I normally just read these forums without posting, but I made an account because I felt something was worth clearing up here. Some people in this thread keep mentioning that B'rer Rabbit is a "West African" folktale figure. This isn't quite right. It's true that elements of the B'rer Rabbit stories share story elements with the stories of Anansi the Spider, but they are not the same stories. For instance, in one Anansi story, Anansi captures a fairy by making a baby doll and coating it with gum, and the fairy gets mad at the baby and slaps it like B'rer Fox, but otherwise the context of the story is different. Ansasi has to capture the fairy as part of a series of tasks, kind of like Hercules. B'rer Rabbit makes the tar baby to escape from B'rer Fox, who is always trying to eat him. The way the baby works plays out similarly in both stories, and there's certainly some overlap, but the B'rer Rabbit stories aren't just the old Anansi stories with new characters.
When people from Africa were taken and sold into slavery as chattels, those who were from cultures where the Anansi stories were told probably shared those stories, and over the hundreds of years that they and their descendants were kept in chattel slavery, those stories probably morphed into the B'rer Rabbit stories. (I say "probably" because we do not have a great written record of these stories or other elements of the culture of enslaved Africans in America during this time, largely due to the fact that the people telling these stories were treated as property).
Those stories were first published by Joel Chandler Harris, in his book "The Tales of Uncle Remus." I'm not an expert here, but I think most people who study these things are pretty sure that Joel Chandler Harris really did get these stories from interviews with people, and didn't just make up the character of B'rer Rabbit himself.
We call the rabbit "B'rer Rabbit" because that's how Joel Chandler Harris thought it sounded when Black people said the word "brother." In "The Tales of Uncle Remus," Harris's book in which these stories were published for the first time, the narrator and the white child who befriends Uncle Remus talk like this:
"'Uncle Remus,' said the little boy one evening, when he had found the old man with little or nothing to do, 'did the fox kill and eat the rabbit when he caught him with the Tar-Baby?'"
But Joel Chandler Harris wrote Uncle Remus's dialogue in a way that he thought Black people talked, so Uncle Remus sounds like this when he responds to the boy's question above:
"Law, honey, ain't I tell you 'bout dat"I 'clar ter grashus I ought er tole you dat, but ole man Nod wuz ridin' on my eyelids twel a leetle mo'n I'd a dis'member'd my own name, en den on to dat here come yo' mammy hollerin' atter you. W'at I tell you w'en I fus' begin? I tole you Brer Rabbit wuz a monstus soon beas'; leas'ways dat's w'at I laid out fer ter tell you."
So all of this is just to say that I don't think "West African Cultural Ambassadors" would be very good at explaining the stories of B'rer Rabbit, unless maybe they had seen Song of the South or read the Joel Chandler Harris stories.
