My dad told me the Br'er Rabbit story when I was a boy. But he used his regular voice but I loved the story. When I found it in a children's book in the original vernacular, I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. I didn't associate it with slavery or blacks--I just thought it was supposed to be a down-homey Southern dialect for story-tellin--which I guess it was but I didn't think of it as belonging to a black slave. In fact, I thought the dialect bit got in the way of the story itself.