Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) was born in Cleveland, Ohio to freed persons of color, Anna Maria Samson and Andrew Chesnutt, a grocer and businessman. By the time he was nine, Chesnutt's family moved him to Fayateville, North Carolina, where the young boy was confronted with the racial divisions and worsening economy of the South. As he grew older into his teens, he became the vice-superintendent of the normal (teachers') school at Fayateville. He married his wife, Susan Perry in 1878 and moved North to escape the poverty and racism he encountered in Fayateville. With a law degree in hand, Chesnutt supported his family by working as a court stenographer while harboring ambitions of becoming a writer.
His first short story to be published, "The Goophered Grapevine" was published in the national magazine The Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and in 1899, this and several other short stories appeared in a collection, The Conjure Woman. Concurrent with the time in which Chesnutt was most productive, the nation was witnessing the turmoil of the post-Reconstruction era. The turn of the 20th century saw numerous social and political movements that helped to shape the character of the literature of its time. The first World War gave rise to a growing sense of global nationalism, while locally, racial tension intensified with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan--a violent terrorist organization stirred to action with the arrival of D.W. Griffith's notorious propaganda film, Birth of a Nation.
This film, which was based on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, propagated racial stereotyping as part of its violent and nationalistic agenda. The familiar hoods, which were worn as much to obscure the wearer's identity as to frighten and intimidate its victims were borne out of the assumptions among whites of African American 'superstition.'
Meanwhile, many of Chesnutt's white contemporaries, such as Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris wrote elegiac narratives that romanticized the plantation society of the Old South. This genre of popular literature, sardonically referred to as "Moonlight and Magnolias," often cast the social hierarchy of paternalist slavery as the "ideal society," while configuring the white male as a heroic figure, the Ole Miss as a long-suffering pillar of female virtue, and the house servants as beloved family retainers, devoted to the care and comfort of their white masters. Writers like Page, et al., popularized images of the benevolent servants whom he referred to as "Old Time Negros," and promulgated the idea that their otherwise 'savage' natures had been softened by the civilizing force of plantation slavery.
*An illustration from Mars Chan and Other Stories by Thomas Nelson Page. From the website www.twain.lib.virginia.edu
The rise of the so-called "New Negro"--an assertive black intellectual, was frequently recast as a rapacious predator of white woman's virtue in the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page, particularly, and most notably in The Clansman.
Doubtless, Chesnutt's short stories, such as "The Goophered Grapevine" suggests a sardonic critique of the racist stereotypes propagated by writers like Page. Joel Chandler Harris, who popularized such stories as "The Wonderful Tar Baby Story," that featured a kindly elder slave called "Uncle Remus," advocated such stereotyping in his own right.
By focusing more analytically on questions of race construction and hierarchy in the U.S., Chesnutt's fiction critiqued white assumptions concerning blacks in the Reconstruction South. Uncle Julius McAdoo, for instance, presents a rival to Harris' Uncle Remus as the devoted servant bound to the plantation and the master's legacy.
Though similar in style and to some extent in content to Page's fiction, Chesnutt's short stories view life and race in the South through the lens of both white and black characters in the postbellum era. "The Goophered Grapevine" ('goopher,' another word for 'conjure'), engages the questions concerning heritage, tradition, and legacy. This short story in particular, responds to assumptions that blacks in the South had no heritage--and what heritage they had if any--was based primarily on folk superstition.
As we read and discuss Chesnutt's short story, how does Uncle Julius McAdoo represent a figure that combats the popular racist stereotypes of the time? Does he?
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