The Conjure Woman

by Charles W. Chesnutt

The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman. Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, African American, Historical Fiction, American, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1899

About the author

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.

Reviews

[Book Riot Community]

This is probably my favorite “forgotten” classic of the year. It’s a collection of antebellum slave folk tales first published in 1899. The writing style is super clever and smart–Chesnutt definitely had a way with words–and the stories in the book offer a completely unromanticized portrait of a world terrible and strange, where anything can happen. That might make it seem far removed from the modern era, but the way Chesnutt frames the folk tales allows him to comment on contemporary (for his own time, at least) race relations in the South, and to show how they’re informed by the past. I listened to the Librivox audiobook production of The Conjure Woman and the reader, James K. White, was absolutely pitch perfect. Definitely recommend this one! — Tasha Brandstatter



from The Best Books We Read In December: http://bookriot.com/2015/12/23/riot-r...

[Lois · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an anthology of interconnected short stories set during Reconstruction and after.
A white man and his wife from the north purchase an old plantation and a formerly enslaved older man, Uncle Julius, tells them African American folktales and stories dealing with Conjure.
He's a bit of a sly character and I quite enjoy his Tall Tales.

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book consists of stories recounted by Julius, an old black servant, to a younger wealthy black couple that recently moved to North Carolina from Ohio. Julius' dialect is thick. But if you read those passages aloud, the meaning is soon clear, and the surprise of recognizing a seemingly opaque word or phrase is part of the charm. The tales are full of trickery, including the probable reasons for Julius making up such tales and telling them to his boss. The irony and the humor are reminiscent of the Br'er Rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris, a contemporary of Chesnutt. I picked this up because of the similarity of title to the recently published Conjure Women by Afia Atakora. This was a delightful find.

PS -- Reading his dialect was a bit like reading Finnegan's Wake -- the surprise pleasure of recognizing a word or a phrase -- only much much easier than Joyce.

[Tonya Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

5⭐️'s because it's a classic.

[Lawrence FitzGerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Folklore as the roots of magical realism. Chesnutt has used the elements of African-American folklore to craft a series of excellent stories . I don't think there was really a weak entry in the bunch. If I were forced to pick a favorite it might be "The Grey Wolf's Ha'nt."

Chesnutt differs from Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame in that he uses elements of folklore to craft original stories while Harris was doing us the favor of collecting folklore.

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting as all get out for its cross-over qualities: pre- and post-Civil War periods evoked, white and black worlds meeting through story-telling after and during US slavery, and the author's own ability to mediate and write these two worlds and time periods so well. The stories themselves, although entertaining enough, were pretty rudimentary tales (even if a horrific record of the kind of everyday cruelty of one group of people owning and treating another worse than most ranchers treat their livestock), and the occult was not in any way scary or threatening--yes, as a lover of Gothic i had hoped for something better than mere fairy-tale lore, something truly macabre. The dialect of the story teller, although also interesting and a wonderful record of the speech of a group of people in a particular era does slow down one's reading. Sensitive modern readers will bray at the constant use of the n-word. Those fed up with political correctness will love the fact that only the black character uses it and tends to throw it in the face of the white characters continually, characters who, being Northerners, refuse to use it themselves. I highly recommend you read this book, but not on aesthetic or dramatic grounds, more on moral and historical grounds, which are also good reasons to read certain fictions.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 19th century series of short stories written by African American Charles W. Chesnutt. They are all dialect stories, which was a thing at the time (think Mark Twain). This is his first work, and he didn't write any more dialect stories, which I think is telling.

That said, these stories also fit into the genre of trickster tales. Julius is an old farm hand formerly enslaved on a property bought by Northern transplants. He tells them stories of plantation life and often directly benefits from the telling. These plantation life stories are darker, and more honest, than the romanticized stories often told. Many turn the romanticized tropes on their head. Julius's dialect juxtaposed with Northern (pedantic?) erudition also serves to demonstrate wisdom vs education.

Overall a good collection, but I anticipate better things in Chesnutt's later work. I'll let you know when I get there. If you have trouble (or just don't like) reading dialect, stomaching the brutality of plantation life, or tend to read literally, then you may struggle with this one.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you, narrator!!

A few years back, I read the Bre’r rabbit tales, it was difficult to get started, but once I understood the dialect, I could read the story with better understanding. Listening to this set of stories made the whole experience way more enjoyable. I recommend if you were going to try to tackle this set of short stories that you do it with the audiobook handy. It was greatly entertaining, listening to the story that were passed down through generations.

