SOURCE: "The Oral Tradition," in Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975, pp. 19-41.
An American educator and critic, Bone is the author of The Negro Novel in America (1958) and Richard Wright (1969). In the following excerpt, he asserts that African American tales exemplified by Harris's Uncle Remus stories embody "the black slave's resistance to white power."