The really vital work of Harris lies in two fields: sketches of the old-time negro and sketches of the mountain cracker of the later period. It is upon the first that his permanence as a writer must depend. He worked in negro folk lore, in that vast field of animal stories which seems to be a part of the childhood of races, but it is not his folk lore, valuable as it may be, that gives him distinction. Ethnological and philological societies have done the work more scientifically. Many of the animal legends in common use among the slaves of the South were already in print before he began to write.[138] What he did was to paint a picture, minutely accurate, of the negro whom he had known intimately on the plantation of Mr. Turner at the transition moment when the old was passing into the new. With a thousand almost imperceptible touches he has made a picture that is complete and that is alive. The childish ignorance of the race and yet its subtle cunning, its quaint humor, its pathos, its philosophy, its conceit, its mendacity and yet its depth of character, its quickness at repartee--nothing has been omitted. The story teller is more valuable than his story: he is recording unconsciously to himself his own soul and the soul of his race. Brer Rabbit after all is but a negro in thinnest disguise, one does not have to see Frost's marvelous drawings to realize that. The rabbit's helplessness typifies the helplessness of the negro, and yet Brer Rabbit always wins. Suavity and duplicity and shifty tricks are the only defense the weak may have. His ruses are the ruses of a childlike mind. Clumsy in the extreme and founded on what seems like the absolute stupidity of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and the others who are beguiled, these ruses always succeed. The helpless little creature is surrounded on all sides by brutality and superior force; they seemingly overcome him, but in the end they are defeated and always by force of superior cunning and skilful mendacity at the supreme moment. It is the very essence of the child story--the giant killed by Jack, the wolf powerless to overcome Little Red Riding Hood, and all the others--for the negro himself was but a child. Page uses the negro as an accessory. The pathos of the black race adds pathos to the story of the destroyed white régime. Harris rose superior to Page in that he made the negro not the background for a white aristocracy, but a living creature valuable for himself alone; and he rose superior to Russell inasmuch as he embodied the result of his studies not in a type but in a single negro personality to which he gave the breath of life. Harris's negro is the type plus the personal equation of an individual--Uncle Remus, one of the few original characters which America has added to the world's gallery.