“The Goophered Grapevine” 279would be recognized by Socrates, the great ancient
Greek philosopher of ethics. The story as told by
Uncle Julius illustrates clearly the conundrum that
was slavery in the antebellum South and the confu-
sion between the races after the Civil War. Certainly
slavery was an ethical quagmire in American history,
and these characters reflect that.
The narrator, a vintner from Ohio, comes across
Uncle Julius, a former slave, still living on the old
McAdoo plantation. His first reaction is that the
former slave is not fully negro but has some white
blood; his hair “suggested a slight strain of other
than negro blood.” Based on his preconceptions, the
narrator also believes that Uncle Julius is not very
bright, but he learns differently through experience:
There was “shrewdness in his character.” The north-
erner is condescending, and he is aware that Uncle
Julius’s tale is suspicious. “I have not noticed any
developments of the goopher in the vineyard,” he
says, but he knows the locals are eating the grapes.
He listens to Julius’s wild tale of cursed grapevines
patiently but is not fooled by it. The narrator buys
the vineyard and makes a success of it. He resolves
his one twitch of conscience by reporting that he
hired Uncle Julius and paid him as much as he
could have made from illegally selling the scupper-
nong grapes. It seems as if the northerner is proud
of his magnanimity. He says that the wages paid to
Julius for his services as coachman “were more than
equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the
vineyard.” He never considers Uncle Julius an equal.
The story of Ole Mars Dugal McAdoo as told
by Uncle Julius reveals how slaves looked at and
humored their masters. McAdoo’s motivation was
twofold: to profit from the grapes and his slaves and
to control through fear. First, he told his slaves not
to eat the grapes because it would cut into his prof-
its. When that did not work, he bought a curse from
a “conjure woman.” “Dey wuz a cunjuh ’oman...
[who] could wuk the mos’ powerfulles’ kin’ er goo-
pher” to place upon his grapevines—if a slave ate a
grape he would die. And so they stopped eating the
grapes out of fear. When a new slave such as Henry
unknowingly ate a grape, the conjure woman pro-
vided a temporary solution to Henry’s dilemma that
ebbed and flowed with the growing season. McAdoo
turned this to his advantage. When the spring sap
rose, Henry’s strength greatly increased, so each year
he was sold to another plantation. As the growing
season waned, Henry’s strength and value declined,
and McAdoo took him back. He made a good profit
on Henry every year. McAdoo was greedy and never
took into account what this might do to Henry or
his family. He destroyed lives without a thought,
secure in his legal rights of ownership.
Uncle Julius has crafted a comfortable existence
on the plantation since Ole Mars Dugal McAdoo
left. He sells the scuppernong grapes, lives where he
chooses, and comes and goes without a “by-your-
leave.” He has a vested interest in maintaining the
status quo. He is unimpressed with both his former
owner and the vineyard’s new owner. His way of
life is firmly built on the practice of lying to the
master. It is Julius’s way of avoiding punishment,
banishment, and hard work. Julius’s dependence
on dialect, which gets thicker as his story proceeds,
is part of that lie: He hopes to disguise his native
intelligence. So if the northerner condescends to
him, Uncle Julius returns the favor by thinking the
northerner will believe in the curse and the story he
tells. Julius is not above stealing, either.
Are these men unethical? By their own lights,
they are not. Ethics do not exist out of context but,
rather, are the underpinning of social structure. They
are rules or standards of how people live harmoni-
ously in society together. Julius feels lying is ethical
for slaves who have no other advantage, while McA-
doo saw no reason to exercise ethics on his slaves.
Chesnutt’s interest was in better interracial relations,
and he believed that could be accomplished through
knowledge and experience. Uncle Julius represents
his earliest vehicle toward that goal. The story of
the northerner, McAdoo the slave owner, and the
former slave is not about violence or evil but about
human nature under very specific circumstances.
While humanity can strive for ideals, the realities are
more often than not determined by context. Slavery
is gone, lamented or not, but its ripples through
human nature take time to dissipate.
Elizabeth MaliaFreedOm in “The Goophered Grapevine”
What does freedom mean to an American? Charles
W. Chesnutt indirectly comes to the conclusion that