Why, it's as good as one of Scott's novels - the audacious Charles Chesnutt

Chesnutt had been publishing short stories for over a decade when The Conjure Woman was published in 1899, so he was able to hurry together another collection for publication in the same year.  The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line is, as one might guess, of variable quality.  A number of stories are about mixed-race African-Americans in Cleveland ("Groveland," ha ha) so have siginificant historical interest, at least, while a couple seem more like standard sentimental magazine fiction (you don't want to know how the little black girl in "The Bouquet" gets those flowers onto her white teachers grave).

Once in awhile, though, Chesnutt pushes harder.  I want to look at "The Passing of Grandison," Chesnutt at his most audacious (although book collectors must read "Baxter's Procrustes" (1904)).  This story is nuts, and is actually about audacity.

A young, rich knucklehead from Kentucky wants to marry an idealistic woman, who in turn wants to marry a hero, a man who has done something.  Such as?  Such as stealing and freeing a slave.  I'll do it! says the knucklehead.

So he travels to the North, supposedly for his health, accompanied by a valet, Grandison, one of his father's slaves, chosen, by the father, because he is "abolitionist-proof":  "Deed, suh I would n' low none er dem cussed, lowdown abolitioners ter come nigh me, suh."  The young idiot then has to figure out how to convince the loyal slave to run off.  In the comic high point, he writes anonymous letters to "several well-known abolitionists," inviting them to spirit off his slave:

DEAR FRIEND AND BROTHER:----

A wicked slaveholder from Kentucky, stopping at the Revere House, has dared to insult the liberty-loving people of Boston by bringing his slave into their midst.  Shall this be tolerated?  Or shall steps be taken in the name of liberty to rescue a fellow-man from bondage?  For obvious reasons I can only sign myself,

A Friend of Humanity.

But with no results:  "'Mars Dick,' he said, 'dese yer abolitioners is jes' pesterin' de life out er me tryin' ter git me ter run away.'"  The young dimwit finally takes his slave to Canada and has him detained by force.  And then he gets the girl, luckily marrying her before Grandison makes his way back to Kentucky from Canada, braving every hardship.  As the colonel, Grandison's owner says, "Why, it 's as good as one of Scott's novels!"  And we still have one plot twist left.

In the outrageous "The Passing of Grandison," Chesnutt reminded me strongly of Ralph Ellison, an audacious writer if there ever was one.

For another look at The Wife of His Youth, please visit BookNAround, also part of this month's Classics Circuit.

I don't think it very likely that you could make us believe it - why Chesnutt repeats himself

Yesterday I provided evidence, as I do now and again, that I should not review books.*  I described the stories in The Conjure Woman as "formulaic," following a formula.  I wanted the word to be descriptive, neutral, but in the context of a book review, it is always negative, isn't it?  Mindlessly formulaic.  Not creative.

As if most books most people (and I) read are not following formulas!  Not you - you only read the most far out of the avant-gardists, of course.  But for most of us, much of the pleasure of a book lies in the variation within the formula.  Charles Chesnutt's conjure stories make the formula explicit, seven stories in a row, the same dang thing over and over again.  Except not.  By fixing certain elements of the stories, Chesnutt highlights the parts that do change, which then actually changes, deepens, the meaning of some of the unchanging parts.

A white couple moves to North Carolina to operate a vineyard.  Uncle Julius tells them stories about slave life, always involving a conjure woman's magic spell.  The wife responds sentimentally, while the husband looks for Julius's selfish economic motives.  So when Julius warns, in "The Gophered Grapevine," that the vines on a particular piece of ground are enchanted, it is to protect his own supply of scuppernongs.  When he says he doesn't like to work with mules, because they might be people ("The Conjurer's Revenge"), it's because he is trying to get his employer to buy a horse from someone he knows.  If he says a patch of woods is haunted ("The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt"), it's because Julius is concealing a source of honey.

The narrator, the employer, is the one telling us all this.  He's the clever fellow who always figures out what Julius is really up to.  He's the loving husband who describes how his wife responds incorrectly, irrationally, to Julius's stories, but let's her do what she want "as I did not wish the servants to think there was any conflict of authority in the household" ("Mars Jeems's Nightmare").

