The Wren’s Nest

Listening to a tale well told is a highlight when visiting The Wren’s Nest, named for the wrens who made a home in the mailbox at the house belonging to Joel Chandler Harris and his family. Set back from a hot, almost treeless street where buses and cars dominate, The Wren’s Nest—in need of some volunteer gardeners—is surrounded by leafy trees. There is shade, and a gate at the entrance to the sidewalk, which helps announce the site to those passing by. The Wren’s Nest, in Atlanta’s primarily Black West End Neighborhood, began life as a farmhouse and was Victorianized in the Queen Anne and Eastlake styles with an asymmetrical roofline, a deep wrap-around porch, and decorative siding.

Harris (1848-1908), was a journalist associated with Atlanta’s New South movement, and the author of the wildly popular Uncle Remus stories. Featuring didactic animal tales passed down through African and Black American folklore and storytelling, the stories first appeared in the newspaper The Atlanta Constitution, became a book in 1873, and then a worldwide sensation. Harris knew the celebrity authors of his age such as Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling—he was a celebrity himself—but he was also a homebody extraordinaire, preferring not only to stay home (he once ditched Mark Twain on a speaking tour just to get back to The Wren’s Nest), but to write in the house downstairs, where the activity of his large family surrounded him.

Harris built the Uncle Remus stories out of his memories of the enslaved men and women he met and the stories they told him while working as an apprentice on a newspaper called The Countryman. Turnwold Plantation in Eatonton, Georgia, is the only known plantation to have produced its own newspaper. The politics and morality of Harris making a good life for himself and his family by appropriating the stories of Black enslaved Americans is the subject of many scholarly examinations, and rightfully so (see, for example, R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., Joel Chandler Harris: A Biography and Critical Study, 2008). But this kind of critical analysis of Harris’s place in American society is not the point of the interpretation at The Wren’s Nest. The centering and continuation of the role of storytelling—of passing down timeless stories, allegorical, metaphorical, and cultural—certainly is, and in this, The Wren’s Nest provides a place to remember what it was like, even if just for a half an hour, when storytelling was an appreciated art form, and a collective experience for listening and watching someone perform in the most simple way possible: a person with a voice tells a story.

Although the Wren’s Nest could be used to critically examine the role of National Historic Landmarks in the South during the Civil Rights era, the creation of public history in Atlanta (this was the first historic house opened in the city), or the relationship between the Uncle Remus stories, Walt Disney, and Ron DeSantis, it is not. The historic house and its interpretive practice serve instead as a sanctuary, surrounded by fading wallpaper and antique bedspreads, to tell and hear human stories in the guise of animals which have enlightened, entertained, and educated people across the globe for millennia.

When I visited and began poking around on the grounds looking at the architecture, Operations Manager Susan Lasby stuck her head out the door to welcome me and ask if I wanted to join the storytelling tour. Christine Arinze Samuel was the storyteller during my visit, and she was warm and engaging.

She brought to life the practice of storytelling by using her movement, her voice—which changed with the different characters—and her expressions. She started with two Uncle Remus tales featuring Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, typological trickster characters which I imagine can be found in literature and oral tales the world over, and then relayed two tales of her own making. Before and after her tale telling, Samuels encouraged the audience—which consisted of adults and children—to write and draw and be creative. Sometimes a prompt like this is all someone needs to start (or restart). To help keep creativity at the center of the museum programming, The Wren’s Nest also offers an academic year Scribes Youth Writers Program, and for the first time this year, a Scribes Summer Camp, both of which are aimed at middle grade students and bring professional writers to the house to work with students on their creative writing.

As a longtime historic house caretaker, museum employee and not-for-profit grant writing consultant, I’m not going to say it didn’t hurt to see The Wren’s Nest struggling. The struggle is not in the content, of course, but in the efforts American house museums must endure just to keep their doors open one day a week. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. There are hundreds of small historic house museums dedicated to influential people and their histories spread across this country. The Wren’s Nest, like so many of these special places, deserves much more than what we give it. Go next time you visit Atlanta and show that house and its stories some love.