Ed Piacentino, Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"

Another variation in fictional depictions of the effects of oppression on slaves emerged during the postbellum period, the heyday of the local color story. Often, local color set in the Mid and Deep South employed a frame and an embedded narrative, the latter recounted by an elderly African-American male and former slave. In this raconteur, we find a more restrictive binary pattern than Séjour used in "The Mulatto." Local color stories generally follow two patterns. Derived from stories slaves told, they can be allegorical beast fables, treating power struggles and survival under an oppressive system comparable to slavery. These stories are predicated on an inequitable double standard, with the power structure under the control of predacious animals. Examples are the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris. A second type presents a more direct rendering of slavery's brutalities and exploitation, such as Charles Chesnutt's conjure stories as told by the loquacious Uncle Julius.

Cover of Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, containing his collected Uncle Julius stories, "The Goophered Grapevine," "Po' Sandy," "The Conjurer's Revenge," and "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," 1899.

Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887) features a multi-dimensional and affable storyteller in Uncle Julius, who still resides in the same place where he had been a slave. Uncle Julius speaks in quaint and comical dialect, creating an impression quite different from Séjour's straightforward, serious, and outspoken Antoine. In the conciliatory, non-controversial conventions of local color, Chesnutt portrays Uncle Julius as polyvocal, assuming competing poses and agendas. Julius is an entertainingly imaginative raconteur whose story involves the supernatural, folkloric, amusing, and outlandish descriptions. He is a cunning con artist and economic opportunist, a simple primitive, and a subdued social critic—contradictory postures reflecting amiability and rebelliousness. Like Séjour's Antoine, Julius, in telling his story of imagined spaces, works within the binaries of rebellion and submission, white and black, domination and abjection. Through him, Chesnutt dilutes and mellows the underlying serious social implications of Julius's embedded tale, establishing a comfort zone distancing the story's enslaved characters from implied readers. While Julius's story of Henry, the victimized slave, does focus on a dehumanizing aspect of slavery (Henry is economically exploited by his greedy master who commodifies him in his restricted space as a slave), the manner in which Julius tells the story is divertingly entertaining. Julius's narrative focuses principally on Henry's predicament rather than on the slave's interior self. It neither engages the sensibility nor arouses the moral consciousness of the frame narrator, a man from Ohio seeking to purchase the former plantation to whom Julius relates his story, or that of the implied reader.

Chesnutt used the rebellion-submission binary in several other conjure tales. In "Po' Sandy," Julius's story gains him temporary use of the old schoolhouse, a space for religious services. In "The Conjurer's Revenge," Julius gains power within his present space, shrewdly employing a tale to circumvent his white employer's buying a mule, and to set up a scam where he purchases a defective horse instead. In "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," Julius again makes a small gain, winning his white female listener’s sympathy so that she gives his unreliable grandson a second chance to continue to work for her family. The outcomes of these tales exemplify Chesnutt's manipulation of frame plots, creating opportunities within imagined spaces. Julius, although gaining some material advantage, remains oppressed. Moreover, the subtexts of his embedded narratives prove ineffectual in inciting understanding and empathy.