[William Clemens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired by the feeling of a lack of knowledge while I was reading 'Nigger Heaven' I thought I would try out some Chesnutt as he was a favorite of the female lead in the other book. This ended up being one of those books that I am surprised has not been more widely acknowledged or read.

The book is a collection of short stories, told by an ex-slave to the two white northerners who buy the plantation he used to belong to. Hired as their chauffeur he relates tales of the plantation, usually with some sort of moral, and usually to his own benefit. Told in deep dialect this book covers many southern folk-tales and beliefs of the slaves.

Once again, like with 'Nigger Heaven', I still feel like I don't know enough about the literature of the time or the history to really judge this book but I personally enjoyed it. The dialect can be a bit rough at times, and I never did quite figure out how some of the words should sound, but it didn't detract from the stories at all and really did help them feel authentic.

With the clever depiction of the ex-slave leading his employers to makes choices benefitting him in the end, even though they were aware of his motives, and the attention to preserving the dialects I don't really know why this book isn't more well known and read along side of Twain and other southern writers. Highly recommended by me

[Lydia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may have been a forerunner for that discredited movement called Ebonics. The difference here is that African-Americans born into slavery and subjected to the Jim Crow system were not allowed to read, write, attend school, etc. "The Conjure Woman" is one of those books that may take two readings to make sure that you understand the words in the broken English that rural, plantation blacks spoke. This is nice book of tall tales of working roots and goopeh mixtures in order to get love, revenge, etc among slaves. Uncle Julius is the storyteller as relays to "fixes" conjured up by freedwoman "Aunt Sally."

Spells cast by her mixture and few other free blacks who had healing powers, the power of revenge, etc are told by Uncle Julius and listened to incredulously by the author, his wife and sister-law in rural North Carolina.

[AGMaynard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chesnutt offered these periodical short stories, which were folktales very much "anti" plantation stories, later collected and published. He also wrote several later. He hoped to get across the daily misery of enslaved people without any false renderings. Reading one per week, then commenting, was powerful.

[Lauren Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of seven interconnected short stories. I listened to this as an Audiobook free through Librivox because it is in the public domain on Youtube. The reader, James K. White, does an amazing job. I highly recommend it if you have trouble with the printed version as much of it is written in the colloquial English of a southern, formerly enslaved man of the late 1800s and written out phonetically, which can be confusing. I often listened and read at the same time.

Every short story follows the same structure, which does help too. The "tales" of Uncle Julius all have fantastical elements, but the most shocking parts are not the fantastical elements but the reality of cruelty that humans are able to inflict on each other. It shines a bright light on how horrible the history of the U.S. white southern culture is.

The stories are very moving, and although the book is short, it can take a while to read, not only because of the phonetic writing style but also because you have to think and digest the different levels and layers of the stories. It's even more interesting that Charles W. Chestnutt was from a free family of biracial descent (although he identified as black), and he was not originally from the south, so he offers unique insights into Southern culture, white culture, and black culture of the reconstruction era in the U.S.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Told from the perspective of a white northern who has settled in the south on a former plantation, the real gem of the stories comes from the unique voice of Uncle Julius McAdoo, who, taking over the narrative, relates various "conjure" stories of slave-life on the plantation. Dressed-up as fable, John finds the conjure stories quaint and somewhat self-serving (for Uncle Julius uses them to (sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully) persuade or dissuade some endeavor on the part of John. His wife, on the other hand, declares, "the story bears the stamp of truth, if ever a story did." She decides that the conjure-embellishments (boys turning into birds to fly back to their mothers, men turning into trees to avoid being sold or lent out) are "mere ornamental details and not at all essential. The story is true to nature, and might have happened half a hundred times, and no doubt did happen, in those horrid days before the war."

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a gem of a book. I wasn't sure what to expect, other than that I have great respect for Mr. Chestnutt, so I knew it would be worth reading. This story is actually a series of tales woven into a book. The story follows white northern settlers that have purchased a plantation in the south. Rather than really following their lives in the current sense, each chapter is broken down into a tale told to them by a former slave that has stayed on their plantation for many years. The stories are fantastical, mostly unbelievable, as they relate to conjuring (voodoo, etc), etc -- but, the element of folklore and history is amazing. These are the best kinds of stories. They tell of the desperation, superstition, perseverance, and humanity of the slaves. None of the stories are horrific. The atrocities of slavery are rather to the point, without excessive emotional manipulation.

