Joel Chandler Harris's "Free Joe and the Rest of the World": Defending slavery

FREE JOE and the REST of the WORLD by Joe Chandler Harris

Free Joe and the Rest of the World" reflects a revisionist version of the antebellum South. It was published in 1884 by Joe Chandler Harris who tells the 'sad' tale of the African-American Free Joe, cruelly freed and drifting like "a black atom," in contrast to the happy, singing, and laughing enslaved human beings in the fields (Harris 1884, p.117). African-Americans are portrayed as quaint stereotypes in this tale, either as picturesque field hands, man-servants, or fortunetellers. Joe is freed by an irresponsible white man, a gambler who does so more out of vengeance on the world after he blows out his brains after a game of cards rather than kindness. Clearly, this is supposed to suggest to the reader that only bad slave-owners free their black slaves. These owners do so because do not want to take care of the slaves, not because they are abolitionists at heart. Joe is estranged from his wife, left with only a dog for company, and is said to see his status diminished as he must rely upon the mercy of "poor white trash" (Harris 1884, p. 120).

The title of the story suggests Joe's misery and estrangement from the rest of the world he knows and loves, namely his fellow African-Americans who are in bondage. No other free men are portrayed in the story, other than 'poor Joe,' and Joe makes no move to head to the North, to find other freed men and to seek an education or a job to buy his wife's freedom, as many slaves did in real life. Instead, he passively sits and pines for his wife Lucinda, but her master forbids the two of them to meet.