Conjuring
The conjuring aspect of the tales Julius relates to John and Annie are a metaphor for those aspects of slave life that proper white society is not yet prepared to hear. The use of supernatural events, magic and the unexplainable are used as an acceptable substitute to convey the kind of abomination of human life and suffering that was a daily part of slave life. The use of such mythic reinterpretation has a hardy literary tradition far preceding its introduction into slave narratives to transform the unspeakable into entertainment.
John
John is the de facto narrator of each story even though once Julius commences his tales, it is told as a first person story through his dialect. John is a teller of the tale, but also a listener and it is in both roles that he transforms into something larger. His condescension toward Julius and the fantastical elements that make his stories unlikely is matched by his condescension toward his wife for being gullible to buy into some of the magical stuff. On the surface, however, John is an agreeable Northerner proud of his liberal acceptance of Julius into home and life as if he were a white man. Together these two images collide to create a serviceable metaphor for an entire subset of Americans: the one who don’t actively profess the most egregious of racist beliefs, but nonetheless reveal the results of conditioning to perceive the world through a racist lens. John is by no means a person ever likely to own slaves, but the racist attitudes he expresses toward Julius without even realizing they are racist on a different metaphorical side of the same literal spectrum.
"That is a very ingenious fairy tale, Julius.”
John’s regular mode of response to hearing one the tales of Julius is to take it entirely at face value stripped of all critical thought which might try to penetrate past the literal to find the deeper meaning. One of the few times he actually refers to the story in a way steps outside his limited boundaries of surface realism ironically has the effect of denigrating the quality of its subtlety to an even greater degree. He engages the use of the metaphor of fairy tale dismissively and in so doing creates a paradox which further implicates him as being more naïve and intellectually ignorant that the old former slave he so casually reduces to stereotypes at every turn.
The Grapevine
The grapevine which is “goophered” is the collection’s most complex and coherent metaphor. In its narrative role as a part of the plantation which the slaves are not allowed to eat from despite toiling as unpaid economic resources, in the climax of the story in which a slave literally becomes so connected with the life cycle of the vine that he dies when the vine dies, in the manner in which the plantation is duped into unwittingly killing off a magical money-making machine in the greedy pursuit of ever more profit, the grapevine takes on huge metaphorical power as the symbol of an entire economic system greased by the blood of humans owned as property.
Sandy
In the story “Po’ Sandy” the title character becomes the collection’s most powerful symbol for the dehumanization of slaves by being turned into a tree which then becomes a source of lumber. After being conjured into a tree as a means of avoiding losing a second wife to slave trading, Sandy transforms into a symbol of the solidity of resistance to slavery. He is determined to beat the system no matter what the cost since even a tree experiences greater freedom than a slave; thus he is a symbol of how one must even give up his humanity to attain conditional freedom. The metaphor is made complete when even this escape becomes subject to the industrialization of the slave. Always a necessary resource of the southern economy, Sandy as a tree can now literally become a natural resource when he is chopped down and cut up into lumber to build a kitchen.
