A Companion to the American Short Story

Home > Other > A Companion to the American Short Story > Page 17
A Companion to the American Short Story Page 17

by Alfred Bendixen


  Woman

  3). Thus, the fi ctional Patesville (based explicitly on Fayetteville, North

  Carolina) becomes the setting for most of Chesnutt ’ s “ Southern ” stories; having lived

  in and around Fayetteville for nearly twenty years, the author knew it well. He chose

  to locate most of the rest of his short fi ction in a place familiar to him as well. Virtu-

  ally all of his “ Northern ” fi ctions are set in “ Groveland, ” Ohio, a fi ctionalized twin

  for Cleveland, the city in which he lived from 1884 until his death in 1932.

  At fi rst glance, many of Chesnutt ’ s short stories, especially those about the ante -

  and postbellum South, probably seemed recognizable, even conventional, to many

  readers. Indeed, the dialect stories which earned Chesnutt his initial fame – published

  in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in 1887 and later collected into his fi rst book, The

  Conjure Woman , in 1899 – came familiarly clothed. After all, readers had grown largely

  familiar with the so

  -

  called

  “

  plantation tradition

  ”

  works of such writers as John

  70

  Charles Duncan

  Pendleton Kennedy, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Dixon.

  Typically, such stories focused on idealized versions of the antebellum South, a place

  (and time) depicted nostalgically as simpler, and more honorable and orderly than

  modern life. Thus, plantation life is recalled, often by an ex - slave narrator who regales

  listeners – generally white characters and, broadly speaking, white readers – with tales

  of plantation life, including generally favorable descriptions of the relationships

  between slaves and masters created by the “ peculiar institution. ” Interesting, too, is

  the fact that the stories told by the ex - slave characters, who speak in sometimes exag-

  gerated dialect, often derive from African American folktales; both Page

  ’

  s

  In Ole

  Virginia, Or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) and Harris ’ s Uncle Remus: His Songs

  and Sayings (1881), for example, drew on African American folktales for their “ inside ”

  narratives.

  Several nineteenth - century African American writers, however, professed to having

  found plantation literature distasteful; there are many examples of attempts to respond

  to, parody, and rebuke such writings. Frederick Douglass ’ s The Heroic Slave (1853),

  William Wells Brown ’ s Clotel; or The President ’ s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in

  the United States (1853), Frances Watkins ’ s The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio (1856),

  and Paul Laurence Dunbar ’ s The Sport of the Gods (1902) all, to greater or some extent,

  repudiate the racial and social claims implicit in plantation tradition literature.

  Many scholars today similarly detect racially charged, even sinister messages under-

  lying the plantation tradition. Figures such as Houston Baker, Amy Kaplan, and

  Kenneth Warren posit that authors in the tradition overtly attempt to reinforce racial

  (and often racist) stereotypes; Kaplan, for example, calls Page ’ s In Ole Virginia “ a col-

  lection of dialect stories narrated by a faithful ex - slave who reminisces nostalgically

  about ‘ dem good ole times. ’ ” And Eric J. Sundquist suggests that the function of

  plantation tradition fi ction goes far beyond idle nostalgia:

  The recreated plantation was a perfect topos for lamenting the loss of legitimate white

  mastery but also for demonstrating that, though legal slavery was gone, the forms and

  hierarchies of a clearly defi ned racial order, with its consequent economic privileges,

  could still be maintained. Plantation literature and culture did not simply demand a

  febrile return to the past; it was the deceptive screen for keeping contemporary African

  Americans in bondage to the whole white race, as Albion Tourgee had said in his brief

  for Homer Plessy. (Sundquist 287)

  Thus, both nineteenth - century African American authors and modern scholars argue

  that the tradition perpetuated unfl attering stereotypes of the past at best and attempted

  to maintain a racist social order at worst.

  Why, then, would a reform

  -

  minded writer who identifi ed himself as African

  American choose to work in what might have been for him an offensive literary form?

  Surprising though it may seem, the plantation tradition – and especially the frame

  story as popularized by Harris and Page – provided an ideal platform from which to

  try to advance Chesnutt ’ s two primary goals as a writer: to earn money and to educate

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  71

  white readers about African Americans. In using such a well - established literary genre,

  one his late nineteenth

  -

  century readers found familiar and comfortable,

  Chesnutt

  would be able to accomplish both goals, despite their seeming inherent contradictions.

  The stories, that is, would allow him to attain popular success ( The Conjure Woman

  did indeed become his best - selling book) by appealing to the expectations of readers

  captivated by nostalgic and quaintly exotic descriptions of the Old South; and the

  stories would simultaneously amend the attitudes of his white readers about slaves

  and the free African Americans who, by the end of the nineteenth century, had come

  to form a signifi cant portion of the citizenry. The format thus allows Chesnutt to

  demythologize the patrician ideals that seem to inform the plantation tradition, and

  it likewise permits the sort of subtle and complex humanizing of African Americans

  that became a feature of virtually all of his writings. In addition, the stories, as Joseph

  McElrath, Jr., points out, are “ dominantly comical in tone; [their] serious refl ections

  … are designed to elicit sympathy in a gentle manner ” ( Critical Essays 4). Such an

  approach no doubt refl ects Chesnutt ’ s own nature as well as his savvy.

