In “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” the sixth story of The Conjure Woman (1900), Charles W. Chesnutt inserts a long quote from Herbert Spencer through one of his main characters. When a rainy gray and “awfully dull” afternoon finds John and Annie, the Northern couple who have moved to North Carolina, seated on the piazza of their new home, John begins to read out “with pleasure”:

The difficulty of dealing with transformations so many-sided as those which all existences have undergone, or are undergoing, is such as to make a complete and deductive interpretation almost hopeless. So to grasp the total process of redistribution of matter and motion as to see simultaneously its several necessary results in their actual interdependence is scarcely possible. There is, however, a mode of rendering the process as a whole tolerably comprehensible. Though the genesis of the rearrangement of every evolving aggregate is in itself one, it presents to our intelligence—(Conjure 80)

At this point, Annie interrupts John, bidding him to stop reading “that nonsense,” thus clearing the way for the entrance of Uncle Julius, the formerly enslaved narrator of the embedded tales that lie at the heart of Chesnutt’s stories (80). Scholars have generally taken the passage from Spencer as Chesnutt’s playfully ironic comment on John’s rationalistic frame of mind. Hemenway, for instance, reads the quotation as ironizing John’s inability “to deal with conjure as something other than the abstractions of a philosophical tract” (299), J. Peterson thinks of the episode as “a complex case of sociolinguistic irony” that pits a standard English against a vernacular treatment of the same topic (442), and Trodd suggests that the excerpt plays with “the broad philosophy behind Chesnutt’s collection” (124). While readings therefore recognize a thematic link between the “transformations” that are described in the quote and the metamorphoses at the heart of Julius’s tales, they rarely pay attention to where precisely the passage stems from. This is not surprising, considering that, while Darwin has been taken up explicitly in scholarship on Chesnutt (e.g. Bender 289–313), himself a staunch monogenist who asserted that “[b]y modern research the unity of the human race has been proved” (“The Future American” 122), Spencer has not had a prominent place so far. Thus, the above quote (without mentioning the name SpencerFootnote 1) is usually taken as a general example of Western science of the day and as an expression of John’s presumptuousness and sense of superiority over Julius, whose tales he finds quaint and entertaining but does not take seriously.

That Chesnutt chose to quote Spencer, and this passage in particular, is, however, significant for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that Chesnutt satirizes John as a Spencerian “armchair anthropologist.” When John refers to the citation and his own scientific rationality as “philosophy” (Conjure 80), a term that echoes what Spencer called his “synthetic philosophy,”Footnote 2 the scene becomes nothing less than a parody and caricature. After all, we find John lodging on a piazza (probably in an armchair) “for a quiet smoke” (80), while delighting in what sociologist Albion Small, in 1897, criticized as the popular “fashion of semi-learned [Spencerian] thought” that allowed anyone to deal, supposedly with scientific authority, with the grand questions of life in terms of evolutionism (741).Footnote 3 John’s quotation therefore represents not just any form of Western scientific rationality, but Spencerian evolutionary thought of the period, which existed, as contemporaries like Small realized, in a dubious “semi-learned” form across various discursive formations. By extension, if one takes the passage as a characterization of the one reading out aloud, the often-noted irony of the scene does not simply target John’s rationalistic frame of mind per se, but his taking a popular Spencerian perspective that is mocked as unscientific.

Secondly, therefore, not only the act of quoting as such, but the specific content of the excerpt, too, must be reassessed more carefully in its original Spencerian context and in its corresponding meaning in Chesnutt’s texts. The cited passage is taken from the chapter on “The Instability of the Homogeneous” of Spencer’s First Principles (1862), the first volume of his monumental System of Synthetic Philosophy, and expresses the idea of a universal law of evolution when it speaks of “a mode of rendering the process [of life’s development] as a whole tolerably comprehensible.” Moreover, the quote focuses on material “transformations so many-sided” and on “the redistribution of matter and motion” (Chesnutt, Conjure 80 = Spencer, Principles 401). Chesnutt’s choice of using Spencer was thus no doubt deliberate, as both share a general theme: transformations of matter. If Spencer, in “The Instability of the Homogeneous,” centrally broaches the issue of the ways in which “any homogeneous aggregation” of matter is “necessarily exposed to different forces” by which “they are of necessity differently modified,” the same is also true for Chesnutt’s stories and, in particular, Julius’s embedded narratives (Principles 404). In the tale that follows the introductory frame narrative in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” and in the embedded tales generally, it is after all Julius who unfolds before John and Annie’s, and the reader’s eyes a world where human and non-human materialities merge and metamorphose, where both are marked by what Spencer calls the “inter-dependence” between “matter and motion” (401).

