page_title: African-American folktales
section_title: Slavery
hierarchical_section_title: African-American folktales / Themes / Slavery
caption_attribution_description: Book cover from The Conjure Woman, a collection of short stories written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1899.
context_page_description: African-American folktales are the storytelling and oral history of enslaved African Americans during the 1700-1900s. Many are unique to the African-American culture, while others are influenced by African, European, and Native American tales.
context_section_description: African-American tales of slavery often use rhetoric that can seem uncommon to the modern era as the language passed down through generations deviates from the standard for racial narrative. The Conjure Woman, a book of tales dealing with racial identity, was written by the African-American author, Charles W. Chesnutt, from the perspective of a freed slave.
  Chesnutt's tales represent the struggles freed slaves faced during the post-war era in the South. The author's tales provide a pensive perspective on the challenges of being left behind.
  Chesnutt's language surrounding African American folklore derived from the standards of the racial narrative of his era. By using vernacular language, Chesnutt was able to deviate from the racial norms and formulate a new, more valorized message of folk heroes.  Chesnutt writes "on the other side" of standard racial narratives, effectively refuting them by evoking a different kind of "racial project" in his fictional work.”
caption: Conjure Woman (1899)
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