Conjuring Abolition in Old Hepsy

The central logic of Mary Denison’s 1858 abolitionist fiction, Old Hepsy, is encapsulated in one sentence spoken by a minor character, the slaveholder Maggie. Angered that her uncle has called her favorite slave a “jade,” Maggie swears, “I hope he’ll have to expiate, for just that one word, nine hundred and ninety-nine years.”¹ Maggie insists that words can constitute sins warranting an atonement of Biblical proportions, and slavery itself, sanctioned by the words of the law, is one such sin. Denison’s novel reflects on the various offenses of slavery, including rape, incest, the separation of families, and murder, and suggests that these crimes persist because of the systemic corruption of two discourses presumably devoted to justice: the law and Christianity. The novel’s titular figure, Hepsy, a respected conjure woman, persistently voices her outrage against the institution of slavery in the form of curses and conjure operations, thereby actively invoking misfortune on the slaveholders who have cursed her. Hepsy’s curses provide an antidote to slavery’s corruption of both the law and Christianity, and attest to Denison’s vision of the means of resistance available to even the most disempowered members of society: the aggressive words of the curse. In so doing, Hepsy’s curses underscore the parallels between

Title Page from The Conjure Woman by Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Hepsy’s personal project of vengeance against the slaveholders of one plantation and Denison’s own project of abolitionist fiction—both women utter destructive, but healing, words, insisting on their power to eradicate injustice and create a new society—to conjure abolition.

By drawing on the power of the curse to sustain her abolitionist fiction, Denison insists that women’s “influence” reaches beyond the tender and intimate persuasions advocated by antebellum domestic ideology. Caleb Smith, in his consideration of nineteenth-century justice systems, defines the curse as “a peculiar kind of verbal performance that could seem to expose, and perhaps to create, a fatal corruption in the foundations of the common order.² By broadcasting social injustices, the curse exposes them to the scrutiny necessary to precipitate reform. Those who have lost hope in the official channels of social reform use the curse; hence its appropriateness within antebellum America as a tool of the disempowered (including slaves, former slaves, and female abolitionists)–the curse, as a martial verbal performance, is directed towards “an audience which was not the legitimating public of the existing law, but which could authorize a new law.”³ The curses of abolitionist discourse, for example, operate with what J. L. Austin terms “perlocutionary force;” they are acts intended to change the thoughts and actions of their hearers/readers, eventually effecting large-scale social reform.⁴ In threatening doom consequent upon the maintenance of legal and Christian arguments sustaining slavery, abolitionists hoped to meet the violence of these corrupted systems with their own violence, engaging in what Debra Rosenthal calls “assaultive” language.⁵ Denison wholeheartedly adopts this project. Hepsy’s curse is more than a call on supernatural authority: it is a literalizing of the trope commonly used to refer to slavery and a metaphor for the abolitionist’s own project of altering social conditions through language.

Sensational in its tone, Old Hepsy dwells on the sins of the slaveholders to illustrate slavery’s accursed effects on the white population. The plantation master, Lawyer Kenneth, frequently terrorizes the neighborhood in drunken fits of rage. More grievously, although he has never beaten a slave himself, he has ordered lynchings and sold slaves, including Hepsy’s children, “down South.” Denison also underscores the sexual transgressions of the women on the plantation. Mrs. Kenneth has just purchased Lucina, the issue of her brief relationship, some nineteen years before, with her enslaved half-brother, Fred Keene. Moreover, Mrs. Kenneth’s legitimate daughter, Amy, threatens to repeat her mother’s sins: she encourages Hollister, a slave and half-brother to both Keene and Mrs. Kenneth, in his amorous advances. Hepsy, who knows all...