The Conjure Woman

The Conjure Woman, the first collection of stories by Charles W. Chesnutt. The seven stories began appearing in magazines in 1887 and were first collected in a book in 1899.

The narrator of The Conjure Woman is a white male Northerner living in the southern United States who passes along the stories told to him by ex-slave Julius McAdoo. Unusual for dialect tales of the period, the stories give a realistic picture of the pre-Civil War South, including descriptions of penurious, brutish masters. Conjuration—magic effected by hoodoo practitioners—helps slaves to overcome difficulties; thus, spells are cast and humans are transformed into birds and mammals in the course of these tales.

The relationships between the patronizing narrator, his wife, who sometimes glimpses the stories’ deeper meanings, and the crafty, sometimes manipulative Uncle Julius—each of whom is subtly characterized—develop over the course of the book.