Voices From The Past: Charles Chestnut

By: Ebony Bailey

In 1899, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a turn-of-the-century African American writer, educator, and lawyer, published The Conjure Woman, a collection of short stories centered on "conjuring" or African American hoodoo practices. Chesnutt's book stood out among his contemporaries. The Conjure Woman critiqued "the plantation tradition," a popular 19th-century genre that depicted a nostalgic vision of the antebellum South, imagining plantation life as harmonious. Chesnutt's stories pulled this romanticized veil away, revealing the physical and psychological traumas of slavery.

Moreover, his stories drew on his childhood memories of folk beliefs and folktales. His writings, grown from an Afro-diasporic vernacular tradition, showcased complex and compelling African American characters, challenging his era's Black stereotypes. For example, The Conjure Woman's main character, Uncle Julius, wields storytelling as a power. A formerly enslaved man, Uncle Julius uses his ingenuity and storytelling techniques to achieve his goals, securing food and land in postbellum America. Thus, in Chesnutt's pages, African American folklore—storytelling, wordplay, conjuring—signifies resistance, resilience, and creativity.

Significantly, Chesnutt published The Conjure Woman during the beginnings of American folklore. At the end of the 19th century, folklorists started codifying the field of American folklore, establishing organizations such as the American Folklore Society. With folklore believed to be “disappearing,” folklorists focused primarily on collecting folk objects and traditions. Yet, as scholar Shirley Moody-Turner notes, Chesnutt's stories depict folklore in action, demonstrating how folklore was "a process rather than a static item," a "dialogic interaction" and performance. Chesnutt reminded his peers that folklore (and storytelling) was dynamic, made possible through in-the-moment exchanges, and made tangible through familiar and familial memories.

Furthermore, during this time, Chesnutt not only published writings based on African American folklore—he also conducted folklore research, contributed to African American folklore societies, and wrote pieces that insightfully analyzed intersections of race and folklore. Chesnutt actively engaged in discussions about folklore with his Black contemporaries. He published short stories, conjure tales, and essays in The Southern Workman, the journal for the Hampton Institute, a prominent historically Black university. The Southern Workman, along with publishing a range of articles from Black leaders, included a "Folklore and Ethnography" section and published proceedings from The Hampton Folklore Society, a society devoted to collecting African American folklore. Notably, Chesnutt's short stories and novels were reviewed in The Southern Workman. Reviewers engaged with his work, expressing hope for Chesnutt's literary career and comparing his depictions of conjure to their knowledge of Afro folk beliefs.

In addition to discussing African American folklore within Black communities, Chesnutt also provided poignant analyses of "whiteness" and tradition, highlighting when Americans harnessed "tradition" as a vehicle for white supremacy. At the turn of the century, African Americans, and other marginalized groups, quickly became subjects of study for white folklorists and burgeoning American folklore societies. The white researcher's gaze was often directed at African American communities. For example, William Wells Newell, founder of the American Folklore Society, insisted that folklorists should collect the “‘fast-vanishing remains’ of the ‘Lore of Negroes in the Southern States of the Union.’” 

However, Chesnutt sought to disrupt this power dynamic, turning his gaze, and thus his reader's gaze, back onto white culture. For example, in 1901, Chesnutt published The Marrow of Tradition, a novel based on Wilmington, North Carolina's 1898 massacre and insurrection. A white mob overthrew Wilmington's government, killing many African Americans, destroying black businesses and a black-owned newspaper office, and driving Black residents from their homes. Some of Chesnutt's relatives lived through this violence. Chesnutt interviewed them, hearing their first-hand experience; he sought to create a novel that directly confronted postbellum America's violent and deliberate denial of African Americans' freedoms and successes. In his novel, Chesnutt details how white Americans used the idea of "tradition" to construct racial boundaries and fuel discrimination and domestic terrorism. In the name of "tradition," white characters in The Marrow Tradition refused to acknowledge Black relatives, overthrew the interracial government, and terrorized the city's Black residents.

Significantly, Chesnutt details these connections between "tradition" and systemic oppression at the beginning of the twentieth century, 36 years after the Civil War and near the establishment of American folklore. During this time, African Americans established schools, governments, housing, and organizations to protect their rights. However, many gains from Reconstruction were deconstructed and repealed; Black Americans faced segregation, lynchings, and race riots. Moreover, African Americans had to fight against racist ideologies that permeated every facet of society, including American folklore studies. As folklorist John Roberts notes, early American folklore studies grew out of racist philosophies that viewed non-white groups as furthest from "civilization" and "culture." Furthermore, African American folklore was used as an indication of Black Americans' "progress" after emancipation. Such romanticized and problematic understandings of folklore and tradition erased Black people's creativity and heterogeneity and propped up discriminatory practices. In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt reminds his fellow white folklorists that "whiteness" is not the norm but instead constructed and performed.  

Thus, Chesnutt was a figure who not only contributed to American literature. He was actively engaged in his period's discussions of folklore and folklore studies, demonstrating the creativity of African American folklore and offering incisive critiques of practices and ideologies behind early American folklore. 

Works Cited  

“1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission.” NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, https://www.ncdcr.gov/learn/history-and-archives-education/1898-wilmington-race-riot-commission. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022. 

Anonymous, "[Review of The Conjure Woman]," The Southern Workman (May 1899): 194-95. The Charles Chesnutt Archive, https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.rev00017. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022. 

Campbell, Donna. “Plantation Tradition in Local Color Fiction.” Literary Movements. Washington State University, 7 Sept. 2015, https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/plant.htm. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022. 

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales. 1899. Electronic ed., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnuttconjure/conjure.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. Electronic ed., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnuttmarrow/chesmarrow.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022.

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. "Superstitions and Folk-lore of the South," Modern Culture no. 13 (May 1901): 231-235. The Charles Chesnutt Archive, https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.works00046. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022. 

Freund, Hugo. “Cultural Evolution, Survivals, and Immersion: The Implications for Nineteenth-Century Folklore Studies.” 100 Years of American Folklore Studies: A Conceptual History, edited by William M. Clements, American Folklore Society, 1988, http://hdl.handle.net/2022/9009.

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Valerie A. Smith, editors. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3rd ed., vol. 1, W.W. Norton, 2014. 

Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice. “Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 1858-1932, The Marrow of Tradition: Summary.” Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnuttmarrow/summary.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2022. 

Moody-Turner, Shirley. Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation. UP of Mississippi, 2013. Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Black_Folklore_and_the_Politics_of_Racia/f_IaBwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

Roberts, John W. “African American Diversity and the Study of Folklore.” Western Folklore, vol. 52, no. 2/4, 1993, pp. 157–171. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1500084.

Wiggins, William H., Jr. “Afro-Americans as Folk: From Savage to Civilized.” 100 Years of American Folklore Studies: A Conceptual History, edited by William M. Clements, American Folklore Society, 1988, http://hdl.handle.net/2022/9009