Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

5. The Julius and John Stories: "The Luscious Scuppernong"

5 The Julius and John Stories "The Luscious Scuppernong" What would deliver [the New World Negro] from servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of a revelation as it invented names for things, one which would finally settle on its own mode of inflection, and which began to create an oral culture of chants,jokes,fall-songs, and fables. —DEREK WALCOTT, Dream onMonkey Mountain and Other Plays Chesnutt's best-known fictions are the stories based on North Carolina folk culture and narrated by an illiterate ex-slave named Julius McAdoo. Chesnutt collected seven of these stories in The Conjure Woman (1899), and between 1889 and 1904, he completed another seven stories, featuring the same characters, that were not included in the collection.x Critics refer to these stories variously as Chesnutt's "conjure tales" "dialect stories,53 or "Uncle Julius tales."2 However, not all of these stories include conjuring, and Chesnutt used dialect in fictions other than those featuring Julius McAdoo. Moreover, Julius is not the only narrator in these stories, nor is he their only important character. I prefer to describe these fictions as the "Julius and John stories," for this designation calls attention to the presence of two narrators, two languages, and two views of the world. Most important, it reminds us of the dynamic between two contrasting perspectives , which lies at the heart of the stories' form and meaning. The dynamic TheJulius andJohn Stories 77 interaction of the two perspectives in these stones represents a potent challenge to important binariesin our culture. The fruitful and deconstructive dialogue of Julius and John is the principal topic of this chapter. The Julius and John designation also helps us seethe connection between Chesnutt's stories and the John and Old Master trickster tales. The latter tales, conceived orally in slavery and collected afterward, narratethe continuing battle of wits between an ingenious slave named John and the slaveholder to whom he belongs. Chesnutt's stories aremost often viewed in the context of the white Southern dialect fiction, which Chesnutt quite deliberately evokes and revises.3 But the stories also draw on an African American narrative tradition of black and white intellectual contest, which is discussed later in this chapter. In Chesnutt's stories, John, an Ohioan whose last name we never learn, has come South with hiswife, Annie, to improve her health and to exploit a new economic opportunity. Their resettlement in the former Confederacy echoes several important political and literary narratives of the i88os and '905. The first is "The New South," an account of the postwar South's social progress given by Henry W. Grady. Grady, an editor of the AtlantaConstitution ., addressed the New England Society in New York on December 22, 1886. In his speech, which was widely reported, Grady reassured his Northern listeners that the prejudices of the past were dead and that Northerners might safely and profitably invest their energies and their capital in the creation of the new Southern economic and social order. "We have learned that one Northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners, and have smoothed the path to southward, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon's line used to be, and hung our latch-string out to you and yours.5 '4 The late decades of the century also saw the flowering of "the novel of reconciliation ." These fictions of North-South healing frequently recounted a Northern family's move to the South and areconciliation of the two regions through intersectional marriage.5 John and Annie's new life in North Carolina climaxes in "Hot-Foot Hannibal" with Annie's sister's engagement to a prominent member of the local aristocracy. Thus the narrative that develops across these stories follows the pattern of regional reunification— but with an important difference. In the other instances of literary reconciliation , the new order is negotiated by Northerners and white Southerners, often on the backs of black Southerners. Chesnutt's Julius and John stories 78 TheJulius andJohn Stories enact dialogue between a white Northerner and a black Southerner. Julius initiates John into Southern history and folk belief,assistinghiscommercial success, and Julius contrives to unite the white lovers. John is Julius's employer, and it is he who introduces each of Julius's stories. All of these tales are elicited by John and Annie's interest in the lore of their new...