Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 251Massachusetts in 1885. There, he continued to write novels, like John March,
Southerner (1894), that dealt with the collision between Northern and Southern
morals and manners. Cable was not the first writer from the South to write of his
region with a mixture of sentiment and seriousness. But his work resonates with
themes and imagery that were to echo in Southern fiction of the twentieth century:
brothers divided by the racial barrier, the shadow of slavery, images of the plague
and the swamp rehearsing the evil that surrounds and infests an entire society. Cable
was one of those writers in whose work the regionalist impulse acquired a sterner,
more skeptical dimension. To that extent, he deserves a place with his fellow
Southerners, Mark Twain and Kate Chopin; like them, he showed how romance and
realism were not necessarily at odds: on the contrary, he could explore the “dark
heart” of his birthplace in and through the glamour of its surfaces.
A writer who knew more than most about the dark heart of racism, North and
South, and who, like Cable and Chopin, began his career as a popular “local color”
writer, was Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932). Chesnutt was born in Cleveland,
Ohio, to which his parents had recently moved. They had left Fayetteville, North
Carolina to escape the repression experienced by free blacks in the South. After the
Civil War, however, the family returned to Fayetteville, and it was there that Chesnutt
was educated. Chesnutt first attracted attention as a writer with his story “The
Goophered Grapevine,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887. This was
followed by many other stories set in the South, and in 1899 two collections
appeared: The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales and The Wife of His Youth
and Other Stories of the Color Line. At the heart of The Conjure Woman is a picture
of plantation life in the Old South, presented through the comments and stories of
an ex-slave and inhabitant of the region, Uncle Julius McAdoo. Julius’s tales were
“naive and simple,” Chesnutt was to write of them later. Their subject, he added, was
“alleged incidents of chattel slavery, as the old man had known it and as I had heard
of it”; and they “centered around the professional activities of old Aunt Peggy, the
plantation conjure woman, and others of that ilk.” Chesnutt admitted that these
stories were written “primarily to amuse.” But, he added, they “have each of them a
moral, which, while not forced upon the reader, is none the less apparent to those
who read thoughtfully.” For example, Chesnutt explained, in one of the tales, “Mars
Jeems’s Nightmare,” a cruel slavemaster is transformed into a slave for several weeks
by the conjure woman so that he might have “a dose of his own medicine.” The
consequence is “his reformation when he is restored to his normal life.”
“The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored
people as the elevation of the whites,” Chesnutt wrote in 1880, “– for I consider the
unjust spirit of caste ... a barrier to the moral progress of the American people.” His
way of doing this, he hoped, would be to “lead people out” to “the desired state of
feeling” about black people “while amusing them.” He could use the established
literary genres and conventions to persuade white readers out of their prejudices
“imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step.” So, the stories in The Conjure Woman
may appear to belong to the traditions of plantation literature and dialect tales
typified, on the one hand, by Thomas Nelson Page and, on the other, by Joel ChandlerGGray_c03.indd 251ray_c 03 .indd 251 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM