5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must for anyone interested in African American Literature, March 15, 2002
This review is from: The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Paperback)
What is most interesting about these stories is both the narrative framework & the way the narrator of the stories about the black community (there are essentially two narrators) uses magic ("The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy" especially) to usurp the authority of the white landowner (the primary narrator, who is re-telling the stories Julius has told him). Maybe it takes an understanding of African American literary traditions-- signifying, call & response, etc, to really dig in, but you can still relate without that background.
There are multiple layers of narration going on-- and once you can get through those layers, you can both enjoy the story-line and understand something pivotal about the way the African American genre works. The dialect and speech patterns are represented in a way that was criticized by some early African American writers who wanted a more "realistic" "naturalistic" and political structure. But underneath the "quaint" nature of the stories about magic & the slave/master relationship are some very subtle and very powerful images of how the slave and master influence *each other*-- that there are differences in the power dynamic than what we expect. It might be hard to get into the language-- but once you do, it's not overdone. Read the dialect the way you would learn another language; it's English, with a twist. There is also a great story on "passing," and some exploration of voodoo. This is a text that should be taught alongside Faulkner & Flannery O'Connor-- another look at the South.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Goophered, May 10, 2011
This review is from: The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Paperback)
Charles Chesnutt (1858 -- 1932) was a lawyer, businessman, and civil rights activist in addition to his chosen work and dream of becoming a successful early African American writer. His first published collection of stories, "The Conjure Woman" (1899) remains his best-known work. The seven original conjure stories in Cheshutt's book are included in this collection together with several additional conjure tales. My review focuses on the contents of the 1899 collection.
These tales are in the pattern of a story within a story within a story. The stories are set in the years following the Civil War and are told in the voice of John, a white businessman. John and his wife Alice had moved from Ohio, at the advice of Alice's physician, to establish a vineyard in central North Carolina. When they find a suitable property, they meet an aging former slave, Juilus McAdoo, known as "Uncle Julius" whom they hire as a coachman. In his own voice, Julius tells John and Alice pointed stories of plantation life. The stories all center upon conjuring or "goophering" in which spells are cast and people sometimes are transformed into something else, such as a tree or a mule, by a conjurer. In most of the stories, the conjurer is a free black woman, Aunt Peggy. There is a male conjurer in two stories.
When John narrates, the stories are written in clear, formal language. The stories and fables Uncle Julius tells, however, are written in a thick difficult dialect. It takes patience and close reading to understand Uncle Juilus, both in his dialect and in what he says. But the effort is worthwhile. These stories have as their model the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris and similar literature. Chesnutt's models, however, presented an idyllic picture of Southern plantation life in the years before the Civil War. Uncle Julius offers a much harsher portrayal of a world in which people used callously and bought and sold like horses or timber. The emphasis of conjuring is also unique to Chesnutt. It reminded me of some of the work of Zora Neale Hurston.
The stories usually begin with John and Alice facing a situation in their new life as vineyard owners in the South. Uncle Julius then tells a story geared subtly to the issues facing his employers. With their conjuring and improvisatory character, the stories are outrageous and humorous. They show the nature of plantation life and work back to the situations of Alice and John which frame the story. John is a practical man with no particular insight into slavery. He focuses on the conjuring and on some of the manipulative effects of Uncle Julius' storytelling, but the deeper impacts of the stories may be lost on him. John tends to see the South as a slow-paced, peaceful land of romance in accordance with myth. Alice sees somewhat further into the stories. She is able to get beyond the magic and the superstition to get a sense of human tragedy.
Uncle Julius' stories tend to be tangled and improvised as he goes along. The best of them are "The Goophered Grapevine", about a slaveowner who has has vineyard "goophered" to prevent his slaves from eating the grapes and soon bears the consequences, "Po Sandy", which recounts how a woman changed her lover into a tree to try to protect him, "The Conjurer's Revenge" which is about a conjurer changing a man who stole his hog into a mule, and "Sis Becky" which tells the tragic story of a slave woman who is parted from her baby when the plantation owner sells her for a race horse.
In a story called "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt", John offers the following summary of Uncle Julius' storytelling:
"It was not difficult to induce the old man to tell a story, if he were in a reminiscent mood. Of tales of the old slavery days he seemed indeed to possess an exhaustless store, - some weirdly grotesque, some broadly humorous; some bearing the stamp of truth, faint, perhaps, but still discernible; others palpable inventions, whether his own or not we never knew, though his fancy doubtless embellished them. But even the wildest was not without an element of pathos, -- the tragedy, it might be, of the story itself; the shadow, never absent, of slavery and of ingornance; the sandness, always, of life as seen by the fading light of an old man's memory."
The stories in "The Conjure Woman" and in a subsequent book called "The Wife of his Youth" remain Chesnutt's best-known work. In recent years, there has been some increased interest in his novels. A collection of Chesnutt's writings in the Library of America
Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (Library of America) will allow interested readers to explore further the work of this pioneering African American writer.
Robin Friedman
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastically charming, January 30, 2008
This review is from: The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (Paperback)
I bought the entire Library of America a few years ago, and have regularly been sampling and greatly enjoying most of the fiction authors in the series (as well as some of the non-fiction writers) ever since.
But I was stymied the first time I tried to read The Conjure Woman. Most of the book is slavery-era folk tales or fantasies, presented as absolute fact in heavy Negro dialect by an elderly black servant who new white landholders "inherit" when they come South from Ohio and buy an old grape plantation in North Carolina. There is always a backdrop to the stories that relates to the white plantation owners (a transplant from Ohio and his somewhat sickly wife); the man who owns the estate is the first person narrator throughout.
The first time around, I just didn't have the patience to slog through the dialect and try to figure out what old Julius, the servant was saying. But since I had also been initially stopped by other writers in the series, then loved them once I gave them a devoted effort, I finally decided to give Chesnutt and Julius a second try. And boy am I glad I did!!
In a way, it reminded me of one of my other favorite works from the series, The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck. Like this book, it is about an abandoned farm that acquires a new owner, and both books are a connected set of weird short stories that are great individually but also have cumulative effect taken together, and have a fascinating and spooky larger story to tell.
While Steinbeck's book is more sinister, Chesnutt's has more charm, as one consistent thread throughout is the suggestion that old Julius always has an immediate reason for telling (inventing?) each strange and scary tale that he tells. Sometimes, it is strictly to advance Julius' own interests -- while on other occasions it is based on influencing events affecting his white employers and their loved ones in a way that is very helpful to all.
In the end, old Julius seems to be a kind of beneficent manipulative genius with his fantastic and persuasive tales. I am very stingy with my stars and have only ever given but a few 5's, but I can say that this is at least a 4+. The book is so perfect in achieving its intention, and Chesnutt is such a genius himself, I'm surprised I never heard of him before!!
And, after getting used to the slave-Negro dialect, I grew to much enjoy reading it (most of the book is in this dialect, as the plantation owner records Julius' stories as he told them). It is so colorful, expressive, and humorous.
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