Hence, Chesnutt’s quotation not only explicitly suggests that his texts can be read as parodying negotiations of Spencer’s evolutionary thought, but also highlights one of the central issues at stake in the Julius stories: transformations of different kinds of matter. The “Instability of the Homogeneous” is Spencer’s chapter title, but it is also an underlying theme of Chesnutt’s texts.Footnote 4 Chapter 7 explores this theme with respect to the transforming materiality of the black body to demonstrate that stories such as “Po’ Sandy,” “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” or “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” are expressions of African American environmental knowledge and of Chesnutt’s philosophy of epistemological relations to the material world. To this end, I employ Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality” to reveal Julius’s embedded tales as narratives of the trans-corporeality of the black body that repeat and revise the traumatic relations of the (enslaved) black body to non-human materialities. A trans-corporeal environmental knowledge thereby becomes part of Chesnutt’s vision for a turn-of-the-century African American literature and of his self-proclaimed “high, holy purpose” of writing against “the unjust spirit of cast which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation” (Journals 139). Moreover, I argue that Chesnutt articulates a philosophy of environmental knowledge by contrasting a trans-corporeal African American environmental knowledge with Spencerian evolutionary ideas of the late-nineteenth century. Chesnutt’s stories perform an “epistemological resistance” that serves not only to criticize Spencerism but also to reflect more generally on the possibilities and limits of human knowledge of non-human non-discursive materialities, which makes them highly relevant environmental texts.

The Trans-corporeal Black Body: Chesnutt’s Environmental Knowledge

While scholarship on the Julius stories has thoroughly addressed major issues such as race, space, memory, or Chesnutt’s use of the vernacular,Footnote 5 the most prominent theme has always been conjuration. Most critics have read conjuration as an expression of resistance to slavery, as “the ally of slaves whose most deeply felt emotions and relationships, whose essential dignity and human identity are threatened by the inhuman slavery system” (Andrews 59–60), whereas others have identified African roots in Chesnutt’s use of the concept.Footnote 6 Ecocritics who have turned to Chesnutt, too, have been drawn to conjuration, as a theme that shows links between the natural world and the plight of the African American population. They read conjure, for instance, as an expression of “a way of inhabitating the South that is humanly and ecologically sustainable” (Myers 7), or as involved in the repression and reworking of the (environmental) trauma of slavery (cf. Outka 103–126).Footnote 7

What such readings have tended to overlook, however, is that not all of Chesnutt’s Julius stories involve the trope of conjuration.Footnote 8 Considering the corpus of the texts as a whole, from the 1887 “The Goophered Grapevine,” the story that made Chesnutt the first African American fiction writer recognized by the white literary establishment, to the climactic publication of The Conjure Woman in 1900,Footnote 9 one also finds stories that do not feature conjure men and women bewitching the diegetic worlds they inhabit. Several stories involving Julius as storyteller, written in the 1880s and 1890s, such as “Dave’s Neckliss” (1889), “The Dumb Witness” (1897), or “Lonesome Ben” (1897), omit such characters and overtly supernatural elements, as they present exchanges and transformations between human and non-human matter. What also binds the stories together, therefore, rather than a unifying trope of conjuration, is a thematic focus on the black body as metamorphosing matter. Chesnutt’s Julius stories are not simply “conjure stories” but primarily, I want to suggest, stories of the materiality and trans-corporeality of the black body.

In Bodily Natures (2010), Stacy Alaimo employs the term “trans-corporeality” to refer to “material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world” (2). Trans-corporeality describes a “movement across bodies” and “interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures,” thus drawing attention to the porous materiality of the human body (2).Footnote 10 Such trans-corporeal “interchanges and interconnections” are central to Chesnutt’s texts, whether the trope of conjuration is involved or not. Whether characters are magically turned into birds, bears, foxes, or frogs, or transformed into “mulattoes” because they eat too much yellow clay from a riverbed, the exchanges between human and non-human matter lie at the heart of Julius’s tales. The texts therefore do not simply play with the question of the human in relation to dehumanizing discourses of race—something that was, after all, central to African American literature from its inception—but do so in a characteristic way through the theme of metamorphosing bodily matter. Chesnutt’s environmental knowledge involves a much more radical turn towards the body than that which can be seen in Washington’s disciplinary appropriation of the body of the freedman or in W.W. Brown’s trickster figures, as it writes against the environmental state of exception of a black body trans-corporealized in “a world of biological creatures, ecosystems, and xenobiotics” (115).

