Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 253immediately at odds with the white. And the distance between white man and black,
sounded in their differences of speech, is then elaborated as Julius reveals the true
dimensions of himself and his culture in his stories. Julius has his own series of
expertises: care of the body administered not by professional men but conjure
women, care of the spirit involving not decorous observance of the Sabbath but
charms, ghosts, and the magical control of natural vitality. He has his own cultural
traditions, based on the oral tales he remembers and performs. And he has his own
relation to the land where he lives, based not on a system of abstract profit and
exchange, but a lived attachment to it, a working with it for limited, immediate,
practical gain. For John, places like the McAdoo plantation are part of a colonial
economy, where, he confides, “labor was cheap, and land could be bought for a mere
song.” For Julius, they are home, a part of nature and a part of him; and, in his own
comically desperate way, he tries to keep his home his. Of course, he fails. As
Chesnutt discloses in story after story, real power lies with the dominant white class.
But, in failing, he still shows his capacity for resistance, his willingness to assert,
however circuitously, his own self and his rights. A tale like “The Goophered
Grapevine” subtly charts the domination of white over black but also the small
advantages, the concessions blacks are able to negotiate within the framework of
that domination. It shows that social control is never absolute, the oppressed are
never simply and entirely the oppressed; they can, and do, declare their own
humanity and their own culture.
“I think I have about used up the old Negro who serves as a mouthpiece, and
I shall drop him in future stories, as well as much of the dialect,” Chesnutt wrote
in 1889. In fact, the other collection of stories he published ten years later had, as
their connecting link, not so much a character as a subject: the one indicated by the
subtitle, Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt was also to claim much later, in
1931, that most of his stories, apart from those in The Conjure Woman, “dealt with
the problems of people of mixed bloods.” And many of the tales in The Wife of His
Youth do dwell on the plight of those who, precisely because of their origins and
coloration, seemed to him to exist as a racial battleground, caught between two
bitterly divided races and cultures, to neither of which they feel they entirely belong.
Some of these tales have a clear didactic intent. One called “Uncle Wellington’s
Wives” tells of a middle-aged mulatto who, persuaded by the propaganda about the
good life in the North, leaves his wife of many years in the South and sets out to
achieve the “state of ideal equality and happiness” which he believes awaits the black
man in Ohio. Forgetting all about the loyal black wife he has abandoned, he marries
a white woman and acquires a well-paying job. However, he soon loses both, and the
lesson to be learned from this reversal is underlined for him by a black lawyer friend.
“You turned your back on your own people and married a white woman,” the lawyer
tells him. “You weren’t content with being a slave to the white folks once, but you
must try it again.” Not all the stories in this collection point the moral as emphatically
as this, however, and not all are concerned with the problems of “mixed blood.” One
of the best, “The Passing of Grandison,” neatly reverses the old plantation stereotype
of the faithful darky who would never dream of deserting his master, even ifGGray_c03.indd 253ray_c 03 .indd 253 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM