the deer reminds Chris of the trick-ster tales, that it suggests he must use his wiles to escape

First, the conflation of the deerwith the devaluation of Black life nods to the long-standing tradition of usinganimals to speak back to the power structures upheld by plantation slaveryin the form of animal folktales. And second, this deer comes roaring back tolife. He gets his revenge on the family that made his noble head into a trophy.The taxidermied deer is a speaking animal that has a kind of second life, andthere are multiple ways we might read its importance in Chris’s escape

the deer strikes back

qualities of vermin also make thema ripe symbol for resistance. To be like vermin is to be tenacious and to refusethe spatial exclusions that people like Dean would enforce

nvestigatingwhether or not the creature has survived, Chris looks into its eyes; the deer

lens of alliance, not solely analogy

Rather, the appearance of animals in some recentfilms highlights the unequal treatment of Black lives in America in a mannerthat continues the fable tradition, and simultaneously emphasizes the human

Theseworks encode various strategies of survival in an era in which Black livescontinue to be devalued

Any resistance must be sanitized soas to be tolerable” for the general audience. 5 But resistance also works not bybeing sanitized, but by being hidden in plain sight, coded as symbols legibleto some but not to all. The use of animal fables has a long-standing historydating back to slavery as providing such a coded language of resistance

Wagner notes that theweaker animals use their wits as a means of overcoming the unequal powerdistribution in the world they navigated

he “speaking animal,” which acknowledgesthe dialectic capacity of the symbolic animal of fables to stage a conversationabout subjugation and resistance, but simultaneously, to point beyond itselfto the reality of animal life.

Paraphrasing Joel Chandler Harris, BryanWagner writes that animal stories were “political allegories in which therelative position of the weaker animals corresponded to the global per-spective of the race.”

It withstands cold and heat, insect and disease pests, fire, and deer browsing.

At that time the lame will leap like the deer,+ And the tongue of the speechless will shout for joy.+ For waters will burst forth in the wilderness, And streams in the desert plain.