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Show MOONEY] CONTACT WITH NEGROES 233 Algonquian tribes the name, wabos, seems to have been confounded with that of the dawn, wdban^ so that the Great White Babbit is really the incarnation of the eastern dawn that brings light and life and drives away the dark shadows which have held the world in chains. The animal itself seems to be regarded by the Indians as the fitting type of defenseless weakness protected and made safe by constantly alert vigilance, and with a disposition, moreover, for turning up at unexpected moments^ The same characteristics would appeal as strongly to the primitive mind of the negro. The very expression which Harris puts into the mouth of Uncle RemUs, " In dem days Brer Babbit en his fambly wuz at the head er de gang w'en enny racket wus en hand," 1 was paraphrased in the Cherokee language by Suyeta in introducing his first rabbit story: " Tsi'stu umliga'ndtilt'ilfi,' unefgutsdtHf gesdl- the Babbit was the leader of them all in mischief." The expression struck the author so forcibly that the words were recorded as spoken. In regard to the contact between the two races, by which such stories could be borrowed from one by the other, it is not commonly known that in all the southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up to the time of the Bevolution. Not to go back to the Spanish period, when such things were the order of the day, we find the Cherokee as early as 1693 complaining that their people were being kidnaped by slave hunters. Hundreds of captured Tuscarora and nearly the whole tribe of the Appalachee were distributed as slaves among the Carolina colonists in the early part of the eighteenth century, while the Natchez and others shared a similar fate in Louisiana, and as late at least as 1776 Cherokee prisoners of war were still sold to the highest bidder for the same purpose. At one time it was charged against the governor of South Carolina that he was provoking a general Indian war by his encouragement of slave hunts. Furthermore, as the coast tribes dwindled they were compelled to associate and intermarry with the negroes until they finally lost their identity and. were classed with that race, so that a considerable proportion of the blood of the southern negroes is unquestionably Indian. The negro, with his genius for imitation and his love for stories, especially of the comic variety, must undoubtedly have absorbed much from the Indian in this way, while on the other hand the Indian, with his pride of conservatism and his contempt for a subject race, would have taken but little from the negro, and that little could not easily have found its way back to the free tribes. Some of these animal stories are common to widely separated tribes among whom there can be no suspicion of negro influences. Thus the famous utar baby" story has variants, not only among the Cherokee, but also in New * Harris, J. C, Uncle Remus, His Songs and his Sayings, p. 29; New York, 1886. |
