The Conjure Woman

About this book

A Northern couple, John and his wife Annie, buy an old vineyard in North Carolina after the Civil War, and the formerly enslaved Uncle Julius McAdoo, who works for them, entertains them with stories of plantation days: tales of conjuring, of a man turned into a tree, of a bewitched grapevine and of a slave changed into a mule. Behind the folk humour the stories reveal the cruelty of slavery, and Julius, it turns out, always has a practical reason of his own for telling them.

Context and significance

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), a writer of mixed race from Ohio and North Carolina, published the collection in 1899, and it was one of the first books by a Black American author to be widely read by white readers. Compare Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Souls of Black Folk.

About the author