He taught at various black schools in North Carolina before returning to Fayetteville in 1877 to begin teaching at the new Normal School. This was all the formal education Chesnutt ever had, although reading was his favorite pastime and he was assiduous in continuing to educate himself. Chesnutt had shown he was an outstanding student, and he was offered a position as a pupil-teacher at Howard School. The following year he dropped out of school in order to help the family get through hard financial times. He was only fourteen years old when his first story was published in a local newspaper. Chesnutt himself was light-skinned, and could have passed as white, but he chose instead to identify with his African-American heritage.Īs a boy, Chesnutt attended the Howard School and also worked in his father's grocery store. His grandmothers were of mixed race, and it is likely that both his grandfathers were white. In 1866, after the Civil War, the family, now with five children, moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina.Ĭhesnutt's racial heritage was mixed.
#Conjure woman meaning free#
He was the first child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Ann Maria Sampson, free blacks who had moved north from North Carolina. Chesnutt was born on June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, Ohio. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYĪfrican-American novelist and short story writer Charles W. The story reveals much not only about the cruelty of the slavery system but also about the folktales and beliefs of AfricanĪmericans during this period, and the contrast between their beliefs and those of the Northern visitor and the culture he represents. He encounters a former slave named Julius who tells him a story about something strange that happened on the plantation before slavery was abolished. Shortly after Reconstruction (the period from 1865 to 1877, when the Southern states were reintegrated into the Union following the Civil War), a Northern businessman travels to the South to investigate the possibility of buying a vineyard. "The Goophered Grapevine" is set in North Carolina in two distinct time periods.
These stories, which use the style of language, or dialect, spoken by African Americans in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, are not only a landmark in African- American literature, they also capture life in the South immediately before and after the Civil War. The story is frequently anthologized and is the best known of the dialect stories Chesnutt wrote in the early part of his career. The story is also available in Collected Stories of Charles W. The story was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection of stories The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. It was the first work by an African American to appear in this prestigious magazine, although at the time the editors were unaware of Chesnutt's race. Chesnutt, was first published in Atlantic Monthly in 1887. "The Goophered Grapevine" by African-American novelist and short story writer Charles W.
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