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thesis entitled

THE POLITICS OF DIALOGUE IN
CHESNUTT'S The Conjure Woman

 

presented by

Andrew Paul Henry

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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MA degree in English
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August 25, 1993

 

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THE POLITICS OF DIALOGUE IN CHESNUTT'S THE CONJURE WOMAN

BY
Andrew Paul Henry

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1993

AB STRACT

THE POLITICS OF DIALOGUE IN CHESNUTT'S THE CONJURE WOMAN

BY
Andrew Paul Henry

A brief summary and close examination of Charles W.
Chesnutt's The Con'ure WOman, paying special attention to the
frame story, the dialogue that takes place in it, and the
political implications of that dialogue. After the summary of
the novel, a critical context for discussing the dialogue in
The Conjure Woman is shown through a review of scholarly
articles by Andrews, Britt, Dixon, Farnsworth, Feinberg, and
Ferguson, all focusing on the framing story. Then there is a
discussion of the ideological implications of dialogue, using
Bakhtin's idea of discourse as a social act. Lastly, there is
an examination of the political/social importance of the
dialogue in the framing story of The Conjure WOman through an
original critique based on the previous discussion of

Bakhtin.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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SWYOFMNOVE’OOOO0.0.0.000000000000IOOOOO00......3

CRITICAL BACKGROUND OF THE STORYTELLER AND FRAME IN TEE

CONJURE WOMAN...........................................21
CRITICAL STANCE.........................................44
PREDECESSORS TO CHESNUTT'S LOCAL COLOR FRAME............49
THE POLITICS OF CHESNUTT'S LOCAL COLOR FRAME............59

mus CImD...‘00......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO66

iii

INTRODUCTION

The object of my writings would be not so much the
elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the
whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which
is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so
powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected
with it to scorn and social ostracism— I consider this a
barrier to the moral progress of the American people;
and I would be one of the first to head a determined

crusade against it.
Chesnutt's Journal, may 29, 1880

At age 22, Charles Wadell Chesnutt laid out his
political as well as literary agenda. Nearly 20 years later,
reaching out to a white, northern audience he was certain was
sympathetic but whose interest lay in “a version of America
in which superficially rendered character types acted out
their amusing idiosyncrasies in a setting distinguished by
uniqueness and a perceptible atmospheric effect" (Andrews
42), he published The Conjure WOman. unlike the success of
local colorists such as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas
nelson Page, Chesnutt's success was modest by all measures.
Critic and biographer William L. Andrews attributes this

modesty to Chesnutt's desire to produce literature that would

 

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reap financial reward and also move his readers to recognize
and change the insidious social caste system affecting blacks
and whites alike (13-14). As Andrews sees it, “the
accommodations of these twin ambitions would pose fundamental

technical problems for Chesnutt's artistry, problems which

2
would greatly affect the quality of his work and the unsteady
course of his brief, active literary career" (13).

In this paper I will discuss the frame story and its
participants, its relationship to the tales Uncle Julius
tells and Chesnutt's attempts to accomplish his political and
social goals. Andrews identifies a critical failure on
Chesnutt's part in a harsh critique of Chesnutt's ability to
balance his “twin ambitions": “Julius'm behavior [does] not
upset the frame of the conventional plantation story, which
posits the black man's subordination to a white patron's
largess, in The Conjure WOman" (52). While it is true that
the novel does not affect a radical stance and did little to
change the lot of African-Americans in a concrete way, it may

.-

hayemled “'whites out of their prejudicesm imperceptibly,

unconsciouslyjmstep by step'" (Andrews 15). Using the novel's
”intrinsic ability-to create a dialogic discourse, the
explicit recognition of an other, The Conjure WOman
intuitively connects with the “material of the verbal sign
[which] allows one most fully and easily to follow out the
continuity of the dialectical process of change, a process

which goes from the bases to the superstructures" (Bakhtin

24).

MYWTHENOVEL

The Conjure Woman opens with ”The Goophered Grapevine,"
a chapter which introduces us to the main players in the
novel: John, the narrator, Uncle Julius, the storyteller, and
Annie, John's wife. In the frame story, Annie and John have
come to Patesville, North Carolina from.the Great Lakes
region to relieve Annie's health problems and for JOhn to
take advantage of the unique money-making opportunities
available to him in the post-Civil War South. Mbst notably,
JOhn expects to plant grapes where “labor was cheap, and land
could be had for a mere song" (3). While he is not at first
impressed by the business activity of Patesville, he soon
learns that this ”somnolent" exterior hid “deeper currents of
life—love and hatred, joy and despair, ambition and avarice,
faith and friendship" (4).

On their first visit to an old plantation up for sale,
JOhn and Annie meet uncle Julius sitting on a pine log,
eating grapes. He is described by JOhn as:

a tall man, and, though slightly bowed by the weight of

years, apparently quite vigorous. He was not entirely

black, and this fact, together with the quality of his

hair, which was about six inches long and very bushy,

exception the top of his head, where he was quite bald,

suggested a slight strain of other than negro blood.

4

There was a shrewdness in his eyes, too, which was not

altogether African, and which, as we afterwards learned

from experience, was indicative of a corresponding

shrewdness in his character. (9-10)

At the time JOhn and Annie meet him, Julius is eating grapes
on the land JOhn is considering buying. His inquiries and
intimations that he is considering buying the ”ole McAdoo
plantation" compel Julius to tell the first of many stories
to the northern couple, as John says later, to discourage him
from buying the vineyard from which Julius has evidently
derived a goodly revenue from the neglected vines.

Julius' tale is about the old master, Mars Dugal'
McAdoo, and his attempts to get the slaves from his
plantation and the neighboring ones to stop eating the grapes
from his vines. He first tries to scare them off by setting
up steel traps and spring guns and staying up at night with a
gun. He never catches any of the perpetrators, but does end
up with a “leg shot full er cowapeas" (14). He decides,
finally, to talk to an old conjure woman named “Aun' Peggy."
After he makes the appropriate payment of food and wine to
her, Aun' Peggy puts a spell on the vineyard so that any
slave who eats a grape from the vines will die within a year.
Two slaves do die, affirming for the slaves that the goopher
is a powerful one.

When a new slave, Henry, unaware of the goopher, comes
to the plantation and eats the grapes, Peggy tells him how to

get around the conjuration. There are consequences to this

5
new spell, however: Henry's physiology works in sympathy with
the seasons. In the spring, he is strong and spritely. As the
fall and winter come on, he becomes weak and sickly, just
like the grape vines from which he has derived his magical
new life. Mars Dugal, quick to see the opportunity for
profit, sells Henry every spring when he is strong and
vigorous, and buys him back in the fall when he becomes, in
body, like an old man. This works well until McAdoo takes the
advice of a carpetbagger on how to increase his yield from
the vineyard and, in the process, kills most of the plants.
Henry, of course, dies along with the grapes.

In the frame, we learn that JOhn buys the plantation, a
"striking illustration of the opportunities open to NOrthern
capital in the development of Southern industries" (34). Not
surprisingly, JOhn hears nothing of any ill effects from the
grapes. Julius also becomes JOhn's coachman, which gives him
the opportunity to tell more tales to the northern
businessman and his wife.

In the second chapter, entitled "Po' Sandy," JOhn and
his wife are planning an addition of a kitchen to their home.
JOhn proposes using a small, old frame house that sits on his
property as the raw material for the new kitchen. By his
estimations, however, he still needs to buy "several hundred
feet of lumber" (38) to build the kitchen to his wife's
specifications and he asks Julius to take him and his wife to
the lumber mill to order the lumber. When they arrive at the

mill, the foreman is off visiting a neighboring farmhouse,

6
which gives Julius the Opportunity to tell a tale. The
apparent impetus for the tale is their casual observation of
a pine log being cut into lumber. As we later find out, the
teller has an ulterior motive in reciting the tale.

The tale is about Sandy, a slave of Mars Marrabo
McSwayne, who is so valued by his owner that he is passed
around to all of Mcswayne's children to help them in their
times of need. Sandy's first wife is sold to a speculator
while he is being lent out and he is given a new wife named
Tenie. Just as he is getting "on mighty well" with his new
wife, Sandy is told that he will be lent out again. Tenie, it
turns out, is a conjure woman, and she goophers sandy,
turning him into a tree: "'I kin turn you ter a tree,’ sez
Tenie. 'You won't hab no mouf ner years, but I kin turn you
back oncet in a w‘ile, so you kin git sump'n ter eat, en hear
w'at's gwine on'" (47). As a tree, Sandy is subjected to
woodpeckers and men stripping the tree-bark for turpentine.
Tenie sees that this plan cannot go on indefinitely and she
plans to turn them both into foxes so that they could run
away to the North. In the midst of preparing the goopher
mixture, Tenie is sent away to help on another plantation.
While she is gone, Sandy is cut down to build a new kitchen
for the mistress of the plantation. Tenie returns to the
plantation just in time to see Sandy cut up in the sawmill
and, not surprisingly, she goes mad. The kitchen that is
built from his body is never used at night because it is

rumored to be haunted by Sandy's spirit. The kitchen is

7
finally torn down and the lumber is used to build the frame
house that prompts Julius' tale.

In the frame story, Annie is appalled by the conditions r»
of slavery and says, "What a system it wasmunder which such
things were possible!" (60). John is amazed by this response, \
asking her if she seriously thinks that the man had been 2
turned into a tree. She says no, but she has clearly been ,/g
moved by the story when she murmurs ”Poor Tenie!" (61).

Later, she convinces John that she "will get no pleasure in
that kitchen if it were built out of that lumber" (61) and
JOhn orders enough new wood to build the kitchen in its
entirety. A.few weeks later, Julius convinces Annie that his
church needs the structure for a meeting place.

The third chapter is entitled "Mars Jeems's Nightmare."

In the frame story for this chapter, Julius introduces his
grandson to JOhn with the hopes of getting the boy a job on
the farm. Although he is not favorably impressed by the young
man, John hires him out of respect for Julius. The youth
turns out to have no sense of responsibility and John
dismisses him,

Julius tries to get his grandson's position back through
a tale he tells to JOhn and Annie shortly afterwards as they
wait for the water spring to be cleaned. The tale involves
the young master on a neighboring plantation. mars Jeems
works his slaves very hard, denying them even the opportunity
to marry and have children, saying that he is raising cotton,

not slaves. There seems to be some hope, however, when he is

8
smitten by the young daughter of "Mars Mcswayne." She won't
have him, however, when she finds out how he abuses his
slaves, saying that his treatment of a wife would probably
not be much different.

