Laura Plantation Creole Folktales and Compair Lapin (Br'er Rabbit) Tradition

The Compair Lapin folktales — West African trickster rabbit stories carried to Louisiana by enslaved Senegalese workers — were first recorded in written form by Alcée Fortier at Laura Plantation in Vacherie in the 1870s, and these stories are the documented source material that Joel Chandler Harris later adapted as the Br'er Rabbit stories. The tradition of Creole French oral storytelling from which these tales come is a living cultural practice still taught through Louisiana Creole cultural organizations and is interpreted as an active tradition at Laura Plantation.