It is important to note that a trans-corporeal vision of the black body was in itself highly problematic for an African American writer of the late-nineteenth century like Chesnutt. Julius’s tales are therefore not simply narratives but problematizations of the trans-corporeal black body. They reveal Chesnutt’s awareness of the difficulties that lie in writing about links between African Americans and the non-human world in the post-Emancipation decades, as they draw attention to the ways in which any notion of a trans-corporeal black body was still haunted by the traumatic conflation of this body with the non-human under slavery. Although Chesnutt, as Wilson reminds us, in his writing “strove for a universal subject position that he perceived as outside of race” (xvii), he was well aware that he was speaking to several audiences. He knew, regarding the black body, that his Julius faces a legacy of discourses negotiating the status of African Americans through the signifier “nature” that had either racially othered, i.e. biologically excluded and environmentally exceptionalized the black body by equating it with non-human nature, or that had agitated against this othering by writing against biological exclusion (cf. Chap. 4). The former is the history of the long-term commodification of the black body, of the pseudo-scientific “biological” justifications of colonialism and racial slavery, and of the enslaved body’s reduction to economic capital through what Eric Sundquist has described as “the elision between human and animal, or human and ‘thing,’ in the philosophy of chattelism” (373). The latter is a discourse of abolitionism and the antebellum fugitive slave narrative that wrote against this biological exclusion of the black body and for its recognition as human. When Douglass, for example, described in his 1845 Narrative how “[m]en and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine,” he raised his voice against the processes of biological exclusion he depicts (35). Likewise, when antebellum African American pamphleteers such as Easton or Lewis invaded and “dissected” the black body to show its anatomical analogies to the white body, they followed the same basic abolitionist logic that to demonstrate a common biological humanity, while showing “that slaves were ranked with animals, was to show that slavery was unnatural” (Mason 124). Both pamphleteers’ “dissections” of the black body (cf. Chap. 4) and the urge towards hyper-separation characteristic of the fugitive slave narrative (cf. Chap. 3) were in this sense the predominant antebellum answers to the conflation of the black body with the non-human during slavery.

Chesnutt’s texts are attempts to give a new answer by repeating and revising the trans-corporeality of the black body as it emerged out of the history of slavery. This means, first, that they do not forget or omit the trauma that stems from the biological and environmental othering of the black body under the peculiar institution. On the contrary, Julius’s tales signal that a trans-corporeal vision of the black body is problematic, as they centrally recall the enslaved’s harmful conflation with the non-human that lay at the core of racial slavery. In this respect, Julius’s voice becomes a powerful instrument of reworking the trauma of slavery, and, as many have noted, a means of setting a counterpoint to the nostalgia of the popular plantation fiction of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, who romantically glossed over the atrocities of the peculiar institution with stereotypes of happy slaves and benevolent masters. Chesnutt, by contrast, presents tales set in the antebellum period that emphasize the haunting cruelties of slavery, cruelties that still complicated the representation of a trans-corporeal black body at the time he was writing. In many of Julius’s tales, therefore, black enslaved bodies, whether their trans-corporeality is emphasized through conjure or otherwise, figure as reminders of the traumatic legacy of the peculiar institution. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” “Po’ Sandy,” and “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” for instance, three of the stories included in The Conjure Woman, all enslaved characters whose bodies merge with non-human matter through conjure, are eventually harmed. In “Po’ Sandy,” the main character, who wishes to “be turnt inter sump’n w’at ‘ll stay in one place,” is transformed into a “big pine-tree” that is eventually cut down and made into lumber for the plantation’s new kitchen (Conjure 17). In “The Goophered Grapevine,” Henry unknowingly eats grapes from a bewitched vineyard, which lets his body live through the seasonal cycles of the fruit until he dies with it. Finally, in “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” Primus, after stealing a piglet, becomes the victim of a conjure man’s viciousness as he is transformed into a mule and turned back “‘cep’n’ one foot,” which leaves him a club-footed, “metamorphosed unfortunate” (28, 30, 32).

Apart from revealing the joint exploitation and destruction of the black body and non-human matter through American slavery, Julius’s tales also stress the avariciousness and immorality of masters who exploited the enslaved’s body as non-human matter. Primus is bought and sold, whether he is a man or a mule (cf. Conjure 26); Sandy remains a commodity, whether he figures in the story as (human) materiality of an enslaved who is handed around by his master’s children like a toy or as (non-human) materiality of a tree which is uprooted and turned into lumber “fer ter buil’ ‘im [his master] a noo kitchen” (19); and Henry, because of his seasonal metamorphoses, is not only repeatedly sold to other farmers as his rapacious owner realizes that “he could make mo’ money out’n Henry,” but is eventually the one who must pay the price for his master’s greed with his life (10). Chesnutt’s planters are not the benevolent patriarchs of Page and Harris, but full of avarice, and make use of the socially constructed racial demarcations, the artificial “biological-type caesuras” drawn between the human and the non-human for a single purpose: maximizing their economic profit (cf. Foucault 255).

