The Goophered Grapevine

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CHARLES WADDELL
CHESNUTT
1887

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
PLOT SUMMARY
CHARACTERS
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

"The Goophered Grapevine" by African-American novelist and short story writer Charles W. Chesnutt, was first published in Atlantic Monthly in 1887. It was the first work by an African American to appear in this prestigious magazine, although at the time the editors were unaware of Chesnutt's race. The story was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection of stories The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. The story is also available in Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt (1992), edited by William L. Andrews. The story is frequently anthologized and is the best known of the dialect stories Chesnutt wrote in the early part of his career. These stories, which use the style of language, or dialect, spoken by African Americans in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, are not only a landmark in African-American literature, they also capture life in the South immediately before and after the Civil War.

"The Goophered Grapevine" is set in North Carolina in two distinct time periods. Shortly after Reconstruction (the period from 1865 to 1877, when the Southern states were reintegrated into the Union following the Civil War), a Northern businessman travels to the South to investigate the possibility of buying a vineyard. He encounters a former slave named Julius who tells him a story about something strange that happened on the plantation before slavery was abolished. The story reveals much not only about the cruelty of the slavery system but also about the folktales and beliefs of African

Americans during this period, and the contrast between their beliefs and those of the Northern visitor and the culture he represents.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

African-American novelist and short story writer Charles W. Chesnutt was born on June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the first child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Ann Maria Sampson, free blacks who had moved north from North Carolina. In 1866, after the Civil War, the family, now with five children, moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Chesnutt's racial heritage was mixed. His grandmothers were of mixed race, and it is likely that both his grandfathers were white. Chesnutt himself was light-skinned, and could have passed as white, but he chose instead to identify with his African-American heritage.

As a boy, Chesnutt attended the Howard School and also worked in his father's grocery store. He was only fourteen years old when his first story was published in a local newspaper. The following year he dropped out of school in order to help the family get through hard financial times. Chesnutt had shown he was an outstanding student, and he was offered a position as a pupil-teacher at Howard School.

This was all the formal education Chesnutt ever had, although reading was his favorite pastime and he was assiduous in continuing to educate himself. He taught at various black schools in North Carolina before returning to Fayetteville in 1877 to begin teaching at the new Normal School. He married Susan Perry a year later and in 1880 became principal of the school.

Lacking promising career opportunities in the South, Chesnutt moved to New York City in 1883, where he worked as a stenographer and reporter. Later, he moved to Cleveland where his wife and three children joined him in 1884. The following year he began to study law, and in 1887, he passed the Ohio bar examination with the highest grade in his group.

But Chesnutt's first love was not law but writing. In 1887, he had his first major success, when his story "The Goophered Grapevine" was published in Atlantic Monthly, the most prestigious literary magazine in the country. During the 1890s, more of Chesnutt's stories were published, and in 1899, Houghton Mifflin published a collection of his stories The Conjure Woman. The stories are set in the South during the era of slavery, and show the wily slaves often getting the better of their cruel and avaricious masters.

Chesnutt's second collection of short stories, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, was published by Houghton Mifflin in the same year. Many of the stories deal with issues of segregation and miscegenation.

Encouraged by his success, Chesnutt decided to devote his life to writing. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1900. It is about mixed race characters who take on a new identity by passing as whites.

Chesnutt's second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, about a race riot in North Carolina in 1898, was published in 1901, but sales were poor. After this Chesnutt turned his attention to other literary forms, including short stories, essays, and plays. But when his third novel, The Colonel's Dream (1905), was also received with little enthusiasm, he decided to retire from writing fiction. Taking up political and social causes, he met black activists Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and advocated the improvement of conditions for black people in the South. In 1928, Chesnutt was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Chesnutt died on November 15, 1932, at his home in Cleveland, Ohio.

PLOT SUMMARY

"The Goophered Grapevine" is set in North Carolina, some time during or soon after the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction. The story is narrated by John, a white Northerner. His wife Annie is in poor health, and their doctor advises them to move to a warmer climate. John was at the time engaged in the business of growing grapes, in northern Ohio. On the advice of a cousin, he decides to investigate the possibility of moving to North Carolina, where the climate is more suitable, the land is ideal for grape-growing, and land and labor are cheap. At the end of one summer, he and Annie travel south and arrive in a small town called Patesville, one of the principal towns in North Carolina. They stay with their cousin, who provides them with a horse and buggy to drive around in.

John finds that grape-culture has been tried in the area, but as a result of the ravages of war, it had fallen by the wayside. Several times, John visits a plantation that he thinks might be suitable. It used to belong to a man named McAdoo but has since been mired in disputes between the heirs. There had been a vineyard there, but it has fallen into neglect. John feels that if he bought the plantation, he would be able to successfully cultivate grapes, especially the native grape, the scuppernong.

One day he takes his wife to see the place, which is about five miles out of town. The plantation, including the buildings, is virtually in ruins. After looking at the vineyard, John and Annie walk back to the yard, where they see an old black man sitting on a pine log under an elm tree, eating some grapes with great relish. They sit next to him, and John engages him in conversation. The man says he is from a neighboring plantation. John asks him about the vineyard, and the man, whose names is Julius, replies that he knows the whole history of the place, since he was born and raised there. He also says that he would not advise John to buy it. The vineyard is "goophered," he says, by which he means that it is bewitched in some way. He then tells the white couple the story of the vineyard.

Julius relates that before the Civil War, Mars Dugal' McAdoo grew scuppernong grapes in great quantities. But the problem was that the black slaves from miles around, as well as a settlement of free blacks, all loved scuppernongs, and would secretly come to the plantation to pick and eat them. Mars Dugal' knew what was going on but despite all his efforts was unable to catch the men in the act of taking the grapes.

Mars Dugal' then developed a plan. Living with the free blacks was a woman named Aun' Peggy. All the black people were afraid of her because they believed her to be a "cunjuh" woman ("cunjuh" is a dialect form of "conjure"), a kind of witch who could put curses on things. One spring Mars Dugal' went to visit Aun' Peggy, taking with him gifts of chicken, cake, and wine. The next day Aun' Peggy visited the vineyard. The slaves soon realized that she had been hired by Mars Dugal' to goopher the vineyard. She made up a concoction consisting of scuppernong leaves and seeds, a snake's tooth, a black cat's tail, and other ingredients. She put these in a bottle, filled it with scuppernong wine and buried it under a red oak tree in the woods. She told one of the slaves that if anyone ate the scuppernong grapes, they would be dead within a year.

After this the slaves avoided eating the scuppernongs. But a stranger visited, and his coachman, knowing nothing of the goopher, ate as many scuppernongs as he could. That night he was killed, and when the slaves heard the story, they knew that the goopher worked. This belief was reinforced when a black child ate some scuppernongs and died the following week.

That season Mars Dugal' was very pleased with himself because he made fifteen hundred gallons of wine, all for the expenditure of the ten dollars he paid Aun' Peggy.

The following summer, one of the slaves died, and Mars Dugal' purchased another one, an old man named Henry who was still strong enough to do a hard day's work. But the other slaves, flustered by the fact that a slave from a neighboring plantation had escaped and there was a big search going on for him, forgot to tell Henry about the goopher. Sure enough, Henry ate some scuppernong grapes. When the others told him about the goopher, he was terrified. An overseer gave him some whiskey, and the next day took him to see Aun' Peggy, to see if they could have the goopher lifted. She gave him some medicine that she said would keep the goopher off him until the spring, but when the sap began to rise he should come to see her again.

In the spring, Henry acquired a ham from somewhere (Julius does not know how or where) and took it to Aun' Peggy. She told him that when Mars Dugal' began to prune the grapevines, Henry should scrape off the sap and put it on his bald head. That would keep the goopher away, and Henry would be able to eat as many scuppernongs as he wanted.

Henry did what he was told and was fine all summer. The following spring, however, as soon as the grapes started to form, something strange happened. Henry, who was bald, began to grow hair on his head, and by summer he had more hair than anyone on the plantation. It was also curly, and it looked like he had a bunch of grapes on his head. He first tried to straighten it, then tried keeping it short.

But the strangest thing was that Henry also seemed to get younger. His joints were no longer stiff, and he was more energetic and lively than even the youngest slave. Mars Jackson, the overseer, had to threaten to whip him if he did not behave.

But in the fall, when the grapes had been gathered, the process was reversed. Henry's hair began to straighten and then fall out. Eventually he was even more bald than he had been before, and his joints got stiff again. Exactly the same thing happened the following spring and fall.

Observing what happened to Henry each year, Mars Dugal', who was a cunning man, came up with an idea for how he could make money out of Henry. Next spring, he took Henry to town and sold him for fifteen hundred dollars to an unsuspecting buyer. In the fall, when Henry lost his vigor, his new owner sent for a doctor, but the doctor could not restore Henry's former strength, although there appeared to be nothing wrong with him. But in the winter, when Henry got rheumatism and appeared about to die, Mars Dugal' offered to buy back him for 500 dollars, pretending that he was doing the owner a favor.

Mars Dugal' took good care of Henry in the winter, and then when the sap began to rise again in the spring, he took him to a different county and sold him again for fifteen hundred dollars. This pattern went on for five years or more, and Mars Dugal' made enough money from it to buy another plantation.

Then a stranger arrived at the plantation. He was from the North, and after he inspected the plantation he told Mars Dugal' that he could tell him how to make his grapevines bear twice as many grapes, and that the new winepress he was selling would make more than twice as many gallons of wine. Mars Dugal' believed what the man said, and got his slaves to pour a mixture of lime and ashes around the roots of the grapevines, as the man instructed. Mars Dugal' followed all the other instructions the man gave.

The next spring, Henry's hair grew even more fast and thick than was usual, and the scuppernong vines grew like never before. Mars Dugal' was short-handed and decided not to sell Henry that year.

But as soon as the grapes appeared, the leaves withered and the grapes turned yellow. The vineyard was dying because of the bad advice given by the Northerner. Henry was affected, too. His rheumatism returned, and his hair began to fall out. When the big vine where Henry used to get the sap from died, Henry withered and died.