A very good way to kick of my 2014 reading!

[Vasha7 · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an amazing surprise! Kept me puzzling over the layers of ambiguity found in these tales, apparently comic dialect stories framed in the condescending voice of a white narrator (apparently the white readers of the original didn't always notice how Chesnutt was satirizing this narrator, and nodded right along with him); Uncle Julius, in the stories, has a variety of purposes for his storytelling: the one the narrator notices is a self-interested one (but he is maybe not always right about the self-interested motive he attributes); then there is the appeal to the sympathies of the narrator's wife; then there are subcurrents of connection to the land and the community-building role of magical beliefs and so on... The stories seem to be subversive on so many levels, although Chesnutt's own commentaries on writing them denies much of this subversiveness.

[hey daisy]

I first read this book as an undergrad by a random chance. I was doing research on old scary stories and came upon this book. I read the whole thing that night but was hurt that I could not use it in the research I was doing at the time. So, now, I re-read it again for a personal challenge (to re-read all my books) and I found that same intrigue I had had the first time I read this book. It's an interesting trip into the past. I appreciate that it's not slavery trauma porn. I appreciate the writer's perspective even in his own times. However, I might be biased because I came to have much respect for Charles Chesnutt anyways. Yet, out of all his works I've read, I loved this one the most.

[Melodie E. Estes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and enchanting.

So interesting to read some of the varieties of the live of slaves. So many had sad lives filled with hard work, the anger of their masters. Others were able to adapt or had good masters. But all lacked their freedom and all had amazing stories to tell. This book shared several of these tales in such an intriguing way, that I totally enjoyed this book.

[Floyd Larck · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose some hypersensitive people would rate this book as a bit racist in nature. If you read it with the past in mind being that the main character in the story (Julius) is an emancipated slave it will not seem racist at all. Without giving away too much, Julius may be just a freed slave but he's wily as any fox.

[Zvjezdana · Rating 3 out of 5]

gotova s čitanjem obaveznih priča pa zato stavljam pod "pročitano", but will have to go back to this jer pišen seminar na ovu temu. da nije napisano u afroameričkon dijalektu i da actually mogu razumit, bilo bi jako dobro!
Africanjujuism, a very cool concept. would like to know more.

[Shelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a wonderful surprise. I loved Julius stories. A good light read to break up my usual books

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An underread classic. Dialect is a bit of a challenge, but worth it.

[Keedra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I WILL ATTEMPT TO WRITE THIS REVIEW WITHOUT SPOILERS. IF SOMETHING SLIPS THROUGH, THEN I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE
This book is a collection of stories that fall into the category of Plantation Tradition Literature. I say this not only because it encompasses the time period, but because it straddles two worlds- reality and spirituality by way of the African American tradition of “conjure”. The language used is the dialect of the period and is true to the time. Some may find this difficult to digest in that it’s written in the broken English of that of a slave as it is communicated from an ex slave to a Northerner, John. This book is filled with layers. John likes to ask the opinion of the ex slave then dismiss it, which gives John an air of superiority. I say this because of the negative feedback he often gives following the telling of the stories. He always has something superior sounding to say in retort. I think this mirrors the attitudes of the southerners of the time period. John is from the north, and he does appear to treat the ex slave with perhaps more respect than his southern counterparts, but he does revert to the degradation of the black southerners that’s so often afforded by said counterparts. He likes to hear these stories, but then proceeds condemn and berate John for believing in something so “foolish” and even goes as far as to say that these stories and beliefs are “what’s going to keep black people down.”He tends to take the stories at face value when we all know that the point of slave stories is the moral- they all have meaning. For example, I remember my great grandfather telling me stories his family told him when he was little. One was about a man helping an injured snake and believing the snake wouldn’t hurt him because he had nursed it back to health. When the snake got better, he did in fact bite the man and the man was surprised. He asked the snake why he would do such a thing and the snake replied “I am still a snake”. Do I believe snakes can talk? Of course not. But this is the type of approach John had to the stories. The moral of the story was: You can’t expect something to behave in a manner that contradicts it’s true nature. Now this idea of morals to stories wasn’t lost on John’s wife who often was able to ascertain the meaning behind the tales. However, ulterior motives are present throughout and eventually get revealed. I feel that the reader can pick up on these ulterior motives almost instantly but I also feel as if this was lost on John early on. As I’ve previously stated, this story has layers and there’s much to unpack within it’s pages. This was just a bit I decided to touch briefly on. I do hope future readers get as much joy from these stories as I did. I hope they analyze them and ponder on them greatly. Thanks for reading this review. P.s. sorry for any typos or grammatical errors (its late and I’m drained). Happy reading, I look forward to reading your reviews.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a remarkable collection of stories! It needs to be on the same shelf as Ovid's Metamorphoses because each of the seven stories involves transformations and shape-shifting. The thin framework that Chestnutt uses to relate the stories--that he has taken his wife to North Carolina for the climate and that they have hired ol' Julius who has survived slavery and knows the stories of survival--works well. In six of the seven stories, Aunt Peggy is the conjure woman (except for the second story, "Po' Snady," where it is Tenie). Aunt Peggy is a free woman, a wise woman, the shamaness, the woman connected to the soil, the animals, and the air for her power.