Chesnutt presents his most drastic deconstructive statement regarding the arbitrariness of drawing demarcating lines between human and non-human matter in “Mars Jeems’ Nightmare,” the third story of The Conjure Woman. This text is remarkable for breaking with a general pattern, as “Aun’ Peggy, de free-nigger conjuh ‘oman down by de Wim’l’ton Road,” temporarily transforms a cruel master into a slave (94). While Chesnutt’s stories otherwise exclusively present transformations of black bodies into non-human animals, conjuration in this tale is used to transform a white body into a black one to teach a cruel master, Jeems McLean, a lesson. Thus, the tale can be read as an ironic comment on how arbitrary the “caesura” dividing the (white) human and the (black) non-human was, as McLean is not turned into non-human matter, as is generally the case through Chesnutt’s conjurers, but into another form of human materiality that is, however, socially constructed as non-human. The story thereby highlights Chesnutt’s general take on race as a social construction, his conviction that it was “[t]radition [that] made the white people masters, rulers, who absorbed all the power […] [and], on the other hand, made the negro a slave, an underling” (“Charles W. Chesnutt’s Own View” 5). Julius’s tale, in “Mars Jeems’ Nightmare” expands this thought into a twofold deconstructive potential of the master’s transformed body. In biopolitical terms, it points out the arbitrariness of racial distinctions; in terms of a speciesist “caesura” between the human and the non-human more generally, it involves an ecopolitics that stresses potential flows between all kinds of matter. In unsettling the “naturalness” of biopolitical, racializing “caesuras” by stressing their construction out of power struggles and economic interests, Chesnutt moreover demonstrates an awareness of the convergence of racial distinctions with distinctions between the human and the non-human. His texts are, in other words, conscious of the intertwinement between racial and environmental knowledge, and identify the roots of the trauma marking the trans-corporeality of the black body precisely within this intertwinement. Thus, the stories reveal that the combination of the peculiar institution’s claiming the black body as non-human property with the avaricious practices of the masters left African Americans with an ambivalent legacy of the trans-corporeal, in which the link between the black body and the non-human material became both a source of degradation and a potential means of resistance. Chesnutt stresses, however, that, under slavery, conjure-induced trans-corporeality provided an at best temporary or imaginary means of resistance.

The same is also true for those cases of trans-corporeality where conjuration is not involved. “Lonesome Ben,” for instance, a text first published in the Southern Workman in 1900 and predominantly read in the context of the alienation involved in a mixed race identity (cf. e.g. Sundquist, 404–406; Wonham, Chesnutt 51–55), does not feature conjure, yet shares many themes, including trans-corporeality, with other stories. Here, too, we find traditional abolitionist themes of family separations and iconic corporeal punishments, as the plot unfolds when Ben decides to run away at the threat of an imminent “cowhidin’” (Conjure 53). The black body’s trans-corporeality, in this case, however, is not expressed through the work of a conjure man, but via (mal)nutrition and digestion. As he repeatedly eats yellow clay from a riverbed, Ben turns into a lonely, “mis’able lookin’ merlatter” outcast (56), who ends up lying on the shore of the creek

‘til he died, an’ de sun beat down on ‘im, an’ beat down on ‘im, an’ beat down on ‘im fer th’ee or fo’ days, ‘til it baked ‘im as ha’d as a brick. An’ den a big win’ come erlong an’ blowed a tree down, an’ it fell on ‘im an’ smashed ‘im all ter pieces, an’ groun’ ‘im ter powder. An’ den a big rain come erlong, an’ washed ‘im in de crick, ‘an eber sence den de water in dat crick’s b’en jes’ as yer sees it now. (58–59)

By becoming first a “brick” and then a “powder” that gives the stream its peculiar color, Ben, like enslaved characters in other stories, not only turns into a commodity, but also becomes part of the traumatized landscape in which the frame narrative is set. As in those stories that involve conjuration, Chesnutt thereby presents the pain of the enslaved as permanently inscribed into the land. The Sandy-lumber, too, is still present in a small frame house, the “goophered grapevine” from which Henry once supposedly ate still exists and is bought by John, and Primus still has a clubfoot. The frame narrative, in short, is “teeming with the ghosts of dead slaves, victims of the cruelties perpetrated by the slave system,” as Kimberly Smith observes (137). Beyond unveiling the trauma of slavery against the nostalgia that prevailed in much late-nineteenth century plantation fiction, trans-corporeality therefore attains an additional crucial function in Chesnutt’s texts, namely that of creating the landscape itself as a body that remembers. Julius’s narratives of the trans-corporeal black body act against the nostalgic forgetfulness of a post-Reconstruction plantation pastoral not only by recalling the lasting trauma of slavery that resided in the antebellum links between the black body and the non-human, but also by employing the trans-corporeality of the black body to create material monuments against forgetting the enslaved’s fate.