Mars Dugal' was upset about losing his vines and Henry in the same year. It was three years before the vineyards were productive again. When the Civil War broke out, Mars Dugal' raised a company and went off to fight, saying he wanted to kill a Yankee for every dollar he had lost because of the bad advice given to him by the Northerner. But Mars Dugal' was killed in the war. His wife moved away, and the plantation had not been cultivated since then.

After Julius finishes his story, Annie asks him if it is true. Julius assures her that it is. He also advises John against buying the plantation, since the goopher may still be on it.

Nevertheless, John decides to buy the vineyard, and it thrives. He cultivates scuppernong and other grapes, and makes good profits selling them to Northern markets. He has not noticed any developments of the goopher, although he suspects that his fieldhands help themselves to the grapes. John also discovers when he buys the plantation that Julius had lived in a cabin on the place for many years, and made some money from the product of the neglected grapevines. John thinks this is why Julius did not want him to buy the property. He adds that he employs Julius as a coachman, and this is more than enough to compensate him for any loss of income that followed the sale of the plantation.

CHARACTERS

Annie

Annie is John's wife. She is in poor health, and this is why she and her husband decide to move to the South where the climate will be milder. After listening to Julius's story, she asks him whether it is true. This shows either her open-mindedness or her naïveté.

Henry

Henry is the old black slave bought by Mars Dugal' to replace one of his field hands who died. Julius describes Henry as an "ole nigger, er de color er a gingy-cake, en ball ez a hossapple on de top er his head." Henry is a strong man who can do a hard day's work. But no one tells him about the goopher, and after he has eaten some of the grapes, he is terrified when he hears what the consequences might be. Aun' Peggy tells him that if he rubs the sap from the grapevines onto his head once a year, he will be protected from the goopher. After Henry does this he finds that his hair grows and he becomes youthful, full of vigor. But in the fall, his strength leaves him and he becomes old again. For years, Henry is used as a tool in Mars Dugal's moneymaking scheme, but after all the grapevines on the plantation wither, Henry grows weak and dies.

John

John is the narrator of the frame story. He is from northern Ohio, where he makes a living growing grapes. Because of the ill-health of his wife, he decides to relocate to North Carolina and carry on the same business there. He is an experienced, rational, careful man who does not make decisions lightly. When he investigates the plantation formerly owned by Mars Dugal' McAdoo, he makes a shrewd judgment—which turns out to be correct—that he could make a success of the place, first by growing the native grape, the scuppernong, and then introducing other varieties. John is a courteous man and he extends that courtesy to Julius, the old black man he meets at the plantation. He seems perhaps a little too concerned with making Julius feel at ease, as if he is aware of racial issues between blacks and whites but wants to make it absolutely clear that he lacks prejudice. He listens with interest to Julius's story and later gives him employment as a coachman. John appears to be a lenient employer, quite unlike Mars Dugal', since he is quite aware that his black field hands help themselves to his grapes, but chooses to overlook it. However, he does not seem to question his own feelings of superiority, nor consider that Julius, who had spent his whole life on the plantation, had some right to earn an income from it, rather than have that taken away from him by a stranger from the North who happened to have the money to buy the plantation.

Julius McAdoo

Julius is an old black man who tells John and Annie the story of the goophered grapevine. Julius was born and raised on the McAdoo plantation and claims to know exactly what happened there. He is described as tall and "venerable-looking," and quite vigorous in spite of his years. He is not entirely black, and has long bushy hair. Because of these facts, John believes that he may have some non-Negro blood in him. The fact that Julius also carries the last name of the former owner of the plantation suggests that he may be the offspring of a member of the slave owner's family and a slave woman.

John also notices some shrewdness in Julius's eyes, and indeed he turns out to be quite a shrewd character. Not only is he a clever storyteller, he may be trying to get an advantage over John by pretending to be merely a simple former slave telling a rambling story. In truth, Julius has his own little business going on in the disused plantation which he does not want to lose, and so it is in his interest to persuade John not to buy it. Julius therefore cunningly includes in his story an incident (about the Yankee who gives Mars Dugal' bad advice) which is meant to demonstrate the disastrous effect of Northern interference in Southern business affairs.

Mars Dugal' McAdoo

Mars Dugal' McAdoo is the former owner of the plantation in North Carolina that John later buys. He is a cunning, ruthless, avaricious man who is always on the lookout for ways to make money. Julius says "ha' ter be a monst'us cloudy night when a dollar git by him in de dahkness." When he discovers that his slaves are eating the scuppernong grapes, he pays Aun' Peggy ten dollars to put a goopher on them. He is delighted when that season he is able to make fifteen hundred gallons of wine, thinking that the goopher was a good investment. He laughs heartily with his overseer about the subject, perhaps suggesting that he does not believe in the goopher but is happy to exploit the superstitions of his slaves. Mars Dugal' is also unscrupulous. Once he discovers the seasonal rise and fall of Henry's strength, he sells Henry for fifteen hundred dollars in the spring and buys him back in the winter for 500 dollars. Using this ruse he manages to cheat unwary buyers for five successive years. In the winters he takes good care of Henry, aware of the fact that "a nigger w'at he could make a thousan' dollars a year off'n did n' grow on eve'y huckleberry bush." Eventually Mars Dugal' is taken in by a slick salesman from the North who gives him bad advice about how to increase his grape yield. He is so furious at being cheated by the Yankee that when the Civil War begins he organizes a company and goes off to fight, eager to kill a Yankee for every dollar he has lost. But instead, he gets killed himself.

Aun' Peggy

Aun' Peggy lives in a settlement of free black people. She is known amongst the locals as a "cunjuh" woman, who can cause people to have fits, get rheumatism, or even wither and die. When Mars Dugal' brings her some gifts, she appears to have no qualms in putting a goopher (a kind of curse), on the scuppernong grapevines to prevent the slaves from eating them. Thus Aun' Peggy shows no loyalty to her race. She is willing to help the white plantation owner at the expense of the black slaves. However, she does show some kindness to Henry when he is brought to her, giving him an antidote to the effects of the goopher.

THEMES

The Clever Slave

Although the plantation system is set up to perpetuate the power of the white slave owner over his black slaves, the reality is more complex. This can be seen in the figure of Julius, who was born and raised on Mars Dugal's plantation. Julius is a shrewd man who has learned how to survive and prosper, despite the fact that when he was on the plantation in the days of slavery he had no power and no rights. As the conclusion of the story makes clear, since Mars Dugal' died and the plantation fell into disrepair, Julius continued to live there and he also operated a little grape-selling business of his own, from which he derived, according to John, "a respectable revenue." It is for this reason that Julius, under the guise of being a simple former slave, tells the story of the goopher to John, hoping to dissuade John from buying the property. Julius is in a world in which white people have all the power, but he uses his wits to make the best life for himself that he can. It is not hard to imagine Julius quietly thriving even when Mars Dugal' was alive.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

We tend to think of slavery as a thing of the past, but in fact, slavery still exists in many parts of the world. Research slavery in the present day. Where does it exist? What form does it take? What can be done to end it? Write an essay on your findings.
Write a short story that includes a frame story. Be sure to show how the characters in the story interact, and what each learns from the other.
Examine race relations in the United States today. Is the legacy of slavery still in evidence? Should the government make reparations to all African Americans because of slavery? Should the government officially apologize for slavery? Partner with another student and lead a class debate on the topic.
Read two other dialect stories by Chesnutt involving John and Julius, perhaps "Po' Sandy" or "Dave's Neckliss." Write an essay in which you describe what more you learn in these stories about slavery, about Julius, and about the relations between John and Julius.

Julius thus belongs in a literary tradition, going all the way back to Roman comedy, of the tricky slave who outwits his master. An unjust system is mitigated by the resourcefulness and

ingenuity of those who have to endure it, and it is they who triumph in the end. In "The Goophered Grapevine" this is clear from Julius's very first appearance. He sits on a pine log holding "a hat full of grapes, over which he was smacking his lips with great gusto, and a pile of grapeskins near him indicated that the performance was no new thing." This is a telling visual image. Long after Mars Dugal's death, long after the plantation has fallen to ruin, the unpruned, wild vines are still yielding grapes, and here sits Julius calmly eating a hatful of them. He has survived everything and seems not to have a care in the world.

The Cruelty of Slavery

The wealthy, greedy, Mars Dugal' is the epitome of the avaricious slave owner who profits from an unjust system that reduces human beings to the level of property to be bought and sold. He thinks only in terms of economics; his sole desire is to make a profit. When Mars Dugal' finds that Henry grows strong and then declines in accordance with the seasons, he treats Henry literally like a piece of land, selling him when he is, so to speak, fertile, and then buying him back at a bargain price when he is no longer productive (in winter). Mars Dugal' simply figures that he can make more money selling Henry and buying him back than by working him in the cotton fields. Henry is regarded as a commodity just like the grapes are. The plantation system under owners like Mars Dugal' therefore reduces human beings to cogs in an economic system that degrades them and undermines their humanity.

There are also some more direct reminders of the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery. On one occasion the overseer threatens to whip Henry if he does not behave, a reminder that on the plantations, slaves who did not please their masters were frequently punished in this way. Another allusion to the cruelty of the slavery system is when a slave on a neighboring plantation escapes and takes to the swamps. The white slave owners get together, take their guns and their dogs, and hunt him down.

But there is also a moral to the story. Those who profit from the system eventually get their comeuppance. The unethical Mars Dugal', who sees nothing wrong in duping other slave owners into buying Henry and then selling him back, is himself duped by a smooth-talking Northerner who is more interested in selling him a new winepress than in increasing his grape yield. This is what brings about Mars Dugal's downfall. So it seems that at least in the case of Mars Dugal', a kind of rough justice prevails.