  Chesnutt obviously believed he could make productive use of the genre – he uses

  it to structure fourteen “ conjure ” stories (a signifi cant share of his entire short story

  output), the seven collected in The Conjure Woman and seven others published between

  1887 and 1925. Like some of his predecessors in the genre, Chesnutt bases many of

  these so - called “ conjure ” stories on African American folktales, and, as the title of his

  collection suggests, he imbues the tales with magic (or, as Julius calls it, “ goopher ” ).

  The stories typically rest upon the interaction of three central characters: John, a white

  Ohio businessman who has moved to North Carolina after the Civil War to purchase

  and operate a vineyard; Julius, an ex - slave raconteur and now coachman who had lived

  and worked on the property when it had been a plantation; and Annie, John ’ s wife,

  who seems to serve in many ways as the proxy for the kind of open - minded white

  reader Chesnutt hoped to cultivate. Each story typically opens with John as narrator

  of the “ outside ” story, but it is Julius ’ s “ inside ” narrative – told in dialect – that forms

  the crux of the story. Each of Julius ’ s tales recounts events on the plantation before

  the war, while John and Annie li
sten; after Julius concludes his tale, both fi gures

  typically comment on, interpret, question, and debate the merits – both literary and

  historical – of the tale (and Julius ’ s telling of it). Perhaps the best description of the

  tales comes from John, who summarizes them this way:

  Some of these stories are quaintly humorous; others wildly extravagant, revealing the

  Oriental cast of the negro ’ s imagination; while others, poured freely into the sympathetic

  ear of a Northern - bred woman, disclose many a tragic incident of the darker side of

  slavery. ( Conjure Woman 40 – 1)

  In “ The Goophered Grapevine, ” the fi rst story in The Conjure Woman collection,

  Chesnutt introduces the three central characters and, indeed, the governing paradigm

  of all fourteen of his conjure stories, and it certainly discloses a darker side of slavery

  than one might fi nd in a traditional plantation tale. Having recently relocated from

  72

  Charles Duncan

  the North and in search of some land in North Carolina to cultivate, John and Annie

  decide to buy a plantation that has suffered from neglect since the Civil War, which

  had ended a considerable, if never specifi ed, number of years earlier. There they meet

  Julius McAdoo, an ex - slave who has apparently been living on the plantation and

  subsisting in part by tending what ’ s left of the vineyards on the property. As in all

  of the conjure stories, the frame story is narrated by John, a white Ohio businessman,

  while Julius narrates the “ inside, ” or embedded, story. In short, Chesnutt developed

  a narrative paradigm which allows him both to counter romantic depictions of slavery

  but also – more interestingly – to explore his own fi ctionalized version of “ Reconstruc-

  tion

  ”

  ; here, as in the other conjure stories, blacks and whites, Northerners and

  Southerners come together and share stories of the past as they attempt to remake

  the country following the Civil War.

  Thus, when Julius learns of John ’ s plans to purchase the estate, he tells the couple,

  in dialect and without interruption, a long story about the plantation ’ s pre – Civil War

  days. The tale recounts the grim consequences that accrue when the plantation owner,

  Mars Dugal ’ McAdoo, hires Aunt Peggy (the conjure woman of the title of the collec-

  tion) to bewitch the vineyard as a means of preventing local slaves from stealing his

  grapes. The spell, which putatively causes anyone who eats the grapes to die within a

  year, works wonderfully well as a deterrent until Henry, a recently acquired slave

  unaware of the vineyard ’ s “ goophered ” condition, eats some of the grapes. Moved to

  spare Henry, Aunt Peggy puts a protective spell on him, but one that confl ates his

  physical well - being with that of the plants; in the summer, therefore, Henry and the

  vineyard thrive, while both are sapped of their energy in the winter. Recognizing

  Henry ’ s magic - induced organic cycles, the plantation owner seeks to maximize profi t

  by selling Henry every summer during his peak condition, and then buying him back

  in every winter, at a greatly reduced price, when Henry, like the plants, is frail and

  unproductive. This profi table enterprise eventually comes to an end when Mars McAdoo

  falls victim to a Yankee confi dence man and his own greed; when he takes the Yankee ’ s

  advice on how to exploit his land and slaves even more, the crops and Henry both die.

  Julius ’ s tale about Henry thereby literalizes the confl ation of African American

  slaves and property, in this situation transforming a black man into the very land he

  works. Henry, that is, literally becomes just another crop that McAdoo cultivates,

  harvests, and profi ts from every season. With Henry functioning as little more than

  a disposable commodity – after Henry ’ s death, McAdoo curses the Yankee only for

  costing him money – in the business of plantation ownership, Julius thus introduces

  John and Annie to an incisive lesson on the treatment of African Americans and the

  very economics of slavery in the Old South. It ’ s no surprise, then, that “ The Goophered

  Grapevine ” and, indeed, virtually all of the conjure stories, focuses on the grim con-

  sequences of an economic system predicated on the buying and selling of humans.

