 | |
| Author | Charles W. Chesnutt |
|---|---|
| Genre | Short story collection |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Company |
Publication date | 1899 |
| Pages | 246 |
The Conjure Woman is a collection of short stories by African-American fiction writer, essayist, and activist Charles W. Chesnutt. First published in 1899, The Conjure Woman is considered a seminal work of African-American literature composed of seven short stories, set in Patesville, North Carolina. A film adaptation, The Conjure Woman (film) was made by Oscar Micheaux.
Chesnutt wrote the collection's first story, "The Goophered Grapevine", in 1887 and published it in The Atlantic Monthly . Later that year, Chesnutt traveled to Boston and met with Walter Hines Page, an editor at the Houghton Mifflin Company. [1] Page asked Chesnutt to forward some of his writing, which was the beginning of a multiple-year correspondence between the two.
Chesnutt wrote three more of the stories between 1887 and 1889 he called "Conjure Tales", two of which would eventually appear in The Conjure Woman. [1] The stories were "Po' Sandy" published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, and "The Conjurer's Revenge" 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 which were selected by Page and other editors at Houghton Mifflin to appear in The Conjure Woman, including "Mars Jeems's Nightmare", "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny", "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt", and "Hot-Foot Hannibal". [1] [2]
Houghton Mifflin did not note Chesnutt's race when announcing and advertising the publication of The Conjure Woman. [5] Chesnutt said that he preferred to be neither heralded or shunned on the basis of his color, but that his "colored friends ... saw to it that the fact was not overlooked". One friend wrote a "chiding" letter to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, that published a favorable review of the book, accompanied by a portrait of Chesnutt to prove his race.
In an 1890 letter to his mentor, the Southern novelist George Washington Cable, Chesnutt explained his intent to subvert the popular image of the Negro in literary magazines, saying that "all of the many Negroes . . . whose virtues have been given to the world in the magazine press recently, have been blacks, full-blooded, and their chief virtues have been their dog-like fidelity to their old master, for whom they have been willing to sacrifice almost life itself. Such characters exist. . . . But I can't write about those people, or rather I won't write about them." [6]
The stories in The Conjure Woman all share the same frame narrative and dueling voices. The narrator is a white Northerner named John who has come to the South because his white wife, named Annie, is in poor health and requires a warmer climate. Also, John wants to own and operate a vineyard. John passes along the "conjure tales" told to him by Uncle Julius McAdoo, an ex-slave who serves as both a trickster figure and a subversive witness. [7] [8] John, who prefaces each tale with a supercilious monologue, is captivated by the pre-Civil War history of the region but skeptical of McAdoo's clever and sometimes crafty accounts, while Annie is more sensitive to lived experience and sometimes glimpses the covert moral in McAdoo's stories.
Each story involves other former slaves from the McAdoo plantation and other nearby plantations. Most of the stories are derived from African American folktales and hoodoo conjuring traditions; [1] others are revisions of tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses . [9] Each story features 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. [10]
The Conjure Woman differs from other post-Civil War literature in the Plantation tradition in condemning the plantation regime [4] and eschewing popular racial stereotypes like the magnanimous white slaveholder and the infantile black in need of a caring master. [4] [11] Critics noted that Chesnutt deploys a clichéd or codified structure, with a friendly former slave recounting a story to white Northerners, and creates a familiar impression of antebellum nostalgia. In African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, Donald M. Shaffer contends that Chesnutt's use of storytelling is a form of black agency as it gives Chesnutt the opportunity to employ a traditional form of storytelling in order to flip the narrative of plantation fictional stories. The tales told by Julius are more tragic than wistful and underscore a deceptive naivety and mysticism with a subtle, sly challenge to white authority. [12] Julius contradicts the dominant racial discourse of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depicting black resistance and survival as well as demonstrating the psychological effects of oppression and slavery. [1] [10] [8] Despite their enslavement, Uncle Julius and other slaves leveraged power in exchange for information, favors, or conjuring, and demonstrate their intelligence through plots of self-gain and sometimes revenge. [10]
In The Art of the Conjure Woman, critic and scholar Richard E. Baldwin argued that Chesnutt is "the ultimate conjure man, hoping that by 'wukking de roots' of black culture he might be able to work a powerful goopher on white America and lead it to accept the equality of the black." [13]