STYLE

Setting and Local Color

The story is set in the area around Cape Fear River in North Carolina. This is the river that John and Annie travel down in order to reach the fictional town of Patesville. Patesville is based on Fayetteville, the town in which Chesnutt lived. The details of the area are realistic and add what is called local color, a literary term that refers to fiction that represents the particular customs, manners, dialect, and attitudes to the world that pertain to a certain region. For example, John's cousin is in the turpentine business, which was a prominent industry in nineteenth century North Carolina, as was grape-culture, especially of the native scuppernong. (It was so named because this type of grape originally flourished along the Scuppernong River.)

Frame Story

A frame story is a story that introduces another story within it. After that story ends, the narrative returns to the original story. The frame story in "The Goophered Grapevine" is told by John, about his trip down to North Carolina to investigate the possibility of cultivating grapes there. The story-within-the-story (also called the embedded story), about the goophering of the grapes, is told by Julius. After Julius has finished, the story returns to John, who tells of how he bought the vineyard and made it prosperous. The frame story allows a contrast to emerge between the educated white Northerner who speaks standard grammatical English, and the regional dialect spoken by the former slave, Julius.

Regional Dialect

The story told by Julius is presented in the regional dialect that was common in North Carolina in the nineteenth century and would have been used by a man of Julius's race and social standing. It may at first be difficult for a modern reader to comprehend, since it uses different letters to indicate the different ways in which the words are pronounced ("wuz" for "was" for example) and many apostrophes to show omitted letters or syllables (the slave owner is "sho't er han's" which means he is "short of hands" (slaves). Some of the words may be unfamiliar, and they are unfamiliar to John and Annie, too, since they have to inquire of Julius what "goophered" means. Dialect language may seem ungrammatical but that is only when it is compared unfavorably to another model, which is why it is better to refer to it as non-standard rather than ungrammatical speech. It is as well to remember that black speech at the time was an oral language; it did not take written form, since slaves were often forbidden to learn how to read or write.

Folktale

Julius's story is based on a folktale that goes back to the times of slavery, in which a slave renews his sexual virility each spring by anointing his head with sap from the grapevine. A folktale is usually a short narrative that has no known author, that is passed on orally, just as Julius passes the story on by telling it to John and Annie. Folktales were common amongst slaves. As Peter Kolchin states in American Slavery: "Through stories of talking animals, ghosts, and magic as well as those offering semi-realistic depictions of plantation relations, slaves entertained one another, expressed fears and longings, and presented their children with didactic lessons on how to get along in a dog-eat-dog world."

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Slavery in the United States

In the 1850s, probably around the time Julius's story in "The Goophered Grapevine" takes place, the slave population in the United States was reaching its peak. In 1860, there were 3,953,760 slaves, about one-third of the Southern population. In some states, including South Carolina, over half the population were slaves. In North Carolina, there were 331,059 slaves in 1860.

Slaves performed a wide variety of tasks for their masters. Peter Kolchin explains in American Slavery that "they cultivated the South's major crops, cleared land, dug ditches, put up fences, built and maintained houses, unloaded boats, and worked as mill hands." Slaves also served as drivers, overseers, cooks, grooms, gardeners, and house servants, but the large majority worked long hours as field laborers. They usually worked six days a week, while on Sundays they were left to their own devices.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1800s: In North Carolina, slaves cultivate tobacco, cotton, and other crops, and build public facilities such as churches and courthouses. Following the Civil War, North Carolina is readmitted to the Union in 1868, after ratifying a new state constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Nevertheless, freed slaves face extensive discrimination by whites.
Today: In 2007, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina make official apologies for having permitted slavery.
1800s: Female slaves are vulnerable to sexual exploitation by white men. This leads to a sizable mixed-race population, and the term mulatto is used to describe the offspring of slaves and whites. By the 1870s, nearly 38,000 people in North Carolina, 9.6 percent of the population of the state, are of mixed race.
Today: In North Carolina's major cities, such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and Fayetteville, 6 percent of the population is of mixed race. In 2003, a study of 90,000 American students, conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the National Institutes of Health, shows that those who consider themselves to be of mixed race are more likely than others to suffer from depression, substance abuse, sleep problems, and other health issues.
1800s: African-American literature as a genre is just beginning. William Wells Brown (1814-1884), a former slave from the South who escaped to the North, writes the first novel by an African American, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, which is published in England in 1853. By the late 1800s, American literature is dominated by realism and regionalism, including portrayals, not always flattering, of African Americans. These trends allow Chesnutt to achieve his first successes as a writer.
Today: African-American literature has a well-established place in American literature as a whole. Books by African-American writers regularly appear on the bestseller lists and win literary awards. Leading African-American writers include novelist Toni Morrison and playwright August Wilson. Young African-American novelists to emerge in the last few years include Edwidge Danticat, David Anthony Durham, ZZ Packer, and Colson Whitehead.

Many slave owners during the nineteenth century developed a paternalistic attitude toward their slaves. They regarded slaves as inferior, almost as children, and believed they had a responsibility to guide and protect them and take care of their physical needs. Food was generally plentiful and it was in the slave owners' interests to safeguard the health of their slaves. However, many slave owners also interfered with the personal lives of their slaves, undercutting any small autonomy the slaves might otherwise have had. It was common for independent religious activities to be restricted, for example, and for restrictions to be placed on visits made to neighboring slaves. Some slave owners went further and directly tried to influence the family lives of their slaves, forbidding divorce, for example.

The system was invested with the need to keep slaves ignorant. In most states, there were laws that were intended to enforce slave illiteracy, although these were rather loosely applied. Four states, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, had laws that prohibited teaching slaves to read and write.

As anti-slavery sentiment in the North gathered force, there was a trend in slave-owning Southern states to ameliorate the conditions of the slaves and safeguard some of their rights. This was mostly a defensive rather than a humanitarian measure, done so that the South could continue to justify slavery and claim that it was a humane institution. In 1852, for example, Alabama enacted a slave code that detailed the responsibilities of the slave owner to treat his slaves with humanity and not to inflict cruel punishment. The code also required masters to ensure that a sick or old slave was taken care of, and it emphasized the need not to separate families when slaves were sold. Punishments were prescribed for offenses against slaves, although as Kolchin points out, the effectiveness of such measures was lessened by the fact that no slave was permitted to testify against a white person.

In spite of these attempts to make an inherently cruel and unjust system more palatable, slaves were still subjected to severe punishment if they incurred the displeasure of their owners. Whippings were common; other types of punishment included stocks, incarceration in private jails, and public humiliation. There were wide variations amongst slave owners in matters of discipline. Some were genuine humanitarians, who refused to use corporal punishment, while others were by any standards despicable individuals, like a man named Hoover in North Carolina who beat a pregnant slave with clubs and chains over a period of four months.

One of the ways that slaves resisted their captivity was by running away. The existence of free states in the North proved a magnetic lure to those who were brave enough to take the many risks involved in escaping. As Kolchin puts it: "Reaching the North could be a task of almost herculean proportions requiring endurance, evasion of slave catchers, and deception of suspicious whites." About a thousand slaves a year during the years immediately preceding the Civil War took this route to freedom, while

many more were captured and returned to their masters. As in "The Goophered Grapevine," dogs were often used to track down fugitives, who would sometimes attempt to hide within a few miles of the plantation.

Reconstruction

The period from 1865 to 1877, which may be around the time the main narrative of "The Goophered Grapevine" is set, is known as Reconstruction. It was a time in which the issues raised in the Civil War had to be settled. The southern states had to be readmitted to the Union, and the legal and constitutional status of the newly freed slaves, now known as freedmen, had to be established. Efforts also had to be made to integrate the freedmen into the economic, political, and social structure of the nation. Constitutional amendments gave the freedmen U.S. citizenship and voting rights, but changing the ways in which Southerners, both black and white, had been accustomed to thinking was not such an easy task. Many whites still regarded blacks as inferior, and resisted the idea of granting them equal rights. Black people immediately saw the necessity of education, which they associated with freedom. The newly formed Freedmen's Bureau helped to establish new schools, and could not keep up with the sudden demand for schools, teachers, and books. By the 1870s, these schools had merged with the public school systems that every Southern state had established. At first, most of the teachers were Northern missionaries, but the number of black instructors from the South soon increased. Chesnutt himself was one of these teachers.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

"The Goophered Grapevine" has received more attention from modern critics than most of Chesnutt's other stories. In Charles W. Chesnutt, Sylvia Lyons Render comments on Chesnutt's ability to create a character like Julius, who is an example of "a stereotype elaborated into an enriching, thought-provoking ambiguity." Render also notes that Aun' Peggy is another unique character in that both slave owner and slave seek her out and follow her advice in order to solve problems. Render also comments in her introduction to The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt that Julius's language "is rich in the diction, flow, and imagery which lend a special vitality to folk speech." William L. Andrews, in The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, calls the story an "arresting mixture of folktale, fantasy, and satiric comedy." Andrews notes that Chesnutt refuses to present Henry, the protagonist of Julius's story, as a tragic figure. Henry's death is less tragic than "curious and weird." The reader is moved, according to Andrews, not by Henry's death but "by the vitality of the author's imagination in developing the grapevine as an inclusive symbol of the socioeconomic, natural, and supernatural forces which overshadow the destiny of the slave." In The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Duncan points out that Henry's fate "literalizes the conflation of African Americans and property, in this case transforming a black man into the very land he works." Duncan also comments on the role played by John's wife Annie, who "functions as a surrogate for much of Chesnutt's audience, in that she lacks the certainty of perspective her two companions profess. Like us, she cannot commit to either man's explanation of events."

The fact that "The Goophered Grapevine" is still attracting critical attention over a hundred years after its publication is a testimony not only to the story's literary merit but to the insight it provides into two difficult periods in the history of the South.

CRITICISM

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay on "The Goophered Grapevine," he discusses the story in terms of the clash between opposing cultures.