At the same time this fruitless courtship is taking
place, a more productive relationship develops between two
slaves, each belonging to one of the white lovers. Solomon,
who belongs to Mars Jeems, is unable to see his sweetheart,
so he goes to Aun' Peggy for a solution. Her solution is a
goopher that will give Mars Jeems a "monst'us bad dream"
(77). The day after the goopher is administered in his soup,
Mars Jeems leaves the plantation to check his other
plantation and, Julius tells us, leaves an overseer in
charge. "Ole Nick," as he is called by the slaves, decides
that while Mars Jeems is gone, the plantation will be
particularly productive so that Mars Jeems will be impressed
upon his return. In the meantime, a new slave is brought to
the house to be broken by Mars JOhnson whose reputation for
"breaking" new slaves is legendary. The new slave is beaten,
starved, and abused to get him to work, but even then it
seems he "did n' 'pear ter know how ter han'le a hoe" (83).
Finally he is sold away, his master acknowledging that if
Mars JOhnson can't get the man to work, no one can. When Aun'
Peggy hears all this from Solomon, she is very interested and
gives Solomon a sweet potato, telling him.to seek out that
unbreakable slave and give it to him to eat. The next day,

mars Jeems shows up in the swamp on the property, looking

9
poorly, complaining about having had a terrible dream, and
asking about what has been going on. Solomon tells him
everything and the next day Mars Jeems has Mars JOhnson give
his account of everything that has happened in the time he
was gone. JOhnson tells how much money has been made and how
much work has been done and, of course, about the new slave.
After hearing this story, Mars Jeems dismisses the bewildered
overseer. It is completely clear by this time that Aun'
Peggy's goopher has turned Mars Jeems into the new slave and
that he now has a new perspective on the life of a slave.

In the frame story, Julius shares the moral of the
story, "dat w'ite folks w'at is so ha'd en stric', en doan
make no 'lowance fer po' ign'ant niggersm is li'ble ter hab
bad dreams" (100). Much to his disappointment, Annie believes
that Julius has "made up" the story, even in the face of his
assertion that he heard the story from his own mother. The
frame ends the next day with JOhn seeing Julius' grandson
back on his place, working. Apparently, Annie had given him
another chance.

The frame setting for "The Conjurer's Revenge" is a
balmy Sunday afternoon at JOhn and Annie's home. John has
remarked to Julius that he is thinking of expanding his
scuppernong field. Julius suggests that if JOhn is going to
do some more plowing, he knows of a horse for sale that might
do. JOhn tells him he is leaning towards buying a mule

instead. Julius' objection to these plans leads to his tale.

10

Uncle Julius says that when he was young there was a
slave named Primus who made his own rules and used to slip
off the plantation at night to visit women on other
plantations. One night when he is out, Primus finds a shoat
and, finding himself irresistibly drawn to the animal, kills
and eats it. Unfortunately for Primus, the animal belonged to
an old conjure man and after he eats it, he disappears. Soon
afterwards, Primus' master buys a new mule whose face
contains some "fermilyus" features. The creature turns out to
be a queer one, with a predilection for tobacco and fermented
wine pressings. In addition, when the wife that Primus has
left behind becomes interested in another slave, this mule
begins to abuse the new man, biting him and kicking him
about. The man, named Pete, is asked by the old conjure man,
who is dying, to bring the offending mule to his home. There,
Pete finds out that the mule is really Primus and the conjure
man wants to take his goopher off him before he dies. Through
a mix-up, the old man ends up poisoned and dying even faster
than he had anticipated, leaving Primus intact, with the
exception of one foot, a potent reminder of his tangle with
conjuring.

In the frame story, Annie is most disappointed with the
story because "It isn't pathetic, it has no moral that I can
discover, and I can't see why you should tell it. In fact, it
seems to me like nonsense" (127), but JOhn takes it to heart,
changes his mind about a mule, and purchases a horse on

Julius' advice instead. The horse quickly dies and John

11
learns a valuable lesson about horse-trading, especially in
the light of his further discovery that Julius owned an
interest in the horse JOhn purchased. For a "long time
afterwards [he] took [Julius'] advice only in small doses and
with great discrimination" (131).

"Sis' Becky's Pickaninny" is the fifth chapter of The
Conjure WOman. In the frame story, Annie, whose health has
steadily improved for two years, suddenly falls victim to "a
settled melancholy" (132). Everything JOhn tries to cheer her
up is singularly ineffective. One day, while Annie sits on
the piazza, Julius appears carrying with him a lucky rabbit's
foot. In a lively debate over the effectiveness of such a
talisman, JOhn demands proof, which Julius offers through the
tale of Sis' Becky.

Sis' Becky was a slave who belonged to a man named
"Kunnel Pen'leton." She had a son named Mose by her husband
who belonged to a different white man. Soon after her husband
had been sold away, Sis' Becky's master, whose life was
consumed by horses and racing, fell in love with a horse
named Lightening Bug. At the limit of his credit, Pen'leton
agrees to trade one of his slaves for the animal and, of
course, he chooses Sis' Becky. The colonel doesn't want to
break up Becky and her son, but the horse-trader will not
even take the pickaninny for free: "I doan raise niggers; I
raises hosses" (142). Pen'leton doesn't want to make any
trouble, so he tells Becky that she is only going with the

trader to be dropped off at his son-in-law's plantation to

12
help out for a few days. When she discovers the truth, she is
heartbroken.

Meanwhile, little Mose becomes distraught just one day
after Becky is gone. Aun' Nancy, made responsible for Mose,
sees the boy begin to waste away; he doesn't eat, he turns
pale, and his eyes lose their shine. When the colonel's wife
looks at the pickaninny, she is concerned and administers a
medicine of dubious value. Aun' Nancy seems to know, however,
that this is not what Mese needs and she takes him to Aun'
Peggy, the conjure woman. Peggy recognizes immediately what
Mose needs and arranges for it by turning him into a
hummingbird so he can fly to his mother. The visit does both
Becky and Mose a lot of good—Becky recognized in the little
bird's hum "her little Mese croonin' on her breas'" (47)—but
only for three or four days. Aun' Peggy again turns Mose into
a bird, this time, however, into a mockingbird. As be sung
all day long, Becky imagines, rightly, that it is her little
Mose, "crowin' en crowin', des lack he uster w4en his mammy
would come home at night fum de cotton-fiel'" (149). This
visit has no longer effect than the other, however, and Aun'
Nancy asks the conjure woman if there isn't some way to just
get Becky back home again. After acquiring Nancy's best
Sunday head-handkerchief, Peggy goes to work. The first thing
she does is have a hornet sting the new horse's knees to make
them swell up. The colonel is infuriated, thinking that he

has been taken by the horse-trader, and writes a threatening

13
letter saying he wants his slave back. The trader, however,
is not easily threatened.

After this first setback, Peggy begins to work on Becky.
Becky dreams three nights in a row that her little pickaninny'
is dead and after the third time, she finds a small bag from
Peggy filled with roots. Convinced that she has been
conjured, she goes to bed, ready to die. The trader, sure
that there is nothing wrong with the horse he has sold and
equally sure that Becky is going to die, writes a new letter
to Pen'leton proposing that they negate the trade. When Becky
returns, she and Mose both grow strong. Eventually, Mose
makes enough money as a blacksmith to buy not only his
mother's freedom, but also his own.

JOhn's response to the tale is that it is a "very
ingenious fairy tale" while his wife declares "the story
bears the stamp of truth, if ever a story did" (159). Her
contention is that the "ornamental" details of the birds and
hornets do not detract from the fact that it was "true to
nature, and might have happened half a hundred times, and no
doubt did happen, in those horrid days before the war" (159).
Still not satisfied, JOhn insists that, at least, the tale
does not address the value of a rabbit's foot. Annie, of
course, recognizes that "Sis' Becky had no rabbit's foot"
(160).

Annie, in the following weeks, improves dramatically.

One day, when they are going out for a ride in their

14
carriage, JOhn finds, to no one's surprise but his own,
Julius' rabbit's foot among Annie's things.

The sixth chapter of The Con'ure WOman, entitled "The
Gray WOlf's Ha'nt," begins with JOhn and Annie again on the
piazza, confined to indoors because of rain. To entertain his
wife on such a dull day, John volunteers to read to her from
his volume of philosophy. After one paragraph, she asks him
to stop. Luckily, Julius arrives. He is there to be sure that
they will not be going out in their carriage, which is indeed
the case. JOhn asks for Julius' advice on clearing a section
of woods near the swamp and how much he thinks it will cost.
Julius thinks that it would cost "a couple hund'ed dollahs"
(166), but he asserts he would not bother. Upon questioning,
he says it is too new for grapes, too low for cotton, and too
close to the swamp to avoid corn-eating raccoons. When JOhn
thinks he might try for corn anyway, Julius tries a now
familiar maneuver; he tells a tale.

In his tale, he warns of bad luck that follows those who
disturb that particular tract of land. Snakes and scorpions
plague the adventurer who, if he gets past them, might
disturb the haunt of the gray wolf. As the tale goes, there
was a slave named Dan on Mars Dugal' McAdoo's plantation. Dan
was mild mannered, always working hard, until he was
provoked. on the plantation there was also a woman named
Mahaly, who Dan started spending his time with. At the time,
there was a conjure man who had a son that also became

enamored with Mahaly. Dan and Mahaly were given permission by

15
their master to marry, which they soon did. This conjurer's
son, however, did not let up on Mahaly and one day, she says
to Dan, "I wish you'd do sump'n ter stop dat nigger man fum
follerin' me 'roun'" (171). Dan responds by seeking out the
other man. This other man pulls a knife on Dan who clobbers
him in the head, knocking him down and out. Dan leaves him on
the ground, believing he will come to and go about his
business. unfortunately, the man is found dead from the
tremendous blow, but, because he is a free-man, no one takes
much interest and Dan is off the hook.

When Dan finds out that he has killed the man, he is
afraid that his father, the old conjure man, will find out
that he has killed the man and poison his food or put a spell
on him, To get some protection, he goes to Peggy, the new
conjure woman in the area. She tells him that he needs a
life-charm.to protect him and agrees to make him one, the
price being a pig. Dan buries the charm under a live-oak and
it does indeed protect him against all the conjure man's
attempts on his life.

As the conjure people often do, the old man employs a
jay-bird to follow Dan and find out where the life-charm is
hidden. It soon does and the old man takes to riding Dan in
his sleep. When they finally meet in the day, the old man is
so nice to Dan, that when he offers to help Dan with "the
witch" that has been riding Dan at night, Dan accepts. and
goes to his house. The old man tells Dan it is the old woman

who lives down by the creek and that the only way to get her

16
to stop is to kill her. The old man tells Dan that she is
coming to him as a black cat and that he will turn him into a
wolf that night so he can catch and kill her.

