Entry · catalog no. 1110
Br'er Rabbit
/ /brɛr ˈræbɪt/ /BRAIR RAB-it
proper noun · Coastal Georgia and the South Carolina Lowcountry · 1870s
✓ Verified
1.
The trickster protagonist of a large body of Black Southern animal tales in which the weakest creature in the field consistently outmaneuvers the strongest. He wins by talk, misdirection, and a willingness to let his enemies underestimate him — most famously by begging not to be thrown into the briar patch he was born in. Under slavery the tales worked as instruction disguised as entertainment: a lesson in how a person with no power survives one who has all of it. 'Br'er' is 'Brother,' a kinship title; in Gullah speech the name comes out as Buh Rabbit.
“She played Br'er Rabbit with that whole hiring committee — talked them into offering her the thing she wanted from the start.”
Origin & Attribution
The stories came out of the oral tradition of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the coastal and inland South, built on hare-trickster cycles carried from West and Central Africa and reworked on plantation ground. They were performed by Black storytellers for Black audiences, and the lesson at their center was aimed squarely at the people who needed it. The standard account credits Joel Chandler Harris as the creator of Br'er Rabbit; he was not. Harris was a white Atlanta newspaperman who collected the tales, published a first book of them in 1880, and packaged them inside an invented narrator, 'Uncle Remus,' and a nostalgic plantation frame that made Black storytelling palatable to white readers while burying its authorship. Disney's 1946 film is a further layer of distortion, not a source; the tales were already in print from Black informants before Harris's book.
1877
William Owens publishes Buh Rabbit episodes in Lippincott's Magazine, three years before Harris's book
1880
Harris issues 'Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings,' attaching an invented narrator to the tales
1888
Charles Colcock Jones Jr. prints Gullah-language versions from the Georgia coast
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Coastal Georgia and the South Carolina Lowcountry · 1870s
Spoken by
Enslaved and freed Black Southerners, especially Gullah-Geechee communities of the Georgia and South Carolina coast
$BRERRAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded149 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
90/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1877
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
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New Orleans, LA
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Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
William Owens, 'Folk-Lore of the Southern Negroes,' Lippincott's Magazine — December 1877
magazine · documented
■
Joel Chandler Harris, 'Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings' — 1880
book · documented
■
+ Cite a sourceCharles Colcock Jones Jr., 'Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular' — 1888
book · documented
See also