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134 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

and naturally he is always the winner. These stories belong to the
oral tradition of the plantation Negroes. Therefore it is relatively
easy to recognize the Negro in his remarkably ironic and wary
disguise as a rabbit. In order to protect themselves against their
own unconscious masochism, which impels them to rapturous
admiration of the (black) rabbit’s prowess, the whites have tried
to drain these stories of their aggressive potential. This is how
they have been able to tell themselves that “the black man makes
all the animals behave like a lower order of human intelligence,
the kind that the Negro himself can understand. The black man
naturally feels that he is in closer touch with the ‘lower animals’
than with the white man, who is so far superior to him in every
respect.” Others have advanced the theory, with straight faces,
that these stories are not reactions to the conditions imposed on
the Negro in the United States but are simply survivals of Africa.
Wolfe gives us the clue to such interpretations:

On the basis of all the evidence, Br’er Rabbit is an animal because the
Negro must be an animal; the rabbit is an outlander because the Negro
must be branded as an outlander down to his chromosomes. Ever since
slavery began, his Christian and democratic guilt as a slave-owner has led
the southerner to describe the Negro as an animal, an unchangeable African
whose nature was determined as protoplasm by his “African” genes. If
the black man found himself relegated to the Limbo of mankind, he was
the victim not of Americans but of the organic inferiority of his jungle
ancestors.

So the southerner refused to see in these stories the aggression
that the Negro infused into them. But, Wolfe says, their compiler,
Harris, was a psychopath:

He was especially adept at this task because he was fi lled to the bursting
point with pathological racial obsessions over and above those that
tormented the South and, to a lesser degree, all of white America. . . . Indeed,
for Harris as well as for many other white Americans, the Negro seemed
to be in every respect the opposite of his own anxious self: unworried,
gregarious, voluble, muscularly relaxed, never a victim of boredom, or

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