Later that same day, the old man tricks Mahaly into
coming to his cabin where he turns her into a black cat and
put her into a basket. When night falls, Dan comes back where
the man turns him into a wolf and he goes to his own home to
wait for the witch. Of course, when the conjure man lets
Mahaly loose, she runs directly home, as a cat, and Dan kills
her. As soon as the blood began to flow, Mahaly transforms
back into her human form and Dan knows that he has been
tricked by the old conjure man. In a rage, he returns to the
cabin and bites the old man's neck until he is sure he will
die. The old man, with his seeming last breath, declares he
is even with Dan, and that if he wanted to be turned back
into a man, he must follow his directions. Believing that the
conjure man wouldn't lie with his dying words, Dan follows
his directions explicitly, drinking the potion he directs him
to. unfortunately for Dan, the spiteful conjure man was also
getting revenge for his own death and the potion makes him
unable to return to his human formt

The frame story ends with John deciding to clear the
land despite the sad tale. He professes to looking for
Mahaly's grave or for the bleached bones of the wolf, but he
only found a bee-tree which he suspects had been frequented

by a certain old man for years.

17

The last chapter of The Conjure woman is entitled "Hot-
foot Hannibal" has a very different type of frame story. In
it, JOhn's sister-in-law is staying with the family and she
has become engaged with a young man named Murchison. As the
story opens, the fiery Mabel and high-spirited Murchison are
fighting. Things are said "that no woman of spirit could
stand" (198), and Annie believes the rift is permanent. John
disagrees, but after a week, begins to suspect that the break
may well be permanent.

Ten days after the rupture, Julius takes the family on a
drive. After trying to get them to go the long way to their
friends' house and being overruled by Annie, the horse
mysteriously will go no further. Julius suggests that they
might sit for five minutes and see if the horse will change
its mind. JOhn and his family agree and, after a short while,
Julius remembers a tale that explains why the horse will not
go any further: the ghost of Chloe, dead these forty years.

When Julius offers to tell the tale, JOhn gladly
accepts, putting the old man's tale into a classic ghost
story setting, describing the stream as "the waters of Lethe"
and the forest as reminiscent of "funeral wreaths" (204). The
tale Julius tells is about Chloe, a slave of old "Mars' Dugal
McAdoo," who was the personal maid to the mistress of the
house. When McAdoo brings Hannibal to work in the house, he
promises Chloe will be his wife in the spring. Chloe, the

hotheaded girl she is, sets herself dead against the marriage

18
ever happening and begins to scheme how she could get her
sweetheart, Jeff, to take Hannibal's place in the house.

To achieve this, Chloe asks Jeff to go to Aun' Peggy,
the conjure woman, and pay her to work her spells. She agrees
to, for a silver dollar, and when he returns the next day,
she has a small doll for him to put under the house where
Hannibal will have to walk over it every day. The doll has a
"peth head" and "pepper feet" and as long as it is near
Hannibal, he will be "light-headed en hot-footed" (208)..As
Jeff leaves, Peggy warns him that he must give the doll back
to her as soon as Hannibal is out of the house, or it will
cause a lot of trouble.

The very next day, the goopher began to work: Hannibal
dropped the firewood in the morning, waking the mistress an
hour early, he dropped dinner in the yard, he overslept, dug
up the mistress' bulbs, and finally got a whipping for it.
The whipping, however, doesn't do any good and Hannibal is
sent from.the house and Jeff replaces him, according to plan.
In their glory, Chloe and Jeff forget that they are supposed
to return the goopher and Hannibal is distracted to the point
that McAdoo threatens to sell him in the spring.

Luckily for Hannibal, the goopher finally wears off.
When he has regained full use of his mind, he realizes that
Chloe and Jeff are responsible for his downfall and he
resolves to get his revenge. Hannibal meets Chloe on the road
and tells her that he has seen Jeff meet a woman by the creek

on Sunday nights. Even though she says she doesn't believe

19
him and goes on her way, she still starts to think. During
this time, Jeff has been at McAdoo's daughter's house and she
remembers hearing stories about a woman that Jeff had been
interested in. True to the jealous female stereotype, she
decides she should go to the creek, just in case.

Sure enough, when she reaches to creek, there is Jeff,
anxiously looking up and down the road, waiting for some one.
When he jumps up and runs down the road to embrace a woman
coming from the neighboring plantation, Chloe turns heal and
runs to McAdoo. She tells him half the story of Hannibal's
goophering (leaving out her own role) and he vows to make
Jeff an example to the other slaves. The very next day he
sold Jeff to speculators who took him down river and Chloe
pretended that she was so mad that she didn't care that he
was gone.

One day, when she was walking down the road, Chloe met
Hannibal on the road. As soon as he sees her, he starts to
laugh and laugh. Finally, after being asked over and over
what he is laughing at, he says, "I's laffin' at myse'f,
tooby sho', —-laffin' ter think w'at a fine 'oman I made"
(220). He mean, of course, that he set up the two lovers,
sending word, as Chloe, to Jeff to meet her at the creek on
that fateful day.

Upon hearing this, Chloe faints and, in the coming
month, gets worse and worse. The doctor is sent for and,
finding nothing physically wrong with her, learns from her

that she in pining away for want of Jeff. MCAdoo tries to get

20
Jeff back, but he finds out he has died on the boat to
.Alabama. When Chloe learns this, she just gets worse and
worse, wandering around like she was looking for Jeff and,
finally, she is found dead by the creek where Julius and the
family are listening to his tale.

Annie and Mabel are deeply moved by this tale and Annie
asks Julius to take them to their friend's house by the route
he had originally proposed. JOhn, trying to lighten the mood,
asks Annie if she is, indeed, frightened by the tale. "Oh,
no," said Annie, "but I've changed my mind. I prefer the
other route" (226). On the new route, they meet MMrchison's
servant who tells them that he is going away to New York.
This comes as a shock to them all. They continue along the
road where they are sure to meet Murchison on his way to the
wharf and Annie asks John to do several favors for her that
involve stopping the carriage and him leaving. When he
finally finishes, he discovers his sister has walked on
ahead. Soon after, Mabel and Murchison come down the road
towards them, arm in anm, "aglow with the light of love"
(228). JOhn wonders if there had been an arrangement between
Julius and Murchison, especially when Julius is invited to
work at the newlyweds' home. JOhn leaves the novel, however,

with assurances that Julius stayed in his employ.

21

CRITICAL BACKGRGJND OF THE STORYTELLER AND FRAME IN THE
CONJURE MN

Most of the critics argue that Julius, an ex-slave still
living at the site of his former slave life, has little
success in his struggle with a white man from Ohio. That
struggle is identified variously as economic, that of the
folk trickster, or of Julius asserting his individuality and
manhood. we will examine these three stances, their strengths
and weaknesses, and finally their failure to show Julius'
true triumph in Chesnutt's work.

To read the frame story and its relationship to the
tales in Chesnutt's conjure stories in terms of economics and
commerce is enticing . John, the protagonist and narrator of
the novel, is a businessman/agronomist from.northern Ohio. At
the beginning of The Con'ure WOman, he has just moved to
NOrth Carolina from "that region of the Great Lakes [where]
the raw winds, the chill rains, and the violent changes of
temperatures characterized the winters" (1) to relieve his
wife of her health problems exacerbated by their former
residence. This is not, however, his only motivation for
choosing North Carolina; JOhn intends to continue his
successful work in grape-culture and has looked to France,
Spain, and even California to do so. But in a typically

entrepreneurial move, JOhn, ever on the lookout for business

22
opportunities, goes to North Carolina. Here, he says, he "was
enough of a pioneer to start a new industry, if [he] could
not find a place where grape-culture had not been tried" (2).
The clincher, in fact, seems to be the free-marketer's siren-
song that "labor was cheap, and land could be had for a mere WM
song" (2-3). With a narrator so focused on the dollar—indeed,“
it controls his vision throughout the novel—one should look
to commerce as the controlling idea in the relationship
between the characters in the frame story of The Conjure
£9323-

In her article "Chesnutt's 'The Conjurer's Revenge': The
Economics of Direct Confrontation," Sally Ann H. Ferguson
focuses exclusively on the issue of "'manhood' narrowly
defined as skill in controlling money—a rarity for black
characters in turn-of-the-century American Literature" (37)
to explain the relationship between JOhn, Annie, and Julius.
For Ferguson, the most significant occurrences in The Conjure
Woman are the confrontations concerned with explicit and
implicit negotiations over money and property. It is through
these negotiations that, she says, the significance of the
frame becomes apparent. Necessarily, however, she concludes
that Julius loses in the confrontation. The implication, of

course, is that, by the end of the novel, Chesnutt fails to
sellfi__fl,__,,.—«~—~.

fl“
~w_ _ __. .

lead whites very far from their prejudices that would
relegate Julius to the realms inhabited by Uncle Remus and

the black storytellers of Page's novels.

23

She begins her discussion with "The Goophered Grapevine"
where Uncle Julius' apparent strength is that he is able to
tell "slick conjure tale[s]" designed to frighten or outwit
his money—clever opponent (37). Unfortunately for Julius,
JOhn's economic cleverness surpasses Julius' ability for
subterfuge. This pattern continues until, in Ferguson's
words, "in direct man-to-man confrontations for dollars, poor
Julius can give [John] no real competition" (38).

In "Po' Sandy," "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," and "Sis'
Becky's Pickaninny," Ferguson notes the intercession of Annie
on Julius' behalf. Julius plays on her sympathy and emotions
to win her over and reduce his formidable economic opponent
to the role of "doting husband" (38). Although Julius attains
his economic goal in each of these stories, the use of such
tactics does not qualify him as "'man' enough to part the
white from his dollars" (38); identifying and capitalizing on
an opponent's weakness, in Julius' case at least, makes him
less of a man. This reasoning is somewhat elusive, however,
because JOhn does much the same thing. He is apparently more
of a man for identifying Julius' weakness, his lack of money,
his inability to buy the property or materials so often in
question, or his lack of negotiation experience, and
exploiting them. JOhn is not seen as manipulative or womanly,
presumably because as a rich, white man skilled in
negotiating over money and power, he is the epitome of

"manhood". Interpreted as such, the likelihood that the frame

24
story can ever establish and sustain a new position for
blacks in post Civil War America is slim indeed.

Ferguson allows that Julius becomes a man, but only
fleetingly, when he mediates and manipulates John's vision
directly. This mediation takes place in "The Conjurer's
Revenge." Ferguson says that in this fourth tale, "Julius
comes better prepared, with his intellect so sharpened by his
previous experiences [of losing to John but winning through
Annie] that he can now manipulate JOhn into deceiving
himself" (38). He does this by playing on the white couple's
inability to "imagine" and "see past externalities" (39). If
they, especially John, could imagine, they would be able to
"see that the Uncle Remus-like darky telling the quaint
conjure story is really a poor but clever black who boosts
his profits and 'manhood' by selling a defective product"
(39). JOhn is taken advantage of in this story, but to imply
that John is momentarily blinded, that suddenly he does not
recognize that Julius tells his stories to obtain something
for himself or for his own advancement, monetarily or
otherwise, is absurd.

