning. There was nothing but red dirt, long shadows, and the smell of warm earth, and still the fox walked it with his jaw tight and his tail snapping behind him.

He knew who he’d see soon enough.

Br’er Rabbit took this road every morning like he owned it. Came bouncing along with that crooked grin, talking fast, acting like the whole countryside was a stage built just for his foolishness.

Br’er Fox had tolerated it long enough.

Today, he thought, things will be different.

He slowed his steps as the thought worked itself out. Off to the side of the road sat a half-forgotten barrel of sticky tar and a bottle of turpentine someone had left near a fence post. Br’er Fox stopped, his sharp eyes narrowing. Slowly, a grin stretched across his face.

“Well now,” he muttered.

If Br’er Rabbit loved nothing more than talking to folks and stirring up trouble, Br’er Fox figured he’d give him someone new to talk to.

So he gathered up the tar and mixed it thick and sticky, working it with careful paws. Little by little he molded the dark, gleaming mess into the shape of a small brown baby. When he finished, the figure looked almost lifelike, smooth and shiny in the morning sun. Br’er Fox tipped a hat onto the sticky head, set the Tar Baby square in the middle of the road, then slipped off into the bushes to wait.

Br’er Rabbit, as always, came strolling down the road whistling and laughing to himself. Just as he turned the corner, he caught sight of the strange figure in the road. It looked like a baby in a sun hat.

Br’er Rabbit slowed to a stop and squinted. A baby in the road? Now what kind of foolishness was this?

“Good morning, little one,” Br’er Rabbit called, tipping his hat polite as you please.

The baby didn’t answer. Didn’t move so much as an eyelash.

1895 version of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, illustrated by A.B. Frost...

Hidden behind the bushes, Br’er Fox trembled with silent laughter. He knew Br’er Rabbit well enough to know what would happen next. That rabbit couldn’t stand being ignored.

Br’er Rabbit cleared his throat and tried again.

“I said good morning, Baby.”

Still nothing.

Br’er Rabbit’s ears twitched. His whiskers stiffened.

“Well now,” he muttered, “you must be mighty proud not to speak to folks.”

The baby continued to sit there quiet as a stump. That did it.

“You’re gonna get it now!” Br’er Rabbit shouted, and he swung his paw at the rude little figure.

The moment his paw landed, it stuck fast in the tar.

Br’er Rabbit blinked in surprise and swung with the other paw.

Now that one stuck too.

Angry as ever, Br’er Rabbit kicked with both feet, trying to free himself. But the tar held tight, and before long he was stuck hands and feet, tangled up with the Tar Baby and hollering fit to split the air.

That was when Br’er Fox stepped out from the bushes, grinning wide.

“Well, well, Br’er Rabbit,” he said, circling slow. “Looks like I’ve finally caught you. Now what shall I do with you? Maybe I’ll roast you. Maybe I’ll hang you…”

Br’er Rabbit’s eyes darted about, his mind spinning fast.

“Please, Br’er Fox!” he cried. “Do anything you please—roast me, hang me, skin me alive—just don’t throw me in that briar patch!”

Br’er Fox stopped and looked toward the thorny briars growing thick beside the road.

“Oh?” he said slowly. “You don’t want to go in the briar patch?”

“No sir! Anything but that!” Br’er Rabbit begged.

Br’er Fox grinned.

“Well then,” he said, grabbing the rabbit tight, “that’s exactly where you’re going.”

With a mighty heave he flung Br’er Rabbit straight into the briar and bramble

The rabbit vanished into the thorns with a crash and a rustle of branches.

Br’er Fox stood there waiting.

He expected yelping. Crying. Begging.

But the briar patch stayed quiet.

Then, from somewhere deep inside the brambles, a cheerful voice rang out.

“I was born and bred in the briar patch, Br’er Fox! Born and bred in the briar patch!”

And out hopped Br’er Rabbit, laughing as he disappeared down the road.

Br’er Fox stood there grinding his teeth, realizing too late what had happened.