This is the first short story from The Conjure Woman, published in The Atlantic in August 1887, told to the narrator by Julius McAdoo, a former enslaved man who lives on the plantation that the narrator, John, and his wife, Annie, visit one day. Set in Patesville, North Carolina, John and Annie moved there for an improvement in his wife's health and to seek other business opportunities. Knowing that the couple wanted to purchase the property, McAdoo advises them not to do so, informing them that when Dugal McAdoo, the previous master, purchased the property, it was very rich in wine production because of its vineyards. To protect his grapes from being stolen, Master McAdoo consulted with a conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, who placed a curse on the vineyard and warned the slaves that whoever stole them, would die within a year. Henry, a new slave, did not know of the curse, and when he ate the grapes, he was cursed to age when the leaves of the vines withered and once the vines died, so did Henry. Suffering the loss of his slaves and his vineyard, Master McAdoo left the vineyard abandoned after the war to the current state in which the couple found it. McAdoo warns the couple against purchasing the property due to it still being cursed, but the narrator buys the vineyard regardless. [14]
This second short story was published in The Atlantic in 1888 and it follows the same frame narrative as the previous one with Julius McAdoo advising John against following through with his plans of demolishing a schoolhouse to build a kitchen. In this short story, Sandy is an enslaved man owned by Mars Marrabo McSwayne, who sends Sandy to travel to help friends and families. During one of Sandy's trips, McSwayne sells Sandy's wife and replaces her for another woman named Tenie. Over time, Sandy and Tenie develop a relationship, at which point Tenie reveals to Sandy that she was a conjure woman for some time in her life. With this information, the couple decides that they will turn Sandy into a tree so that he no longer has to travel and turn him back into a person from time to time. However, as McAdoo relates, one day McSwayne decides to have the tree cut down to build floorboards in his kitchen, ending the life of Sandy. Afterwards, other enslaved people claimed that they heard groans and moans coming from the floor, resulting in the belief that the building was haunted. This led to the kitchen being demolished, of which lumber was used to build the schoolhouse that John wishes to dismantle to build a kitchen in its place. After hearing the haunted story from McAdoo, Annie dissuades John from dismantling the schoolhouse to build the kitchen and leaves it alone. [14]
In this third short story of The Conjure Woman, it opens up with John informing McAdoo that he can no longer let his grandson work in the plantation because he is not a good worker. With this, McAdoo shares the story of Mars Jeem, a slaveowner, who would have nightmares of being turned into a slave. Because Mars Jeem mistreats his enslaved people, his fiancé refuses to marry him, which results in him further taking his anger out on the enslaved people. One of these enslaved men, Solomon, asks Aunt Peggy, a conjure woman, for help, at which point she hexes Mars Jeem's soup. Disappearing and reappearing as a Black man, he is beaten and made compliant. A month later, Solomon feeds the man a hexed sweet potato, upon which then the man disappears and once again returns as Mars Jeem. With this new experience, Mars Jeem begins to treat his enslaved people better and his fiancé agree to marry him once again. As the moral of the story goes, McAdoo warns John and Annie that those who do wrong by others suffer from nightmares and those who do good receive good prospects. Having taken this moral well, Annie encourages John to let McAdoo's grandson continue to work at the plantation. [14]
In this short story, McAdoo once again tries to dissuade John from doing something that benefits him only, which is to purchase a mule. McAdoo shares the story of an enslaved man named Primus, who was turned into a mule after he was thought to have stolen a pig. The conjurer is overcome with guilt for making the mistake of placing the conjure, so he promises to reverse the spell, but as the mule is sold to his original owner, it gets drunk and attacks Primus's girlfriend. However, the conjure man dies as he is attempting to reverse the spell, and Primus is instead left with a club foot, which he had prior to the conjure. As the story goes, McAdoo advises John against buying the mule and instead encourages him to purchase a horse, which turns out to be sick and unreliable, thus dying. At this point, John is left to question McAdoo's trustworthiness and his intentions with John. [14]
This short story of The Conjure Woman now follows John as he reproaches McAdoo for all of his superstitious beliefs and how they lack foundation, commenting that these traditions are the reason why Southern Black people are destined for a life of continued acquiescence and little prosperity. This opinion stemmed from McAdoo's assertion that carrying a rabbit foot leads to good luck. John is concerned for Annie's health, since the main reason they moved to the countryside was to improve her health due to her current bouts of depression and anxiety. With this knowledge, McAdoo then relates the story of a young boy who was separated from his mother and orphaned due to a series of events, which could have all been avoided if the mother had simply carried a rabbit's foot. As the story goes, according to McAdoo, Sis' Becky's husband dies, upon which her master trades her in for a horse. Thus leaving her child, named Mose, orphaned and who grows sick, Aunt Peggy goes on to turn him into a mockingbird from time to time so that he can visit his mother. As part of her plan, Aunt Peggy lames the horse for which Sis Becky was traded, ultimately influencing Becky's master to trade her back, and reuniting her with her son once more. McAdoo claims that none of these events would have happened if Sis Becky would have had a rabbit foot with her, a moral that Annie once again understands. Over time, John notices that Annie grows to feel better, which he attributes to her simply surpassing her melancholy. One day, Annie asks John to grab her handkerchief from her blue dress, and as he goes to grab the handkerchief, John discovers a rabbit foot that McAdoo had placed in her room, which can be related to Annie's quick recovery from her ails. [14]
