Lucy May Stanton of Caribbean sugar, molasses, and rice. Lucy May Stanton was given a set of oil paints and began to learn to paint when she was seven years old. Mme Sally Seago, a French artist in New Orleans, gave Stanton lessons in New Orleans. In Atlanta, she lived across the street from Wren's Nest, the home of author and journalist Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus stories and shared his stories with her and her sister, Willie Marion Stanton. Her mother, Frances Megee Stanton, died in 1888. In 1889–1890 she took a tour of Europe with her father and
Joel Chandler Harris a problematic and contradictory figure: sometimes a mouthpiece for white paternalism, sometimes a stereotype of the black entertainer, and sometimes poetically subversive. Julius Lester, a black folklorist and university professor, sees the Uncle Remus stories as important records of black folklore. He has rewritten many of the Harris stories in an effort to elevate the subversive elements over the purportedly racist ones. Regarding the nature of the Uncle Remus character, Lester said, There are no inaccuracies in Harris's characterization of Uncle Remus. Even the most cursory reading of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writer's Project of the 1930s