The first half of Charles W. Chestnutts The Conjure Woman begins with the interaction between a Northern white male and the conventional portrayal of a slave. In the novel an old ex-plantation slave, Julius, recounts stories that he says he heard as a child. The audience of the stories is the white Northern male, who is the narrator of the story, and his sickly wife, Annie. The stories are told for many purposes but my favorite reason behind the telling of the tales is Julius attempt and in most cases achievement to acquire several things by this sly action.From the time that Julian the slave meets John, the Northerner and narrator, the stories begin to roll off his tongue. Julian sets off immediately telling the couple, John and Annie, that he wouldn vise [them] to buy dis yer ole vimyad, caze de goophers on it yit. Julian quickly leaps into telling the couple on how the vineyard became cunjd because all the slaves were eating the scuppernon the master at the time, Mars Dugal McAdoo got Aunt Peggy, the cunjuh woman, to come gopher the field so the slaves could not eat the scuppernon any longer. Julian says all this because he actually has derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines. Although Julian does not scare off the couple as he wishes and they buy the land John offers him the job of coachman, which had wages equivalent or greater than that of the vineyard.One of the stories where Julius is able to get something he desires is the one of Po Sandy. The drastic love story and conjuring magic are just enough to distract the couple from perceiving what is occurring. Julian tells of how two slaves are in love with one another, Sandy and Tenie, but Sandy is passed around to different plantations because of his great work. Tenie decides that to keep them together she can turn him into a tree. He becomes a tree but one day Tenie is away in town taking care of someone and the tree is cut down to...