The way people read stories changes over time. For early readers of "The Goophered Grapevine," who, incidentally, did not know that the author was African American, the story appeared to present a simple, agreeable ex-slave, who knows his place in relation to whites, telling a tale that reveals some of the customs and beliefs of black people. The contrast between the narrative of the educated, apparently enlightened, non-prejudiced Northerner, told in standard English, and the authentic African-American dialect spoken by Julius, which to readers of the day would have appeared as almost laughably ignorant and ungrammatical, would have reinforced in the reader the unquestioned notion of the superiority of the white man. Later readers, however, have come to appreciate the irony laced into this story, and into the other Uncle Julius stories that appeared in Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman. Julius is not the simpleton nineteenth-century readers took him for, and the story is in reality about a clash between two cultures, each of which may possess its own validity.

Chesnutt gave his early readers some good reasons not to question their basic assumptions about race. For example, when John, the narrator of the frame story—a man rooted in the progressive, empirical, scientific thought of his time who acts only with the "coolness of judgment"—first sees Julius, his description of the old man might appear to reinforce traditional stereotypes. Julius sits on a log in the vineyard eating grapes with great relish. When he sees John and Annie, he respectfully stands up and moves away from the log; like a well-trained former slave, he is immediately ready to vacate his seat for the white couple. John, keen to show off his enlightened views, tells him to resume his seat since "There is plenty of room for us all," a comment which ironically foreshadows the ending of the story, when John and Julius both live on the plantation—but there is only room enough for one man to be the employer and the other to be employee.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Up from Slavery, an autobiography by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), first published in book form in 1901, is a masterpiece of African-American literature. Washington was born a slave in Virginia, but was so driven by a desire for knowledge and education that by the time he was twenty-five, he began a thirty-four-year term as president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. From that position he became the most influential black leader of his day.
The most enduring work by noted African-American intellectual, historian, and activist W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) is The Souls of Black Folk. First published in 1903, it gives much insight into the condition of black people in America at the turn of the century. Much of the book is autobiographical, and discusses such topics as poverty, the virtual slavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, lynching, and black music.
Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, first published in 1899, contains seven of Chesnutt's folk tales set before the Civil War and told by Uncle Julius to John and Annie, his new employers on the plantation.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), was first published in 1845. Douglass was born a slave in Maryland, taught himself to read and write, and in 1838 escaped and journeyed to Massachusetts. His narrative tells the story of his life from childhood until his escape, and provides a vivid picture of the horrors of slavery. Douglass later became a noted orator, newspaper editor, reformer, and diplomat.
Passing: When People Can't Be Who They Are (2004), by Brooke Kroeger, investigates the phenomenon of "passing." This term has usually been used to describe those of minority heritage who are believed to be white and who promote that belief (a strategy available to the light-skinned Chesnutt, but which he refused). Kroeger includes an account of a man who suppressed the black heritage of his father and passed as a white Jew during the 1980s and 1990s, but she also extends her case histories to include homosexuals who have felt compelled to pass as heterosexuals.
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (2002), by Joel Chandler Harris and compiled by Richard Chase, contains all the original animal stories that Harris (1848-1908), a white journalist from Georgia, began publishing in 1880. The stories are a collection of African-American folklore, and contain tales about the origins of things, satirical stories, trickster tales, and stories about witchcraft, magic, and superstition. They are told by Uncle Remus, a slave, and like Chesnutt's early stories, they are told in the African-American dialect of the late nineteenth century. The stories include the character later made famous by Disney, Brer Rabbit.

As he continues to describe Julius, John notes that "he was not entirely black." Interestingly, this description was added by the author only when the story was published in The Conjure Woman in 1899. It did not appear in the original version published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and Chesnutt never explained why he made the change, but it is possible that he thought his predominantly white readership would be more favorably disposed to Julius and his stories if he was presented as a mulatto, a person of mixed race.

Whatever the reason for the author's revision, as John continues his description he lets slip his underlying paternalistic and racist attitudes. He comments that there was a "shrewdness" about the old man's eyes that he identifies as "not altogether African." This suggests that John accepts the stereotype of the simple black man; any shrewdness in Julius's character must come from the non-black part of him. John's skepticism about the tale he is about to hear is apparent from the beginning, when he notes that Julius's eyes "assumed a dreamy expression," which for a man like John, who is so committed to rationality, is not exactly a compliment.

For his part, Julius's question shortly after the conversation begins ("Is you the Norv'n genman w'at's gwine ter buy de ole vimya'd?") shows that he is completely aware of the situation and what is at stake. But he is also willing to go along with the white man's perception of him as an innocuous old ex-slave. He plays into the stereotypes when he says apologetically that he will explain how the vineyard came to be goophered "ef you en young miss dere doan' min' lis'nin' ter a ole nigger run on a minute er two."

The story Julius tells centers around the love that the slaves had for the scuppernong grapes that grew abundantly in the vineyard. The slaves would come from all around the neighboring plantations, walking as much as ten miles during the night to savor these grapes. As Julius explains the lure these grapes exerted, he is surely keeping up his performance of conforming to black stereotypes for the benefit of John and Annie: "Now, ef dey's an'thing a nigger lub, nex' ter ‘possum, en chick'n, en watermillyums, it's scuppernon's. … de scuppernon’ make you smack yo' lip en roll yo' eye en wush fer mo'."

The basic situation that launches Julius's story, and the roles played on each side—slave and slave owner—is in keeping with typical attitudes and behaviors identified by Peter Kolchin in his book, American Slavery. He points out that, since the system was so cruel and unjust, slaves would develop numerous strategies to undermine their masters. These included pretending to misunderstand orders, breaking agricultural implements by "accident," and petty theft, the latter on the principle that those who put in the labor deserved to enjoy its fruits. Kolchin quotes a former slave as saying "I was never acquainted with a slave who believed, that he violated any rule of morality by appropriating to himself any thing that belonged to his master, if it was necessary to his comfort." Kolchin also comments that such behavior, whatever its justification, did help to foster among whites the idea that black people "were by nature lazy, foolish, and thieving." Here in a nutshell is the story of the goophered grapevine: the slaves who just assume they have a right to eat the grapes, and the slave owner who regards this as theft and who exploits what he sees as the slaves' foolishness in believing that a vineyard can be "goophered" by a kind of magic.

Underlying this conflict between slave owner and slave is a fundamental clash of worldview or culture. As Dean McWilliams explains in Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, "The Goophered Grapevine," together with the other dialect stories published in The Conjure Woman, reveals that whites and blacks inhabit "a different cosmology with different ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic assumptions." Among the differences he cites are the categories "human/natural, matter/spirit," and "empiricism/imagination." The dominant society places its value on the first named of each set of terms, but in the world of Julius and the slaves, it is the second set that provides the operating principles of their worldview. They believe in magic and witchcraft, in mysterious forces in nature that can be manipulated for good or ill. In this worldview, the natural and the human world interact in unusual ways. A human being can in effect be turned into a grapevine—remember that the luxuriant hair that grows on Henry's previously bald head curls into balls that make his head "look des like a bunch er grapes"—whose vitality exactly follows the rhythms of the seasons.

Of course, the dominant culture rejects such things as mere superstition, seeing in them only an opportunity to take advantage of simple people. John, the narrator of the frame story, is a skeptic right from the beginning. He is only "somewhat interested" in hearing Julius's story, and only then because Julius gives the information that the vineyard is goophered "with such solemn earnestness, and with such an air of confidential mystery." The white folks have a condescending attitude because of what they regard as their superior scientific culture, but the slaves have their own kind of empiricism that satisfies their need to understand cause and effect relationships. They believe the evidence of their own eyes is sufficient to confirm the truth of their understanding that the forces of nature can be made to act on them by one such as Aun' Peggy, who understands the natural world's secret network of connections. This can be seen from the incident in which the black child dies within a week of eating some of the goophered scuppernongs. The white people say the child died of fever, but the black people know that the goopher was the cause.

This is not the only occasion in the story in which illness brings two very different medical systems into focus. John decides to move south in the first place because his doctor tells him that his wife's health will improve in a warmer climate. John has great confidence in the "skill and honesty" of his family doctor. But in Julius's story, when the ailing Henry is taken by his new owner to a white doctor, the doctor can find nothing wrong with him, and the medicine he prescribes has no effect. When Henry says the cause of his malaise is the goopher, the doctor only laughs. These are clearly two incompatible ways of seeing the world.

This incompatibility, as McWilliams points out, extends to conflicting attitudes to the land, and the story does raise issues about the rights of ownership. Julius was born and raised on the plantation and took the name McAdoo, which suggests he has some of the blood of the white former owners, and he is now, in the absence of any official owner, making some nice money from the vineyard. He appears to be faring much better than many blacks did during and immediately after the Reconstruction period. Julius is not enduring the hard life of the sharecropper (sharecroppers worked portions of land they did not own and were meagerly paid with a small share of the crop) or of the agricultural wage earner, who worked for someone else.

Julius appears to be something of an entrepreneur. And yet in spite of his long association with the plantation—he has known nothing else his entire life—he has no formal rights because he does not have the money to buy it. But as McWilliams puts it: "Legal title is, from Julius's perspective, irrelevant, for in his view, the land does not belong to humans at all, but humans to the land; men and women do not live on nature, but in it." Such a perspective would not mean much to John, however. He possesses the capital to buy the vineyard, which ensures that Julius, a free man in name, nonetheless becomes dependent on the goodwill of the newcomer. John's smug conclusion, that "the wages I paid him for his services as coachman … were more than an equivalent for anything he lost by the sale of the vineyard," is to be expected, but what Julius thinks of their arrangement is another matter. Becoming a coachman at the beck and call of John and Annie may be small compensation for the loss of his former independence.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on "The Goophered Grapevine," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Ben Slote

In the following article, Slote compares "The Goophered Grapevine" to a series of advertisements for California raisins and discusses strategies for reading and teaching the work of Charles Chesnutt.

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Source: Ben Slote, "Listening to ‘The Goophered Grapevine’ and Hearing Raisins Sing," in American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp. 684-94.

