please don't throw me in that briar patch!

I use a lot of southern expressions in my speech, and a great many cultural references. I've used the phrase, as many southerns do, "Please don't throw me in that briar patch!" to feign dismay at getting exactly what I want. The connotation is that the person you are saying this to means you harm, and so you are pleading against what you desire. Think of it as very old-timey reverse psychology.

This expression comes from an old Br'er Rabbit story, The Tar Baby, of the Uncle Remus (created by Joel Chandler Harris) stories from the old South. My father is a southern story teller, and I've done some research into the genre largely focusing on the Appalachian Jack Tales and other tales (collected as The Grandfather Tales) recorded by Richard Chase.

I bring this up as a southerner out of the South, I make many references, and several from the Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox tales, which fall on ignorant ears. (ignorant does not mean stupid; the word means "a state of not knowing," from the Latin ignorans, ignorantis). SF is mostly transplants, and only a few of us are blessed to be from the South. I often find myself explaining one reference or another. It only occurred to me yesterday as I again said "please don't throw me in that briar patch," to ask if my audience, who had never questioned it before, knew what it meant.

They did not.

Basically, people around here are accustomed to me not making sense all the time and just indulge my ramblings until I, eventually, stop.

So now it's time for a little education.

I love good southern story telling. And I love the Br'er Rabbit stories.

From the Wikipedia entry on Br'er Rabbit:

Although Joel Chandler Harris collected materials for his famous series of books featuring the character Br'er Rabbit in the 1870s, the Br'er Rabbit cycle had been recorded earlier among the Cherokees. ^[1] The "tar baby" story was printed in an 1845 edition of the Cherokee Advocate^[2] three years before Joel Chandler Harris was born".

Rabbit/Hare myths abound among Algonkin Indians in Eastern North America, particularly under the name Manabožo 'Great Hare', who is generally regarded as supreme deity among tribes in eastern Canada. "It appears that Joel Chandler Harris, when he wrote them, did not realize that his Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox were originally Cherokee inventions." (The Cambridge History of American Literature, "Later National Literature", Part III, p. 615)

There was a "melding of the Cherokee rabbit-trickster ... into the culture of African slaves." (That the People Might Live : Native American Literatures and Native American Community, p. 4) "In fact, most of the Br'er Rabbit stories originated in Cherokee myths."^[3]

The Uncle Remus stories were popularized by Walt Disney in the film (and related material) Song of the South. It is not likely that this film will ever be re-released for home video/DVD as the master/slave relationships and "happy darkies working in the fields" theme is just too racist for today.

A telling of the Tar Baby story here (text, not audio as it should be). And other Br'er Rabbit stories at American Folklore.

And for the Disney version, here it is off of YouTube in two parts:





If I can find a recording of a good story teller (like my Uncle Rob), I'll post it.