Because you can’t trap a creature in the place that made him.

---

Br’er (aka Brother) Rabbit, is the ultimate trickster: clever, audacious, and morally complex.

Across the Black diaspora, the trickster is a recurring archetype, always bending the rules to stay unbroken. In West Africa, he is Anansi the Spider, the master schemer weaving wisdom into every web. In the Caribbean, he is Ti Malice, the sly hare outsmarting the brute force of Bouki the hyena, proof that wit beats weight every time. In the American South, he walks the line between folklore and conjure as High John the Conqueror, a human trickster using humor and root magic to survive systems built to crush him.

All of these figures share the same DNA: they are the underdogs who refuse to be powerless, and their stories share survival strategies with us all.

In 1880, Joel Chandler Harris published Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. The book was a massive bestseller, praised by Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt, but Harris wrote through a distorting lens. He presented a racially softened, romanticized version of the post-Civil War South, designed specifically for white comfort.

But the trickster refuses to be tamed. Br’er Rabbit remains bold and morally layered. Berkeley professor Bryan Wagner calls him a “selfish hustler”: an underdog who refuses to starve just because the “rules” say he should. His cunning is political philosophy in action.

Take the Tar Baby.

At its core, the Tar Baby story is about power, cunning, and survival.

For Br’er Fox, it’s a “contrapshun”¹ designed to trap the Rabbit. But for enslaved storytellers, tar was also a policing technology. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass recalls a Maryland plantation where tar fences marked “guilty” those caught taking fruit from the garden. Being touched by tar meant brutal punishment, and enslaved people began to fear tar as much as the lash. When Br’er Rabbit gets trapped in that tar contraption, he is navigating the very real, very dangerous surveillance of the plantation state.

This is why Wagner calls the tale a “collective work in political philosophy.” It asks: Who controls food and water when the rules are rigged by slavery, colonialism, or the loss of the commons? And that question is global. In South Carolina, the fight is over black-eyed peas; in Tanzania, dhurra; in Oaxaca, chiles. From West African yams to bottles of whiskey, the resource changes, but the logic remains: if the system is rigged, virtue can sometimes be a trap, and cunning is always the proper survival strategy.

Over time, the Tar Baby motif also shifted in meaning.

The tragedy of the Tar Baby is how thoroughly its meaning was later hollowed out. In the original oral tradition, it was a profound metaphor for the “sticky” nature of systemic entanglement—the more you fight the trap with blind rage, the tighter it holds you. But as the 20th century progressed, white illustrators merged the motif with blackface and “pickaninny” imagery, curdling a story of survival into a visual slur. By 1946, Disney’s Song of the South completed the damage, consolidating the Tar Baby into a dehumanized symbol of “darky” humor, effectively erasing the political genius of the enslaved people who dreamt it into being.

Zora Neale Hurston gave us the antidote in Mules and Men (1935). By stripping away the frames of the “contented slave” and the “quaint” narrator, Hurston restored the raw, audacious power of the tales. In her hands, Br’er Rabbit emerges fully: audacious, morally complex, and resilient. He hops from oral tradition to children’s books to hip-hop lyrics, carrying lessons in strategy, survival, and resistance everywhere he lands. He recognizes that in a world of predators, the only way to win is to change the geometry of the fight.

This is the lesson of the briar patch. To the Fox, the thicket is a place of pain, a punishment designed to tear skin and draw blood. But for the Rabbit, the briar patch is the only place where the predator cannot follow. It is home disguised as a cage. The trickster’s victory isn’t found in fleeing his origins, but in inhabiting them so completely that the very thing meant to break him becomes his sanctuary. Born and bred in the briar patch, he reminds us that the trap is only as powerful as those who believe it cannot be outwitted.

---

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!

1. This is the word used in Joel C. Harris’ work meant to mimic the cadence of speech used by enslaved people. His narrator, Uncle Remus, embodied the Sambo stereotype: the docile, “content” counterpart to the Mammy, safely tucked away in a world where the racial hierarchy never shifted.