Slavery's Impact on the Family Unit
Families are torn asunder under the peculiar institution of slavery as if family did not even matter. As if slaves were not even human. But then, of course, they weren’t. This theme runs throughout the stories that are collected together to form a coherent narrative and separation of family members becomes a force that helps to integrate the various narratives at play. The natural consequence of marriages being broken up and family relations being ripped apart without notice is emotional turmoil and that emotional turmoil in turns drives the actions of those who seek relief and comfort for their grief. Thus this lack of even basic decency on the part of slaveowners is shown to be a force that binds the Africans together as a unit with a truly collective and shared experience that unwittingly to the owners serves to make them stronger.
Slavery as Capitalism Revealed
The dream of every capitalist is produce goods and services without having to slice into profits by paying wages. In essence, the practice of slavery is capitalism realizing its ideal form. It is not just the family unit of the slaves that comes under pressure from economic interests—it is their very expendable lives. The poisoning of the grapes at the hands of the conjure woman by Mars Dugal in order that his profits won’t be impacted by slaves literally eating his margin is only the most obvious way in which capitalism as an entity becomes a metaphor for economics in American in a larger sense. The suggesting being, of course, that if the ethical concerns were not enforced upon business owners, they would cease to exist entirely.
Forces of Fate Beyond One’s Understanding
A strain of supernatural intervention into the narrative is not just a persistent theme, but provides the book its very title. The idea of a slave woman being able to conjure up changes in case and effect might lead a reader to naturally assume that this power would always be used within an equation in which the good that came to the slaves resulted from evil enacted upon their oppressors. In practice, however, this is not necessarily always the case. The supernatural and the potential for it to be controlled by one party and not another is ultimately revealed as something far more complex than simple “black magic” in much the same way that Christianity is often engaged as a weapon to control the fates of the oppressed without it necessarily being a “religion of evil.”
The Evil of Slavery
The most masterful control of thematic elements by the author is his ability to constantly reveal new ways in which slavery rises to the level of pure evil without making that attack against sink into a didactic diatribe against what should be obvious. The truth is that for a great many white readers at the time, many of the evils obvious to Chesnutt were not quite so evident in their understanding of the history of the South. Chesnutt published the book in the final year of the 19th century, more than three decades the end of the Civil War. And yet even at that late date, many people in the North still clung to a history of slavery that has very successfully whitewashed its most venal aspects. Thus, the author was able to artfully sidestep the need to turn his book into a moralizing rant and instead focus on a conveying the theme of slavery’s inherent inhumanity through the art of storytelling.
