Contextualizing the Frame Tale

Although critics who have written about Song of the South--from James Snead to Susan Miller and Greg Rode--examine the live-action frame tale and its "Old South" coding, they fail to recognize that this frame tale is framed itself. They claim the first scene starts with the carriage ride of Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), his parents (Ruth Warrick and Eric Rolf), and Aunt Tempy (Hattie McDaniel) from Atlanta to the plantation run by Johnny's grandmother.⁽¹⁾ There is, however, a scene that between the credits and the first appearance of the featured family.

As the credits fade to black, the vocal orchestration continues and inside the white frame that once housed the book of credits, text appears:

As the text fades, the fireplace is burning brightly and the sound of a man laughing is heard on the soundtrack. The camera zooms towards the chair and fireplace (and slowly the white frame disappears) as the voiceover begins:

"Oh, yes sir, there's other ways of learning about the behind feel of a mule than by getting kicked by him, sure as I'm named Remus. And just ‘cause these here tales is about critters like Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, that don't mean they ain't the same like can happen to folks.

So them what can't learn from a tale about critters just ain't got their ears tuned for listening. [frame is gone and image fades into scene of horse-drawn carriage going down a dirt road] Like it or not, they too busy going along all mixed up with their own troubles. Uh, like the time that Miss Sally and Mister John was coming down to the plantation."

[The image of the carriage fades into interior where Sally and John, husband and wife, are sitting on one side and Johnny and Aunt Tempy are sitting on the other].

This scene is key because the viewer literally and figuratively enters the frame tale concerning Johnny and Uncle Remus (considered by many to simply be a frame tale of the animated sequences). As the camera zooms toward the empty chair and burning fireplace--which will later be identified as the interior of Remus' cabin--the white frame that surrounded the credits disappears as Uncle Remus tells the story. This means that even the live-action frame tale has already occurred and exists within Uncle Remus' catalog of tales but the logic behind such a rhetorical effort is flawed since all of Uncle Remus' stories have to do with talking animals who serve as figures in the real world. There is no reason for a story about humans to be relayed in the same way as the adventures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear--unless, of course, the story is not necessarily about this one family but serves as an allegory for the movie-going audience to interpret. If that is the case, then the depiction of the characters in such broad, Disney-esque strokes: the distant father, the troubled mother, the confused child, and, of course, the smiling mammy, all serve in ways that are similar to the animated animals. They are not real people in a real time any more than Brer Rabbit in his Briar Patch is real. Instead, they are figures in a fantastical world full of familiar codes and identities.

This argument, however, is complicated by Disney's treatment of historical reality. A world with blacks singing white songs on a plantation is an acceptable fantasy unto itself but when this world also features an editor of an Atlanta paper writing questionable things--implicitly about the rights of African-Americans but never actually explained in the film--it seems the filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it too. Since the movie never discusses the father's professional life, this appears to be a nod to Joel Chandler Harris' career as for the papers and a good reason for him to be an absentee father in this time period. The fact that he will leave his wife and son is foreshadowed in the carriage scene as Johnny asks why they are heading to his grandmother's in the first place.

The entire conversation allows Johnny to ask the hard questions and have his parents consistently avoid giving him the real answers about the newspaper and their failing marriage. Eventually, Aunt Tempy changes the subject when she hears a frog. This prompts Johnny's father to tell a story:

John: You know, when I was your age, I used to catch lots of ‘em. I remember one time I hid a whole box of ‘em up in your grandma's milkhouse and it got lose.
Tempy: [smiling] Yes, and I remember what you got for doin' it, too. [laughing]
John: [laughing] Well, it was old Uncle Remus' fault, you know. He told me that story about Brer Frog.
Tempy: The tale about him having a tail and losing it?
John: That's it. Only, um, how can there be a tail when there ain't no tale?

Tempy: [smiling, in unison] ...when there ain't no tale?
Johnny: Aunt Tempy?
Tempy: What is it child?
Johnny: Is Uncle Remus real?
Tempy: Of course he's real. You just wait ‘til you hear him tell a tale about Brer Rabbit. Then you'll know he's real.

This scene seems totally fantastical for a number of reasons besides having Johnny ask all of the tough questions and Aunt Tempy demonstrating her permanently affixed smile. The logistics behind the scene don't quite make sense--especially when it becomes clear that they're visiting is Johnny's maternal grandmother. The fact that both John and Sally were children who knew Uncle Remus and Tempy, who later appears right at home in the plantation house, knew John well enough when he was a child that she saw him punished for the frog incident, is only explained if John and Sally were close neighbors who later married.

The parallel between their marriage and Johnny's future life becomes clear when Johnny meets Ginny, a poor girl who lives near the plantation. Such a repetition can be explained in terms of fantasy since Aunt Tempy serves as the mammy figure incarnate. Especially considering the appearance of a later scene in which Tempy and Remus are the center of attention as two clearly mythologized figures.