Jean Smith Filetti

In the following article, Filetti draws parallels between "The Goophered Grapevine" and the parable of the vineyard in the Bible.

Whether Charles W. Chesnutt had the parable of the vineyard in mind when he wrote "The Goophered Grapevine" is not documented, but a careful study of the story does seem to suggest a skillful use of this moral lesson. Chesnutt undoubtedly knew the Bible, and like many if not all blacks, he would have known how white slave masters used the biblical parables to control their slaves and to justify their own treatment of them. Masters warned that saucy, impudent behavior would be punished by God and frequently presumed to intervene in his name. Many actually interpreted biblical references to the master or lord of a household as references to themselves and would justify the whippings they inflicted by quoting parables: "And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes" (Luke 12:47). Like the white slave masters who manipulated the Word to suit their own purposes, Uncle Julius, the ex-slave narrator of the bewitched vineyard story, gives a slight twist to the parable of the vineyard for a personal reason.

Subtly the reader is prepared for a moral lesson through the description of the setting preceding "The Goophered Grapevine." The setting is perfect for the rendering of a moral lesson. The grounds around the decayed McAdoo plantation are serenely edenic: the vines that had twined "themselves among the branches of the slender saplings which had sprung up among them—grew in wild and unpruned luxuriance," and the air had "the native infection of restfulness." We also have the naive Adam and Eve—John and Annie—and they are met and instructed by Uncle Julius, a "venerable-looking" man who is very much at home in and part of the garden-like setting. But Chesnutt gives a peculiar twist to this Eden by casting the teacher, Uncle Julius, as a black and ex-slave and by making John and Annie uncomfortable in the garden. Responding to the pair's discomfort Theodore R. Hovet notes:

They are strangely abstract and alien to the verdant vineyard. After alighting from the buggy and walking but a short distance, Annie complains of weariness. The only place to rest is a log under a spreading elm which is a shady "though somewhat hard seat."

Neither character is interested in the wild beauty of the vineyard or in sampling the "luscious Scuppernong" growing there. Outside of their buggy—that recurring symbol of American enterprise—the Northerners are weak, unable to fit comfortably into the natural environment, and indifferent to the bounties of nature.

Because John and Annie are misplaced and new to this environment, Uncle Julius believes they are in need of a lesson on how to respond properly to the vineyard. So he delivers his story of the greedy Master McAdoo. In the story, Julius exposes the tragedy of slavery by portraying the master-slave relationship as it actually was and teaches that avarice will bring destruction. This story certainly shows John and Annie how not to respond to the vineyard.

The tale also indirectly suggests the proper response, because ironically, or perhaps purposely, Julius's tale of the bewitched vineyard parallels the parable of the vineyard. Both are obviously set in vineyards; both deal with the relationship of a master and his property; and both have similar story lines. Rather than portraying how not to handle one's property, however, the parable suggests how the master should respond to his possessions:

A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none. Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground? And he answering said unto him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and dung it: And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that thou shalt cut it down. (Luke 13: 6-9)

The owner in the Bible story is concerned with bringing productivity to his vineyard. He has patiently waited for three years and is willing to wait another to see if the vinedresser can remedy the problem by giving the tree proper nourishment. The easier route would have been to allow the owner to chop down the tree, but the vinedresser, acting very much like a messenger of the Lord, is concerned about the welfare of the tree and desires to bring the Word, nourishment, to it. The suggestion is that if this nourishment does not bring life, then the tree does not deserve its place in the vineyard.

In the Chesnutt story, McAdoo, the owner of the vineyard, already has a productive vineyard. But he is greedy. Thus, the Yankee who stops at the plantation is able to persuade McAdoo to allow him to dig around the vines and "fix up a mixtry er lime en ashes en manyo, en po' it ‘roun’ de roots er de grapevimes" so the vineyard will grow twice as big and produce twice as much. In both versions the nourishment is the same—manure. But the reasons for using it are vastly different. Rather than a patient man trying to bring life to a barren tree, McAdoo is one who ravages the soil and the vines to produce larger and larger yields. The Yankee vinedresser, who takes rather than gives life to the vineyard, also "takes" the owner: winning his money in a card game and living "off'n the fat er de fan'." Both men are out for personal gain.

It seems that Uncle Julius, who has everything to lose if John decides to become a Mars McAdoo, manipulates the Northerner with his skillfully spun moral lesson. By picturing a poor response of a master to his property that strongly parallels and calls to mind the biblical parable of the vineyard, he teaches what the proper relationship of a master and his possessions should be. Perhaps the new master of the McAdoo plantation does subconsciously learn the lesson, inasmuch as, at the end of Julius's tale, he decides to nurture his newly acquired vineyard. He does develop the neglected vineyard and, rather than greedily placing restrictions, such as a conjure, on the grapes to prevent the hands from sampling them, he rather amusingly maintains that "our colored assistants do not suffer from want of grapes during the season. He also generously compensates with wages any revenue Uncle Julius has lost from his private sales of the scuppernon' wine. In truth, then, Uncle Julius does instruct the Northerners with his twist to a familiar biblical lesson.

Source: Jean Smith Filetti, "Chesnutt's ‘The Goophered Grapevine,’" in Explicator, Vol. 48, No. 3, Spring 1990, 3 pp.

Sylvia Lyons Render

In the following essay, Render gives a critical analysis of Chesnutt's work.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a "voluntary Negro" (one who, though so fair as to be mistaken for white, chooses not to "pass"), was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and the former Ann Maria Sampson, free blacks, who in 1856 had fled their native North Carolina to escape the increasing circumscription of their rights as the national controversy over slavery intensified. After the Civil War, however, the family, which eventually included five living children, moved back to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where the father operated a downtown grocery.

The impressionable Charles Chesnutt grew up in this region, which became the setting for much of his short fiction. Until his father's business failed about 1872, he usually helped out in the store after school and paid close attention to the easy exchanges among the customers, black and white. When he had a little free time, he enjoyed browsing in a nearby bookstore or reading in an excellent private library to which he had been granted access. When Charles was about nine years old, curiosity propelled him toward the sound of gunfire; he discovered that a Negro man in custody and about to be arraigned for alleged rape had been shot and killed. The scene became an indelible memory, as did other less violent but nevertheless traumatic encounters with increasingly overt racial prejudice. Worsening conditions impelled him in 1883 to leave the South and the security of the Colored Normal School principalship in Fayetteville.

That position he had attained through precocity and perseverance. Forced to go to work at fourteen to help support the family, Charles spent a year as a pupil-teacher at the normal school, and then became in turn peddler, teacher, and administrator in Fayetteville, Charlotte, and adjacent rural communities. Independent study and private tutoring—when he could afford it—enabled him to acquire the requisite skills and certification to teach. He also learned much not only about the folkways and mores of the North Carolinians with whom he came in contact but also about periods and peoples of Western civilization that he encountered only between the covers of books.

Teaching in a rural community and without friends who shared his interests, the adolescent Charles began in 1874 to keep journals which chronicle his passion for reading and—inspired by writers such as Charles Dickens—his growing inclination to become an author (a serialized story by him had appeared in a local newspaper when he was fourteen). This desire remained constant after Chesnutt returned to Fayetteville in 1877 to serve as first assistant to the principal of the new Colored State Normal School. In 1878 he married a colleague, Susan U. Perry, and began to study shorthand as a means of finding employment in the North. Neither fatherhood, family disapproval, nor Chesnutt's elevation to the school principalship upon the death of Robert Harris in 1880 weakened his resolve to leave Fayetteville.

In that year too, after continued study, wide reading, and soul searching, which his increased responsibilities as a family man accelerated rather than impeded, Chesnutt decided that he would like most of all to write fiction. He had been struck by the popularity of Albion W. Tourgée's A Fool's Errand (1879) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Moreover, he was increasingly concerned about the worsening plight of Afro-Americans—himself included. Writing in a journal now at Fisk University, he formulated, on 8 May 1880, his "high and holy purpose":

The object of my writing would not be so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites—for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism—I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people; and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it. Not a fierce indiscriminate onset, not an appeal to force, for this is something that force can but slightly affect, but a moral revolution which must be brought about in a different manner.
The work is of a two-fold character. The Negro's part is to prepare himself for recognition and equality, and it is the province of literature to open the way for him to get it—to accustom the public mind to the idea; to lead people on, imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step, to the desired state of feeling. If I can do anything to further this work, and can see any likelihood of obtaining success in it, I would gladly devote my life to it.

In 1883, when Chesnutt could write shorthand at a rate of two hundred words per minute, he resigned from the normal school, worked briefly in New York City, and then moved on to Cleveland, where he secured a clerkship and later a position as legal stenographer with the Nickel Plate Railroad Company. In less than a year his family, by then including two little girls and a baby boy, joined him in the city which became their permanent home. Chesnutt then began to write in earnest and to study law. His first adult story, "Uncle Peter's House," appeared in the Cleveland News and Herald in December 1885; others followed, published through a newspaper syndicate and in periodicals such as Family Fiction and Tid-Bits.

By 1887 Chesnutt's industry had begun to have tangible results. He stood at the head of the examinees admitted to the Ohio bar that year; he also became the first Afro-American to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, the most prestigious contemporary literary magazine. "The Goophered Grapevine," a folktale set in postbellum North Carolina, was chosen solely on its merit (Chesnutt made no mention of his race when he submitted it); and its appearance in the August 1887 issue of the Atlantic marked the formal beginning of his short-lived literary career. Chesnutt's fiction soon came to the attention of Tourgée and George Washington Cable, both of whom shared Chesnutt's interest in improving race relations. Cable subsequently advised and encouraged Chesnutt in his literary endeavors.

In 1899 Houghton, Mifflin Company published Chesnutt's two volumes of short stories: The Conjure Woman, a collection of folk tales similar to "The Goophered Grapevine," and another group of related stories, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, whose title story (Atlantic Monthly, July 1898) treats middle-class blacks living in "Groveland" (Cleveland) after the Civil War. Also in 1899 Small, Maynard published a short biography of Frederick Douglass, which the firm had commissioned Chesnutt to write.

