The Virginia state legislature has formally expressed regret for the institution of American slavery. “Virginia was built on the backs of slaves,” said sponsor Delegate A. Donald McEachin. The issue has been contentious. As Delegate Frank Hargrove put it in debate, “The present commonwealth has nothing to do with slavery… I personally think that our black citizens should get over it. By golly, we’re living in 2007.”

The historical roles of the actors in this legislative drama are not entirely clear. Which Virginians are not victims of slavery, whose is the remorse and who is entitled to accept it? Justice has grown harder with time. The plantation owners and the plantation workers all sleep in the same earth and share the same descendants.

I remember standing in an all-white public school auditorium singing the highly unapologetic state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.” That’s where I labored so long for old Massa, day after day in the fields of golden corn. It must have been an interesting spectacle, rows of white children referring melodiously to themselves as “this old darky” in verse during morning assembly, as part of their segregated education in state patriotism. Virginia may owe all of us a generous round of apologies.

We were not speaking for ourselves in morning assembly, half a hundred years ago. Perhaps we inadvertently spoke for the legislature, or perhaps for James A. Bland, the college-educated African-American New York songwriter who wrote “Carry Me Back” in 1878. Bland’s musical portrait of the freed slave longing for his antebellum paradise was for white audiences. The truth might have also sold well, but we’ll never know.

Bland’s not-very-liberated slave was a bizarrely sentimental cuss. And he wasn’t much like Uncle Remus, to be sure. From the outset, Uncle Remus’s sardonic tastes were more in keeping with the humor of the bilin’ pot, as when Brer Rabbit scalds and taunts Mr. Wolf to death and then hangs the skin on his back porch. In 1878 Uncle Remus was still just a newspaper vignette, but he told his first story a year later. Two years later, in 1880, the first collection was ready. Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings sold 10,000 copies in the first four months and has never been out of print since. Remus would ultimately tell nearly 200 tales before Joel Chandler Harris, a white man who always claimed Remus was a black voice, hung up his ink pens for the last time and slipped into the mossy grave, unbowed.

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