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The Conjure Woman

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This article is on the short stories from the book The Conjure Women

First edition cover, 1899

The Conjure Woman is an 1899 collection of short stories by African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt. It is Chesnutt's first book, and an important work of African American literature.

Background

Charles Chesnutt wrote the short story, “The Gophered Grapevine,” in 1887. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the same year, Chesnutt traveled to Boston and met with Walter Hines Page, other employees of Houghton, Mifflin, and Company Publishing house.[1] Page asked Chesnutt to forward some of his writing. This was the beginning of a multiple-year correspondence between Page and Chesnutt.

Chesnutt wrote three more "Conjure Tales" between 1887 and 1889, two of which would eventually appear in The Conjure Woman.[1] "Po’ Sandy" was originally printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, and "The Conjurer's Revenge" was published in Overland Monthly in June 1889.[2] In March of 1898, Page wrote Chesnutt to inform him that Houghton Mifflin would consider publishing a short story collection with "the same original quality" as "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy."[1][3][4] Over the next two months, Chesnutt wrote six additional stories. Four of these stories are "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," and "Hot-Foot Hannibal ". These four stories were selected for inclusion in the collection.[1][2] "Hot-Foot Hannibal" also appeared in the January 1899 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. In March 1899, The Conjure Woman was published.[1]

List of Stories

  • "The Gophered Grapevine"
  • "Po' Sandy"
  • "Mars Jeems's Nightmare"
  • "The Conjurer's Revenge"
  • "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny"
  • "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt"
  • "Hot-Foot Hannibal"

Content

Every story contains the same frame narrative structure and main characters in which Uncle Julius McAdoo, a former slave, shares a "Conjure Tale" with a white Northern couple.[1] The couple, John and Annie, meet Uncle Julius while they consider moving south for Annie’s health and visit in search of property. John is captivated by the pre-Civil War South and wants to own a vineyard. Each story opens with a monologue from John's point of view, which establishes the setting and John's idealistic perspective.[5] The bulk of each story is Uncle Julius's retelling of a "Conjure Tale". Uncle Julius is a former slave and serves as a trickster figure whose accounts clash with John's ideas.[6][7] The tales involve other former slaves, some from the McAdoo plantation and some from nearby plantations, and derived from African American folktales and hoodoo conjuring traditions,[1] and some tales are revised stories from the Metamorphoses by Ovid.[8]

Each story contains a conjurer, most notably Aun' Peggy in "Po' Sandy," "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," and "Hot Foot Hannibal." In "The Conjurer's Revenge" and "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," Uncle Julius discusses the activities of free black conjure men.[5] After Uncle Julius concludes, Annie comments on the veracity or contents of the tale.[1]

The Conjure Woman differs from other post-Civil War conjure tales and plantation writing in its condemnation of the plantation regime.[4] Typical plantation literature relied on racial stereotypes, portraying an Edenic relationship where magnanimous white slaveholders provided for infantile blacks.[4][9] Although Chesnutt follows the same general structure, with a friendly former slave recounting a story to white northerners, the stories Uncle Julius tells are not wistful.The stories revised the classical plantation narrative and contradicted the dominant racial discourse of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, depicting black resistance and survival within white culture.[1][5][7] Despite their enslavement, Uncle Julius and other slaves leveraged power in exchanges of information, favors, or conjuring, and demonstrate their intelligence and person-hood through plots of self-gain and sometimes revenge.[5]

Reception

The Conjure Woman was reviewed over seventy times and received mostly positive reviews.[10] It sold so well that Houghton Mifflin released two more books by Chesnutt the following year.[2]

The book was adapted by Oscar Micheaux as a silent film released as The Conjure Woman in 1926.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Chesnutt, Charles W. (2012). Stepto, Robert B.; Greeson, Jennifer Rae (eds.). The Conjure Stories. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-92780-1.
  2. ^ a b c Chesnutt, Charles W. (1993). Brodhead, Richard H. (ed.). The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. Durham & London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822313786.
  3. ^ "Note on the Texts". The Library of America online. Literary Classics of the United States. 2001. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
  4. ^ a b c Martin, Gretchen (Winter 2009). "Overfamiliarization as Subversive Plantation Critique in Charles W. Chesnutt's The ConjureWoman & other Conjure Tales". South Atlantic Review. 74 (1): 65–86 – via JSTOR.
  5. ^ a b c d Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice (2004). "Summary of The Conjure Woman". Documenting the American South. UNC Chapel Hill University Library. Retrieved 2 December 2018. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  6. ^ Cash, Wiley (December 2005). ""Those Folks Downstairs Believe in Ghosts": The Eradication of Folklore in the Literature Of Charles W. Chesnutt". CLA Journal. 49 (2): 184–204 – via JSTOR.
  7. ^ a b Shaffer, Donald M. (2012). "African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman". The Western Journal of Black Studies. 36 (4): 325–336 – via WorldCat.
  8. ^ Koy, Christopher (July 2011). ""African American Vernacular Latin and Ovidian Figures in Charles Chesnutt's Conjure Stories"". Litteraria Pragensia. Studies in Literature and Culture. 21:42: 50–70 – via academia. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
  9. ^ Mackethan, Lucinda H. (1985). "Plantation fiction, 1865-1900". In Rubin, Louis D. (ed.). The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 9780807112519.
  10. ^ Browner, Stephanie. "Charles W. Chesnutt". chesnuttarchive.org. Retrieved 2 December 2018. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
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