In another one of McAdoo's tales, this time, he aims to convince John to not cultivate land where McAdoo has found bees since he uses it as his side business. As such, he relates the story of a conjure man named Uncle Jube, who seeks revenge on an enslaved man named Dan for murdering his son for trying to steal his wife. With this knowledge, Dan goes to see the conjure woman for help in protecting him, but Uncle Jube has already caught up to him. Uncle Jube manages to fool Dan into believing that he does not know that Dan is responsible for the murder of his son and instead agrees to help him find the witch that has caused this misfortune. Prior to meeting with Dan, Uncle Jube kidnaps Dan's wife and turns her into a black cat and later turns Dan into a wolf. Informing him that the black cat is indeed the witch, Dan tears out the black cat's throat and realizes that it was his wife all along. Upon this realization, Dan goes to find Uncle Jube and tears his throat out. As he bleeds to death, Uncle Jube reveals his intentions by letting Dan know that now they are even and to drink the potion that will turn him back into his human form. However, he did not realize that drinking the potion would keep him as a wolf forever, solidifying Uncle Jube's revenge. Ending the tale with Dan haunting his wife's grave forever, McAdoo argues that John must stay away from that piece of land. [14]
In this final short story of The Conjure Woman, Annie' sister, Mabel, faces relationship issues with her boyfriend. Seeing the opportunity, McAdoo tells the story of a young woman by the name of Chloe whose master arranges a marriage with a man named Hannibal. However, because Chloe is in love with another man named Jeff, this poses problems for Hannibal, who grows increasingly frustrated. Searching for a solution, Chloe and Jeff go to Aunt Peggy, who gives them a conjure doll that is meant to intervene with Hannibal's performance to the extent that his master sends him to work the fields again. Taking Hannibal's place, Jeff and Chloe become more wrapped up in their relationship and ultimately forget to return the doll so that Aunt Peggy can take back the curse. Due to this sequence of events, Hannibal continues to worsen in his worth ethic, which results in his master deciding to sell him, which angers Hannibal even more. As a means for revenge, Hannibal lies to Chloe by saying that Jeff is cheating on him. Reacting to this news, Chloe confesses to her master about the conjure doll, which results in Jeff being sold in the place of Hannibal. After Hannibal confesses his trickery to Chloe, the master tries to get Jeff back but it is too late as Jeff has drowned. Filled with his anguish and misery, Chloe lives the rest of her life in mourning until her death. Hearing this story and understanding the moral, Mabel decides to make up with her boyfriend. [14]
The Conjure Woman received mostly positive reviews [15] and 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.
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. It is a syncretic religion between two or more cultural religions, in this case being African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an American author, essayist, political activist and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the African-American director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Following the Civil Rights Movement during the 20th century, interest in the works of Chesnutt was revived. Several of his books were published in new editions, and he received formal recognition. A commemorative stamp was printed in 2008.
Queen: The Story of an American Family is a 1993 partly factual historical novel by Alex Haley and David Stevens.
Plantation tradition is a genre of literature based in the Southern United States that is heavily nostalgic for antebellum times. The ideology is that of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, though this specific genre is often called "The Plantation Myth."
John the Conqueror, also known as High John de Conqueror, John, Jack, and many other folk variants, is a folk hero from African-American folklore. He is associated with the roots of Ipomoea purga, the John the Conqueror root or John the Conqueroo, to which magical powers are ascribed in African-American folklore, especially among the Hoodoo tradition of folk magic. Muddy Waters mentions him as Johnny Cocheroo in the songs "Mannish Boy" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man". In "Mannish Boy", the line is "I think I'll go down/To old Kansas too/I'm gonna bring back my second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo". This line is borrowed from the Bo Diddley song "I'm a Man", to which "Mannish Boy" is an answer song. In "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man", it is called "John De Conquer Blue".
