The Sandy Tree
In “Po’ Sandy” the slave named Sandy has already lost one wife as a result of her being traded away as property. He falls in love with her replacement and is determined to never experience the heartache of losing her in the same way and so submits to a conjuring trick of being turned into a tree. In this way, the tree that contains the soul of the slave is an effective symbol resulting from the combination of two different aspects of its meaning. The firm steadiness of a tree is a solid representation of enslavement and its incapacity to escape while the fact that Sandy’s soul inhabits the tree also make it a symbol of the undying spirit of freedom that seeks escape from enslavement at any cost.
Conjuring
Conjuring becomes a symbol in the construction of a subtle allegory spread across the length of these tales. These are stories which were intended to show a reality about slave life which was becoming disconcertingly disconnected from the facts for Chesnutt by virtue of a sub-genre of plantation tales told by white writers presenting the “master’s” side of the story. Chesnutt was determined to take white readers as deep into the ugly truth about slave life as he could while recognizing that a paying audience would only be willing to go so far. Thus, while the plots of the individual stories themselves do strip away the whitewash to provide a glimpse into the harrowing conditions of slaves, they do not go all the way. Rather than telling what might really have happened to characters like Sandy, Henry and Dan, Chesnutt subtly moves from shifts from realism to mythology to allow him to turn indigestible fact into the more appetizing form of metaphor. The ramifications of conjuring thus become individualized symbolic stand-ins for a truth too terrible to behold.
Animals
A blind horse, a mule, a wolf, a cat and animals galore populate these stories, very often playing significant roles in the conjuring act. In more than a few, the plots of the stories revolve around slaves being turned into animals or traded for animals. The symbolic connection becomes unavoidable: human beings are treated as nothing more than brute beasts and this is yet another subtle way that Chesnutt confronts the Pollyanna portrait of slave life that had become so popular at the time.
The Sandy Schoolhouse
When the Sandy tree is cut down, it is used as lumber to construct a building that will eventually become a school and which the narrator John wants to tear down so he can use to build his wife Annie a new kitchen. The story Uncle Julius tells of Sandy being turned into a tree has the point of trying to convince the white couple that the lumber of the schoolhouse is haunted and shouldn’t be used for the kitchen because he has eyes on using the schoolhouse as a meeting for his church’s temperance group. The motivation for the story does nothing to reduce its symbolic meaning: that the specter of slavery will continue to haunt every square inch of the South regardless of how much effort may be made to avoid facing it.
The Supernatural
A mythology begins to slowly develop over the course of the stories for slaves. There is an acceptance of the weird, the strange and the supernatural that not only defy explanation, but—more curiously—require no explanation. Gradually, one perceives that for slaves, occurrences and events which would quite naturally raise suspicion or fear or some kind of profound emotional response are instead treated no differently than anything else. This understated presentation of the acceptance by slaves of extraordinary forces suddenly exerting enormous influence on their fortunes or misfortunes effectively turns those forces into power symbols of mundane, utterly explainable forces of oppression. Used to living lives with no control over their fate, the quality of strangeness of those forces are bounded to become indistinguishable—worse—meaningless.
