In reading the first three stories for today, all of which are narrated by Uncle Julius, I became interested in the twists Chesnutt adds at the end of the stories. In each one, it is ultimately revealed telling the story benefits Uncle Julius in some way. In the Goophered Grapevine, it is revealed that he lives on the property and was making money off of the “haunted” grapevines. Similarly, Uncle Julius ended up being able to use the “haunted” schoolhouse as a place for prayer in Po’ Sandy instead of it being used for a kitchen. Then, the wife gave Julius all of the remaining ham after hearing about Dave in Dave’s Neckliss.
All of these examples portray Julius as both clever and tricky. From what I’ve been told about Chesnutt, I think he wants us to be reading these stories as Julius being clever and smart – able to outsmart white people. This would add dimension to black characters and allow the black characters in the story to triumph, despite the horrors of their past, as detailed by Julius throughout the narratives. However, I can also see how at the time that Chesnutt was writing these, that these might be read as portraying black people as tricky or up to no good. I wonder what the general understanding of these stories were at the time they were published, and I wonder what Chesnutt wanted to accomplish with these blurred lines. Regardless, I think these endings add nuance to the story and help paint it in a new light, which I really appreciated.
I also found the ending of the stories to be points of interest, and I couldn’t imaging them ever being read in a way that would support the arguments for abolition or equality. Uncle Julius must have been at least a little bit clever to craft the stories he tells in a way that would ultimately benefit him, but the endings instantly change that into a judgement of manipulativeness and distrustfulness. Obviously, the average reader, who was likely white, would have taken issue with the results of Uncle Julius’s tales and interpreted them as harming white property owners. There might have been some variation, but I’d be willing to assume that the average interpretation was not as friendly as Chesnutt makes it out to be.
In addition, he constantly undermines the intelligence of Julius that he so called creates with his stories. Every white character speaks with perfect grammar, but Julius and each other black character (except the prisoner in the sheriff’s children) speaks with almost illegible accents. I don’t believe for a second these were meant just to create a setting with a southern accent, but functioned to show black people to be stupid. With a modern interpretation, the accents read as blatantly racist, especially given that only black characters have them. Thus, I was rather disgusted by the characterization of Julius. I thought it was racist and cruel and if it functioned to show black people as clever in any way, it was in the most racist, white-savior way Chesnutt could have chosen.
I also noticed these tricky endings (especially in Po’ Sandy) as the ending seems to benefit Julius in an unexpected way. To me, I wondered if these endings are meant as simply notes of humor in these narratives and as another layer of entertainment. Often this category of narratives would never be considered humorous, but I wonder if Chesnutt wanted to stretch the genre for himself and for black readers and add this level of humor that would’ve excluded a white audience (since the punchline is often at the sake of the white characters).
I also noted the subtle cleverness attributed to Uncle Julius, and I think I agree with Eliza on this one. While the stories recounted by Uncle Julius are not funny–as they all end with the tragic death of an enslaved person he claims to have known–there is something humorous in the subsequent quarrel between the narrator and his wife: Annie is always disturbed or moved by the stories, and either pleads with or acts against her husband’s will to make herself feel better, which then results in Uncle Julius “getting” something — the schoolhouse or the extra ham, for example. However, Annie’s pity is simultaneously dismissive. For example, when she expresses disgust at Tenie and Sandy’s fates, her husband asks, “‘Are you seriously considering the possibility of a man’s being turned into a tree?’ ‘Oh no,’ she replied quickly, ‘not that’; and then she murmured absently, and with a dim look in her fine eyes, ‘Poor Tenie!'” Here, Annie completely derides the bases of Uncle Julius’ stories–the “conjure” aspect. Perhaps Chesnutt hopes to make a statement on the ignorance of white people as to the experience of being enslaved; whether or not Uncle Julius is intentionally “manipulating” the narrator and his wife is ambiguous. Yet, even if he is spinning the stories or completely fabricating them in an effort to evoke sympathy from the white characters, perhaps this could be interpreted as a sort of “Benito Cereno” adjacent scenario: the white characters’ own racism blinds them from the possibility of a clever, deliberative Black individual. From this perspective, it is pretty ironic that Uncle Julius’ stories of white exploitation of Black people actually function to invert this dynamic, exploiting the ignorance of the narrator and his wife.
I was also wondering about the distinction between trickiness and cleverness in regards to Uncle Julius. I largely agree with Tessa’s point in that I found the resolution to remark upon the narrator’s wife as the sentimental, if not derivative, audience to Uncle Julius’s stories. The intention behind her actions (i.e. waking up in the middle of the night to tell the narrator not to use the timber for the schoolhouse or giving Julius all the ham) seems to be a jab at her literal and direct interpretation of the symbols within Julius’s stories. I wonder if there is irony in her sentimentality towards the stories without actually changing behaviors beyond superstitiously acting out after hearing them. I’m not clear on the intent ascribed to Uncle Julius other than a form of entertainment and/or education for the couple, but I can clearly see the possibility of a critique of white audiences reacting to the experience of slaves.