Every tale of this novel, in fact, ends with the

-.....__...-..-H.

 

 

narrator' s recognition that Julius is indeed clever and that

_..__.q-1, H...
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0“..-"

MM...“

more often than not, he accomplishes exactly what he sets out

fi—i‘...

 

to achieve3in,five of the seven stories Julius is triumphant!
,stw~rr”"

I suggest that instead of playing upon the "sensory
prejudices of JOhn" (39) to get him to buy the horse, as

Ferguson suggests, John acknowledges that for once the

\
\

/‘
_.._w._.-4."'

25
economic issue at hand is one in which he had little
expertise—KAt the time I was not a very good judge of
horseflesh" (130)—and he asks for Julius' advice. His
reliance on his senses and on Julius' advice is perfectly
reasonable considering his inexperience and Julius'
expertise. John even says that "[Julius] was a marvelous hand
in the management of horses and dogs" (64). Although he is
rather disparaging of the story Julius tells, it is apparent
that John is convinced by Julius' assessment, has relied on
his advice in the past, and continued to in the future, even
after purchasing the broken—down horse and recognizing that
Julius played a "more than unconscious part in the
transaction" (131).

Ferguson's identification of this story as Julius'
highest point of status as a black male is weakened when we
ask if there was really any economic confrontation at all. In
the other stories, both sides tacitly acknowledge the contest
taking place. However, "The Conjurer's Revenge" is not so
much an economic struggle between two men, but more a case of
the knowledgeable defrauding the ignorant. Ultimately,
Ferguson's analysis of The Conjure woman as a series of
economic confrontations between men fails to instruct us very
deeply about the gains-Chesnutt made for African-American
literature.

In "The Significance of Charles W. Chesnutt's 'Conjure
Stories'", Chesnutt biographer William L. Andrews quotes

William Dean Howells as saying that Chesnutt's short stories'

26
"racial interest" is not what makes the stories worthwhile.
Rather, "it is much more simply and directly, as works of
art, that they make their appeal" (79). As Andrews later
says, Chesnutt's adherence to traditional styles and
structures within the short story is what made him p0pular in
his own day. More specifically, Chesnutt followed the
conventions of "dialect stories, of small peculiar groups
isolated and analyzed, of unique local 'characters' presented
primarily for exhibition,m of unfamiliar people whose quaint
and often out-dated mode of living had survived only in out-
of-the-way places" (80). Moreover, the "use of an outsider
[John] to explore this unfamiliar life was standard fare for
local color writing" (81).

Andrews also points to several alterations of local
color writing that were important to the novel's success and,
presumably, to its place in American letters. The first is
Chesnutt's use of the folktale motif. Joel Chandler Harris,
whose Uncle Remus stories were contemporary to Chesnutt's The
Con'ure WOman, 93359299§ly“t°1d entire folk stories from the

African-American tradition. Chesnutt's contribution was the

M'“

Minna-"A
_q~

'fiEE'Off"folk tradition as a basis and unifying principle for
stories whose plots, characters, and themes were largely
products of his own imagination" (83-84).

Chesnutt also extended the folktale envelope by
expanding the role of the storyteller. Although largely
common stock, none of the tales expand local color writing's

subject or scope, "Julius' often remarked technique of

27
adapting a story to prevent his employer's intentions from
clashing with his own interests does constitute one
individualizing trait in him" (85). Andrews says that the
addition of an ironic conclusion to the frame story
popularized by Thomas Nelson Page expands the realm of the
storyteller, but not enough to flesh out the black character
fully or make a great impact on the relationship between the
black employee/white employer relationship. In this
assertion, Andrews misses a great opportunity to understand
Chesnutt's significant political gains for blacks through the
frame mechanism.

According to Andrews, a third expansion of the black
storyteller is the trope common to all the stories of
"conjuring as a means by which a slave expresses and attempts
to preserve his most deeply felt emotions, human relations,
or identity" (93). Although the ex-slave storyteller relates
slave experience and many of its profoundly negative aspects,
Andrews says that Chesnutt does not spotlight the issue of
race. Instead, he is careful to show the characters'
"essential humanity beneath the accidents of his peculiar
ethnic background and social status" (93). The slave is
depicted as a victim, but this victimization is secondary to
Chesnutt's efforts to show how, within the confines of that
horrible institution, the slaves of the conjure stories
exhibit the kind of heroism that can only arise when one acts
against a seemingly omnipotent opponent. Facing such a

system, the slave acts not out of the "dog-like loyalty" or

28
"open militancy and defiance" seen in the local color stories
of his contemporaries, but rather out of their "freedom from
the enslavement of the spirit" (94). However, although the
tales reveal potentially humanizing portraits of slaves, it
is difficult to see the freedom Andrews alludes to when we
consider the frame story. The View contradicts the
observation that Julius:

maintained a peculiar personal attitude, that might be

called predial rather than proprietary. He had been

accustomed, until long after middle life, to look upon
himself as the property of another. When this was no
longer possible, owing to the war, and to his master's
death and the dispersion of the family, he had been

unable to break off entirely the mental habits of a

lifetime, but had attached himself to the plantation, of

which he seemed to consider himself an appurtenance.

(55)

In the absence of the institutional aspects of slavery,
Julius does indeed seem to be enslaved in spirit, unable to
break an instinctive bond to the plantation and its ante-
bellum way of life.

The last significant contribution that Andrews says that
Chesnutt makes to the genre of local color stories, and
perhaps his only technical innovation, is the suggestion that
the frame story reveals at least two different readings of
the tales. Andrews moves again towards seeing the real value

of the frame story when he suggests that the reader could

29
"join the businessman in regarding Julius' stories as
‘ingenious fairy tale[s]' and 'absurdly impossible yarn[s]'
concocted to entertain and subtly manipulate his employers or
respond to the stories as absorbing and moving narratives in
themselves, as the businessman's wife does" (97). He says

that whichever reading one makes Chesnutt presents the black

fi__.« —. _ . -
.._..r—~e uw-v ~ ~--'... ~___‘_’. - _____,, ., -.. 6._»-..W-o nW-‘m‘m

man in a pewIandemorewhuman.wayiii.i.
\_flflfl_~h,i.

The literal, economic interpretation assumed by John

 

serves to humanize Julius because the "average reader of
local color in Chesnutt's day" would expect unquestioning
loyalty to the slave system of the storytellers, as in Page's
In Ole Vir inia, or naked revolt against injustice.
Chesnutt's local color stories reveal to the reader an
enlightened version of the everyday life of ex-slaves, one in
which the economy of common affairs plays an important role.
Instead of representing unrealistic, stereotypical literary
characters only concerned with either service or revolution,
even the representation of John's rather shallow reading of
the tales serves to edify the reader.

Annie's sensitive and emotional response to the plight
of slaves in the tales guides the reader towards a deeper
understanding of the human tragedy inherent in the ante-
bellum South. The reading offered by the businessman's wife
can move the reader to grasp, sympathetically, the
"inadequacy of [the] traditional local color attitude towards
such stories" (98), where the storytellers are devoted to the

slave system or rebel against its inequity. Even if the

3O
reader cannot progress to Annie's more sensitive position,
Chesnutt has still moved the reader beyond the uncles of Page
and Harris.

Lorne Feinberg's article entitled "Charles W. Chesnutt
and Uncle Julius: Black Storytellers at the Crossroads" is a
kind of synthesis of Andrews' "double narrative' and
Ferguson's economic concerns. He says that "the narrative act
and the economic contract that frames the tales provide Uncle
Julius with opportunities to annul and invalidate some of the
brutal conditions of his slave past" (161-162). The danger of
this re-negotiation is that the position of storyteller is
one of accommodation. In The Con'ure WOman, this
accommodation can easily give way to the validation of roles
assigned in the Old South's caste system. Of course, it also
affords Julius the opportunity to reshape the relationship
between the listener and the tale.

To dramatize his point, Feinberg illustrates, through a
discussion of Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Vir inia, the
conventional framework confronting Chesnutt when he chose the
ex-plantation as the setting where he would re-negotiate the .r”'*
status of ex-slaves: /

conventionally in the plantation genre, the tales of the

black teller are framed by the introductory remarks of a N

cultivated, well educated, white narrator. The white ///

narrator's frame creates the illusion of distance for (

the comfortable reader, a kind of cordon sanitaire which

makes it safe to contemplate the words and deeds of ////

31 ““» ‘
social and racial inferiors. The white narrator is //
perfectly free to interrupt the black storyteller at any(//
juncture of his tale to pass judgment or to point out to \
the reader the comical ignorance or superstition of the
narration. Even his silences are significant, for they
are silences of condescension that leave him firmly in
control of the narrative situation. (164)
Feinberg says that the power negotiations between JOhn and
Julius, similar to the "confrontations" noted by Ferguson,
offer Julius not only the chance to "test [his] worth in the
marketplace, [but also] to question the control of a white
man, [and to] represent radical new freedoms for the freed
slave" (165). Although he acknowledges the purely economic
exchange—his words are offered up in exchange for his
employment and in JOhn's "economic absolutism" we see Julius'
ulterior economic motives—Feinberg rejects their central
importance, suggesting, unlike Andrews, that they are
completely dehumanizing and "express nothing of his inner
self" (165-66).

Feinberg also expands the interaction between Julius and
JOhn beyond Ferguson's "manhood/skill in controlling money"
issue. He maintains that the purely economic issue that JOhn
misses is the connection between his own motivations and the
"economic grasping" (168) of the tales, the "absolute
financial standard of value [that he as] the Yankee
entrepreneur seems to share with his plantation predecessors"

(171).

32

Another issue upon which Feinberg remarks is the
"economics of 'Storytime'" (166). In the frame story of The
Con'ure WOman, Chesnutt upsets the typical power arrangement
of an adult telling a tale to an audience of non-judgmental
children who have willingly given up authority to listen to a
tale. This arrangement is found, for example, in Harris'
uncle Remus stories. Chesnutt introduces a new audience of
sophisticated, white Northern adults, the effect of which,
Feinberg says, is to free Julius from the usual constraints
of telling a strictly engaging, imaginative tale and allows
him to confront "the issue of race oppression and the
brutality of his slave past" (167) in a way Uncle Remus never
could. The pitfall, Feinberg says, is that Julius cannot
"fix" his place as a storyteller; JOhn and Annie, well-
educated adults, choose to maintain their silence during the
tales and reserve their "intellectual and moral judgment"
until the end of the tales (167). Implicit in the
relationship is, though, the constant threat that they could
speak, instantly reversing Julius' power as a teller.