In other words, in each story the narrator is condescending to Julius and to his wife.  What is a minor part of any given story becomes more interesting as it repeats.  My favorite touch is that the narrator's "real motives" become more fanciful as the stories progress.  Maybe Chesnutt is just following his own formula, providing a punchline, and fails to come up with such good ones.  Or maybe the narrator is a fool.

The title of the post is from "The Conjurer's Revenge."  The narrator knows that Julius is trying to trick him, so he tries to draw Julius out into the open, encouraging him to tell his stories, so that he can indulge his superiority over Julius (and over his sweet but weak wife).  Then he can tell us, and the readers of The Atlantic Monthly, all about it, and we can patronize the sly (but not too sly) Negro.

Now I'm the one assuming that I'm more sophisticated, seeing through the narrator, thinking that Julius is not sly but merely intelligent, that he tells his stories for a purpose that is his own, but not necessarily material.   I'm afraid that question - why does Julius tell his stories - may be too complicated for this pass through The Comjure Woman.  Meaning, I don't know.  I'm still thinking about it.

*  Whether I should do whatever it is I normally do is a separate topic.

He kep' on wukkin' de roots - Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman

Today's post is part of the Harlem Renaissance branch of the Classics Circuit, ably organized by Rebecca Reid and others. 

The Conjure Woman (1899) is a slender book of seven formulaic stories.  That sounds so negative.  True, though.  Each story works like this:

Our narrator, a white Northerner who has relocated to North Carolina, relates a story told to him by his employee and former slave Uncle Julius.  In each story, told in dialect, a slave gets assistance from the magic powers of a conjure woman.  Usually, some sort of strange transformation occurs - a slave is turned into a tree or a mule, or a master is turned into a slave.  The clever narrator discovers Julius's ulterior motive, but is thwarted by his kind-hearted wife, who always does what Julius wants.  Frame, story, frame.

Three reasons to read The Conjure Woman:

1.  The varied and accurate (aside, I suppose, from the magic spells) portrait of slave life. The advantage of reading Chesnutt over a historian like Eugene Genovese (see Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)) escapes me.

2. The voice of Uncle Julius.  In "The Goophered Grapevine" a slave becomes one with nature:

All dis time de goopher wuz a-wukkin'. When de vimes sta'ted ter wither, Henry 'mence' ter complain er his rheumatiz; en when de leaves begin ter dry up, his ha'r 'mence' ter drap out. When de vimes fresh' up a bit, Henry 'd git peart ag'in, en when de vimes wither' ag'in, Henry 'd git ole ag'in, en des kep' gittin' mo' en mo' fitten fer nuffin; he des pined away, en pined away, en fine'ly tuk ter his cabin; en when de big vime whar he got de sap ter 'n'int his head withered en turned yaller en died, Henry died too,--des went out sorter like a cannel.

Despisers of dialect writing will despise this.  I have to say, I love the conceit of this story, the man who turns into a human grapevine and changes with the seasons.  It feels like the eruption of an old pagan story.  In each tale, Julius, and Chesnutt, are good storytellers.  For some reason, Chesnutt wrote one Uncle Julius story (in the Library of America Stories, Novels, an Essays (2002), but not in The Conjure Woman) without the dialect, but as a sort of summary, and it could not have been duller.

And speaking of dull, the narrator's voice is pompous, Latinate, tedious, paternalistic.  I suspect parody.

3.  Because the other reason to read The Conjure Woman, the reason that the formula is useful for Chesnutt, is that the sophisticated reader is allowed to enjoy the big joke played on the narrator and his wife.  In "Po' Sandy," the narrator tells us, and the readers of The Atlantic Monthly, that Julius's stories are "quaintly humorous," an reveal "the Oriental cast of the negro's imagination," but also "disclose many a tragic incident of the darker side of slavery."  So the well-intentioned reader can feel both condescending and virtuous.  He can, like the narrator, enjoy his chuckle when he discovers that Julius tells us that the grapevines are haunted because he wants to protect his own grape supply.  Julius is crafty, but we see through him, and indulge him.

The joke, though, is that Julius is joking himself.  He does not believe that his haunted grapevine story will prevent the sale of the vineyard.  The ex-slave is creating an ironic history of the vineyard, and of slavery.

I don't think I have explained this at all.  Let's try again tomorrow.