John the Conqueror second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo", and in "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" it is called "John De Conquer Blue". John the Conqueror was an African prince who was sold as a slave in the Americas. Despite his enslavement, his spirit was never broken and he survived in folklore as a sort of a trickster figure, because of the tricks he played to evade his masters. Joel Chandler Harris's Br'er Rabbit of the "Uncle Remus" stories is said to be patterned after High John the Conqueror. Zora Neale Hurston wrote of his adventures ("High John de Conquer") in her collection of
Joel Chandler Harris the Uncle Remus stories, adopting the words: "cottontail," "puddle-duck," and "lippity-(c)lippity" into her own work. Mark Twain incorporated several of the Uncle Remus stories into readings during his book tour. He wrote to William Dean Howells in the early 1880s, reporting that the "Tar Baby" had been received "best of all" at a reading in Hartford. Twain admired Harris' use of dialect. He appropriated exchanges and turns of phrase in many of his works, most notably in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "The Mysterious Stranger". A.A. Milne borrowed diction, plot, and narrative structure from several Brer Rabbit stories. "Pooh Goes