South stepped easily, with the short story, into the front rank and has held her place ever since. The field once entered was explored faithfully, the eager minds of her sons and daughters running through the Ante-Bellum, Revolutionary and Colonial eras, and when Joel Chandler Harris developed the “Brer Rabbit” stories, “The Little Boy” and “Uncle Remus,” it seemed as though future work must lie in refining for the ore was all in sight. [Pg 8] But there was one lead almost entirely forgotten or undervalued in the scramble for literary wealth and this lead was into the Southern nursery where the real black Mammy reigned. With the better lights before us now we realize the astonishing fact that the very heart center of the Southern civilization had not been touched. [Pg 9]Mrs. Cocke in the charming stories contained in this volume is the happy pre-emptor of the new find. Every Southerner old enough will recognize the absolute truthfulness of the scenes and methods therein embalmed, and applaud the faithfulness with which she has reproduced that difficult potency, the gentle, tender, playful, elusive, young-old, child-wise mind of the African nurse in the white family; the mind to which all things appeal as living forces and all lives as speaking intelligences. [Pg 9] The naturally developed mind of the African slave had no leaning to violence. The influence of the wildness of nature, the monotones of forests, fields and running waters, the play of shadows and the wind voices lingered in it and the tendency to endow all life surrounding it with human or[Pg 10] god-like powers as strong in an humbler way as with the early Greek. But the Greeks were warriors; the African slave tribes, never. Where one worshipped force, the other bowed to shrewdness and cunning and by these lived within a hostile environment. The rabbit that survives and multiplies was to the African slave always mightier than the lion that fell to the hunter’s gun or spear, and the rabbit was and, to a large degree still is, the best personification of the negro mind in its method of approach and treatment. Brer Rabbit in the stories retold by Harris is really the child-wise, world-old mind of Uncle Remus, himself a type. The absence from them of some of the moral laws is in itself one proof of faithful reproduction. [Pg 10] But in the nursery we had by necessity the[Pg 11] moral laws grafted on the African mind by master and mistress through daily association