Saturday is the day to visit the home of Joel Chandler Harris in West Atlanta because his stories are told by experts at 1 p.m. Curtis Richardson was my storyteller.

The Queen Anne Victorian porch where he wrote many of them, in front of his desk or in the backyard are the settings, all which fade away by the sheer skill of the Wren’s Nest Ramblers as the tale tellers are known.

Originally a modest farmhouse owned by the Atlanta Constitution, The Wren’s Nest was transformed into a Queen Anne Victorian in the Eastlake style by the Harris family who bought it in 1881.

Pretty for a tour, with original furnishings from a family of nine children and loaded with insight I didn’t have.

The Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear and Tar Baby stories I know, the Disney movie “Song of the South” I’ve seen, but the author’s life and the way it influenced the stories he told through Uncle Remus were new to me.

Maybe I should pay more attention to the lives of the people whose words I read.

Laine Shakespeare shared some perspective on my tour; he’s the executive director and the great-great-great-grandson of Joel Chandler Harris.

Nice touch in the family home turned museum five years after Harris died in 1908.

That’s quick for a house museum, and it seems to be so because Harris and his stories about trickster animals were wildly popular.

Shakespeare points out the Uncle Remus stories were the first continuing serial style stories for children and they grabbed the attention of people of all ages, comparable in broad interest to our Harry Potter stories.

Theodore Roosevelt loved them, and sought a friendship with Harris. So did Andrew Carnegie.

Plus, Harris was a successful newspaper editor, working with Henry Grady at the Atlanta Constitution for 27 years.

Fame, fortune and recognition were not his childhood experiences. Joel Chandler stuttered, was short, freckled and in the language of his birth era, a bastard.

The Eatonton community shunned his mother, and ridiculed him.

At age 13, he went to work as a printer’s devil on Turnwold Plantation.  

More learning for me understanding the stories on my tour.

Guess what? Setting type, cleaning ink, so did Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. First job.  Wonder if I should have.

Plantation owner Joseph Addison Turner for Harris’s early-teen job had a large classical library and encouraged Harrison to read.

    At the same time, the slaves were his friends and he listened to their stories from Africa.  Trickster animals appear in many of them apparently.

Brer Rabbit started in 1878, once a week in the newspaper. That, says Shakespeare, was the first time animals dressed, talked and took on human personalities. “He wrote them as he heard them,” Shakespeare says.

Here’s the time frame, clear to me by the people involved with the tales.

Beatrix Potter’s first job was illustrating Brer Rabbit. Look what happened to her career. Designer William Morris created a Brer Rabbit wallpaper 18 months after the first Uncle Remus book was released.

    Rudyard Kipling memorized the stories in school. Mark Twain read his stories on tours, but not Harris. Not with that stutter.

    Harris intended to encourage understanding with the stories, to help cultures appreciate one another, says the triple-great-grandson managing the museum.

Seems to me that could be so because of his bedroom, furnished exactly as it was according to the stipulations of the Wren’s Nest Museum establishment:

 Portraits of African American children reading and writing hang on the walls of his bedroom.  Hmmm.

First thing most of us see in the morning, by choice, is usually something we appreciate. He believed in his post Civil War life that all people could read and write, given the chance.

For me, ghee whiz. Uncle Remus perhaps thought that too. Bet I’ll re-read or re-listen with a new idea.

Since Harris cared about education for all people, The Wren’s Nest sponsors all sorts of reading and writing events. Details are on their web page.

If you have a bucket list of writer’s homes, now museums, to visit, this is a very good one of the 73 in America.

If you just love the Brer Rabbit stories, simply enjoy.