While the Julius stories thus problematize an African American vision of trans-corporeality, they are at the same time attempts to renegotiate the meaning of the material relations of the black body. On the one hand, Chesnutt repeats the harmful conflation of the black body with the non-human under slavery and creates a monument to the interconnected humanity of those who had to live through it. On the other hand, however, the texts go beyond recalling the victimization as well as the potential of (temporary) resistance inscribed into formerly enslaved bodies and the land, as they articulate an environmental knowledge that involves a revised, more positive version of the trans-corporeality of the black body. This may be seen, first, in the ways in which Julius’s tales suggest an intimate local knowledge and an empowering emotional attachment of African Americans to the land, and, second, in Julius’s role as a co-narrator of the land in the frame narratives.

To begin, there is the idea that enslaved blacks possess an intimate and empowering local knowledge of the non-human non-discursive material world, a knowledge rooted in both plantation space and the wilderness beyond. In “Po’ Sandy,” for instance, only the enslaved realize a change in the environs after Sandy is transformed into a part of the landscape surrounding the plantation. Only they know the forest well enough to recognize “a tree w’at dey did n’ ‘member er habbin’ seed befo’; it wuz monst’us square, en dey wuz bleedst ter ‘low dat dey had n’ ‘membered right, er e’se one er de saplin’s had be’n growin’ monst’us fas’” (Conjure 17). Chesnutt’s conjure men and women, too, can be read as emblems of an intimate African American knowledge of non-human nature. They employ birds and other animals as spies and allies, or make use of storms or floods, thus representing their power as one based on the collaboration between the human and the non-human rather than merely the domination of the former over the latter. Moreover, the character of Julius himself at times betrays an intimate African American local knowledge of the non-human world. In “Hot-Foot Hannibal,” for example, the last story of The Conjure Woman, Julius and the mare Lucy team up as tricksters to settle a quarrel between Annie’s visiting sister Mabel and her lover, the young Southerner Malcolm Murchison. Here, it is not so much Julius’s tale, but the manner in which he places it in the framing story that reveals his intimate local environmental knowledge. As John, Annie, and Mabel take a “drive to a neighbour’s vineyard,” Julius arranges a meeting between the estranged couple by organizing a delay and detour seemingly caused by Lucy’s disobedience (121). That they have to stop “about half-way” to their destination and take another route, supposedly due to the mare’s fear of a haunt roaming the land, has two effects. First, it places Julius in the position to tell his story, which subversively urges Mable to re-join her bonds with Malcolm and, secondly, arranges the two temporally estranged lovers’ meeting on the alternative route that the party have to take. Julius’s tricksterism therefore significantly involves a non-human agent, Lucy, who apparently joins him in his scheme. Although he alleges that the otherwise compliant mare’s disobedience is “a cu’ous thing ter me,” one is convinced by the end, that she has been involved in his plan all along in ways the reader is not allowed to decipher. Through Julius’s conspiring with Lucy, both together achieve the reunion of the couple, who are eventually “walking arm in arm” again (130). In such instances, Chesnutt expresses an idea that also runs through W.W. Brown and B.T. Washington. Like the former, who repeatedly suggested the enslaved’s agrarian knowledge of the land (cf. Chap. 5), and the latter, who claimed that black freedmen by going through the “school of slavery” could work out an African American georgic (cf. Chap. 6), Chesnutt, too, implies an intimate and empowering local environmental knowledge of African Americans as experts of the land.

Moreover, Julius’s narratives of the trans-corporeal black body suggest an emotional attachment of African Americans to the land that could secure survival under the peculiar institution. This attachment involves a way of reading and understanding the non-human world that differs from a Washingtonian georgic vision that focuses primarily on the agrarian usefulness of the land, as it endows the surroundings with spiritual meaning. Moments in which reading non-human non-discursive materialities in a particular way provides an empowering emotional attachment can be found, for example, in “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” another story written specifically for The Conjure Woman. Once again, Julius’s tale begins by recalling the traumatic conflation of the black body with the non-human: an enslaved woman, Becky, is traded by her master for a race horse named “Lightnin’ Bug,” and separated from her child, little Moses (cf. Conjure 104–105). In the course of the story, however, the work of a conjure woman is exceptionally successful in reuniting mother and son, in part because the mother is able to find an emotional attachment to non-human matter that helps her survive. When Moses is turned into a “hummin’-bird” and flies to Becky’s far-off plantation, the text describes how the mother is able to hear “sump’n hummin’ roun’ en roun’ her, sweet en low. Fus’ she ‘lowed it wuz a hummin’-bird; den she thought it sounded lack her little Mose croonin’ on her breas’ way back yander on de ole plantation” (107). Subsequently, when he is turned into a “mawkin’-bird,” she feels him “stayin’ roun’ de house all day, en bimeby Sis’ Becky des ‘magine’ dat mawkin’-bird wuz her little Mose crowin’ en crowin’, des lack he useter do w’en his mammy would come home at night fum de cottonfiel’” (107). In such moments, Becky’s ability to find a connection to the non-human non-discursive material world through her senses and her imagination in a way that acknowledges a spiritual presence in non-human nature allows her the emotional solace necessary to endure her hardships. It is not important at this point that this involves superstition and not rationally acceptable knowledge, since, Chesnutt’s story suggests, her form of knowledge has a true effect—something that Annie realizes, too, when she empathically remarks after Julius has finished his tale that “the story bears the stamp of truth, if ever a story did” (110). The text as a whole thus self-reflexively celebrates the empowering potential that lies in imagining the black body as trans-corporeal, and simultaneously signifies on what I have called, in the context of the Underground Railroad, a “hermeneutics of freedom” (cf. Chap. 2). Chesnutt’s story echoes this process of finding meaning and spiritual solace in the “book of nature,” but combines the idea with imagining a trans-corporeal black body.

