It seems she is subject to bouts of depression and has recently fallen into dark moods given to bouts of extreme dread about the arrival of misfortune. The story starts off with John concerned about Annie’s health. John is left pondering whether to trust Julius completely ever again, feeling as though he has somehow been duped. John buys the horse which almost instantly proves frail and quickly dies. After hearing the story, Julius almost offhandedly informs John about the availability of a good horse that he should consider instead of the mule. The slave is thus left incomplete, suffering from a clubfoot for the rest of his life which he did have before the conjuring. Overcome with remorse, he vows to reverse the spell and turn the mule back into man, but before he can finish the job he dies from accidentally consuming poison. Later on, the conjurer attends a religious revival meeting at which grows sick and decides to confess and repent his sin. John writes that he was considering investing in a mule when Julius related the strange story of the conjuring of a slave into a mule after he was mistakenly thought to be stealing a pig. John responds with a superior attitude and condescension, but Annie takes the moral to heart, informing her husband that she knew he wouldn’t mind when she told the grandson he could have one more chance on the farm. And just in case his listeners might have missed the point of this one, Julius foregoes his usual attempt to remain subtle and let the lesson sink in by outlining the moral clearly for John and Annie: Those that treat people bad are subjects to horrible nightmares while those that treat people well will prosper. His nightmare is being conjured into a slave himself, thus learning an important lesson in the value of treating others more humanely so that when the nightmare ends he makes good on his vow to become a more benevolent master. (Mars is the dialect pronunciation of “master” by Julius). Julius is inspired to tell the tale of a particularly harsh and vicious news master-Mars Jeems. John opens his narrative by reluctantly but firmly telling Uncle Julius that he can no longer allow the old man’s grandson to continue working on the plantation because he is unreliable.
The story ends with Julius asking for permission to use the schoolroom as a meeting place for the temperance group from his church, explaining that ghosts don’t haunt church meetings.
Thus, if John uses the lumber from the schoolroom, he is sure to have a haunted kitchen. The kitchen became so subject to tales of being haunted that eventually it was turned into a schoolroom. In the end, his plans went terribly awry as the tree was cut down to make lumber to build a kitchen. Julius warns against using that lumber by telling a story about a slave who so wanted to ensure he was never separated from his wife that was conjured into a tree. The result wasĪgain, the story starts out in the contemporary setting with John’s wife wanting a kitchen and John deciding he will use old lumber from a schoolhouse on the property. The story itself tells of the master getting a conjure woman to poison the vines to keep the slaves from eating them and how a newly arrived slave unwittingly ate the grapes. For instance, he tells the story this story with the intention of staying on the plantation as a hired hand tending to the grapevine he’s been working on all during the period of Reconstruction. Many of the stories, like “The Goophered Grapevine” also conclude with some kind of surprise revelation about the likely intent of Julius telling the story.
The story turns on the introduction of a supernatural element at the resolution of which the narrative turns back to standard English with John again the de facto narrator relating how he and his wife Annie each respond (in increasingly different ways) to the strange story. The narrator, John, introduces Julius as a storyteller and proceeds to relate the story the old man tells complete in slave dialect. The collection starts off with what is probably the second most cohesive display of the Chesnutt’s brilliantly subtle method of telling a story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story to force readers to understand theme, character, literary method, irony and historical revision, bested only by his masterpiece (and one of the finest short stories in the history of American literature), “Dave’s Neckliss.” “The Goophered Grapevine” sets the template for the stories to follow as it is introduced by a white narrator who has bought the plantation where old Uncle Julius used to be a slave. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
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