A pioneer in the development of fiction giving voice to the African-American experience, Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) found literary success with his "conjure tales" — vignettes from black folk life, recounted partially in the vernacular — and later with his "stories of the color line," which addressed more directly the problems of race in America. This outstanding, affordable volume presents a selection of the best of both conjure and color line tales. Ten stories include "The Goophered Grapevine," widely considered Chesnutt's best work, "Po' Sandy," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "The Doll," "The Wife of His Youth," "Dave's Neckliss," "The Passing of Grandison," "A Matter of Principle, "The Sheriff's Children," and a wry look at the American intelligentsia, "Baxter's Procrustes." Brimming with wit, charm, and insight, these stories testify to the qualities that have earned Chesnutt an enduring place in American literature and have made his fiction required reading for scholars and students of African-American history and culture. This edition features an informative Introduction by African-American literature expert Joan Sherman that provides valuable background information on Chesnutt and his work.

Tales of Conjure and the Color Line : 10 Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Black History)

Literature & Fiction

Charles Waddell Chesnutt

United States

Dover Publications

The Colonel's Dream

General Books

The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work. In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman. Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.

The Conjure Woman and Other Tales

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932)—African-American educator, lawyer, and activist—was the most prominent black prose author of his day. In both his fiction and his essays, he addressed the thorny issues of the "color line" and racism in an outspoken way. Despite the critical acclaim resulting from several works of fiction and non-fiction published between 1898 and 1905, he was unable to make a living as an author. He kept writing, however, and several works which were not published during his lifetime have been rediscovered (and published) in recent years. He was awarded the Springarn Medal for distinguished literary achievement by the NAACP in 1928. The library at Fayetteville State University, in North Carolina, is named after him. The Wife of His Youth (1899) was Chesnutt's second collection of short stories, drawing upon his mixed race heritage. These deal largely with race relations, the far-reaching effects of Jim Crow laws, and color prejudice among African Americans toward darker-skinned blacks. Eric J. Sundquist wrote: "Chesnutt's color-line stories, like his conjure tales, are at their best haunting, psychologically and philosophically astute studies of the nation's betrayal of the promise of racial equality and its descent into a brutal world of segregation. He made the family a means of delineating America's racial crisis, during slavery and afterward."  I have added three of Chesnutt's essays on the "color line" in an Appendix to this collection.

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and Selected Essays

The Conjure Woman

Short Stories & Anthologies

Babblebooks

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Books by Charles Waddell Chesnutt