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When Charles Chesnutt wrote "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Passing of Grandison," he engaged in the African tradition of storytelling that has been passed down for generations. His stories evidence the oral heritage of African peoples: stories within stories, spoken language, call and response, hyperbole, personification, and signifying. He introduced the "lore of 'conjuration,' African American hoodoo beliefs and practices" to a white reading public, validating the African experience, revealing its continued existence in a land where there had been a deliberate attempt to eradicate that experience, and evidencing the resiliency of African peoples and their cultural traditions (Gates, Norton 603). Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman first indicates his deliberate referencing of these cultural traditions. The seven-story collection focuses on plantation and slave life, featuring Aun' Peggy, a conjure woman who works magic and casts spells, as a primary character. Aun' Peggy's spells and magic are the enslaved's primary defense against the inhumanity of enslavement.
Gloria C. Oden posits that Chesnutt chose conjuring as a frame and theme because he knew that conjure "filled a deep need in the slave's life for a weapon to invoke against the arbitrary and often violent circumstances that made up his existence. It compensated for the powerlessness he felt, and, consciously or unconsciously, it gave him the vitality of his African heritage" (39). While others had written about Negroes and their beliefs, they did so in "terms of [Negroes] being fearful of the dead and of their keeping a charm about them as a protection against evil spirits" (39). Chesnutt, however, ventured into this "spiritual area of Black folk belief" (39).
More significant is Chesnutt's engagement of the African cosmological system to tell his stories. This engagement is nowhere better evident than in "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Passing of Grandison." In African cosmology, there exist many Orishas, secondary divinities who represent the various aspects of the Supreme Being, who is too vast for (wo)man to comprehend. Within that cosmology exists the deity Elegba, also called the trickster, who is considered the messenger to the Supreme Being. Elegba is the deity of the crossroads, of choices and decisions: "He is the Orisa who sits at the threshold of every decision and offers the options that decide our future. Elegba is...