You’ll also find a new project that features historical photographs of maritime life on the North Carolina coast between 18. Here you’ll find my books and an assortment of my essays and lectures. This is David Cecelski’s official website. Leon Prather, Jr., picked up the story where he left off. Pierre Ruffin, Florence Kelley and other leading social activists.Īs I looked at the museum’s copy of The Conjure Woman, however, I thought above all about Chesnutt and The Marrow of Tradition.įor half a century, Chesnutt’s novel, more than any other literary or historical work, kept the story of the racial massacre in Wilmington alive, until a new generation of black scholars, led by Helen Edmonds and H. This photograph accompanied the publication of his poem “Abraham Lincoln” in 1909.Īs did another early black novelist with roots in Fayetteville, David Bryant Fulton (his novel was called Hanover or The Persecution of the Lowly), Chesnutt dared to tell the story only three years after the murderous plot by Wilmington’s leading white citizens unfolded.Īfter 1906 Chesnutt wrote little fiction but increasingly turned his attentions to civil rights activism.įrom his family’s home in Cleveland– he had left Fayetteville way back in 1878– he was active in the early formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , working alongside W.E.B. 1863 and grew up there and in Wilmington, N.C. Widely considered a landmark in African American literature, The Conjure Woman was the beginning of a career that wedded literature and social activism.ĭavid Bryant Fulton (pen name “Jack Thorne”) was born in Fayetteville, N.C. Aunt Peggy has many magical powers, including the ability to steal souls from bodies, and she is not afraid of using her hexes against white people. The “conjure woman” in the title, by the way, refers to a character called “Aunt Peggy,” an African American witch who figures in the stories.
They had a strong subversive streak and they undermined the old myths about the South that whites had created to justify the oppression of African Americans after the Civil War. Inwardly, however, Chesnutt’s stories turned that version of southern history on its head. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, white southerners were very fond of stories that made plantation slavery seem like a good thing.
#CONJURE WOMAN FULL#
Outwardly the stories resemble the kind of folksy “Plantation Myth” tales that were full of nostalgia for the Slave South. Chesnutt knew that world well: his family was from Fayetteville, N.C., and he had spent much of his youth there before moving north.Ĭhesnutt drew the themes of the stories from sources ranging from African American folk tales to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. From the Collections at the National Museum of African American History & Cultureįirst published in 1899, The Conjure Womanis set on a plantation in eastern North Carolina after the Civil War.
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