Chesnutt's Piazza Tales

Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories

Bibliographic Data

ID2976293
AuthorsWilliam Gleason (0000-0003-2196-3511, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume51
Issue1
Pages33-77
Publication date1999-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.1999.0012
OpenAlexW2019290956
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited18

Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories William Gleason* (bio) Architecture is not simply a mechanical contrivance but an essay in the art of communication, a complex web of memories and messages. —J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style 1 When Charles W. Chesnutt surveyed his literary prospects in the fall of 1889, he had every reason to be optimistic. In the previous two years Chesnutt had placed three of his conjure (or “Uncle Julius”) tales in the Atlantic Monthly, becoming the first African American fiction writer to be published by such an influential arbiter of national taste. During the same period, he had struck up fruitful correspondences with Albion Tourgée and George Washington Cable, prominent white authors and social reformers who read and commented favorably on Chesnutt’s work. New stories, including the beginning of a first novel, were flowing from Chesnutt’s pen, and a fourth conjure tale was about to appear in the Overland Monthly. Feeling sure of his talent and connections—but also ambivalent about the imaginative and professional constraints that continuing in the Uncle Julius “plantation school” vein might impose—Chesnutt plotted the next steps of his career. First, he would publish a collection of his stories, gathering the Atlantic tales together with a selection of his non-dialect work to make a book. Then he would stop writing conjure tales altogether and concentrate instead on more up-to-date representations of the American [End Page 33] color line. As Chesnutt explained to Tourgée that September, “I think I have about used up the old Negro who serves as a mouthpiece, and I shall drop him in future stories, as well as much of the dialect.” 2 Uncle Julius would thus help facilitate Chesnutt’s arrival as a book author—and then disappear. But the book that Chesnutt proposed never materialized. As critics like Richard Brodhead have shown, in the wake of that optimistic fall of 1889, Chesnutt encountered a period of “literary blockage,” not consolidated success, as white editors—even at Houghton Mifflin, the parent house of the Atlantic—rejected not only Chesnutt’s proposed collection but more signally (and despite multiple revisions) the new color line story into which he poured much of his post-1889 energy, “Rena Walden.” 3 It was not until 1898, nearly ten years later, that Chesnutt would finally strike his “entering wedge” into the literary world, although not in precisely the fashion he had imagined. For after reading through yet another of Chesnutt’s story collections, Atlantic editor Walter Hines Page decided in March 1898 to commission more “‘cunjure’ stories” to fill out a possible book of North Carolina dialect tales. Chesnutt quickly complied, hammering out six tales in seven weeks, four of which Page then matched with Chesnutt’s original Atlantic stories to make The Conjure Woman, which would appear to strong reviews in 1899. The irony here, of course, as Brodhead has aptly remarked, is that Chesnutt’s success would come only through a return to the same plantation genre—and its “preferred fictions of racial life”—that he had earlier sought to leave behind. 4 Chesnutt would have his collection, but he would have to resurrect Uncle Julius to do so. But in fact, Chesnutt had not stopped writing Julius tales at all. Three times during his “blocked” decade—and well before Page’s commission—Chesnutt turned of his own accord back to the plantation tale, to dialect, and to Uncle Julius. Why would the calculating author revisit a supposedly “used up” genre? Not, as one might imagine, in anticipatory deference to a proposition like Page’s. Chesnutt did so, I argue, in order to explore in more detail what he found he had not “used up” in the earlier Julius stories: what we might call (following Dell Upton) the “social experience” of American architecture. 5 For what we discover when we look closely at the second phase of Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius stories—the three pieces written between his 1889 letter to Tourgée and the 1898 summons from Page—is that the meticulously framed conjure tales offered Chesnutt a surprisingly versatile form through which to [End

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