Joel Chandler Harris, a newspaper man, by the way, got his Brer Rabbit and Ubcle Remus stories from slave tales he heard as a child in Georgia. Some of them are said to be allegories of their treatment, and a kind of code to conceal the meaning from white folk. I haven't studied this, but it might be plausible, and demonstrates a degree of imagination that their white contemporaries would not have believed them capable of producing. Stan
(Sorry about the runon sentence.)