252 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Harris. But they are subtly and significantly different. They introduce the lore of
“conjuration,” African-American hoodoo beliefs and practices, to a white reading
public mostly ignorant of black culture. And they offer a new kind of black
storytelling protagonist: Uncle Julius McAdoo shrewdly adapts his recollections of
the past to secure his economic survival in the present, sometimes at the expense of
his white employer. In effect, The Conjure Woman quietly tells the reader about black
community and humanity: the cultural forms, the strategies African-Americans use
to maintain their sense of identity and resist white domination. Conjure figures in
these tales as a way to control property and settle disputes; above all, though, it
figures as a resource, a form of power available to the powerless in oppressive,
intolerable situations. So does storytelling. Julius defends himself against the
superior power of the whites – whose surplus capital enables them to buy the
McAdoo plantation on which he lives – with the weapon he has in evidently endless
supply: the numerous tales he knows about the land that his white masters know
merely as abstract property.
The story that first brought Chesnutt to public attention, “The Goophered
Grapevine,” is exemplary in this respect. The narrator is “John,” who tells us that he
decided to buy an old plantation near “a quaint old town” called Patesville, North
Carolina, partly to continue his business of “grape-culture” but mainly because
“a warmer and more equable climate” than the one available in his native Ohio was
recommended for his invalid wife. The tale then revolves around the various
anecdotes Uncle Julius McAdoo tells them about this, the McAdoo plantation: all
of which focus on evidence to the effect that the plantation, and its grapevines, are
“goophered” or bewitched. “I wouldn’t ‘vise you to buy dis yer ole vimyard, ‘caze de
goopher’s on yit,” Julius tells John and his wife Annie, “an dey aint no tellin’ w’en it’s
gwine ter crap out.” John, however, does not heed the warning. He buys the plantation
and he subsequently discovers, he tells the reader in the conclusion to the tale, that
Julius had occupied a cabin there for many years, “and reaped a respectable revenue
from the product of the neglected grapevines.” “This, doubtless, accounted for his
advice to me not to buy,” John infers, but he is sufficiently intrigued by Julius, and
his evident quickness of wit, to make up to him “for anything he lost by the sale of
the vineyard” by employing him as a coachman. The whole narrative slyly subverts
convention by showing that the relationship between the races is one of conflict, not
the cross-cultural harmony the plantation genre typically evokes. Everything about
John identifies him with the white bourgeois ruling class of the years after the Civil
War: his genteel speech and Latinate vocabulary, his wife confined to domesticity
and refined invalidism, his Sundays spent attending “the church of our choice” and
browsing through the “contents of a fairly good library.” Above all, there is his belief
in enlightened business methods, and “the opportunities open to Northern capital
in the development of Southern industries.” For him, the McAdoo plantation is
an investment, a commodity which, like all commodities, should be exploited for
maximum profit. This puts him at total odds with a man like Uncle Julius. Uncle
Julius instinctively knows this, which is why he tries to get rid of him. His lively,
earthy vernacular, his dialect speech creates a dissonance, sets the black characterGGray_c03.indd 252ray_c 03 .indd 252 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM