Examples Of Superstitions And Folklore In The Conjure Woman

Alice Malsenior Walker, an African American born into poverty, came into this world on February 9, 1944 in Eatonon, Georgia. She was the youngest child of eight children born to Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walkers. Both of her parents were sharecroppers as well as expert story tellers. Things were not easy for the Walkers and Alice often witnessed her mother’s frustration of having the burden to take care of eight children with little means. Even though children of share croppers were usually made to work the fields, Alice’s mother made sure that her kids received an education. Alice was brilliant at writing poetry.

The slave narratives also gave Northerners a glimpse into the life of slave communities: the love between family members, the respect for elders, the bonds between friends. They described an enduring, truly African American culture, which was expressed through music, folktales, and religion. Then, as now, the narratives of ex-slaves provided the world with the closest look at the lives of enslaved African American men, women and children. (in incheiere)

In her short story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker summarizes the representation of the beauty, the conflicts and struggles within African-American culture. “Everyday Use” focuses mainly between members of the Johnson family, consisting of a mother and her two daughters. One of the daughters Maggie, who was injured in a house fire and has living a shy life clinging to her mother for security. Her older sister is Dee, who grew up with a grace and natural beauty. “Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure… (716) She also grew up determined to have a better life than her mother and sister. This takes place when Dee (the only family member to receive a formal education) returns to visit Dee’s mother and younger sister Maggie. Again this portrays a slight issue between two different views of the African-American culture. Alice uses symbolism to empathize the difference between these interpretations, showing that culture and heritage are parts of daily life. The title of the story, Everyday Use, symbolizes the living heritage of the Johnson family, a heritage that is still in “everyday use”.

Myths are one of the most important elements included in the history of not only African-American lives but also the lives of each and every one of us. Myths are inevitable human resources at times when no other idea justifies our being. As Barthes posits, for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the 'nature ' of things. This study looks into the significance of "Myths" and their determining roles as semiological systems in August Wilson 's dramatic twentieth century cycle plays; Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson. In these plays, myths take the forms of individuals, rituals and even ancestral objects. It can be observed that each one of these elements performs the most important role in conveying the significance of the African-American psyche and delicately portrays the eminent influence of ancestral backgrounds in shaping the lives of each character. The works of scholars such as Roland Barthes, Henry Gates, as well as many more, have been employed to better grasp this matter.

Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman,” (Western Journal of Black Studies 36.4 [2012]: 325-336), Donald M. Shaffer Jr. argues that Chesnutt’s collection can be considered as a “racial project”. Chesnutt narrates these tales in order to destroy the concept of hierarchy and race in American society. The “race project” can be seen as linkages between the oral act of storytelling and the social status of black people after the Civil War. In addition, Shaffer states “Chesnutt's use of the conjuring tale as a touchstone of imaginative possibility and spiritual perseverance speaks to its cultural potency. Much of what Chesnutt knew of conjuration or "goophering" he gleaned from his childhood recollection having grown up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Chesnutt (2001) describes the practice in an essay entitled "Superstitions and Folklore of the South. In the essay, he traces the origins of conjuration to Africa, where "it probably grew, in the first place, out of African fetichism" (QTD, Shaffer,

The concept of a new beginning is a repetitive theme that occurs in African American literature, mostly, in the geographical form of The South. Used as a literary landscape, The South is more than a representation of the horrors that African-Americans had endured during the time of slavery. It is there that African-Americans developed a society and culture that was constructed through the struggles of their ancestors and the mechanisms that had developed to survive. The history of their people is embedded throughout the soil of the landscape and it is from there a new future can arise. It also gave them religion and spiritual connections to their ancestors. Negro spirituals—whose original purpose was to guide slaves to freedom and increase

When analyzing all of the information provided in the two books, Witchcraft in Europe by Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters and Magic and Superstition in Europe by Michael D. Bailey, there are a multitude of common themes that appear repeatedly in both pieces of work on the topic of witchcraft. These common themes vary in topic with some relating to the stereotypical appearance of witches, the actions witches performed, or even the legal procedures involving the conviction of witches. These themes do not only show themselves in those two pieces of work, but also in The Trial of Tempel Anneke by Peter A. Morton. While common themes can be seen in reference to Tempel Anneke’s trial, there are also many

The book, The Spirituals and the Blues, by James H. Cone, illustrates how the slave spirituals and the blues reflected the struggle for black survival under the harsh reality of slavery and segregation. The spirituals are historical songs which speak out about the rupture of black lives in a religious sense, telling us about people in a land of bondage, and what they did to stay united and somehow fight back. The blues are somewhat different from in the spirituals in that they depict the secular aspect of black life during times of oppression and the capacity to survive. James H. Cone’s portrayal of how the spirituals and the blues aided blacks through times of hardship and adversity

