Conjure Stories

Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers. Robert B. Stepto is Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama, Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography, and From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Among his edited volumes are Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Literature, Art, and Scholarship; Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction; and Harper American Literature. Jennifer Rae Greeson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature and of articles related to various aspects of American literature and culture.

• Introduction A Note on the TextsTHE TEXTS OF THE CONJURE STORIESThe Goophered GrapevinePo' SandyThe Conjurer's RevengeDave's NecklissA Deep SleeperLonesome BenThe Dumb WitnessA Victim of Heredity; or, Why the Darkey Loves ChickenThe Gray Wolf's Ha'ntMars Jeems's NightmareSis' Becky's PickaninnyTobe's TribulationsHot-Foot HannibalThe Marked TreeCONTEXTSSarah Ingle • The Terrain of Chesnutt's Conjure TalesCharles W. Chesnutt • From His Journal, Spring 1880 [Why could not a colored man . . . write a far better book about the South?][I think I must write a book]William Wells Brown • [Voudooism in Missouri]Joel Chandler Harris • The Sad Fate of Mr. FoxOvid • The Transformation of Daphne into a LaurelCharles W. Chesnutt • Letters to Albion W. Tourgée and George Washington Cable To Tourgée, Sept. 26, 1889To Cable, March 29, 1890To Cable, June 13, 1890Paul Laurence Dunbar • The Deserted PlantationCharles W. Chesnutt • Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South The Free Colored People of North CarolinaAdaptation of "The Dumb Witness"The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?Post-Bellum-Pre-HarlemCRITICISM EARLY CRITICISMCritical Notices of The Conjure WomanWilliam Dean Howells • Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's StoriesBenjamin Brawley • [Fiction with a Firm Sense of Art]Helen M. Chesnutt • Chesnutt and Walter Hines PageMODERN CRITICISMRobert Hemenway • [Black Magic, Audience, and Belief]William L. Andrews • [A Critique of the Plantation Legend]Robert B. Stepto • [The Cycle of the First Four Stories]John Edgar Wideman • [Julius's Ex-Slave Narrative]Werner Sollors • [Reason, Property, and Modern Metamorphoses]Houston A. Baker Jr. • [The Sound of the Conjure Stories]Eric J. Sundquist • [Chesnutt's Revision of Uncle Remus]Richard H. Brodhead • [Chesnutt's Negotiation with the Dominant Literary Culture]Candace J. Waid • Conjuring the Conjugal: Chesnutt's Scenes from a MarriageGlenda Carpio • [Black Humor in the Conjure Stories]Charles W. Chesnutt: A ChronologySelected Bibliography