The Anti-Remus
The prevailing theme uniting this entire collection is a rejection of what might be termed today the Disney-fication of plantation life by successful authors of the period. The recurring character of Uncle Julius is a direct response to Uncle Remus who had already become the most famous representative—though hardly the only—of the dialect fiction which purported to portray a realistic account of antebellum life in the slave-owning states. White readers across the nation—but most dangerously those located in the North who had no connection to factual accounts—made these books best-sellers and in the process came to view their tales of kind masters and satisfied slaves as believable exceptions if not necessarily the rule. Chestnutt’s stories in this collection act to counter that transmission of misinformation not by directing confronting it in a didactic fashion, but rather through often downright brilliant use of subtle irony that forced (by being subtly led) attentive readers to realize that even as exceptions, the stories of happy plantation were primarily an invention of white writers telling stories that were uniquely related to black experiences.
The Suffering of Slavery
The horrors of slavery are illuminated through narrative rather than polemics. Rather than banging the reader over the head with politically-infused fiction-as-activism, Chesnutt takes the extraordinary risk of counting his readers to connect the fantastical elements of drama with the hardcore foundation of historical reality. The plots involves trickery and spells resulting in poisoned grapes, interspecies transformation, ghosts, hauntings and other otherworldly events. What takes place within those otherworldly events are abominations that by all rights belong purely within the realm of fiction, but were actually all too common during the era of slavery: children being separated from parents by being sold to another owner, the value of the life of a person being reduced to a literal trade for a horse, masters forcing slaves to work until they fall over and die from exhaustion.
White Control of the Black Narrative
Despite the fact that the entirety of what could be termed “African-American fiction” at the time Chesnutt wrote the stories in this collection could likely have been stored in a single medium-sized box inside a library, it had already become apparent that the narrative of black experience in America was going to be filtered through a white perspective. Even those slaves and former slaves literate enough to actually write their narrative themselves were dependent upon a white-controlled editing and publishing industry to make their stories known. As for those “as told by” slave narratives, one can only guess at how much influence the white writers they were told to wielded over the final product. Engaging his typical flair for subtle insinuation rather than bolding an important element in all-caps, Chesnutt confronts this reality as a theme put in the form of literary structure. Many of these stories might well be termed a story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story. For instance, “Po’ Sandy” is story about a slave whose wife is traded for another woman. He falls in love with her and in order not to lose another wife she agrees to turn him into a tree only to later be cut down during the period when she is loaned out to another plantation. This story is told second-hand by Uncle Julius to John and Annie who now own and live in what used to be the plantation house. The story that Uncle Julius told about Sandy and his wife is, in turn, the central core of a story which is actually narrated by John. Through the dialogue with his wife Annie with which John ends his first-person narrative is the further implication that the fantastical elements of the story told by Uncle Julius are a mythologizing of some actual event so horrific that it must be fictionalized for consumption. Thus the factual truth of what might have happened to Sandy must be controlled and edited and rewritten through the white perspective of John so that readers may find it palatable and engaging.
