Georgia Native’s Works Soon to be Digitized

ATHENS, GA - Who is Joel Chandler Harris? Between the years 1865-1909, he was the most popular author next to Mark Twain. But no one knows who he is. In a class of about 40 people, mostly women, only a few of them have ever heard of this writer, and that is only because of Amanda Gailey’s class.
As part of the Women’s Studies Friday Speaker Series, Amanda Gailey, an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia, spoke Friday about her upcoming project. “It is a big project and it just keeps growing!” said Gailey. Gailey specializes in humanities computing and in knowledge of 19th century printing press. She also has a large interest in Whitman and Dickenson and has contributed to both of their digital archives. Gailey took a sip of her Jittery Joes and spoke of the life and times of Harris.
In the times of Joel Chandler Harris, he was overshadowed by author and friend, Mark Twain. In the year of Harris’ death in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt thought Harris should be remembered because he loved the author from Eatonton. Being second to Twain in popularity during that time, Harris’ fame should have lasted, but Twain’s stories have endured time and are a part of most high school curriculums. Huckleberry Finn, though put through much scrutiny in high schools because of the book’s seemingly racist matter, has continued to be a very important part of American literature and has left Harris’ Uncle Remus Tales in the dust.
In Harris’ stories, he took more risks with race than Twain, featuring African Americans as kind and caring as opposed to Twain who had them shown as clowns and inferior. Twain’s stories were about white boy’s fantasy of escaping domesticity, like in Huck Finn, while Harris humanized African Americans to white readers. Harris was shocked to know that Twain’s illustrator had never visited the South and used white boys as a model for his black boy pictures. Meanwhile, Harris’ illustrator, A.B. Frost, had toured around Georgia to see what real African American people looked and acted like.
In 1907, Harris founded the Uncle Remus’ Magazine with his son, Julian. Within its first year, it went from 100,000 to 240,000 subscribers. Harris created male and female, white and black personas in the magazine that wrote monthly articles. Unfortunately, Harris’ untimely death came a year after the magazine started. Julian kept it running for the next five years, to appease his father’s wishes, but it was not the same without Harris. Advertisements featuring African Americans were not portrayed well. They were either seen as very superstitious or as slaves. Harris depicted Black women as caring and nurturing and made seem more Harriett Beacher Stowe and less Mark Twain. He believed that one should embrace family and domesticity and not run away from it.
In this new digital database, Joel Chandler Harris’ stories will be the first and most abundant of the searchable database. Most of the stories feature African dialect that is hard to read and understand. The database will feature regularized spelling searches to find the modern spelling of the word in the story. A question arouse on how children of that time understood the words in the stories. “Reading aloud gave the children the knowledge of the correct accents of words that are so hard to crack now,” said Gailey. There will also be many images in this new database. “We have so many illustrations to upload and they are very difficult to get digitized,” stated Gailey.
Her project is Race and Children’s Literature of the Guilded Age, a digital archive of illustrated American literature published between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the foundation of the NAACP (1913). The archive will start with Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus Tales, who lived in Eatonton, Georgia. Gailey is working in collaboration with Dr. Gerald Early, Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University. The professors will use the project to help students and scholars to examine how adults wanted children to think about racial difference during this pivotal period in American history. The project brings together methods in humanities computing, literary criticism, art history, illustration and printing technology to form an interactive database for cross-disciplinary study.