RALEIGH - People who in the last few days have been decrying a "racist use" of the image of the Tar Baby might benefit from knowing more about the allusion and its origins. Tony Snow, now the White House press secretary, certainly found himself in the proverbial Briar Patch when he used the image to describe his predicament when facing his first meeting with the Washington press corps.

The infamous Tar Baby originated as a figure in a grand scheme detailed in an African-American Brer Rabbit slave tale. These stories, in which the sly rabbit always manages to outwit those who are stronger and more powerful than he, were shared by slaves who took great pleasure in the trickster rabbit's exploits.

Brer Rabbit is supposedly weaker than those around him, just as the slaves were, but in hundreds of tales based on African lore he manages not just to escape but to outwit and embarrass his persecutors. Shortly after the Civil War ended, the Brer Rabbit tales were appropriated by Joel Chandler Harris, a white journalist who created an old former slave character, Uncle Remus, to tell the stories. Uncle Remus would narrate these comic tales in columns that Harris wrote for the Atlanta Constitution. Eventually the tales were collected into a series of books that made Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit famous (Harris was invited to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, a great fan of the tales).

The stories have a common plan: Uncle Remus tells the Brer Rabbit tales to a little white boy, the son of the old black uncle's former owner. While Uncle Remus might seem to be an Uncle Tom, a slave who loved his masters and looks back fondly on the times before the war, Remus clearly relishes explaining the Rabbit's wily ways. Joel Chandler Harris once explained to his readers that his character Uncle Remus understood all too well how the balance of power in the Slave South worked against all slaves, who in order to survive had to depend on quick-wittedness and deception as their only weapons.

• • •

So we come to the most famous of all the Brer Rabbit tales, the Tar Baby story. In Uncle Remus' tale, the sticky doll is designed by Brer Fox as a way to catch Brer Rabbit. Brer Fox knows that Brer Rabbit will insist that it speak to him, as a sign of respect.

Sure enough, when Brer Rabbit encounters the Tar Baby on his path, he is insulted when the doll refuses to acknowledge his greeting, and he grabs hold of the sticky arm and soon finds himself hopelessly stuck (Tony Snow's analogy to his own situation in the Bush White House might be all too appropriate).

In Uncle Remus' story, it looks as though Brer Rabbit's goose is cooked, to mix a metaphor. Brer Fox thinks he has finally caught his prey, until the rabbit, in a wonderful example of reverse psychology, tells Brer Fox to go ahead and do anything he wants, but "Please don't throw me in that Briar Patch."

Brer Fox can't resist the opportunity to make his enemy suffer the worst of all fates, so he does exactly what Brer Rabbit begged him not to do. Once in the briars, Brer Rabbit, free of the sticky tar, hops happily away with a final taunt: "I's born and bred in the Briar Patch, Brer Fox."

• • •

In some circles today, the Tar Baby seems to have evolved into a racist stereotype insulting to African-Americans. Joel Chandler Harris was not immune to prejudice against blacks in his own time. However, he understood the slaves' ability to survive, and he never altered the plots of the Brer Rabbit tales that he had heard when he worked on a plantation himself, as a white boy living in poverty in middle Georgia.

The Tar Baby story celebrates the ingenuity of the slave and his determination to get free at any cost. The plantation South was the slaves' briar patch, and the Tar Baby just one of many traps set by a powerful foe.

Tony Snow's reference to the tale, given the workplace he has just joined, seems to fit. And instead of being insulted, people of color today can take pride in the fact that, in the original story, they are the literary descendants not of the Tar Baby but of its nemesis, the persistent, victorious Brer Rabbit, who knows a good Briar Patch when he sees one.

(Lucinda MacKethan is a professor of English and teaches Southern Literature at N.C. State University.)