laoise, it is best to excerpt a bit from the story when a link to the rest of it is available. The Joe Clones sometimes come along and cut out stories when they're too long.
Rabbits are classic trickster characters, celebrated for their overt sexuality, their running speed, their ability to get into (and out of) trouble. American Indian cultures use a large number of tricksters like the rabbit (or coyote or bluejay or others--it isn't exclusively rabbits) in their stories. And the Brer Rabbit stories are a classic Euramerican appropriation of the African (slave) and Choctaw (Indian) trickster stories. They are credited to Joel Chandler Harris, when it would probably be more accurate to suggest that they were collected by and edited by Harris.
Until the advent of missionary colonization, the trickster was generally a god in the American Indian pantheon, but was quickly demoted by missionaries.
This is in the "for what it's worth" category, of course!