Journal Entry for A Good Night’s Work
While reading Charles Chestnutt’s Conjure Tales, I was continuously intrigued by the trope/character of the conjuring woman. Who is this “free-nigger cunjuh ‘oman” that still involves herself in the politics of the enslaved? How did she gain her freedom? Was she born free, or did she somehow navigate the politics of slavery to gain her liberty? These questions are not answered in the Conjure Tales, of course, but I wanted to work and navigate this space (outside enslavement but still working in that zone and sphere) within the Ivanhoe assignment.
As this is the first move, I find myself a bit wary about the colloquialism. I’m worried about butchering it, and find myself sticking mainly to words that I can pick at and adapt from Chestnutt’s piece (yet another one of Sussman’s “mimetic” agents). In this move, I focused primarily on the conjuring woman and her role as an agent of justice, of sorts.
In “Who Owns the Whip?: Chestnutt, Tourgée, and Reconstruction Justice,” Bill Hardwig discusses Chestnutt and Tourgée’s opinions of the justice system at the time. Tourgée believed that a justice system should be “color-blind” in order to provide African Americans with more opportunity. Chestnutt, while navigating the same premise, believed that the justice system, and the opportunity for a former enslaved person to gain power/opportunity “remains very much influenced by color dynamics and racist legal practices” (Hardwig 10). Hardwig discusses Chestnutt’s “The Web of Circumstance,” in particular, wherein a former slave gains opportunity and power, only to be punished for it. The hegemony is thus able to control black opportunity, and thus, progress and advancement, in much the samw way that white masters would use a whip “to control the slave population” (Hardwig 11).
With knowledge of Chestnutt’s opinions on justice and the hegemonic version of justice, so to speak, it led me to reconsider the way that the conjuring woman functions in his previous tales. While she is undoubtedly oftentimes the catalyst for tragedy, she too is presented as the image of the avenger, seeking vengeance on white masters for their ill treatment of their slaves; this can especially be seen in Chestnutt’s “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare.”
Hardwig, Bill. “Who Owns the Whip?: Chesnutt, Tourgée, and Reconstruction Justice.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–20. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2903361.