Chesnutt's Conjure Tales

Charles W. Chesnutt was one of the most prominent African-American writers and community leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He and I share a hometown -- Cleveland, Ohio -- which was, in his day, a powerful engine of industry and social mobility; by mine it had become a much-reduced city better known for its burning river than its cultural output. Still, Cleveland has always had a sort of attitude -- a 'tougher than the rest' outlook that has kept its place on the map secure,

Chesnutt thrived, like Poe, in a journalistic era, one where excellence in short stories and essays could win one a precarious place in the public eye. And, in his "conjure" stories, he actively reclaimed African-American traditions, folklore, and humor, from a time when they had been largely re-appropriated by white writers. Prominent among these was Joel Chandler Harris, who collected genuine Black folktales featuring such recurrent characters as "B'rer Rabbit," "B'rer Bear," and "B'rer Fox," and then re-cast them through the imagined voice of an older Black man he created and called "Uncle Remus." In that guise, told to a young white boy, tales that might otherwise have been deprecated became iconic -- for decades, Uncle Remus was the bestselling children's book in America; Theodore Roosevelt read it to groups of children and invited Harris to join them at the White House.

But of course this was a problem, especially given that the tales were written in exaggerated "Black" dialect -- which is where Chesnutt came in. Well-aware of Harris's tales and their popularity, he decided to work to "signify" upon them, creating an alternate interlocutor -- one "Uncle Julius" -- who, though seemingly aiming to please his presumptively white listeners, was in fact taking them all for a ride -- by turning his seemingly "quaint" tales against their white hearers. It was an effect greatly appreciated by his readers, and which led eventually to a collection of tales that rivaled Harris's own. Chesnutt very ably mimicked Harris's mimicry -- in almost a sort of "SNL" spirit -- and showed how, in a very essential way, all stories are about power -- that of the speaker as well as that of the listener. 

In 1946, twelve years after Chesnutt's death, the Walt Disney Company decided to turn Joel Chandler Harris's versions of these folktales into a feature film, Song of the South. It was an unrepentant version, full of the sort of magical Black figurations that, while seemingly celebrating that tradition, turned it into a muted and cartoonish version of itself. It's now kept securely under lock and key, though bootleg versions exist, and Disney's own "Splash Mountain" attraction retained the characters -- though this is soon to be replaced by "Tiana's Bayou Adventure."