Tales of Conjure and the Color Line: 10 Stories

Charles Chestnutt (1858-1932)was a pioneering African-American short story writer, novelist and essayist. He wrote about the life of blacks during the reconstruction era and during slavery. He also wrote about turn-of-the century relationships between black people and white people and about the emerging black urban middle-class and its relationship to both poor rural black people and to educated white people.Chestnutt wrote two volumes of stories, "The Conjure Woman" (1899) and "The Wife of his Youth and other Stories of the Color Line" (1899). This short, inexpensive book from the Dover Thrift series includes stories from each volume together with a useful introduction to Chestnutt by Joan Sherman.There are five "Conjure Woman" stories in the brief volume. These stories take place in North Carolina just after the Civil War and they relate back to events and characters in the pre-Civil War period. The stories are told in a heavy dialect which takes some getting used to. The characters are a white Northern couple, John and Annie, who have moved to North Carolina, an aging black storyteller and former slave named Uncle Julius, and a "conjure woman" named Aunt Peggy. At critical moments during their stay in North Carolina, Uncle Julius tells John and Annie stories about the conjure woman which illuminate life in the slave South and which have a way of returning back to John and Annie as well. The stories are fun, creative, and outrageous.The second group of five stories explore white black relationships subsequent to the Civil War as well as relationships between different types of black people. There are three stories which deal with highly educated black people and the ambivalence they feel towards the rural blacks in the post-Reconstruction south. These stories also show the difficulties faced by urban black people in the North at the turn-of-the century in gaining acceptance from their neighboors. (Chestnutt had first-hand experience of this situation.) There is also a story centering upon a lynching in a Sourthern town.This is a short, inexpensive book which will introduce the reader to an early African-American writer who deserves to be better known.