Slave Dialect
The most obvious example of the use of imagery in the stories is replication of the speaking dialect of Uncle Julius. This can be frustrating to work through for many readers, but it serves a specific purpose aside from adding local color. (This is especially so for readers that make the effort to actually speak this dialect out loud.) Uncle Julius comes off sounding backward, uneducated and ignorant no matter how one might try to transform that manner of speech into something that expresses learning. The purpose is not to make Uncle Julius look stupid; precisely the opposite, in fact. The purpose is to put the reader into John’s place so that they, too, begin to underestimate Julius which thus serves the ultimate goal of irony when Julius is finally revealed to be consistently outwitting the far better educated and well-spoken John.
Conditioned Racism
Interestingly, Chesnutt uses dialogue as imagery to make revelations about John as well. As a counterpoint to the particularly vicious brand of racism on display in the various white masters ruling the plantation with an iron fist, John is presented as a model systemic racism that conditions white society so insidiously that even the more progressive members remain unaware of it. The deep-seated brand of less malevolent by potential more dangerous racism (as a result of its greater pervasiveness) is revealed and gradually cemented through the imagery of repetition in John’s reaction to the stories of Julius. The initial response from John is almost always one of condescension toward the superstitious beliefs and absurd impossibilities on which the stories turn. From this starting point, John’s reactions vary according to story in a way that deepens the attentive reader’s understanding that his initial reaction stems more from a general racist perspective toward blacks than it does toward Julius as a black individual. Those secondary responses range from belittling his wife for believing in the absurdities (and thus by implication betraying the superior intelligence of her race), to mocking Julius for the seeming lack of intelligence in telling a story that betrays the very point he was trying to make (and thus divulging that it is John who missed the point) to actively humiliating Julius by questioning whether he is capable of devising a stated moral to a story by himself.
Separation
Images of loved ones being separated from each other as a result of the system of slaver are pervasive throughout the collection. The consequences of this enforced splitting up family units and lovers is often made all the more tragic through the symbolism of conjuring. For instance, the title character of “Po’ Sandy” loses his first wife to slave trading and makes a stand against being another separation when he falls in love a second time by being conjured into a tree only to be cut down and turned into lumber when his new lover is on loan to a nearby plantation. Becky, in the story bearing her name, is first separated from her husband and then when she is traded for a horse, is not allowed to bring her small child with her who must be conjured into two types of birds to reunite with his mother. The persistent reference to separation as a daily expectation of life as a slave serves the author’s purpose of demystifying the predominant literary genre of time seeking to revise history by presenting slavery as far more benevolent than reality.
Controlling the Narrative
The most subtle use of imagery as a literary device by Chesnutt is his very structure of the stories. The de facto narrator of each tale is the white Northerner, John. Within John’s contemporary narrative about the events related to he and his wife buying the plantation, dealing with her depression and acting as ward for her visiting unmarried sister is the arrival of Julius and a story about the days of slavery. Once Julius begins talking, the perspective shifts entirely from John’s first person account to the first person account of the ex-slave written in dialect. Even so, it is vital to remember that the presumption that Julius is telling his story is only half-right; technically, it is John transcribing the story. While the devotion to recreating the story exactly as Julius tells it even down to the pronunciation of words is without question an honorable attempt on the part of John its integrity, nevertheless the history Julius has related is still mediated through the white writer and thus by definition raises questions of integrity. The larger implication related to the imagery contained within the collection’s structure of black history becoming merely one aspect within the broader context of a white man’s historical record needs no explanation.
