Chesnutt's first book gathers seven tales framed as plantation reminiscence: John, a Northern white man who has moved to North Carolina for his wife Annie's health, records the stories told him by Uncle Julius McAdoo, a formerly enslaved coachman whose tales of Aunt Peggy, the local conjure woman, always seem to turn to Julius's own advantage. Beneath the dialect humor, the stories — several of which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, beginning with "The Goophered Grapevine" in 1887 — carry slavery's violence and the uses of folk belief as quiet resistance.
Author: Charles W. Chesnutt · Original publisher: Houghton, Mifflin and Company (Boston and New York), 1899