To maintain his control over his audience, Feinberg says
that Julius resorts to a variety of strategies. He first
seeks "refuge in deliberate stereotypes to veil his
condemnation of the slave system" and present his listeners
with comfortable characterizations. Feinberg also asserts
that his use of the theme of metamorphosis is the "most
cunning of Julius' strategies to control his audience" (167).

Julius embeds his critique of exploitation through

33 ‘
objectification in chapters such as "The Goophered Grapevine"

and "Po' Sandy" where characters are transformed through

 

'—‘—‘— HM “.m‘ —...

[1’ r..- h'—.—. ~— - "WWW
_, ___._ .1- __ . ___'.

witchcraft into things and ill-used in a_manner parallel to

M-w‘. ._._...._,.__—~.- -.A —.——--.._L

the sale and barter of slaves.“

M.~fl,, _...—.—.. i , A.--"

 

In another innovation in the relationship between the
black employee/white employer, Chesnutt's storyteller offers
an important and, ironically, ignored lesson on how to avoid
the trap the slave owners in the Old South fell into.
Feinberg adds little to the discussion not already covered by
Andrews except to say that when Annie accords "Sis' Becky's
Pickaninny" a truth value—"'Why JOhn!’ said my wife severely,
'the story bears the stamp of truth, if ever a story did"
(159)-"she suggests a new status for Uncle Julius as a
historian and chronicler of his culture" (171) and that
Julius is exploring his own changing identity in the
Reconstruction Era.

Feinberg's final comment is that there is a strong
parallel between Julius' position as a teller and Chesnutt's
"status in the literary marketplace" (172). He suggests that
Chesnutt's subversion of the plantation tale afforded him a
success in much the same way that Julius' subversion of the
folktale allows him success. The efficacy of his doing this
is underscored by Chesnutt's lack of commercial success in
his later writing where he more directly confronted his
racial themes. Feinberg says that they both "encounter the
perils of a dynamic relationship with their white audiencesm

establish[ing] the crucial lesson of the crossroads, that

34
survival as an occupation cannot be taken too seriously"
(172).

David D. Britt is another critic who sees The Conjure
Teheh's most important feature as its ability to work at two
different levels of meaning. He says that the effect of the
various levels of meaning in the novel is to "allow the
reader to be deceived about the more significant levels of
meaning if he chooses, or needs, to be deceived" (271) in
order to understand the plight of African-Americans. Chesnutt
embeds his more radical intentions of enlightening a largely
white readership in the deeper layers of his frames to allow
the stories access to the wider audience, many of whom might
never read the novel if its politics were made blatant. Britt
identifies the device that initially allows for the deception
as the double narrative of the stories. Britt interprets
Chesnutt's technique of allowing the white narrator to
introduce each of the tales (he usually presents Julius with
some kind of business problem) and to also interpret the tale
in his closing final words in much the same way as Andrews
interprets the businessman's position as typical "reader of
local color" (Andrews 80). This, Britt says, "creates a
surface level of meaning that leaves the Southern caste
system undisturbed" (271). Unlike, Andrews, however, Britt
does not consider the depiction of the average slave's life
as mitigating the ex-slave's depiction in the slave/master
hierarchy. In fact, Britt reads JOhn's background as a

northerner, presumably disinterested in the system, as

35
validating the status quo: "It becomes clear that JOhn
perceives Julius as crafty but of low intelligence and
essentially servile in spirit. In other words, he subscribes
to the racial biases common to most Americans" (273). Britt
dismisses the importance of the interaction between JOhn and
Julius in the frame story and argues that though "The Conjure
Teheh [is an] apparently 'safe' work, a reassuring collection
of tales that depicts a contented, entertaining black man
working within the unchallenged framework of American social
and intellectual mores" (273).

Britt finds a "double narrative," much the same way
Andrews and Feinberg do, but he argues that the innovative
use of dialect is the defining factor for Chesnutt's double
meaning. Through dialect, he says, Julius creates a "language
buffer" through which he can safely "work" on JOhn. Because
JOhn cannot take him seriously while he listens to his
"quaint and humorous" (274) way of speaking, Julius gains the
opportunity to manipulate him. How, then, does one read the
frame story? Britt suggests that reading the conjure stories
as Julius' attempt to manipulate John economically would
reduce Uncle Julius to the status of an unsuccessful hustler—
Britt points out that in only one of the stories does Julius
reap some material benefit for himself. He also asserts that
viewing Julius as a "‘darky entertainer' in the minstrel
tradition" (274) is invalid and that the "stories are not
about financial matters at allm in the way the surface

narrative implies" (274). Britt finally contends, in much the

36
same way as Feinberg does, that the stories are "elaborate
:metaphors, allegories really, in which the supernatural
elements point toward those dread realities of the slave's
life that lie beyond the comprehension of the ruling class.
The black man is laying bare the nature of the slave
experiencem showing the limitations of the white man's moral
and imaginative faculties" (274).

Once Britt has stated this "most obvious technique"
(273) to deceive JOhn into seeing the two sides of the ex—
slaves tales, he illustrates this "tension between the
outside and inside narratives [and] establishes the thematic
patterns" (275) in "P0' Sandy." The outside narrative, Julius
wanting to use the old school house as a meeting place for
his church, functions to prevent John from using the school

to provide the wood for his new kitchen. The inside
. 11\\\

narrative, the extended metaphor of the tale, "reveals the h

,/
dehumanization of the slave, the brutality of treatment (l

afforded the slave, and the intense love that a black man and /}5

woman have for one another" (275). Britt points to the

V)
. —-—-‘——/

recurring metaphor of homelessness which prevents Sandy from

establishing any "roots" and his transformation into a tree.

[7 M- ,-4~-.....~—-- u. .M " ~~>‘- -qflv-a—«fl...» ”9—4—-
o—fiWI ..._,__,_ n-fl-“’

.Thgeggh Sangy s metamorphosis, Britt says we can see the

 

 

 

 

 

dehumanizing aspects of slavery, the homelessness and the

objectification of these people, and its consequences:Sandy" égk/

_ #— fihfi ~ s., ---- ghe— "M
\w ’_’_,,.—v-v-' #' "N, ‘_. _‘

is "mutilate[d, and] impotent," while his wife experiences a

"love that drives [her] to distraction" (276). Clearly, Britt

37

says, these must be viewed as compelling commentaries on the
suffering of slaves that, presumably, JOhn must recognize.

Elaborating on the metaphorical aspects of the tales,
Britt contends that harmony or dissonance with the natural
order is a metaphor for the "natural, moral order of the
universe" (277) that can be consistently found in the conjure
stories. "The white men seek to exploit nature (cotton,
vineyards, and especially other men), with a resulting
atrophy of their capacity for human emotion" (277). Slaves,
on the other hand, exist in close alliance with nature,
evidenced by "the acts of goophering [which] show birds,
animals, and even the growing seasons working in concert with
black resistance against inhumane treatment" (277). Britt's
primary illustration of these extended metaphors is "The
Goophered Grapevine." In this tale, the white master, "Mars'
Dugal," first exploits goophering's connection with nature by
having his vineyard conjured: even though he does not buy
into the power of conjuring, he knows that his slaves will
not risk eating the grapes. Later, he exploits the seasonal
cycle of his new slave, Henry, whose body works in amazing
sympathy with nature as the result of another goopher, by
selling him in the spring when he is youthful and buying him
back in the fall when he grows old. Mars Dugal is on the way
to profiting handsomely. The slave owner's exploitative greed
catches up with him, however, when he takes advice purported
to boost the output of his vineyards. The recommendations are

bad, exposing the roots of the vines to the elements, and

38
they all shrivel and die, Henry in harmony along with them.
Britt contends that this "natural" death is somehow positive
'while McAdoo's death on the battlefield defending the immoral
institution of slavery bears out the immorality of the
plantation system.

At the end of the article, Britt contends with the
metaphors in "The Conjurer's Revenge" and "The Gray WOlf's
Ha'nt," two stories set entirely within the slave community.
Both of these stories, Britt says, counter a number of
stereotypes about black people, most notably that of the
"obsequious" black and the lack of ethics among blacks.
Primus, the protagonist in "The Conjurer's Revenge" is not
suhnissive in the least. In fact, he is "feared by both
whites and blacks" (281) because he is willful and powerful:
"[He] did n' min' de rules, en went w‘en he felt lack it; en
de w'ite folks purten' lack dey did n' know it, fer Primus
was dange'ous w'en he got dem stubborn spells, en dey'd
ruther not fool wid 'im" (Chesnutt 109). Britt says that the
second myth, the lack of morals, is dealt with swiftly in
these same two tales. The petty thefts from.whites are
"presented as a matter of course by Julius" in the other
tales. In these two tales where the crimes are black on
black, however, such transgressions are "viewed as serious
breaches of the norm and are dealt with accordingly" (281).
Blacks are free to exert a degree of control over their
ethics when whites are not present and, as revealed in "The

Conjurer's Revenge" and "The Gray WOlf's Ha'nt," the slaves

39
retain "enduring humanity despite the exploitive propensities
of the whites" (282).

In "The Teller as Folk Trickster in Chesnutt's The
Conjure Woman," Melvin Dixon makes the strongest claim for
Chesnutt's success in his struggle for black identity through
‘the frame story and the tales. Early in the essay, Dixon says
that "the fictional trickster and the novelist construct an
elaborate fictive world whichm is a playground for playing
out [his] aggressions [and in which] he is able to achieve a
kind of precarious masculine identity for himself and his
group in a basically hostile environment" (187-188). Dixon's
argument relies primarily on our understanding of what he
calls the "process of identification which takes place
between the teller and the hero of the story" (188). Although
he is speaking about Julius and the characters of his tales,
we presumably should apply this same insight to Chesnutt and
his fictive alter ego, Julius.

Dixon is careful to point out in "The Goophered
Grapevine" the similarities between old Henry, the slave who
eats the conjured grapes, and Julius himself: a love of
grapes, old age, light ccmplexion, and a bald head. The
importance of the identification between the teller and the
hero is, as Dixon tells us, quoting Roger D. Abrahams,
crucial to our understanding of the folktales: "the conflict
of the hero must in some way echo the conflict of the
narrator and his audience in order for the story to get the

approbation of being heard, applauded, and remembered" (189).