Traditions and old teachings are essential to Native American culture; however growing up in the modern west creates a distance and ignorance about one’s identity. In the beginning, the narrator is in the hospital while as his father lies on his death bed, when he than encounters fellow Native Americans. One of these men talks about an elderly Indian Scholar who paradoxically discussed identity, “She had taken nostalgia as her false idol-her thin blanket-and it was murdering her” (6). The nostalgia represents the old Native American ways. The woman can’t seem to let go of the past, which in turn creates confusion for the man to why she can’t let it go because she was lecturing “…separate indigenous literary identity which was ironic considering that she was speaking English in a room full of white professors”(6). The man’s ignorance with the elderly woman’s message creates a further cultural identity struggle. Once more in the hospital, the narrator talks to another Native American man who similarly feels a divide with his culture. “The Indian world is filled with charlatan, men and women who pretend…”

“The Wife of His Youth” is an 1898 historical fiction short story by author Charles W. Chesnutt. Charles Chestnutt is the first African American writer to use folklore in series literature. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio on June 20, 1858, but spent most of his childhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Growing up in the south had a lasting impact on him, in that it furnished rich material for his fiction. Therefore, it is not surprising that Chestnutt’s characters, settings, scenes and institutions reflect North Carolina’s culture. As a creative writer blossoming in the 1880s, Chesnutt believed that he could use folklore to stem the tide of racist thinking depicted by the plantation school writers, such as Thomas Nelson Page and others, who wrote of slavery as a benevolent system. However, by 1905, Chestnutt realized that fiction was not the route to bring America around to treating African Americans with the same respect as whites. Consequently, with this realization Chestnutt became a fighter against discrimination with his voice. He made speeches and wrote essays against all kinds of discrimination (Young). In his short story “The Wife of His Youth”, Chesnutt combines the themes of racial identity and colorism to create the conflict at the center of the story.

By observing Stout’s exhibit, Tales of the Conjure Woman, one can see she was heavily influenced by the practice of hoodoo. According to Merriam-Webster, hoodoo is a body of practices of sympathetic magic traditional especially among blacks in the southern United States (Merriam Webster). One of the main concepts she focused on her exhibit was colonialism. Colonialism is the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory, or people. Much has happened in terms of the development of African-American religion and African-American culture. For example, in American slavery, Africans were snatched from their own belief systems. When they were brought to America, they were taught that

Folktales have the power to take us back to the beginnings of peoples’ lives, from their hopes to their defeats. African American folktales originated from people, most of who were long ago were brought to America from Africa to this country against their will. This group of enslaved people was torn from their individual cultures when they were forced to their past, families and their languages and customs behind him with their native land. The black people coming to America entered as slaves, and they were suppressed by white slave holders. They were not permitted to speak their own native tongues. The slave owners enforced that they speak American English but it was forbidden for them to read or write. They were forced to do hard labor

Charles Waddell Chesnutt is an African American writer who writes many novels and short stories about African American superstitions and folklore of the south in The Conjure Woman. The Conjure Woman is a collection of folktales that explore complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War. Chesnutt writes these stories in vernacular forms to represent the oral act of storytelling and express Chesnutt’s black identity and cultural heritage of African American people. Chesnutt's folktales show how whites treat African American people as second class citizens. Chesnutt also uses African American folklore to celebrate his black identity throughout telling these stories. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman represents African American traditions through telling stories about superstitions and folklore of the south and displays Uncle Julius’s purposes of telling conjure tales.

Native American literatures embrace the memories of creation stories, the tragic wisdom of native ceremonies, trickster narratives, and the outcome of chance and other occurrences in the most diverse cultures in the world. These distinctive literatures, eminent in both oral performances and in the imagination of written narratives, cannot be discovered in reductive social science translations or altogether understood in the historical constructions of culture in one common name. (Vizenor 1)

     The essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” by contemporary American novelist Alice Walker is one that, like a flashbulb, burns an afterimage in my mind. It is an essay primarily written to inform the reader about the history of African American women in America and how their vibrant, creative spirit managed to survive in a dismal world filled with many oppressive hardships. This piece can be read, understood, and manage to conjure up many emotions within the hearts and minds of just about any audience that reads it. However, Walker targets African American women in today’s society in an effort to make them understand their heritage and appreciate what their mothers and