History and Survival: Charles Chesnutt and the Time of Conjure

It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who only knows his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that.

Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture

Two years after the publication of his first book, The Conjure Woman, Charles Chesnutt reflected on the cultural sources of his own conjure tales in his essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901). Offering some notes towards an ethnography of the belief in "conjuration" or "goopher," Chesnutt contrasts such "delusions" with an educated modernity: "Relics of ancestral barbarism are found among all peoples, but advanced civilization has at least shaken off the more obvious absurdities of superstition. We no longer attribute insanity to demoniac possession, nor suppose that a king's touch can cure scrofula."¹ Chesnutt employs language that derives from evolutionary anthropology, with its stages of cultural development (i.e., primitive, barbaric, civilized), casting the belief in conjure as a survival from an earlier stage—"curious" and "quaint," but ultimately a product of superstition and "mere lack of enlightenment." It is perhaps not surprising that Chesnutt scholarship has sometimes seemed uneasy about this essay. According to Eric Sundquist, "[w]hat is remarkable about it, especially in light of Chesnutt's conjure tales, is his apparent degree of skepticism about black folk beliefs."² Chesnutt seems to distance himself from an African American folk culture that includes conjure: by claiming that "we" have abandoned absurd superstitions, he identifies himself with a cosmopolitan "advanced civilization," rather than with the "old people of the South," who still believe that injuries or ailments are caused by "some external evil influence."³ The temporality of cultural development displaces racial difference in Chesnutt's formulation: "all peoples" are subject to lingering superstitions, but the educated modern world has advanced furthest in rejecting such beliefs.⁴ Yet Chesnutt's notion of "relics of ancestral barbarism" also complicates this narrative of progress: even modern civilization has only renounced the "more obvious absurdities," but has not entirely freed itself from remnants of an earlier history. Chesnutt seems to share the view of the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who suggests that such relics persist everywhere around us, and unless we recognize them, we may not be "capable of rightly comprehending" our own time.⁵

I argue that the temporality of cultural evolution has an important place in Chesnutt's thinking about race and culture, particularly in the conjure tales. Within this framework, the concept of superstition is especially significant, constituting the juncture where beliefs understood to belong to the past come into conflict with ideas of progress and modernity. The teleology of progress is both affirmed and potentially compromised by the intrusion of survivals from earlier cultural stages within the present: the recognition that a belief or practice is a survival provides a kind of tangible evidence for cultural evolution, but it also may suggest that evolutionary progress is incomplete, partial—that we are not finished with our past, in effect. The logic of the survival points to a vision of history as uneven and nonlinear, in which different "times" coexist in the same historical "moment." This vision of a world in which cultural time is not uniform, in which there exist zones or pockets of more "primitive" time, serves to relegate living non-Western cultures to a different epoch than that of modernity. Yet it may also suggest that the time of the modern "civilized" world is itself not so assured, even that modernity is a tenuous cultural achievement, haunted by other time. The concept of cultural survivals as first expansively theorized by Tylor points towards a kind of historical unconscious, in which formerly meaningful fragments of forgotten history are embedded within our modern lives, but remain "obscure" to us. I contend that Chesnutt's conjure tales make use of this temporal structure to tell the story of the...