40

Dixon contends that the conflict in the tale between Henry
and his master over the grapes "mirrors" the conflict between
Julius and John. Although JOhn sees through Julius' trickery
at the level of the immediate and material, Dixon believes
that the story acts at another, more important, level: as a
vehicle for Julius' "masculine and artistic self-esteem" and
"his aggression against the institution of slavery which
dehumanized him, and which now continues to emasculate him in
his present relationship with his employer" (190). Although
Dixon has shifted the discussion to use the terminology
appropriate for discussing folklore, he continues the debate
over a metaphorical reading of man-to-man confrontations.

Dixon moves past the readings offered by the other
critics by positing Annie's symbolic sexual seduction by the
black storyteller and JOhn's figurative cuckolding. Instead
of reading the relationship between Julius and Annie as that
of a story teller and an understanding listener particularly
sensitive to the pathos of the tales as other critics have,
Dixon finds a sexual connection, presumably because he is
working to prove that Julius is asserting his manhood. The
underlying assumption for his argument seems to be that the
ultimate gesture of defiance and virility for the male ex-
slave is to seduce the master/white man's wife/sister/mother.

Dixon says that the "symbolic seduction of the wife by
the language and drama of Julius' speech is heightened" (193)
in "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny." In a reading that runs counter

to Feinberg's idea of "Storytime," Dixon cites Abrahams to

41

assert that "Julius, as teller in the oral traditionm is
'master of the situation he is narrating; he is the director
of the lives of the heroes of the pieces and of the structure
in which they are appearing'" (190). Dixon adds that,
according to Abrahams, "the assertion of masculine identity"
(191) is one of the primary functions of the oral tradition.
Moreover, Dixon says that "Julius gains mastery over his
employer by asserting his masculine and artistic power in the
verbal dramatization of conflicts endured by his slave
ancestors" (191). The simple act of telling a story, then,
becomes a profoundly important act, laden with the sexual
power of the word.

The interaction Dixon examines in most depth is Julius
giving Annie a rabbit's foot in "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny." A
shift in the site of exchange between Annie and Julius occurs
in this chapter: it is originally verbal, it becomes concrete
when Annie accepts the foot, and finally, when John discovers
the foot wrapped in Annie's handkerchief, "Julius' trickery
[progresses] to the level of metaphorical sexual union with
the employer's wife" (192). Dixon invests a phallic quality
into the rabbit's foot, arguing that the dried up left hind
foot of a rabbit "kilt by a cross-eyed nigger on a d'ak night
in de full er de moon" (Chesnutt 135) and originally
described as "some small object in his hand" (Chesnutt 134)
is his symbolic penis. Dixon argues that its association with
the night and the graveyard "gives the foot sensual as well

as supernatural characteristics" (193).

42

In his attempt to bolster his interpretation, Dixon
reads the relationship between the mother and child in "Sis'
Becky's Pickaninny" as "the perverse sexual intimacy [that
mirrors] the growing sexual attraction between Julius and
[Annie]" (193). He says "their incest is implied by the
physical intimacy of their life and the fact that: 'W'en
little Mese growed upm He tu'nt out ter be a smart man, en
l'arnt de blacksmif tradem En bimeby he bought his mammy en
sot her free, en den he bought hisse'f, en tuk keer er Sis
Becky ez long ez de bofe libbed (Chesnutt 158)" (193). Why
this is sexual and not the loving son aspiring to and
obtaining the freedom of his family Dixon does not address.
As he continues to reach for sexual connections, he reads
Annie's response to Julius' story—"her countenancem. had
expressed in turn sympathy, indignation, pity, and at the end
satisfaction" (158)—as sexual. By turning this into a sexual
response and claiming a mirroring between the frame and the
tale, he implies that Julius and Annie's relationship is also
"perverse" and "incestuous" (193). Again, he does not explore
this issue.

The last extension Dixon makes is that this "paper is a
study of the character Julius as teller and trickster for his
small audience, and, on a larger scale, a study of Chesnutt
as teller and trickster for his wider literary audience"
(187). To this end, Dixon says "just as the Julius masked his
moral lesson in the fictive world of his folklore to get what

he wanted, so too did Chesnutt use the fictive world of the

43
novel to accomplish his professional goals" (196). Those
goals, to "reveal the underlying facts of injustice and
rebellion", are reached, Dixon says, through Chesnutt's use
of folklore entertainment, the only guise in which the
message would be tolerated by nineteenth century America

(197).

44

CRITICAL STANCE

Although it is true that Chesnutt did not, as Andrews
has pointed out, make any technical innovations in the novel
genre, a reading of The Conjure Woman particularly sensitive
to the subtleties of discourse and to what M. M. Bakhtin
calls the understanding that "verbal discourse is a social
phenomenon" (259), can add significantly to our appreciation
of Chesnutt as a politically progressive writer. we have
seen, through the critics we have reviewed, that Chesnutt is
regarded by most as having fallen far short of his goal to
lead "whites out of their prejudicesm imperceptibly,
unconsciously, step by step" (Andrews 13), but I contend
that, when the discourse of the novel is viewed as a social
construct, Chesnutt has indeed deeply debated white
prejudice.

Bakhtin's work must first be put into a philosophical
context. Foucault says in The Order of Things that in the
nineteenth century the study of language was born out of the
revolutionary idea that it was merely a "particular domain of
objectivityi. one object of knowledge among others, on the
same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the
history of events and men" (296). This is a fundamental shift
where the "critical elevation of languagem implied that it

had been brought nearer both to an act of knowing, pure of

45
all words, and to the unconscious element in our discourse"
(Foucault 299). This system of binary oppositions, later
formalized in the twentieth century by Saussure, is
synthesized by Bakhtin and other Marxist critics into a
system of interaction between these two elements.

Caryl Emerson outlines the primary postures of this
stance fully developed in Marxism and the Philosophy of
Langgage by V. N. VOloshinov in her article "Outer Word and
Inner Speech." Bakhtin and his circle "posited four social
factors that make the understanding of speech and writing
possible" (23). The first posture they take is that "each
ideological product is meaningful not in the soul but in the
objectively accessible ideological material" (23). Emerson
argues that the word "ideological" (23), as a translation of
the Russian ideologija and as it is used by Bakhtin and his
circle, expresses "an 'idea system' determined socially" (23)
rather than the politically-laden English usage. This
distinction is important because, for Bakhtin, the verbal
sign is a social construct rather than an individual's mental
construct, as Saussure had claimed, and any struggle over
semantics must occur in public discourse rather than within
the person: "this outer experience, if it is to register
significance, must in some way be organized socially. Signs
can only arise on 'interindividual territory'" (Emerson 23).
Bakhtin asserts that in this territory, "signs do not arise
between any two members of the species Heme Sapiens. It is

essential that the two individuals be organized socially,

46
that they compose a group (a social unit); only then can the
medium of signs take shape between them" (Bakhtin 12).

The other social factors that Bakhtin posits are the
ones that relate directly to considerations of Chesnutt as a
political writer. Bakhtin says that "ideology always exists
as a relation between (or among) speakers and listeners and,
by extension, between or among social groups" (Emerson 24).
This means, or course, that the negotiation over meaning
between these groups or individuals takes place through the
word: "the word is the most sensitive index of social
changes, and, what is more, of changes still in the process
of growth, still without definitive shape and not as yet
accommodated into already regularized and fully defined
ideological systemsm. The word has the capacity to register
all the transitory, delicate, momentary phases of social
change" (Bakhtin 19). The novel, therefore, becomes a social
barometer at several different levels.

The world constructed by an author has the powerful
ability to influence and be influenced by the reading public—
if it falls too far from a shared vision and the ideas
readers are concerned with, the book will fail to attract an
audience; if it represents an acceptable or interesting view,
it can even be celebrated. Caryl Emerson says, "each social
group—each class, profession, generation, religion, region—
has its own way of speaking, its own dialect. Each dialect
reflects and embodies a set of values and a sense of shared

experiencem. every act of understanding involves an act of

47
translation and negotiation of values" (24). From the
perspective we are adopting, then, a reader wresting some
meaning from a novel constitutes a haggling over
signification and ideas.

The representation in the novel of contemporary society
grappling with current issues becomes, therefore,
particularly critical, volatile, and political. The manner in
which individuals and groups interact in a novel is itself
important as a social construct because it ultimately
communicates to a reader, through the text, a universe with
which the reader becomes engaged in dialogue. That reader
internalizes the interactions between characters in the
novel, perhaps empathizing with one of the perspectives or
arguing against another, but ultimately engaging in an
internal dialogue with the novel. "Understanding strives to
match the speaker's word with a counter word. Only in
understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt made
to match it with the 'same' word in one's own language"
(Bakhtin 102). The novel, the word, then, becomes one of the
most important sites in which the "medium of signs" acquires
ontological significance. Even if one character rejects the
ideas that have been spoken by another, the evidence that the
idea has been translated, understood, and debated, even
internally, is politically important.

Lastly, Emerson says that for Bakhtin "words cannot be
conceived apart from the voices who speak them; thus every

word raises the question of authority" (Emerson 24). Since

48
Bakhtin already posits that every word, in order to have
meaning, must take place between two individuals "organized
socially," every utterance is engaged in the negotiation of a
group or individual's status in the represented world and, by
extension, the social context in which the novel finds
itself. In the novel, new ideas struggle to be acknowledged:
new aspects of existence, once they are drawn into the
sphere of social interest, once they make contact with
the human word and human emotion, do not coexist
peacefully with other elements of existence previously
drawn in, but engage them in a struggle, reevaluate
them, and bring about a change in their position within
the unity of evaluative purview. (Bakhtin 106)
In The Con'ure WOman, Chesnutt introduced a new existence
into the represented world of the post-Civil War South. As a
new significance issuing from an old one, this manifestation,
inherently contradictory to the old one, engages it and, in

the end, shakes it to its very foundations.

49

PREDECESSORS TO CHESNUTT’S LOCAL COLOR FRAME

Before examining the frame stories in The Con'ure WOman,
it is important to place the novel in the context of other
contemporary local color novels whose success Chesnutt was
eager to duplicate, while avoiding their political and/or
racial stance. One highly successful example of the genre is
Thomas Nelson Page's novel In Old Virginia or Marse Chan and
Other Stories, published in 1887.

The frame story opens with a chapter entitled "Marse
Chan." The narrator, spending the afternoon on a leisurely
ride on his horse, wonders to himself about the people who
used to reside on the plantations he casually passes by. He
reflects on what he says must have been their "desire [for] a
level path in life" and that, while their lifestyle was
possible, "the outer world strode by them as they dreamed"
(1). From.the start, this narrator is clearly sympathetic to
the old South and to the system that sustained its dream.

