Set in the fictional postbellum community of
Pasteville, North Carolina (Chesnutt’s fictional
Fayetteville), the seven frame stories in the book
provide southern local color of the past told in
the heavy North Carolinian black dialect of Uncle
Julius McAdoo, a shrewd former field hand slave,
who enriches his recollection of the plantation
with conjure and voodoo tales and folk practices
and beliefs. Uncle Julius tells his stories to John,
the primary narrator, an Ohioan who has gone
south after the Civil War to invest in a vineyard
and to find a hospitable climate for his ailing wife,
Annie. Upon meeting the prospective owners for
the first time, Uncle Julius advises them against
the purchase, relating the strange and tragic events
caused by the gopher, or hoodoo, placed on the
vineyard by its former owner, Colonel McAdoo, to
keep his slaves from stealing his valued and price-
less scuppemong grapes. Aware of Julius’s own
personal interest in the property and the profits
he might have already realized from the land, John
purchases it nevertheless and hires Uncles Julius as
his coachman.
In his role as griot, or storyteller, Uncle Julius
illuminates the darker side of the peculiar insti-
tution, slavery. Unlike the loyal and obsequious
slave Friday, who yearns to return to the “good
ole days” of slavery, Julius topples it from its be-
nign pedestal. Images of bartering human flesh
and the lawless appropriation of human bodies
surface throughout Uncle Julius’s recollection. We
see this, for example, in “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny.”
Although it means she will be separated from her
infant, Little Mose, Sis Becky, already separated
from her husband, is traded by her master, Col-
onel Penddleton, for a racehorse. The colonel’s
action confirms Sis Becky’s status not only as
voiceless property but specifically as chattel, as
beast of burden. Similarly, when he returns to the
slave quarters after being “lent out” to his master’s
children, Sandy of “Po’ Sandy” discovers that his
master has swapped his wife for a new female
slave. Sandy reveals that commodified black bod-
ies are important only for their exchange value.
Mars Marrabo “pays” Sandy one dollar to com-
pensate for having separated his family.
Finally, the expediency of black life is found
in the exploitation of Henry in “The Goophered
Grapevine.” After he unknowingly eats the goo-
phered grapes, Henry is kept alive by Aunt Peggy’s
conjuration, a sap made from the vine, which she
instructs him to rub on his head. Although he does
not die, Henry takes on the properties of the vine,
becoming young and strong during the spring but
old and infirm during the fall. Aware of Henry’s
dilemma, Marse Dugal McAdoo devises a plan in
which he sells Henry at the height of his virility
and buys him back when his body goes dormant
like the vineyard. His scheme brings him a profit of
$5,000 in five years. As critic Robert Bone notes,Beneath the comic surface of the tale is a lesson
in economics of slavery. The slaves were in fact
worth more in the spring, with the growing
season still to come; in the fall prices declined,
for an owner was responsible for supporting
his slaves through the unproductive winter
season. These fluctuations in price underscore
the slave’s status as commodity; his helpless
dependence on the impersonal forces of the
market. The target of Chesnutt’s satire is the
dehumanizing system that reduced the black
man to the level of the crops that he was forced
to cultivate. (85)In the end, Uncle Julius indicts multifaceted
slavery, while enriching his tales with conjure,
voodoo, and folk practices and beliefs. Julius is
clearly patterned after the paradigmatic African
folk hero, the trickster. More important, how-
ever, Uncle Julius, in action and narration, moves
beyond chronicling horrific slavery. As griot, he
simultaneously records and celebrates the slaves’
successful conversion of their marginalizing site
of oppression and deprivation into a space of re-
sistance and radical possibilities. For example, the
bond between Sandy and his second wife, Tennie,
a conjure woman, is so strong that rather than be
sold into slavery he allows her to convert him into
a tree during the day. At night, she reconverts him
into her mate and companion. Also, rather than
let Little Mose, Sis Becky’s son, pine away, Aunt116 Conjure Woman and Other Stories, The