Unlike many other writers, however, Chesnutt knew the vernacular of Black North Carolinians and depicted it faithfully. This wasn’t some mocking blackface speech; it was evidence of his own multilingualism even as African American Vernacular English was not considered a formal language (and in popular realms still isn’t, the general agreement of linguists that it is indeed a language, given its distinct grammatical structure and rules despite sharing much of the same vocabulary as standard English, notwithstanding).
Chesnutt could render the languages of the elite and of the dispossessed. He could also write from both vantages. While on the surface the tales of The Conjure Woman appear to be quaint depictions of plantation life, they are in truth about the subversive practices African Americans adopted to resist the conditions of slavery.
Perhaps in an effort to appeal to a largely white and northern readership, The Conjure Woman’s stories are told in the first-person voice of a white northern man who has moved down South for his wife’s health. He purchases a plantation and finds a formerly enslaved resident of the plantation living in a cabin on the land. The man is referred to as Uncle Julius (that common form of disrespect given to older Black southerners for generations, called “Uncle” or “Auntie” rather than “Mr.” or “Mrs./Miss”). Julius becomes an interpreter and interlocutor. The narrator treats Julius with gentle condescension, and is amused at how much his naive wife, Annie, is moved by Julius’s storytelling.
Julius tells the transplants tales about “conjuring,” the vernacular spiritual practices that allow the enslaved to one-up the cruelty of the slave society. He shares these stories as a form of persuasion. They usually lead to a material gain for Julius.
For example, in “Dave’s Neckliss,” first published in the October 1889 issue of The Atlantic, Julius is invited into the narrator’s home to eat ham. Julius sits at the table with Annie. At the time, this would have been a dramatic event in the South—a Black man and a white woman at a table together. Julius, eating the ham with relish, suddenly becomes tearful. Annie asks him what’s wrong, and he launches into a story of plantation life: A literate and skilled enslaved man, Dave, is falsely accused of stealing a ham from the smokehouse and, as punishment, is forced to wear a rotting ham chained around his neck. The master, who knows that Dave is literate—which is against the law of slavery—attributes his violation to the sin of Black literacy.