Ultimately, “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny” furthermore hints at the lasting strength that African Americans may draw from imagining a trans-corporealized bond of the black body with non-human non-discursive material surroundings. In the end, Moses, having been turned into a variety of birds,

could sing en whistle des lack a mawkin’-bird, so dat de w’ite folks useter hab ‘im come up ter de big house at night, en whistle en sing fer ‘em, en dey useter gib’ ‘im money en vittles’, en one thing er ernudder, w’ich he alluz tuk home ter his mammy; fer he knowed all ‘bout w’at she had gone th’oo. (Conjure 110)

Here, Chesnutt suggests that connecting spiritually to non-human matter has an empowering potential and offers a more permanent means of survival. Moses, through his temporary transformation, has acquired skills and gained character traits that, to some extent, alleviate his fairing under slavery. If taken at face value, Chesnutt’s suggestion at this point is no doubt radical, as it emphasizes through Julius’s tales a fluidity not only of matter but also of knowledge through matter. The embedded tales repeatedly express this notion by presenting more than merely bodily traits that persist between human and non-human forms of matter. Primus, for example, in “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” continues to have a fondness of tobacco and wine, whether he is a mule or a man, and—as a mule—tries to fend off the advances of another suitor of his wife (cf. 26–28). Likewise, Tobe’s desultoriness in wanting “ter git free too easy” in “Tobe’s Tribulations” is also visible while he is transformed into a bear, a fox, or a bull-frog (115, cf. 116–119). Although the outcome of this fluidity of knowledge and character traits across different forms of matter therefore rarely has effects that are as beneficent as in the case of “Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” such moments highlight Chesnutt’s revision of the problematic trans-corporeal relation of the black body to non-human non-discursive materialities. Representing more than merely anthropomorphizations of animals, the characteristic fluidity of Chesnutt’s notion of trans-corporeality expressed through Julius’s tales involves transmissions of knowledge from human to non-human matter and vice versa. If one follows this thought through, the implication is that all materialities, whether human or not, remember, know, and live in an interconnected way. Taken less literally, however, it may also be read as another assault on the biopolitical, simultaneously racializing and speciesist “caesura” between the human and the non-human. In this respect, Chesnutt’s trans-corporeal environmental knowledge proposes the empowering potential that can lie in a co-agency of the human and the non-human, which may be acted out if African Americans recognize not only the trauma but also the strengths that lie in their intimate local knowledge and in their emotional attachment to the non-human non-discursive material world.

Such a co-agency between human and non-human materialities is also represented through Julius’s relation to the land in the frame narrative. The empowering potential of Chesnutt’s trans-corporeal environmental knowledge becomes visible not only in the embedded tales, but also in their interaction with the frame narrative that involves Julius, John, and Annie. As noted, Chesnutt’s texts turn the landscape into a locus of memory.Footnote 11 Beyond connecting the antebellum diegetic world of Julius’s tales with that of the frame narratives, however, the land also marks Julius’s own trans-corporeality within the act of narration. The texts suggest that a common knowledge resides in Julius and the land itself, and that both join in relating the stories that Julius turns into intelligible discourse. Thus, he emerges in the frame narratives not simply as an inventor of stories, but as an interpreter of a memory and knowledge shared by the trans-corporeal black body and the non-human materiality of the land, which becomes a co-agent in the narrative process.

