When Apollo 16 astronaut John Young stepped onto the moon in 1972, his first words invoked Brer Rabbit and the briar patch. This deep dive reconstructs the biography of that fictional folk hero, starting with the African savanna hare and trickster traditions from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Akan stories where Anansi meets a hare named Adanko. It follows parallel hare tricksters among the Algonquin and Cherokee, including a Cherokee tar baby story printed in 1845, the same year Joel Chandler Harris was born.

The episode explains how American slavery forced these traditions to merge, turning Brother Rabbit into a subversive survival tool whose fox and bear adversaries stood in for slave owners and overseers, with the tar baby sequence traceable back to a Zimbabwe-Botswana folktale. It then follows the character into print, from Robert Roos ...