The future looked bright. His books were selling, and Chesnutt was being invited to lecture and read his stories so frequently that he decided that year to retire from court reporting and devote himself exclusively to literary endeavors. In what proved to be his most popular novel, The House Behind the Cedars, he further developed some of the themes introduced in The Wife of His Youth. The novel appeared in October 1900 and was in its fourth printing by April 1901. His second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, based on the Wilmington (North Carolina) Riot of 1898, was published in October 1901 and was not well received. Perhaps because race relations had continued to deteriorate during this period and because Chesnutt's more-overt criticism of race prejudice in his second novel was distasteful to his largely white reading audience, Chesnutt found it necessary in early 1902 to reopen and expand his court-reporting business in order to support his family properly. His last published novel, The Colonel's Dream, declined by Houghton, Mifflin because of previous losses, was brought out by Doubleday, Page in 1905. It too was a financial failure. Chesnutt published no more books after this point, although he continued to write novels until some time in the 1920s and to publish short fiction occasionally. He also continued to produce articles, essays, and speeches.

Thwarted in accomplishing his "high and holy purpose" through writing fiction, Chesnutt nevertheless persisted in trying to eradicate race and color prejudice in other ways. A highly respected businessman increasingly appreciated in cultural circles, he consistently promoted equal treatment for Afro-Americans on local, state, and national levels. He was among the 150 people invited to celebrate Mark Twain's seventieth birthday at Delmonico's in New York City in 1905. In 1910 he was elected to membership in the previously all-white Cleveland Rowfant Club, a literary group composed of a limited number of men who occasionally published privately printed books for its members. He received an honorary LL.D. from Wilberforce University in 1913, and in 1928 he was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chesnutt was cited for his "pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent, and for his long and useful career as scholar, worker, and freeman of one of America's greatest cities." Upon accepting the award Chesnutt declared, "My books were written, from one point of view, a generation too soon. There was no such demand then as there is now for books by and about colored people. I was writing against the trend of public opinion on the race question. And I had to sell my books chiefly to white readers." By that time all of Chesnutt's books were out of print. But in 1929, perhaps because of the upsurge of interest in Negro literature engendered by the Harlem Renaissance, Houghton Mifflin published a new edition of The Conjure Woman.

After Chesnutt's death in 1932, W. E. B. Du Bois eulogized him in "Postscript: Chesnutt" (Crisis, January 1933): "Chesnutt was of that group of white folk who because of a more or less remote Negro ancestor identified himself voluntarily with the darker group, studied them, expressed them, defended them, and yet never forgot the absurdity of this artificial position and always refused to admit its logic or its ethical sanction. He was not a Negro; he was a man. But this fact never drove him to the opposite extreme. He did not repudiate persons of Negro blood as social equals and close friends. If his white friends (and he had legions) could not tolerate colored friends, they need not come to Mr. Chesnutt's home. If colored friends demanded racial segregation and hatred, he had no patience with them. Merit and friendship in his broad and tolerant mind knew no lines of color or race, and all men, good, bad, and indifferent, were simply men."

Despite the brevity of his career as an imaginative writer, Chesnutt is now considered one of the best American authors of short fiction at the turn of the century. Combining Euro-American, Afro-American, and African forms and techniques, he made phenomenal use of the seemingly simple folktale as a vehicle of social protest. Moreover, he enriched American literature with an unprecedented array of realistically portrayed Afro-American characters. As a literary artist, Chesnutt made a cogent commentary on American culture; and both in his treatment of character and in his choice of themes he anticipated many later writers.

In accord with his avowed purpose for writing—securing equal treatment of all Americans—Chesnutt took as his main themes the humanity of Afro-Americans and the inhumanity of man to man. Chesnutt treated both in the contexts of relations within and between races as they were defined by contemporary conditions and issues. Most of his Afro-American characters—especially the slaves—display much more sensibility and intelligence than in prior writings about them. Also, reacting to the worsening conditions for American blacks, especially in the South after 1877 and well into the twentieth century, Chesnutt focused on interpersonal issues such as miscegenation, intermarriage, and color prejudice among Afro-Americans and social issues such as racial discrimination in voting, the criminal justice system, employment, and education.

The Conjure Woman includes seven frame tales of antebellum times, superficially resembling the Uncle Remus tales retold by Joel Chandler Harris. They are the recollections of Uncle Julius, an emancipated slave who speaks in a North Carolina Negro dialect. The tales are introduced and commented upon in standard English by Julius's new employer, John, who has recently brought his wife, Annie, from northern Ohio to central North Carolina for health reasons and decided to engage in grape culture there. Annie as well as John is present while Julius spins his yarns, which usually contain some fantasy. The inner and outer narratives are always organically related—though the links are not equally apparent. Uncle Julius relates, in a seemingly uncritical manner, humane and sometimes inhumane reactions of slaves he has known to treatment they have received, primarily from owners but occasionally from free conjurers. The oppressive conditions include denial of recreation, insufficient food, conjuration, frequent selling or trading that sometimes results in separation of families, overwork, flogging, and murder. As John soon realizes, Uncle Julius seems to have an ulterior motive for telling each story.

In "The Goophered Grapevine," which Uncle Julius relates to the couple during their first encounter, he tries openly to dissuade John from buying a deserted plantation with a vineyard that is still somewhat productive, as is apparent because Uncle Julius is eating scuppernongs from the vineyard at the time. He describes the dire effects upon a slave newcomer, Henry, who inadvertently eats grapes which Mars Dugal' has paid Aun' Peggy, who was born free, to "goopher" in order to stop the slaves from eating them and thus reducing his profits. Because Henry transgressed unknowingly, Aun' Peggy can ameliorate but cannot completely neutralize the power of the goopher, which would otherwise have caused his death within the year. Uncle Julius relates in detail how Henry was affected and how Mars Dugal' capitalized on the situation—finally to his own detriment—to reinforce his advising John not to buy the plantation. The conjure is still effective, Uncle Julius avers, but he knows which vines were not goophered and can therefore eat the grapes with impunity. John, unbelieving, buys the plantation but hires Uncle Julius as the family coachman to compensate him for the revenue he would otherwise have derived from selling the grapes as he has in past years. Thus Julius is in the position to encounter, with John and Annie, circumstances which give rise to the other six tales in this collection.

The second tale Uncle Julius tells in The Conjure Woman, "Po' Sandy" (Atlantic Monthly, May 1888), grows out of Annie's desire to have a kitchen apart from the couple's new home on the old plantation and John's plan to use some of the lumber from a deserted schoolhouse on the premises in building the additional room. The whirring of a saw eating through a huge log at the sawmill, where Uncle Julius had driven the couple to purchase additional lumber, jogs his memory. He then relates the tragic events which took place when Sandy, a model slave whose first wife had been sold away from him, seeks to avoid being sent away from his equally devoted new wife, Tenie, a "cunjuh 'oman," by letting her change him back and forth into a tree. One of the outcomes of Uncle Julius's telling this tale is his securing for his church group the use of the old schoolhouse originally scheduled to be torn down.

Transformations which similarly influence plot development take place in several other tales. In "Mars' Jeems's Nightmare" (previously unpublished) a cruel master behaves differently after being changed temporarily into a slave. In "The Conjurer's Revenge" (Overland Monthly, June 1889) a headstrong, light-fingered slave, Primus, is turned into a mule and almost back again. In "Sis Becky's Pickaninny" (previously unpublished) Becky's little baby is transformed into a bird for a day at a time to keep his slave mother from dying of grief while they are separated. Finally, in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt" (previously unpublished) a loving slave couple, Mahaly and Dan, are changed permanently into a black cat and a gray wolf, who perish, at the will of a free conjurer, who also dies in the course of avenging his son's death.

In the inner narrative of "Hot-Foot Hannibal" (Atlantic Monthly, January 1899) Aun' Peggy conjures Hannibal, a favored house slave, at the request of Chloe, another house slave, and a field hand, Jeff, so that Hannibal will be unable to perform his duties well during the winter and thus fail to be rewarded with Chloe (who prefers Jeff) as a wife by their master as promised. The plan backfires, with disastrous results. There is also a love triangle among whites in the outer narrative, the happy resolution of which seems to be influenced greatly by the tragic fate of the slaves.

In each of the inner narratives in The Conjure Woman Chesnutt realistically portrays slaves striving to establish their identities as human beings. He reveals how they attempt to establish and maintain the same social relationships which characterize all human societies, while these natural inclinations are usually disregarded by masters who, possessing absolute power over their human chattel, are often cavalier in their use of it. Moreover, residual attitudes of racial superiority and inferiority are reflected consciously or unconsciously in the postbellum interactions of John, Annie, and Uncle Julius.

Chesnutt also wrote seven other Uncle Julius tales, which were first collected in The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt (1974). In one of these stories, "The Marked Tree" (Crisis, December 1924 and January 1925), Uncle Julius traces through several generations of the Spencer family the fatal effects of a powerful goopher put on them by a slave conjure woman whose son died as a result of the family's having sold him. Significantly, John, who has previously scoffed at goophers, now seems to acknowledge their power.

Contemporary reception of The Conjure Woman was generally good. In Cleveland interest was high. A special large-paper edition of 150 numbered copies requested by a member of the Rowfant Club was distributed to subscribers there before the trade edition appeared in March 1899. The volume was also the best-seller in Cleveland for April of that year.

As the author of what an anonymous southern reviewer called "the best book of short stories of the year" (Raleigh News and Observer, 30 April 1899), Chesnutt was compared favorably with Joel Chandler Harris, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Thomas Nelson Page, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Other reviewers labeled Chesnutt a northerner and found him lacking in understanding of Southern mores and folkways. Critics commented more on the humor of the tales than the tragedy, and the dialect got mixed reactions. Little was said about John and Annie's reactions to Uncle Julius's tales, while commentary about Uncle Julius was both extensive and controversial. One reviewer found Julius's selfish motives distasteful; another said that his character was perfectly drawn and enriching to the stories as a whole. In one of the most perceptive, balanced, and detailed reviews (Bookman, June 1899) Florence A. H. Morgan declared, "these stories are so perfectly consistent with human nature, that, aside from the supernatural element, which is palpably a vehicle for the deeper thought underlying, the stories prove themselves."