  Julius stresses not only the tangible effects on the slaves, but he also emphasizes – as

  Annie repeatedly recognizes – how the system dehumanizes the white characters as

  well. After Henry ’ s death, for example, Julius describes the slaveowner ’ s responses:

  “ ‘ Mars Dugal ’ tuk on might ’ ly ‘ bout losin ’ his vimes en his nigger in de same year.

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  73

  … He say he wuz mighty glad dat de wah come, en he des want ter kill a Yankee

  fer eve ’ y dollar he los ’ ‘ long er dat grape - raisin ’ Yankee ’ ” ( Conjure Woman 32).

  Taken together, the plots of the conjure stories offer a range of tone and interpretive

  possibility. In stories such as “ Po ’ Sandy ” and “ Dave ’ s Neckliss, ” Chesnutt describes

  brutalities inherent in the slavery system that lead to psychological devastation,

  murder, and suicide. In the latter, for example, the title character takes a degrading

  punishment so much to heart that he ultimately kills himself. Clearly, Chesnutt

  intends for readers to fi nd such events shocking. But other stories emphasize instead

  the more positive implications of blacks and whites – in the forms of Julius, John, and

  Annie – learning to live and work together in a new America. Although John often

  questions or even dismisses Julius ’ s motives for telling his tales, Annie ’ s interpretations

  of the tales often demonstrate not only her sympathy for those who had been enslaved

  but also a perceptive comprehension of the human motivations that pervade each tale.

  In many ways, the conjure tales look back critically on the antebellum South, but the

  stories also evoke more encouraging implications – the main characters may well rep-

  resent the beginning of a new understanding of, and appreciation for, the “ other. ”

  Several of Chesnutt ’ s other stories also borrow from familiar literary genres, only

  to be manipulated into a new form by the author. In “ The Passing of Grandison, ” for

  example, Chesnutt once more appropriates, but modifi es, another literary form, this

  one distinctly African American: the slave narrative. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis

  Gates, Jr., defi ne the slave narrative as “ [t]he written and dictated testimonies of the

  enslavement of black human beings ” (Davis and Gates xii), and the genre constituted

  a signifi cant portion of the African American literary tradition well into the nineteenth

  century. As James Olney and others have pointed out, traditional slave narratives,

  which are generally autobiographical in form, have a number of shared characteristics:

  an account of the slave ’ s life in bondage, a “ description of successful attempt(s) to

  escape, … guided by the North Star ” (Olney 153), and a brief commentary on the

  ex - slave ’ s life in the North. As with plantation tradition literature, nineteenth - century

  readers would have been familiar with slave narratives; thousands reached print in the

  United States before the Civil Wa
r. Black authors such as Frederick Douglass (about

  whom Chesnutt published a biography), Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Solomon

  Northrup, and Harriet Jacobs, among many others, published autobiographical

  accounts of their slave years. Traditional slave narratives have at their core a shared

  rhetorical goal – to convince white readers that slavery should be abolished.

  By the time “ The Passing of Grandison ” reached print in 1899, of course, slavery

  had long since been abolished. Thus, Chesnutt clearly has another purpose in mind

  for the work. Although broadly comic in tone and far different in narrative strategies,

  the plot of “ The Passing of Grandison ” may nevertheless initially seem familiar to

  readers of slave narratives; it focuses, after all, on a particular slave, Grandison, who

  lives on a Kentucky plantation and who eventually escapes to the North; he even

  makes use of the North Star in one of his treks. That ’ s where the similarity ends,

  though, as the rest of the story adds a farcical element to a genre not known for its

  use of comedy.

  74

  Charles Duncan

  The action of the story derives from the attempts of the son of the plantation owner

  to “ free ” one of his father ’ s slaves as a means of impressing his fi anc é e. But despite

  the young man ’ s elaborate efforts – including secretly plotting with abolitionists and

  leaving Grandison alone (with a drawer full of “ escape ” money) for days at a time in

  a Boston hotel – Grandison proves unfailingly loyal to his masters, so much so that

  the son ultimately hires thugs to kidnap the slave and take him to “ freedom ” in

  Canada. Even that desperate measure works only temporarily as Grandison escapes

  from Canada, and in a startlingly ironic plot contrivance, uses the North Star to navi-

  gate (South!) back to captivity in Kentucky. Ultimately, however, Grandison proves

  not quite the model slave after all; having gathered his family, he re - escapes with

  them to the North, leaving his “ master ” deeply disappointed in the fi delity of his

  slaves. Easily one of Chesnutt ’ s best stories, “ Grandison ” is both surprising and very

  funny, two traits not normally associated with slave narratives.

  In refi tting, more than thirty years after the abolition of slavery, the slave narrative

 

‹ Prev