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[Review of The Conjure Woman]

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  • Source Text: Anonymous, "[Review of The Conjure Woman]," Public Ledger (4 May 1899): 6.

THE CONJURE WOMAN. By Charles W. Chestnutt. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, From H. T. Coats, Company, Philadelphia.

The seven tales in this collection depict the shrewdness of the negro in using his superstitions to his own advantage in any traffic with his more enlightened white brother. "The Goophered Grapevine," "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "The Gray Wolf's Hant," are capital stories, told by Uncle Julius in the richest Carolina dialect. The dual aspects of the guile and credulity are well preserved in the rare spells and invocations by which the negro compasses his own profit without any loss to his faith in "de wukkin' de roots" and in divers strange "mixtries." Uncle Julius and Uncle Remus are "near kin."

  • Cite (Chicago style): Anonymous, "[Review of The Conjure Woman]," The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, Gen. Ed. Stephanie P. Browner, Matt Cohen, and Kenneth M. Price, accessed April 25, 2024. https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.rev00018.
  • Source File: ccda.rev00018.xml
  • Document ID: ccda.rev00018
  • Rights information: The base text of the original item is in the public domain. The text encoding and editorial notes were created and/or prepared by the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Any reuse of the material should credit the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive. [License]
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