One day, perhaps, if there is any sort of justice in the universe—or at least that part of the universe which oversees literary legacies—Ernest Hemingway’s place in the academic canon of American fiction will be replaced by Charles Chesnutt. Hemingway’s legacy is today so mythologized that it seems impossible to imagine that future generations might have the sense to recognize Charles Chesnutt is his superior in every conceivable way. But, then again, what 19th century scholar would ever have predicted that one day that crazy Herman Melville’s forgotten story about the crazy hunt for a white whale would be one of the top three serious contenders for the Great American Novel?
History has a way of eventually weeding out the overrated so that the forgotten can be finally given their due. And after all, even though it is not technically a novel, but rather a compendium of loosely connected short stories, Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman is also deserving of being on that short list of the best books of fiction ever written by an American author. This collection is just that impressive
Chesnutt may well be the man to knock off Hemingway or some other undeserving writer from the place on the literary canon which should be rightly his. The stories in this collection has already nearly single-handedly undone another inexplicably high reputation for a writer who at one time was as beloved and popular as Mark Twain; in fact, even Mark Twain was a fan. While the conjure stories revealing the ugly reality of plantation life are with each passing year being recognized more and more, the sentimentalized and just plain fancifully racist plantation stories of Joel Chandler Harris are now seen as such an embarrassment that the Walt Disney Company wants nothing to do with his Uncle Remus character.
Aside from toppling at least one titan of American literary history, The Conjure Woman also reveals that the single greatest exemplar of subtle irony is an author whom perhaps as many as 99% of American students in the 20th century were never introduced to or even heard of. The genius of these stories lies in the way that Chesnutt’s reimagining of the “Uncle Remus” stereotype seems to tell a simple, but ridiculously unrealistic tale in the middle of each story only for multiple readings to reveal a depth of complex realism few would ever imagine.
No solid critical engagement of any story can be attained with just one reading, but Chesnutt a whole new spin on the concept that a text is like an onion in which each layer that is pulled away reveals yet another one lying beneath. By the time a reader gets to the point where they can honestly say they fully understand all the intricacies of secretly coded meanings conveyed by Julius, The Conjure Woman has become the size of one of those blooming onions that an entire table of diners can’t finish off.