Striking an informal note in his review of The Conjure Woman (Conservator, November 1902) Horace Traubel called "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny" "the poem of the book," advising readers "to go to the negro with soul. Soul will take you to the negro and give him to you. Nothing else will. And Chesnutt is soul. That one drop or two of negro blood has placed Chesnutt just right with justice." (Chesnutt evidently liked Traubel's reviews. In an undated note attached to a copy of The Colonel's Dream that is among the Traubel Papers in the Library of Congress, Chesnutt told Traubel, "I love to have you read my books, because you read them with my eyes—and with my heart.")

Although Chesnutt had been identified as a Negro in print early in 1891 and had so described himself in a 8 September 1891 letter to Houghton, Mifflin, the general reading public was largely unaware that he was an Afro-American until after The Conjure Woman appeared. Reaction to the disclosure was mixed. An extreme position, not atypical for the times, was rejection of that truth because, according to one unidentified reader, a Negro was incapable of such creativity. Chesnutt himself considered his ethnic identity "a personal matter." As he declared years later in "Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem" (Colophon, part 5, 1931) "It never occurred to me to claim any merit because of it, and I have always resented the denial of anything on account of it."

Chesnutt's second book, The Wife of His Youth, introduced subject matter more contemporary but less familiar to his readers than the Uncle Julius tales. For the first time in American fiction Chesnutt, an insider, explored the lives of those Americans whose African ancestry was so slight as to be hardly—if at all—evident in their appearance. Called "Blue Veins" in the vernacular—because, along with other physical attributes generally characterized as Caucasian, they had such fair skin that their wrist veins were easily discernible—they lived in many sections of the country, including Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky—the major settings for the ten stories in the volume.

The lead story, "The Wife of His Youth," had attracted critical attention upon its appearance in the July 1898 Atlantic Monthly, and in a review of both Chesnutt's collections Hamilton Wright Mabie found the story worthy to "take its place among the best short stories in American literature" (Outlook, 24 February 1900). Mr. Ryder is "dean of the Blue Veins" and president of Groveland's "Blue Vein Society," whose "purpose was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people" eager to rise in the typical American manner. Ryder, having fled from the South before the Civil War to escape illegal enslavement, has for years cultivated a literary and musical bent while advancing himself through assiduous industry to a white-collar position, which has enabled him to buy a comfortable home and accumulate some savings. He is now about to propose to a young widow, Mrs. Molly Dixon, a former schoolteacher "even whiter and better educated" than himself, in whose honor he is giving a ball that evening. Relaxing on his front porch, Ryder is involved in reverie of recollection and anticipation when he is interrupted by the approach of a "very black," toothless, little old woman. She shows him a daguerreotype of her "husband," a "merlatter … Sam Taylor," who, to avoid being sold down the river illegally more than twenty-five years ago, had run away from the plantation where he was then apprenticed. She explains that she has been searching for him, and, though she obviously does not recognize Ryder as the young man in the daguerreotype, Ryder does. Though the "marriage" was not legally binding, he is faced with the moral dilemma of choosing between the faithful but uncultivated former slave and the more socially desirable Mrs. Dixon. His choice of the old woman climaxes the story.

Chesnutt demonstrates his ability to provide a striking variation on the theme of color prejudice among Afro-Americans in a companion piece, "A Matter of Principle" (previously unpublished), as satirical as "The Wife of His Youth" is serious. The prominent Cicero "Brotherhood" Clayton, "the richest colored man in Groveland," and his wife are faced with a dilemma; their "nearly white" daughter Alice receives a letter from the Honorable Hamilton M. Brown, a member of Congress. Having met Alice at the recent 1870s colored "inaugural" ball in Washington, D.C., he is asking permission to call on her during a trip to Groveland. The plot revolves around Alice's inability to recall Mr. Brown's complexion, and the overweening importance of his color in the Claytons' deciding whether or not to receive him.

Chesnutt presents admixture of blood from an altogether different angle in "The Sheriff's Children" (Independent, 7 November 1889). Set in Troy, North Carolina, in the 1870s, it discloses the far-reaching effects of racial mixing upon the law-abiding white Sheriff Campbell and a young mulatto accused of murder, Tom, whom the officer is protecting from a mob. While the sheriff is busy hastening the withdrawal of the would-be lynchers with rifle fire, Tom grabs a loaded pistol and threatens to kill Campbell unless he releases him from the jail. During a tense verbal exchange the younger man reveals that the sheriff is his father and former owner, who had sold Tom and his mother years before to a speculator. Only the timely arrival of the officer's daughter, who wounds her half-brother, prevents the sheriff's murder; but even more decisive action takes place before the story concludes the following morning.

In "The Web of Circumstance" (previously unpublished), social conditions determine the fate of enterprising Ben Davis, a former slave who, through industry and thrift, is prospering as a blacksmith and investing his money in real estate, including a home for his "good-looking yellow wife" and two children. His openly expressed desire to have a whip like the handsome fifteen-dollar one owned by Colonel Thornton and a probable affair between Ben's wife and his mulatto assistant pave the way for his downfall. Ben's misfortunes after he has been arrested for theft of the whip, which was apparently planted in his shop, are clearly attributable to race prejudice powerful enough to unbalance the scales of justice. The story thus becomes a searing indictment of a society greatly warped by its racial bias. The overt protest in this collection anticipates Chesnutt's more explicit social criticism in his last two novels, The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream. Similarly, attitudes toward racial mixing in the stories are developed more fully in The House Behind The Cedars.

With the publication of The Wife of His Youth Chesnutt gained stature as a literary artist. Through it he demonstrated conclusively that he was capable not only of adding significantly innovative aspects to an already established and easily recognizable American literary form, but also that he could successfully treat in fiction a particular group of Americans in a "middle world" insofar as race was concerned and who, in their efforts to cope, became involved in situations seldom faced by other Americans. Hamilton Wright Mabie credited Chesnutt with "distinct gift and insight." In "Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories" (Atlantic Monthly, May 1900) William Dean Howells asserted that both Chesnutt's collections of short fiction were "remarkable above many, above most short stories by people entirely white, and would be worthy of unusual notice if they were not the work of a man not entirely white." Howells pointed out some flaws—mostly in The Conjure Woman—but emphasized Chesnutt's faithful portrayal of character. Overall he ranked Chesnutt with Guy de Maupassant, Ivan Turgenev, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, as "one who sees his people very clearly, very justly, and he shows them as he sees them, leaving the reader to divine the depth of his feeling for them." Howells labeled "The Wife of His Youth""altogether a remarkable piece of work [with] uncommon traits," citing "the novelty of the material … the author's thorough mastery of it … his unerring knowledge of the life he had chosen in its peculiar racial characteristics … the passionless handling of a phase of our common life which is tense with potential tragedy [and] the quiet self-restraint of the performance." Howells praised particularly Chesnutt's characterization of the "paler shades" (as Howells termed them), about whom Chesnutt wrote with unprecedented candor as an insider and whom—despite their sometimes startling resemblance to whites—were kept as far removed from whites as "the blackest negro."

Howell's positive, literary treatment of Chesnutt's efforts was less common than that of Nancy Huston Banks, who reviewed The Wife of His Youth in "Novel Notes" (Bookman, February 1900). While not entirely negative, she approved wholeheartedly only of the title story, which prompted her statement that Chesnutt "may perhaps be given the credit of the first publication of a subtle psychological study of the negro's spiritual nature, the first actual revelation of those secret depths of the dusky soul which no white writer might hope to approach through his own intuition." Yet, for her, romantic relations between blacks and whites were "all but unapproachable ground," and she criticized Chesnutt for "touching this and still more dangerous and darker race problems" which were not treated (in fact largely ignored) "by more experienced writers." Banks readily conceded that "The Sheriff's Children" contains a "too probable truth" and is "legitimate literary material," but in her opinion its verisimilitude made the story unsuitable for publication.

Commendatory reviews of The Wife of His Youth were quoted in probably the longest of the early articles about Chesnutt in an Afro-American publication, the short-lived Colored American Magazine. In "Charles W. Chesnutt. One of the Leading Novelists of the Race" (December 1901), John Livingston Wright discussed from an Afro-American point of view the grave problems of the "‘light-black’ or the ‘black-light’ [individuals] whose mixture of blood makes them almost outcasts" as well as those of darker-skinned Negroes. Crediting Chesnutt with "practically pioneering in his especial vocation," Wright also commented about the author's "modest and charming manner" before "excellent audiences" during his recent reading tour of several eastern cities.

One of Chesnutt's stories that appeared after the publication of The Wife of His Youth, "Baxter's Procrustes" (Atlantic Monthly, June 1904), is an example of a facet of Chesnutt's work that has received almost no critical attention: fiction with only white characters. "Baxter's Procrustes" has been repeatedly cited for its literary excellence ever since Atlantic editor Bliss Perry found it "an ingenious and amusing story extremely well told" prior to its initial appearance in print.

This story is a satire of an all-male club devoted to books and book collecting—remarkably like the Cleveland Rowfant Club, which had denied Chesnutt membership in 1902. Suggesting that club members are too concerned with books as financial investments rather than with their contents, the story pointedly brings some of the group's values into question. It does not accuse them of racism, nor is it vengeful in tone, although Robert Hemenway finds social protest beneath the surface of what others have read as a "bagatelle." The Rowfanters enjoyed the story even though they realized that they were the objects of Chesnutt's raillery and elected him to membership in 1910. In 1966 the club published a special limited edition of "Baxter's Procrustes" accompanied by a biographical essay on Chesnutt by John B. Nicholson, Jr., a member.