The narrator's revelry is interrupted by a black man
calling for his dog. So intent is the man upon finding the
animal that he does not hear the narrator approach and so
affords us Page's "candid" glimpse of the ex—slave. The story
falls a short seven years after the end of the Civil War and
one might think the man would be enjoying the fruits of his

emancipation. Instead, Page's ex-slave, finding himself

50
without a human master to serve, chooses to serve a canine
one:

The setter sauntered slowly up to the fence and stopped,

without even deigning a look at the [ex-slave], who

immediately proceeded to take the rails down, talking
meanwhile:

"Now, I got to pull down de gap, I s'pose! Yo' so sp'ilt

yo' kyahn hardly walkm. Jes' like white folks—think 'cuz

you's white and 1's black, I got to wait on yo' all de

time. Ne'm mine, I ain' gwi do it!" (3)

Of course, he already has, and in a manner one might expect
from a stereotypical ex-slave: ready acquiescence accompanied
by slight verbal resistance.

Upon noticing his white observer, the black man, half
apologizing for letting him see the interactions with the
dog, termed strictly a "family affair" (3) by the narrator,
tells him that the dog's late owner was "Marse Channin'",
also owner of the now decrepit mansion and surrounding
plantation. The narrator, dismounting, relates that the self-
named Sam-there is no reason for them to introduce themselves
to each other—takes hold of his reins "instantly, as if by
instinct" (4) and instantly begins to relate Marse Channin's
tale when the narrator demands he "Now tell [him] about Marse
Chan" (4). Clearly, the relationship established between
these two men, and indeed continued throughout the novel, is
little changed from that between a white man and a slave

before the war.

51

The political stance of the novel says that Sam is a
receptacle, a repository for stories about the white man's
Old South. He does not possess the stories, but acts like a
jukebox—telling stories upon demand, giving them up to those
who own them. In this negotiation over the word, if it can be
called that, the winner is quickly apparent. There is no need
for any "act of translation" or striving to understand the
story on the part of our narrator; the story is, as Page says
in his dedication, "To my people—This fragmentary record of
their life".

The only thing remaining after the ex-slaves finish the
tales is a sign of approval from the narrator. The story of
Marse Chan's biography ends with a typical appeal to a total
stranger for verification: "Dey tells me dat de Bible sey
dyar won' be marrying nor givin' in marriage in heaven, but I
don' b'lieve it signifies dat—does you?" (38). The narrator
"comforts" Sam, as if he were truly agitated, that his
"interpretation" of his dead master's fate is consistent with
his own and rewards Sam in the only manner he seems to know—
not with thanks, but "with several spare 'eighteen-pances'"
(38). At its closure, the frame story ends with no
negotiation, only a simple act of condescending magnanimity
and token payment for services rendered.

"'Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'. A Plantation Echo", "Meh
Lady: A Story of the war" are other chapters in In Ole
Virginia where, although the tales are told by different ex-

slave storytellers, the relationship between the tellers and

52
the narrator of the frame story remains the same. The
storytellers, all victims of the slave system, recall over
and over again an idyllic past for which they seem to
sincerely long: "Deses heah free-issue niggers don' know what
Christmas ism. Hit techs ole times to mech a sho'-'nough,
tyakin'-down Christmas" (40) or "Lord! suh, hit cyars me back
so sometimes, I mos' furgit de ain' never been no war nor
nuttin'm. we wuz rich den, quarters on ev'y hill, an' niggers
mo' 'n you could tell dee names" (79-80). The tales they tell
are, again, those of their masters.

"Ole 'Stracted" is the only chapter of the novel in
which the story of a black family, newly freed and suddenly
at the mercy of "half-strainers" and "po' white trash" (147),
is told. Consistent through the chapter is the assertion by
these former slaves that Ole 'Stracted's life had been much
better as a slave with his first master and that perhaps
theirs was too. After Ole 'Stracted was stolen as a young man
and sold by someone other than his master, he was, since that
day, without a name or identity: "Everything since that day
was a blank to him, and as he could not tell the name of his
master or wife, or even his own name, and as no one was left
old enough to remember him, the neighborhood having been
entirely deserted after the war, he simply passed as a
harmless old lunatic laboring under a delusion" (153). He
waits and waits for the return of his master to "buy [him]
back—den [they] gwine home" (156). Not surprisingly, the

Master that comes to take the ancient is God. In Page's

53
formula of the Old South, the Master of the plantation and
God are equated. In a final, ironic twist at the end of the
chapter, even though the system has been destroyed, Ephriam,
who, it turns out, is the old man's long lost son, receives
from his dying father money he had made as a slave with which
he intended to buy back the boy, if he ever could have found
him. Even from its grave, Page's genteel South takes care of
its responsibilities.

A second novel to which The Conjure Woman is often
compared, both because of its frame structure (another
"Uncle" narrator telling tales) and the time period when the
tales are told (post-Civil War) and the places (the Southern
ex-plantation) is Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings.
This comparison is illustrative more of the difference
between the two works than of the similarity: these
superficialities mark the end of the similarities between the
novels. In the first place, Harris says in his preface that
Remus' tales are, like Page's, meant to be white people's
stories: "my purpose has been to preserve the legends
themselves in their original simplicity, and to wed them
permanently to the quaint dialect—if, indeed, it can be
called a dialect-through the medium of which they have become
a part of the domestic history of every Southern family; and
I have endeavored to give to the whole a genuine flavor of
the old plantation" (vii). Though these tales are from the
slave tradition, they are told because of their connection to

the Southern white experience. Harris goes on to say that

54
"the myth-stories of Uncle Remus are told night after night
to a little boy by an old Negrom who has nothing but pleasant
memories of the discipline of slavery—and who has all the
prejudices of caste and pride of family that were the natural
results of the system" (xvii). With this approach, one is not
surprised to find that Harris reads the trickster tales as
"thoroughly characteristic of the Negro" (xiV).

Lest the reader endeavor to interpret the tales
allegorically in favor of the black man, Harris' introduction
prefaces any debate that might arise by saying that "it needs
no scientific investigation to show why he selects his hero
the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him
out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the
fox. It is not virtue that triumphs, but helplessness; it is
not malice, but mischieviousness. It would be presumptuous of
me to offer an opinion as to the origin of these curious
myth-stories; but, if ethnologists should discover that they
did not originate with the African, the proof to that effect
should be accompanied with a good deal of persuasive
eloquence" (xiv-xv). It is as if Harris is in a dialogue with
his audience before the tales are even told, anticipating
that the reader will try to match Remus' word with his own
counter word, attempting to place that experience against his
own, and will acquire an ontological significance.

Harris also recognizes the social context in which his
novel will be read and he tries to "place" Harriet Beecher

Stowe's "wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the

55

South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attached the
possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius;
but the same genius painted a portrait of the Southern slave-
owner, and defended him" (viii) in the same camp as his own
version of the slave system and his portrayal of Uncle Remus.

It is not surprising then, that the frame for the
"Legends of the Old Plantation" section of the novel is set
up with a benevolent old black man storyteller doting over a
favored son as heard by the mother: "One evening recently,
the lady whom Uncle Remus call 'Miss Sally' missed her little
seven-year-old boy. [She] saw the child setting by Uncle
Remus. His head rested against the old man's arm, and he was
gaping with an expression of most intense interest into the
rough, weather-beaten face, that beamed so kindly upon him.
This is what 'Miss Sally' heard" (3-4) and so begins the
tales. Since we never return to Miss Sally, we must presume
that all the tales are related to us as heard by the woman. I
think that this context could hardly be infused with less
authority: an ex-slave's tales to a little boy, as filtered
through a woman. The frame is very carefully constructed to
insulate the tale as fully as possible from the real
authority that existed and which is, in fact, never seen or
heard in the novel. While Page's white male narrator
validates or even tells the tales that strengthen his
position, here, it seems, the tales could not even hold up
under such pressure or perhaps can only exist where there is

no one authoritative challenge to their legitimacy. If we are

56
looking at this in terms of negotiation over social
authority, we again see that there is no negotiation taking
place—in the context of the nineteenth century South, women
and children are hardly in a position to negotiate the status
of the tales.

A second section of the novel where we see the frame
story is in a short section of the novel entitled "A Story of
the war". In our discussion of Chesnutt's use of the frame
story, it is striking how similar the frames are in "A Story
of the war" and in The Conjure Woman. "A Story of the War"
begins with a white Northerner, Miss Theodosia Huntington,
moving south. For Miss Huntington, there are three reasons
for the move: 1) to be with a relative, 2) to improve her
health (her friends had "persuaded her that to some extent
she was an invalid" (204)), and 3) to "explore a region which
shempictured to herself as remote and semibarbarous" (203-
204). Upon her arrival in Atlanta, she is met by Uncle Remus,
whose function is, for the first time, defined: he is the
family driver. Then, in a setting with which we are familiar,
"One Sunday afternoonmthe family were assembled in the
piazza" (206), reading and talking. When Remus comes into the
piazza, complaining about "deze yer sunshine niggers" (206)
who do no work and beg Remus' tobacco, JOhn "wants" Remus to
tell his experience during the Civil War. Remus is clearly
uncomfortable—"he shuffled around in an awkward, embarrassed

way" (207)—but does tell the story, with apologies.

57

The two novels' frame structures are strikingly similar,
making me wonder if Chesnutt copied the elements deliberately
or whether they were simply so common that their use was
second nature. The tale that is surrounded by the frames is
similar to another work as well. But this time, the
resemblance is not to Chesnutt, but to Page's tales. Remus'
tale is told, as Miss Theodosia observes, "from the
standpoint of a Southerner" (207-208) and with the air of one
who expected his hearers to thoroughly sympathize with him.

In his tale, Remus confesses that "hit didn't strike me
dat dey wuz enny war gwine on" (208). Remus remembers fondly
all the praise his master received during the war and speaks
easily of how "lonesome" he becomes as the war progressed and
men all around him are conscripted into the army. Ironically,
he is lonesome for the very men whose morality would keep him
in servitude. Eventually, the mistress of the house gives
Remus responsibility for running the plantation and his
master, on a short visit, gives him responsibility for
defending his wife and sister from an imminent Yankee attack.
Remus literally becomes caretaker for the Southern slave
tradition that keeps him in bondage.

When the battle moves to the area surrounding the
plantation, Remus takes up a rifle and goes into the battle
with very ambiguous intentions: is he "deserting" his post?
or is he out to defend his master's plantation? As he
reconnoiters in the woods, he spots a Yankee sharpshooter in

a tree. At the same time, he spots his master coming down the

58

road and, knowing he is the next target, Remus points, closes
his eyes and fires! At this, Miss Theodosia can not contain
herself and she bursts into the narrative—"Do you mean to
saymthat you shot the Union soldier, when you knew he was
fighting for your freedom?" (214). In the final twist of the
episode, Remus admits that he did, in fact, consider this,
but in what has, by this time in the novel, become a typical
fashion, Remus reacts in a way that validates the white,
Southern experience.