At another level, the "peculiar" institution of slavery shows its permanent scars on the psyche of the freed slaves. In "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," cruel, brutal slave owner, Jeems, gets some of his own medicine to see what it is like to live on the receiving end of an immoral system. In "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," slave owners barter human lives without conscience until the conjure woman corrects their malevolent ways.

Chestnutt, I assume, learned from Twain the power of writing these tales in the vernacular. Havey you read Twain's short story, "A True Story," published in 1876, about Aunt Rachel? In Chestnutt's book, the idiomatic language is difficult but authentic and it has its own cultural importance.

And then there is Julius, the narrator of these tales. Julius is his own conjurer only this time using his narratives to spin his spells on us. It is a marvelous Russian egg of a book, with wheels turning inside wheels. I loved its complexity.

[Duffy Pratt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid book of short stories, all of them framed by an educated man relaying a tale told by an ex-slave, in very deep dialect writing. Ordinarily, I'm put off with strong dialect writing, but Chestnutt pulls it off and makes it sound both authentic but relatively painless. (Unlike for example, the dialect in Wuthering Heights, or more recently, Cloud Atlas.)

The stories all involve conjuring, which are essential to the tales, but at the same time are not presented in a way so that we are to believe it. And, most of the tales show that the ex-slave had an ulterior motive for presenting the tale and the magic involved.

Overall these are very good stories, and well worth reading. I was pleasantly surprised.

[Barcie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short collection of stories involve old Julius telling the new owner of a post-Civil War plantation fanciful tales involving conjuring and the practice of goofer. The audio version includes a warning about offensive language (words considered egregious racial slurs now but that were commonplace for the period) and they are plentiful and abrasive, even knowing their historical context. Author Charles Chesnutt was an African American activist writing around the turn of the century, and The Conjure Woman offers an historic look at plantation life and African folk lore. The author's note at the end of the collection is interesting and worth reading/listening to.

[Sheila Metcalf · Rating 5 out of 5]

ATY Read - Week 10. A history or historical fiction book: The Conjure Woman

WOW! And… I mean WOW!!! I’m a bit concerned by the language in this book, the sheer number of times the “N” word used here is more than off-putting, but I did see the book through.

The book consists of a series of interwoven short stories that tell of a couple, from the North, that purchase an old plantation and a sly older, formerly enslaved gentleman, named, Uncle Julius, that tells them African American folktales and spins yarns of hexes (Conjure) and their effects on the lives of those that live there.

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading in high school. The author manages to share the emotions (including both hope and joy, as well as powerlessness and sadness) around slavery in the American South in an all-ages appropriate way. This edition has versions of the short stories that have been "translated" into modern English. All spelling has been standardized in the "translated" versions and offensive terms have been replaced with more specific terms. The originals are in appendixes.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11666 on recommendation of Polly Shulman's The Poe Estate.

I find my review of one story from this at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... applies to the collection as a whole.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven't read Charles Chesnutt since high school, and it was interesting to return to something that I had disliked, mostly because the dialect was hard to read. And while that's still the case, I found myself appreciating these stories more than I expected. They disrupt stereotypes and subvert the benevolent slave master narrative, instead conveying the enslaved people's pain and intelligence. "Po' Sandy," with its combo of Julius's savvy and haunting imagery, was my favorite.

[Kim Armstrong Silcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collection from the first African American writer to be published in The Atlantic. This collection brings together his stories about antebellum Southern Black social belief systems that can been seen as superstitions but were a way to explain the unexplainable. The dialect is difficult to read, so I found an audiobook version that was easy to listen to. The language is dated and objectionable to current readers but is an interesting depiction of everyday life.