Journal Entry for R{O}{O}{T}S
Robert Hemenway’s The Function of Folklore in Charles Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman was vital in the writing of this move. Hemenway discussed not only the capacity for fetishization of Afro-American culture and superstition in Chestnutt’s work, but he also utilized a variety of Chestnutt’s own writings to support his position. For example, Hemenway uses the following quote from Chestnutt to display how he might have appropriated some forms of folklore in his writing. Chestnutt wrote:
I discovered that [some of] the brilliant touches due, I had thought to my own imagination, were after all but dormant ideas, lodged in my childish mind by old Aunt This and old Uncle That, and awaiting only the spur of imagination to bring them again to the surface.
This is a surprising echo of John’s own ignorance towards Afro-American culture and superstition, and yet, it is also paradoxically emphasizes how this specialized knowledge of conjuring has been and continues to be embedded in one’s “roots,” in the blood of former enslaved peoples that might have still ran in his veins.
I used a quote that Hemenway provided in my move, wherein a former enslaved person had described a white person’s relationship to conjure magic:
White folks don’ put much stock in roots and the like no mo’. They thinks that science has solve jes’ about every thin-but there’s lots of times they’d be better off if they’d pay mo’ attention to us what knows.
The mention to the red oak tree and other ingredients used by the conjure woman are the same ones which Chestnutt refers to in “The Goophered Grapevine.”
Hemenway, Robert. “The Functions of Folklore in Charles Chesnutt’s ‘The Conjure Women.’” Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 13, no. 3, 1976, pp. 283–309. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3814130.