Uncle Julius
Uncle Julius represents a character stereotype that was incredibly popular at the time. Most famously incarnated as Uncle Remus, this broad character type was an old former slave who regaled with slavery-era plantation tales that painted a portrait of happy times with kind masters. Uncle Julius ironically subverts this popular image by constructing Julius in the guise of this familiar trope only to have stories reveal subtly reveal plantation life as the utterly evil system of dehumanization it really was.
Slavery Economics
One of the most corrosively ironic moments in the book occurs when a plantation master orders a conjure woman to poison his grapes to keep the slaves from eating them. By mistake, a newly arrived slave does eat the grapes and is magically transformed into a literal personification of it: he is spry and energetic during the spring, but lethargic and aged when the fall comes. The master figures out he can keep the slaves from eating the grapes while also profiting from particular slave by selling him at above average price during the spring and then buying him back at bargain prices each fall. This greed eventually moves the master to take a chance on increasing the productivity of his vine (and by extension the slave) by making a deal with a Yankee businessman to try out a powerful new fertilizer. The ironic result is that the Yankee has duped the greedy master into buying a product that actually winds up killing the grapevine and, of course, his profitable slave as well.
Clueless John
Some of the most satisfying irony in the story is watching how slyly Julius outwits John. The white Northerner displays a cringe-worthy predilection toward condescension toward the former slave which eventually reveals John as low-level example of how racism so pervades white society. This superiority is often deflated for the reader in a way that deepens the irony as a result of John’s obliviousness. One of the best examples is a story told specifically with the intent of changing John’s mind about firing Julius’ grandson. Operating at once on several different ironic levels, Julius so lacks trust in John’s ability to understand the deeper implications of his stories that he actually voices its moral to which John replies “I am glad, too, that you told us the moral of the story; it might have escaped us otherwise.” The big irony here is that even after displaying his superiority with this remark, John’s actions reveal that he the real moral of the story did escape him. Once again it is left to Annie to penetrate to the real meaning of the story which she exhibits in this case by informing John that she told the grandson they would give him one more chance, thereby overruling John’s earlier pronouncement that the decision to let the boy go had been made and would not change.
Annie
Annie may be intended as a character of great ironic meaning or she may be an example of unintended irony. That Chesnutt deals with his many themes so subtly that neither possibility is manifestly apparent is yet another testament to his genius. Julius is explicitly—though still subtly—a creation sparked in part to undermine the superiority of white society toward black Americans as a race through his interaction with John. That much is fairly obvious. What is not nearly as obvious is whether he purposely created Annie to become the counterpart to Julius in the sphere of gender equality. One thing is irrefutable: it is always Annie who penetrates past the surface qualities of the old man’s stories to apprehend their deeper meaning as opposed to John who either never seems to get at the real meaning or lags far behind Annie. Whether or not this is intended to be irony or not, it can certainly be interpreted as an ironic commentary on John’s quite explicit feelings of superiority toward not only the old black man, but his young wife subject to depression and other displays of emotionalism.
The Black Man's Narrative of the White Man's Narrative of the Black Man's Narrative
Subversive irony nearly explodes as a result of a collision of realities. The centerpiece of the stories in the collection is the exposure—for many contemporary readers their very first revelation—of the much more horrific truth about life for slaves on plantation. Despite the fact that it is the story of black American history, it is being negotiated through the prism of a white man’s narrative, thus situating the stories of Julius and the slaves that populate his recollections as mere aspects of John’s own history. The irony almost becomes impossible to contain upon the further realization that the white narrator’s personal history in which black history is just one aspect is actually the history of a black man writing about a white man writing about a black man telling stories about other black Americans. And as if that weren’t enough, the final touch: during his life time, many readers assumed that the actual author of the collection was—like his narrator—a white man.
