Tales of conjure woman free#

Andrews, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, vii-xvii Andrews, William L., Frances Smith Foster, & Trudier Harris, eds., The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 Garraty, John A. Works Consulted: Andrews, William L., Introduction, Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line by Charles W. Chesnutt from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture available on this site.

Tales of conjure woman free#

His accounts include Aun' Peggy's conjure spells in 'Mars Jeems's Nightmare,' 'Po' Sandy,' 'Sis' Becky's Pickaninny,' and 'Hot Foot Hannibal' as well as those of free black conjure men in 'The Conjurer's Revenge' and 'The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt.' These conjure tales reveal moments of active black resistance to white oppression in addition to calculated (and even self-motivated) plots of revenge. Yet Uncle Julius McAdoo, the ex-slave and 'trickster' figure extraordinaire who narrates the internal storylines, presents a remarkably different view of southern life. Enamored by remnants of the plantation world, John portrays the South in largely idealistic terms. These seven short stories use a frame narrator, John, a white carpetbagger who has moved south to protect his wife Annie's failing health and to begin cultivating a grape vineyard. While drawing from local color traditions and relying on dialect, Chesnutt's tales of conjuring, a form of magic rooted in African hoodoo, refused to romanticize slave life or the 'Old South.' Though necessarily informed by Joel Chandler Harris's popular Uncle Remus stories and Thomas Nelson Page's plantation fiction, The Conjure Woman consciously moved away from these models, instead offering an almost biting examination of pre- and post-Civil War race relations.

Published in 1899 by Houghton Mifflin, Chesnutt's first book, The Conjure Woman, was a collection of seven short stories, all set in 'Patesville' (Fayetteville), North Carolina. In 1928, Charles Chesnutt was awarded the Springarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in recognition of his literary achievements. Consequently, his later publications were reduced to the occasional short story. Neither The Marrow of Tradition nor his final novel, The Colonel's Dream (1905), sold well. Chesnutt's second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, was published a year later in 1901. The popular and critical success of his short stories in The Conjure Woman (March 1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (fall 1899) set the stage for the 1900 publication of his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. The publication of two collections of short stories and three novels between 18 helped establish Charles Chesnutt as the most prominent African American fiction writer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The publication of 'The Goophered Grapevine' (later to become the first story in The Conjure Woman) in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1887 inaugurated Chesnutt's influential literary career. After passing the Ohio bar in 1887, he opened a successful stenography business. Having grown frustrated by the limited opportunities he encountered as a mixed-race individual living in the South, he moved permanently to Cleveland in the early 1880s, settling his entire family there by 1884. Chesnutt first worked in Charlotte and Fayetteville as a schoolteacher, a career he began as a pupil-teacher at age fourteen. The Chesnutt family remained in Cleveland until 1866 and then moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina. On June 20, 1858, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Maria Sampson, free African Americans living in Cleveland, Ohio.