After the publication of The Colonel's Dream in 1905 general interest in Chesnutt's work declined sharply. All of Chesnutt's books went out of print and, except for a financially successful new edition of The Conjure Woman in 1929, they were not republished until the late 1960s.

In 1974 The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt collected most of Chesnutt's short stories. Dating from 1885 to 1930, the previously uncollected stories range from anecdotes to long, rambling narratives. Except for the seven Uncle Julius tales mentioned earlier, they are about black and white life in the South and North as Chesnutt observed it. More often than not, even in seemingly frivolous short pieces such as "A Roman Antique" (Puck, 17 July 1889), Chesnutt's concern about race relations is manifested. In this little farce the narrator recounts his being asked for a handout by an old white-haired Negro who claimed to have been Julius Caesar's "fav'rite body-sarven'" and to have been wounded severely in Gaul while trying to protect his master. In turn Caesar had expressed his appreciation by giving him a quarter when he recovered and had left instructions in his will that the slave be emancipated by the time he became one hundred years old. In "The Doll" (Crisis, April 1912) Tom Taylor, the Negro proprietor of a barbershop in a high-class northern white hotel, finds himself weighing carefully the consequences of the various actions he may take when he is suddenly given the long-hoped-for opportunity to avenge the murder of his father by a white Southern colonel during Reconstruction. "Tom's Warm Welcome" (Family Fiction, 27 November 1886), about lower-class and middle-class whites near Fayetteville, North Carolina, some time after the Civil War, makes the distinction between "pore shote" Tom McDonald and more prosperous people such as gristmiller Dunkin Campbell and his daughter Jinnie. "White Weeds" (previously unpublished) focuses on the attitudes of cultivated northern white academicians.

Between 1906 and 1952, when Helen M. Chesnutt published her biography of her father and donated his papers to Fisk University, Chesnutt received only passing attention from the literati and none from the general white readership. Unlike Paul Laurence Dunbar, Chesnutt was little known among blacks as well. Nonetheless, during most of this period, a few scholars recognized Chesnutt's eminence as a black creator of short fiction. In 1931 Vernon Loggins stated that The Conjure Woman signaled the coming-of-age of Negro literature. Moreover, many other scholars of black literature in the 1930s and 1940s (themselves mostly Afro-Americans) were of the opinion that Chesnutt's short stories and novels equalled those of any other writer of his time. They also concurred with John Chamberlain's assertion in "The Negro as Writer" (Bookman, February 1930) that Chesnutt "pressed on to more tragic materials and handled them as no white novelist could have succeeded at the time in doing. And before he lapsed into silence all the materials of the Negro novel and short story as a vehicle for dramatizing racial problems had made their appearance, either explicitly or through adumbration, in his work."

In 1953, obviously moved by the Chesnutt biography, Russell Ames decried the neglect of Chesnutt by the literary establishment while comparing him favorably with other American writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. Since then, interest in Chesnutt has been steadily increasing.

Chesnutt was recognized as a southern writer as early as 1900, and many times thereafter he was claimed as a North Carolina author, but until the 1960s Chesnutt was seldom represented in regional anthologies and critical literature on the South. The inclusion of his "The Conjurer's Revenge" in The Local Colorists: American Short Stories 1857-1900 (1960), edited by Claude M. Simpson, was exceptional. In 1967 Julian Mason protested the exclusion which he considered "a disservice to Chesnutt, to his fiction and its concerns, to the South, and to the integrity and accuracy of histories of Southern literature." During the 1960s, however, a significant number of studies on regional aspects of Chesnutt's works appeared, including Sylvia Lyons Render's examinations of history, geography, character, ethnicity, beliefs, and customs in Chesnutt's stories and Charles W. Foster's article on nineteenth-century Negro dialect of the Fayetteville area as it is represented in Chesnutt's stories. Chesnutt's ambivalent feelings about the South have also been explored. Wayne Mixon has called him "A Southern writer in the best sense of the term because he wrote about the South, not for the South…. He refused to defend the region's shortcomings, hoping instead to excise them by facing them openly and presenting them realistically in his fiction."

Merrill Maguire Skaggs, in The Folk of Southern Fiction (1972), has found in Chesnutt's writings characters who fit into the "plain folk" (as opposed to the plantation) literary tradition and whom he calls "the core of the social structure [in the Old South], a massive body of plain [white] folk who were neither rich nor very poor" … [whose] worth was not directly related to their income but [based] rather on good character … determined by the possession of four major traits—pride, courage, common sense, and a willingness to work." Ladell Payne has also determined that like other black and white southern writers, Chesnutt drew on the folk culture and story-telling traditions of his area. For some of the Uncle Julius tales Chesnutt was inspired by stories told him during his childhood by old Afro-American tale-spinners, and, according to Gloria C. Oden and Chikwenye Ogunyemi, the Uncle Julius tales are linked to African folklore by their literary methodology as well as by the beliefs and practices they portray. According to Sterling Stuckey the stories reflect "an ethos … a life style and set of values … an amalgam of Africanisms and New World elements," which gave the transported Africans a better chance of surviving under conditions of abject servitude. Hence "the tradition of subterfuge, indirection, and subtle manipulation of whites" in the Uncle Julius tales, which Jules Chametzky has labeled "the first fictional form given to the black ethos in America." (Joel Taxel has shown how black characters in other Chesnutt stories employ similar strategies.)

Recognition of Chesnutt's literary adaptation of this ethos is just one of many post-1970 indications that Chesnutt was being considered as an accomplished literary artist. Another was provided by Richard A. Baldwin in his cogent essay "The Art of The Conjure Woman," in which he shows how Chesnutt's Uncle Julius stories were "a perfect vehicle for his artistic needs." Chesnutt's effectiveness in creating structure and characterization in the tales prompted Melvin Dixon to label Chesnutt as well as Uncle Julius a trickster and a teller. Expanding on this theme, David D. Britt calls The Conjure Woman "primarily a study in duplicity that masks or reveals its meaning according to the predisposition of the reader." Britt points out that Chesnutt's use of the frame-tale device "gives the first and final word to the white man, implying that the latter is the ‘official’ interpreter of Julius's yarn" and thereby creating "a surface level of meaning that leaves the Southern caste system undisturbed." Thus, by minimizing the possibility of his readers' feeling threatened, Chesnutt maximized the chances of educating them. Yet it is important to recognize that because Uncle Julius is seen only through John's eyes, the portrait of the old story-teller is flawed by John's rationalism, materialism, racial bias, and ignorance of Southern folkways—as well as his apparent lack of awareness of these limitations. Julius is a product of a system under which a black was more likely to survive if, when expedient, he said one thing but meant another. Sometimes called "signifying," this ironic use of language was and still is characteristic of Afro-American verbal communication. John frequently misses the underlying significance of Julius's words and is thus an unreliable narrator. The stories' ironic treatment of black-white interactions, as well as Uncle Julius's many recollections of the harshness of slavery, so unlike its nearly idyllic depiction by popular writers of the time, has prompted Robert Bone to classify The Conjure Woman as "antipastoral" and to praise Chesnutt for his skill in adapting the pastoral folk tale for his own ends, which David Britt has defined as "laying bare the nature of the slave experience, exploding myths about masters and slaves, and showing the limitations of the white man's moral and imaginative faculties."

Chesnutt's white characters also mask their true feelings and motives. According to P. Jay Delmar, the stories in The Wife of His Youth "show how both whites and Blacks are constrained to hide their true racial identities from themselves and each other" for better and for worse. Chesnutt's talent for characterization has also been recognized, as critics such as Delmar and Eugene Terry find many of Chesnutt's characters tragic according to classical standards rather than pathetic.

Still others, having read Chesnutt's works with the "new sensibility" which Terry propounded, have made sound metaphorical and allegorical interpretations. Pointing out "parallels in Ovid's Metamorphoses and The Conjure Woman, including similarities in Ovid's account of the fall of man and ‘The Goophered Grapevine," Karen Magee Myers interprets Chesnutt's tale as "the old myth … skillfully molded by Chesnutt to represent the fall of the South, and the death of the utopian concept of the American Dream." Along the same lines Theodore Hovet calls the story "a parable which explains the consequence of an unbounded faith in economic progress and the way such a belief serves to conceal the cost in human dignity … a microcosm of the mental attitudes, economic methods and consequences of American imperialism." In another allegorical interpretation Harmut K. Selke calls Sheriff Campbell in "The Sheriff's Children" a representative of the "Founding Fathers," who have failed to recognize their Afro-American sons. Gerald Haslam has called this work "a parable for this nation's contemporary racial crisis and continuing moral atrophy," while Ronald Walcott has noted similarities between the biblical parable of Cain and Abel, and he believes that Chesnutt "may be suggesting, now, that the South, so long as it is unwilling to perceive the implications of the mulatto's life, may yet have to suffer the consequences of his death."

Such serious consideration of Chesnutt's short fiction suggests that more and more readers are agreeing with Robert Bone's assessment of him as "a literary artist of the first rank" who deserves to be placed, with Henry James, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane, among the major American short-story writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Source: Sylvia Lyons Render, "Charles Waddell Chesnutt," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 78, American Short-Story Writers, 1880-1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant, Gale Research, 1989, pp. 68-82.

SOURCES

Andrews, William L., The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, Louisiana State University Press, 1980, p. 61.

Chesnutt, Charles W., "The Goophered Grapevine," in Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, edited and with an introduction by William L. Andrews, Mentor, 1992, pp. 1-13.

Duncan, Charles, The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt, Ohio University Press, 1998, pp. 101, 103-104.

Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery: 1619-1877, Hill and Wang, 1993, pp. 105, 154, 157.

McWilliams, Dean, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, University of Georgia Press, 2002, pp. 84-85.

Render, Sylvia Lyons, Charles W. Chesnutt, Twayne's United States Author Series, No. 373, Twayne Publishers, 1980, p. 62.

———, Introduction to The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Sylvia Lyons Render, Howard University Press, 1981, p. 17.