Evidence of this can be found when considering how phenomena such as changes in the weather or the sensual experience of the surroundings in the frame narrative correspond with Julius’s tales. In “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” for instance, after Julius has told his story of two lovers, Mahaly and Dan, and the malignant work of a conjurer that leads to the permanent transformation of the latter into a wolf who supposedly stays around Mahaly’s grave “howlin’ en howlin’ down dere” in the swamp (Conjure 89), the frame narrative ends with a gothic moment:

The air had darkened while the old man related this harrowing tale. The rising wind whistled around the eaves, slammed the loose window-shutters, and, still increasing, drove the rain in fiercer gusts into the piazza. As Julius finished his story and we rose to seek shelter within doors, the blast caught the angle of some chimney or gabel in the rear of the house, and bore to our ears a long, wailing note, an epitome, as it were, of remorse and hopelessness. (89)

Julius’s response may not come as a surprise. He reads this “long, wailing note” in the context of his own story: “Dat’s des lack po’ ole Dan useter howl” (89). Connecting the storm, a non-human material phenomenon, with his tale, he interprets a facet of the land as a form of communication that he translates into a language intelligible for his listeners and Chesnutt’s readers. The question here and in other tales is not so much whether we believe in the tale as such and, in this case, its supernatural elements; whether we dismiss it as superstition or celebrate an ethos of resistance of the enslaved expressed through conjure. Instead, the point is that Chesnutt presents Julius as a skilful interpreter of non-human material phenomena. He reveals his storyteller not only as possessing a particular local knowledge of the land, but also places him in a relation of co-agency with the non-human materialities within the act of narration. As Julius opens up the memory of slavery as the concealed knowledge of the land, African American environmental knowledge becomes visible, in Chesnutt, as a knowledge of interpretation.

Similar observations can be made regarding “Tobe’s Tribulations” and “Lonesome Ben.” The former presents Julius’s tale about Tobe, who attempts to escape slavery with the help of a conjure woman, but ends up permanently transformed into a frog in a marsh that John, in the framing story, plans to use as a “food-supply” (Conjure 112). The non-human phenomenon Julius interprets in this case is Tobe’s supposed lament among the nightly “chorus from the distant frog-pond,” which, according to his tale, is a remnant of the peculiar institution (112). Here, too, the landscape is revealed as remembering, “knowing,” and expressing the traumatic experience of the black body. As he relates his tale and connects his narrative with the non-human material, Julius and the land become co-agents in telling the same story. Both the bullfrog’s cry and the human voice and body of the former enslaved are presented as spiritually invested matter that creates meaning in a reciprocal process fundamental to Chesnutt’s environmental knowledge, in which Julius and the land do not simply share memory but become co-narrators. In this way, Chesnutt’s environmental knowledge becomes highly self-reflexive, as it emphasizes how the land shapes the production of a human environmental knowledge, and how human interpretations and narratives, in turn, shape relations to the land. As both the body of the former enslaved and the body of the land link two timeframes and levels of narration, the stories suggest more generally that the ways in which we read rain, thunder, the sound of frogs, or other natural phenomena, and the ways in which we narrate this shape our relation to non-human non-discursive material environs.

“Lonesome Ben,” the story in which the clay-eating Ben pines away and eventually dies, being transformed first into a brick and then into a powder that supposedly gives a creek’s water its peculiar hue, further demonstrates Julius’s role as co-narrator of the land. Julius’s tale is not just a fanciful attempt to explain the color of the stream, which has “an amber tint to which the sand and clay background of the bed of the stream imparted an even yellower hue” (Conjure 55). Rather, the materiality of the water itself becomes the representation of a trans-corporeal memory and knowledge that connects the narrative levels of the story; Julius’s explanation stresses the lasting effects of interactions between different kinds of matter, human and non-human, that once made the water “yaller lak it is now” (55). Just like human constructions such as the frame house that is supposedly built out of Sandy’s lumber, or non-human material phenomena such as thunderstorms or the croaking of bullfrogs, the coloring of the stream, too, functions as a way of revealing the land as a memorizing trans-corporeal entity, the meanings of which can be co-narrated through narrators like Julius.

Trans-corporeality is therefore crucial to Chesnutt’s stories in two main ways. On the one hand, Julius’s embedded tales are narratives of the trans-corporeal black body that reveal the black body’s relation to the non-human material as simultaneously haunted and empowering. On the other hand, the act of narrating the tales itself marks Julius’s own trans-corporeal relation to the materiality of the land, a relation in which both matter and knowledge appear fluid. Chesnutt, in this way, articulates African American environmental knowledge as a knowledge that realizes its own perspective in a world of uncertainties—a knowledge that self-consciously implies that any attempt to relate a story of the land is at the same time a means of relating to the land. Since, as Julius suggests, “dey ain’ no tellin’ w’at ‘s gwine ter happen in dis worl’,” the process of narration itself becomes essential to Chesnutt’s environmental knowledge (Conjure 18). In this respect, Chesnutt’s trans-corporeal environmental knowledge can be understood as tied to his broader political strategies—his “high, holy purpose” of writing against racialization—as well as his ideas about storytelling. Whether with respect to settings that first enable articulations of memories, of interconnections between these and his black characters, or in terms of co-agencies within narrative processes, the non-human non-discursive material world is vital to Chesnutt’s stories. His texts’ environmental dimensions are therefore a significant part of his idea of educating whilst entertaining, of his subtle, refined, and indirect tactics of “amusing them [the (white) public mind] to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling” (Journals 140).

