Henry and the Grapevine
The title vine in the opening story of the collection becomes inextricably linked with a slave name Henry who after eating poisoned grapes is suddenly afflicted with health that aligns with the seasonal cycle of growth. In the spring he is at full energy and capable of working hard without tiring, but by fall he can barely move. Henry thus becomes indistinguishable from the land on which he toils, which is very symbolic of the bondage of slaves working in plantation fields.
Beasts
The conjuring of a man into a mule in one story and of a couple into a wolf and a cat in another is juxtaposed alongside a stories of slaves being traded for horses to make an implicit connection. Slaves are beasts with fewer rights than wild animals and subject to being valued less than domesticated animals which meet a greater need.
Ghosts and Spirits
With his soul trapped inside the lumber used for building the kitchen and later the schoolhouse, Sandy becomes a spirit that haunts the plantation. Chloe’s ghostly presence can stop a horse in its tracks. A section of land on the property remains uncultivated due to stories about it being haunted by the spirit of a man eternally transformed into a wolf. The ghosts and residue of slaves who died under the unhappiest of terms become a collective metaphor for the literal manner in which slavery will forever haunted every last inch of those states in which it was legal.
The Storyteller
Technically, the narrator of these stories is John. The stories of the lives of slaves on the plantation are flashbacks told in the dialect in which Julius speaks, but as carefully recorded as written word by John. John is therefore the one actually writing down the accounts of black history and part of his account involves his opinions of the worth and veracity of the stories along with occasional undocumented suggestions of an ulterior motive at work for Julius to tell these particular stories. In this sense, John becomes a symbol for the whitewashing of written black history by white writers, editors, and publishers.
The Honey Tree
Uncle Julius tells a particularly harrowing and horrific story about murder, revenge and the conjuring transformation of a man into a wolf and his wife into a black cat. This story was inspired directly by John musing about clearing out some uncultivated land of on the property to use for growing crops. At each mention of crops, Julius gives a reason why it’s a bad idea. The rational for not growing crops and the story all seem connected to the desire of Julius for John not to clear the land and later John finds out why: it is a spot which hides a particularly robust and abundant supply of honey inside an old tree. John muses that Julius has successfully used his story to scare people away from that area of the plantation for years in an effort to maintain the honey supply for himself and so that secreted escaped from the misery of bondage becomes a symbol for every kind of secret ever shared by slaves that were kept hidden from their masters using myths, legends, codes or any other means of obfuscation.