The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a novel by the African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt, portraying a fictional account of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, an event that had just recently occurred.
Margaret Garner, called "Peggy", was an enslaved African American woman who killed her own daughter rather than allow the child to be returned to slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).
Anti-Tom literature consists of the 19th century pro-slavery novels and other literary works written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Also called plantation literature, these writings were generally written by authors from the Southern United States. Books in the genre attempted to show that slavery was beneficial to African Americans and that the evils of slavery, as depicted in Stowe's book, were overblown and incorrect.
Aunt Phillis's Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is by Mary Henderson Eastman is a plantation fiction novel, and is perhaps the most read anti-Tom novel in American literature. It was published by Lippincott, Grambo & Co. of Philadelphia in 1852 as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published earlier that year. The novel sold 20,000–30,000 copies, far fewer than Stowe's novel, but still a strong commercial success and bestseller. Based on her growing up in Warrenton, Virginia, of an elite planter family, Eastman portrays plantation owners and slaves as mutually respectful, kind, and happy beings.
African-American folktales are the storytelling and oral history of enslaved African Americans during the 1700s-1900s. Prevalent themes in African-American folktales include tricksters, life lessons, heartwarming tales, and slavery. African Americans created folktales that spoke about the hardships of slavery and told stories of folk spirits that could outwit their slaveholders and defeat their enemies. These folk stories gave hope to enslaved people that folk spirits would liberate them from slavery. One of these heroes that they looked up to was the charming High John the Conqueror, who was a cunning trickster against his slave masters. He often empowered newly freed slaves, saying that if they needed him, his spirit would be in a local root. Other common figures in African-American folktales include Anansi, Brer Rabbit, and Uncle Monday. Many folktales are unique to African-American culture, while others are influenced by African, European, and Native American tales.
Br'er Rabbit is a central figure in an oral tradition passed down by African-Americans of the Southern United States and African descendants in the Caribbean, notably Afro-Bahamians and Turks and Caicos Islanders. He is a trickster who succeeds by his wits rather than by brawn, provoking authority figures and bending social mores as he sees fit. Popular adaptations of the character, originally recorded by Joel Chandler Harris in the 19th century, include Walt Disney Productions' Song of the South in 1946.
The House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux. It was loosely adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the post-Civil War South. No print of the film is known to exist, and it is considered lost. Micheaux remade the film in 1932 under the title Veiled Aristocrats.
"The Wife of His Youth" is a short story by American author Charles W. Chesnutt, first published in July 1898. It later served as the title story of the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. That book was first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection The Conjure Woman.
The House Behind the Cedars is the first published novel by American author Charles W. Chesnutt. It was published in 1900 by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. The story occurs in the southern American states of North and South Carolina a few years following the American Civil War. Rena Walden, a young woman of mixed white and black ancestry, leaves home to join her brother, who has migrated to a new city, where he lives as a white man. Following her brother's lead, Rena begins living as a white woman. The secret of her identity leads to conflict when she falls in love with a white aristocrat who learns the truth of her heredity. The ensuing drama emphasizes themes of interracial relations and depicted the intricacies of racial identity in the American south.
"The Passing of Grandison" is a short story written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published in the collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899). The story takes place in the United States in the early 1850s, at the time of anti-slavery sentiment and the abolitionist movement in the Northern United States, and after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble is a 2000 American television film starring Jane Seymour and directed by James Keach. It depicts the life of British actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, who sees first-hand the horrors of slavery when she marries an American plantation owner. Her published diaries in the form of personal accounts are shown to influence the British government's decision to withhold support of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Keith Carradine co-stars as Fanny's husband Pierce Butler, with Keach, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Colin Fox also appearing.
Puppy Creek Plantation, also known as the McGregor-Lamont House, is a historic plantation house located near Rockfish, Hoke County, North Carolina. It was built about 1821, and is a two-story, three-bay, Federal style frame dwelling. It is sheathed in weatherboard, has a gable roof, and sits on a high brick pier foundation. It features exterior end brick chimneys and full-width front porch.
Mae Louise Miller was an American woman who was kept in modern-day slavery, known as peonage, near Gillsburg, Mississippi and Kentwood, Louisiana until her family achieved freedom in early 1961.
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The Conjure Woman public domain audiobook at LibriVox