Three Not-So-Ordinary Joes

"The lives of Joseph Addison, Joseph Addison Turner, and Joel Chandler Harris intersected in Civil War-era Georgia thanks to a slaveowner who was more interested in literature than in running his plantation. Addison was a British literary giant who was admired by a planter in the American South; the planter named his son after the British writer-publisher and collected his books. Growing up, the young J. A. Turner read Addison and was inspired by him. Later, Turner tried and failed at publishing magazines, poems, books, and articles, all while running the plantation. When the Civil War broke out, Turner realized he could install a printing press in a plantation outbuilding. His journal, The Countryman, was the only newspaper ever published on a slaveholding plantation. Then the third Joe showed up: Joel Chandler Harris (as a boy, he was called Joe), who became Turner's apprentice. Turner's journal was widely read within the Confederacy and celebrated Southern culture. The paper collapsed at the end of the Civil War, and Turner died a few years later. Harris had often joined Turner's children in the plantation's slave cabins, listening to the fantastical animal stories the Negroes told. Young Harris recognized the tales' subversive theme of the downtrodden outwitting the powerful. He began publishing these stories in the voice of an elderly slave he called Uncle Remus. The popular tales influenced writers like Twain, Kipling, and Beatrix Potter. Author Julie Williams noticed the links between her Joseph, Joe, and Joel and brings to life the literary gifts of Joseph Addison, Joseph Addison Turner, and Joel Chandler Harris -- her "three not-so-ordinary Joes" --