Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings by Joel Chandler Harris

This book presents a nostalgic version of plantation life in the slave South. Uncle Remus, a formerly enslaved man who still lives with the white family that owned him before the Civil War, tells the family's young son a series of stories about animals--Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Brer Tarrypin and their friends. In many of these stories, although Brer Fox or Brer Bear is stronger and a natural predator, they fail to catch and eat Brer Rabbit, who is clever enough to escape their plans and to live to torment them another day. The stories preserve Georgia folklore, but the frame narrative tends to reinforce the nostalgic and misleading idea that life was better in the Old South. These stories are the basis for the Disney movie Song of the South, the first movie to combine live action film and animation--and a movie which Disney executives now refuse to sell on the basis of its racist nostalgia for the Old South. These same executives don't mind making money off the franchise however: as the popular Splash Mountain ride in both Walt Disney World and Disneyland is based on one of the Brer Rabbit stories.