This shared experience is not negotiated—in fact, it is
a balanced and tried equation, one that Remus is compelled to
explain to the Northern sister—the man he shot is her
brother. Though Remus cost him an arm, he says he has more
than paid him back: Remus inducted JOhn into the Southern
lifestyle, which he has embraced, given him a wife and a
child, "'en I gin 'im.deze—holding up his own brawny arms"
(215). Central to the deal is Remus' giving himself up to a

new, Northern master.

59

THE POLITICS OF CHESNUIT'S LGIAL COLOR FRAME

After examining Page's and Harris' novels as popular
models of local color writing to which Chesnutt and the
reading public were accustomed, the radically different
political use of the frame device in The Conjure Woman can be
seen. The idea systems defined by the relationships in the
frame are still growing, working towards accommodation in the
system already regularized and portrayed in In Ole Virginia
and Uncle Remus. In fact, the system is fully in place at the
outset of The anjure Woman. There, a powerful white
community dictates the ideas and actions of an ex-slave
community. As The Conjure woman progresses, however, Chesnutt
adds important new aspects to the power relationships
depicted in the local color frame.

One of the most weighty outward signs of the ideological
struggle to which The Conjure WOman is sensitive is the
relationship between Uncle Julius and his white employers. At

avery basic level, The Conjure woman posits a black man

 

~—-~—-...m. ---.-

educating a white audience by telling his history of the

slave-holding South before the Civil war. Unlike Page s ex-

 

slaves, Julius does not focus on the white fighis”experiéfiaé'

as the only viable narrative of that time period. Instead, he

wire-4“.“

tells directly the blackiperception 9f the conditions to

p-C—fi'muru‘.

which he was subjactedeamfarrcrwarom_t e doting storytellers

60
in In Ole Virginia. In a powerful shift of authority, Julius
gains, in Annie's estimation at least, the status of
historian: she says at the end of "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny"
that the tale "is true to nature, and might have happened
half a hundred timesm in those horrid days before the war"
(Chesnutt 159). Julius' role, as defined by Annie, is not
merely that of an old storyteller concerned with his personal

welfare. Instead, he tells a true history of the South.

Even John, who at one point says that Julius' tales are
"grotesquem broadly humorousm [and] palpable inventions"
(Chesnutt 168), acknowledges in the frame of "The Gray wolf's
Ha'nt" the truth value of the tales as history: he hears:

"some [stories] bearing the stamp of truth, faint,

perhaps but still discerniblem. But even the wildest was

not without an element of pathosr—the tragedy, it might
be, of the story itself; the shadow, never absent, of
slavery and of ignorance; the sadness, always, of life
as seen by the fading life of an old man's memory.

(Chesnutt 168)

By directing the tales at the very group who have inherited
the legacy of the slave system, Chesnutt depicts, through
Julius and the dialogue of frame story, the negotiation of
nothing less than the relative status and power of the
participants.

Beyond simply directing his tales of slavery at his new
employers, Julius evokes from them one of the most crucial

gestures in the bargaining over social power and position.

61
Chesnutt depicts Julius as not only a historian, but also as
the person able to lead John and Annie to "match [Julius']
word with a counter word", the only way they can have an
understanding of what they hear (Bakhtin 102). Julius'
direction and definition is critical to his listeners'
understanding of the tales and guides then to a premeditated
sense of the tales' ontological significance. For instance,
"The Goophered Grapevine" tale is prefaced by the necessity
of explaining "goophering":

"Well, I dunno whe'r you b'lieves in cunj'in' er
not,-some er de w'ite folks don't, er says dey don't,—
but de truf er de matter is dat dis yer ole vimya'd is
goophered."

"Is what?" [JOhn] asked, not grasping the meaning
of this unfamiliar word."

“13 goophered,-conju'd, bewitch'."

He imparted the information with such an air of
confidential mystery, that I felt somewhat interested,
while Annie was evidently much impressedm." (Chesnutt
11-12)

Despite Feinberg's assertion that there hangs over this
"storytime" the threat of role reversal where JOhn and Annie
arbitrarily resume their dominant positions in the
relationship (Feinberg 166), Julius' authority while he is
telling his tales is, in fact, never violated—he is never
interrupted once he begins telling a tale. In this

representation of new responsibilities, Julius provides the

62
framework of the black experience and the language essential
to building a new political climate of significant, shared
meaning.

Another function of the dialogue between Julius and his
employer is to establish the general conditions under which
Julius works. Unlike its predecessors in local color, The
Conjure Woman represents a new relationship where Julius
holds some sway over the terms of his service. For instance,
as a direct consequence of Julius' telling the tale "The
Goophered Grapevine," JOhn recognizes in the frame the value
of what he denies Julius when he purchases the vineyard:

I found when I bought the vineyard, that Uncle Julius

had occupied a cabin on the place for many years, and

derived a respectable revenue from the product of the
neglected grapevines.... I believe... that the wages I paid
him.for his services as coachman, for I gave him
employment in that capacity, were more than an
equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the

vineyard. (Chesnutt 35)

Clearly, such a negotiation over the black man's value as an
employee and the impact white society might have on his life
is a major development in the represented world of the frame.
Page and Harris offer no such opportunity for contesting the
outcome of their association—indeed, the relationship seems
immutable from the outset of both novels.

The nature of the relationship between the two men is

further refined in "Mars Jeems's Nightmare." In this frame,

63
it becomes clear that Julius is an invaluable source of
information to John and his wife, as well as the primary
shaper of their vision of the world they now inhabit. Rather
than rely on John's cousin or upon white neighbors for
information about Patesville, the two recognize that Julius
"had a thorough knowledge of the neighborhood, was familiar
with the roads and watercourses, knew the qualities of the
various soils and what they would produce" (Chesnutt 64).
Julius clearly offers a perspective more valuable to John and 1

Annie than that of the gratuitous storyteller in In Ole

 

Vir inia, mouthing a dead history. Julius has an intimate
understanding of the area—he had never strayed more than
twenty miles from his home—that is probably consistent with
experience of most of the inhabitants, both ex-slave and
white, of Patesville and, indeed, most of the rural South.

A fourth dimension Chesnutt adds to the frame story that
pushes the boundaries of the relationship between the black
and white characters posits Julius as a reliable source in
the investigation of the narrator's human nature, as well as
further negotiating with John over his relationship with his
black employees. In the frame of "Mars Jeems's Nightmare,"
JOhn's comment that young Mr. MbLean "looks as though he were
ashamed of himself" (Chesnutt 69) for beating his horse into
a frenzy of fear compels Julius to say that "a man w'at
’buses his hoss is gwine ter be ha'd on de folks w'at wuks
for 'im" (Chesnutt 70). Unmistakably, in the context of this

frame where JOhn has just discharged Julius' grandson because

64
he "turned out to be trifling, and [JOhn] was annoyed by his
laziness, his carelessness, and his apparent lack of any
sense of responsibility" (Chesnutt 66), Julius wants John to
put himself in the place of the boy and consider his own
actions from that perspective:

"W'ite folks w’at is so ha'd en stric', en doan make no

'lowance fer po' ign'ant niggers w'at ain’ had no chanst

ter l'arn, is li'ble ter hab bad dreams, ter say de

leas', en dat dem w'at is kin' en good ter po' people is
sho' ter prosper en git 'long in de worl'." (Chesnutt

100)

Although not his doing, when Annie rehires the boy the next
day, apparently taking Julius' admonitions to heart, does not
discharge him again.

Although John implicitly recognizes Julius' centrality
to his understanding of the South, he often complains about
them, saying that "some of these stories are quaintly
humorous; others wildly extravagant, revealing the Oriental
cast of the negro's imagination" (Chesnutt 41), "absurdly
impossible yarn[s]" (Chesnutt 61), and "very ingenious fairy
tale[s]" (Chesnutt 159). How, then, do the tales themselves
function to further Chesnutt's political goals, over and
above the content seen in Page's and Harris' novels? How do
they differ from an allegorical reading of Uncle Remus' tales
where one finds an ideological stance that seems sosimilar
(and perhaps explains why Harris felt compelled to say that

"such a[n allegorical] interpretation may be unreasonable"

65
(Harris xiv))? In the first place, Julius' tales directly
represent, with great authority, the thoroughly cruel and
dehumanizing elements of slavery—these stories, "poured
freely into the sympathetic ear of a Northern-bred woman,
disclose[d] many a tragic incident of the darker side of
slavery" (Chesnutt 41). Faced with the graphic depiction of
such incidents in a local color novel, a critical response
seems unconscionable. It is very difficult to dismiss the
tales as one might Uncle Remus' stories which are directed at
a child.

The content of the tales also evokes a consistent
discussion in the frame over the meanings inherent in the
tales and, thus, models for the reading public appropriate
responses to the tales. As we have seen, the relationships
portrayed in the frame embody many important "new aspects of
existence" (Bakhtin 106) and Chesnutt confronts headlong "the
white world's fumbling inability to appreciate the wisdom,
humor, and heart of a black man's experience, rooted in the
cruelties of the slave experience" (Farnsworth xvii). The
relationships constitute such politically profound ideas that
he seems unable to simply leave the interpretation to his
readers. In his quest to elevate whites, Chesnutt will not
allow his readers to misconstrue the profound power of the
black experience and the unfamiliar world that challenges the

very foundations of an assumed white privilege.

WORKS CITED

66

WORKS CITED

Andrews, William L. ”The Significance of Charles W.
Chesnutt's ’Conjure Stories'". Southern Literary
Journal. 7.1 (1974): 78—99.

Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W.
Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1980.

Bakhtin, M. M. and V. N. Volosinov. Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.
R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Britt, David D. ”Chesnutt's Conjure Tales: What You See is
What You Get." College Langgage Association Journal. 15
(1972): 269-283.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Conjure woman. 1899. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Dixon, Melvin. “The Teller as Folk Trickster in Chesnutt's

The Conjure WOman." College Language Association
Journal. 18 (1974): 186-197.

Farnsworth, Robert M. Foreword. The Conjure Woman. By
Chesnutt. 1899. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1969. v-xix.

Feinberg, Lorne. “Charles W. Chesnutt and Uncle Julius: Black
Storytellers at the Crossroads." Studies in American

Fiction. 15.2 (1987): 161-173.

67

Ferguson, SallyAnn H. “Chesnutt's 'The Conjurer's Revenge':
The Economics of Direct Confrontation." Obsidian. 7.2
(1981): 37-42.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random
House, 1970.

Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His
Sayings. 1880. New York: Appleton-Century, 1921.

Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other
Stories. 1887. Ridgewood: The Gregg Press, Inc., 1968.

 

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