Essay Questions

How is “The Goophered Grapevine” the perfect metaphorical realization of the concept of American slavery in the pre-Civil War southern United States?

In this story, a slave named Henry unwittingly ate from a grapevine which had been “conjured” on orders from the plantation owner to kill any slave who ate from it because he was tired of the slaves eating up his crop. The conjure woman reveals to Henry how he can avoid his tragic fate by rubbing sap from the vine on his head. The result is that Henry’s health and vitality mirrors the seasonal growth of the grapes: young and vibrant in the spring, but all used and up worthless by the beginning of winter. Recognizing the value in this, the plantation sells Henry off each spring at an inflate price and recoups the investment many times over by buying Henry back in the winter at a bargain price. Thus, the story has Henry quite literally becoming property which his owner profits from, making it an exquisitely apt metaphor for the slave experience. As an added ironic bonus which acts as commentary upon the eventual defeat of slavery, the owner finally gets his comeuppance by being slickered by a Yankee businessman.

Chesnutt’s stories belong to the vanguard of realism in American fiction as his stories subvert the romantic sentimentalizing of plantation life established by writers like Joel Chandler Harris. How does Chesnutt even subvert the image of slave owners?

Uncle Julius constantly refers to the masters (“marsters) in his stories as being “good.” Although perhaps not obvious to the predominantly white readership of his own time as irony, it is certainly clear enough to modern readers that this was the intention. However, Chesnutt moves beyond mere irony in his portraits of masters by rejecting not just the fantasy caricature of benevolent do-gooders as presented in the works of Harris, but also humanizing them out of the one-dimensional caricature as inherently malevolent beings. One of the aspects of Chesnutt’s stories that often takes a few readings to fully appreciate is the unrelenting—yet always subtly implicated—critique of the capitalist system which slave owners exploited to gain political power. As in the case of the grapevine owner discussed above, most of the plantation owners and slave traders in his stories have so dehumanized their slaves that it is not really a case of pure evil, but a more complicated situation in which greed and business savvy dictates brutal treatment and the rejection of any validity of moral quandaries. His stories are often populated with owners that other owners view as evil because they act out of a heartlessness rather than simply making it all about business.

How does the dual-narrative structure of each of the individual stories contribute to the purpose and intent of the book?

Chesnutt ached to move beyond writing dialect stories, obliviously unaware that they would eventually be the works which earned him his greatest respect and admiration by later scholars and academics. His primary purpose in continuing to write them after the first few became successful was his desire to stem the wound caused by the sentimentalized portrait of plantation life and slavery co-opted by white southern writers in the aftermath of the Civil War. Realizing that as a black writer, he could hardly expect to continue selling well by directly attacking institutions and the myths that had grown up around, he adopted the methodology of subtlety, often demanding multiple readings of the same text to actually understand just how subversive the stories really are. Another way of lessening the impact of the attacks, intensifying the subtlety and making his message less potentially explosive is the emotional distancing from the subject afforded by not just structuring his stories as a tale-within-a-tale, but being able to code his true intent and meaning by having the inner tale told by Julius in a dialect form which reminded readers of Uncle Remus while at the same time mercilessly satirizing Chandler's sanitized version of history.