Reading the Julius stories in this way not only highlights their importance in the history of African American environmental knowledge, but also reveals Chesnutt as a far-sighted environmental writer. He is not just “strikingly modern” with respect to his views on race as a social and linguistic construction (cf. McWilliams ix), but also intriguing as a theorist of a racially shaped history of the American environmental imagination, who provides, with the Julius stories, significant “environmental texts” (L. Buell). With respect to the tradition of African American environmental knowledge more specifically, the stories’ vital contribution lies in moving from writing against biological exclusion to writing against an environmental state of exception. They refrain from repeating the slave narratives’ urge towards hyper-separation and do not reiterate antebellum pamphleteers’ move inside the body to argue for a sameness of the black body on “biological” or “anatomical” grounds, and strive instead toward trans-corporealizing the black body as a means of overcoming its racially produced state of exclusion and exception. Although the texts acknowledge the problems of a trans-corporeal vision of the black body, building literary monuments to the enslaved who were harmed by the conflation of their bodies with the non-human, they environmentalize the body in a way that neither romanticizes the relation between African Americans and the non-human through a sentimental or picturesque discourse of nature nor interprets that relation as one of a mere georgic usefulness. Instead, Chesnutt trans-corporealizes in a more fundamental way that seeks to show the power that lies in imagining and narrating the black body in its interconnectedness with non-human non-discursive materialities.

Epistemological Resistance: Chesnutt’s Philosophy of Environmental Knowledge

Chesnutt’s trans-corporeal environmental knowledge is not only a vital part of his narrative technique in the Julius stories, but also a component of what William Andrews describes as his broader political vision and strategy “to accustom the public mind gradually to the idea of Afro-American recognition and equality” (14). Therefore, the following examines one of the ways in which his environmental knowledge, too, subversively interacted with discourses of his time, by enabling a broader philosophical critique of Spencerism. Chesnutt, as aspiring, light-skinned African American writer of the turn of the century, held a deep belief in “the unity of the human race” (“The Future American” 122) and explicitly engaged, as the quote from the beginning of this chapter suggests, in reflecting on Spencer’s philosophy, which may therefore be read as potential context for his stories. His philosophy of environmental knowledge is part of his strategy to write “not so much [for] the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites” (Journals 139), and becomes a means of signifying on Spencerian thought (which also involves certain forms of trans-corporeality) and reflecting on narration, knowledge, and interpretation.

In this context, it is vital to note first that a trans-corporeal African American environmental knowledge is not the only form of environmental knowledge (in a broad sense) presented in the Julius stories. Another, competing knowledge of the human in its non-human non-discursive material conditions negotiated through the texts is that of evolutionary thought or, more precisely, as Chesnutt’s quote in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” explicitly suggests, of Spencer’s “synthetic philosophy.” Unlike Darwin’s Origin of Species, Spencer’s extensive writing, comprising his multi-volume Synthetic Philosophy and numerous books and essays published from the 1840s on, focused primarily on human society. Calling Spencer “the apostle of social Darwinism” is therefore misleading, since his central framework was not that of Darwinian biology, but one that employed biology indiscriminately as a metaphor to articulate a biopolitical vision that imagined the social body itself as “naturally,” quasi organically evolving towards perfection (Gould 146, emphasis mine). His major concepts, including “the survival of the fittest” and the notion of a society’s tending towards an ultimately purified state of “equilibration,” broadly influenced U.S. discourse and were popular at the time Chesnutt was writing; they fit a late-nineteenth-century American view of society that involved a tradition of biologizing conceptions of race. At the heart of Spencer’s “philosophy” lay his conviction that evolution was the driving force within human societies and not just what had first brought about humankind as a whole. Furthermore, there was his concomitant unwavering belief in the inevitability of progress in human societies as something that was “naturally” guaranteed. Progress was

not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artefact, it is part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness. […] So surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect. (Social Statics 80)

Exhibiting a Lamarckian optimism,Footnote 12 Spencer thinks of social evolution not simply as a biological process but as progress from an unordered, chaotic state of savagery or barbarism towards ever more complex stages of civilization. In this respect, he epitomizes central notions of U.S. evolutionary thought outlined in the last chapter, such as the idea of a developmental difference in simultaneously existing human (racial) groups, and of a hierarchical trajectory as an adequate way of describing the relation between these groups (cf. Chap. 6).

Furthermore, Spencer “naturalized” societies as “organisms” that tended towards perfection; he conceives different racial groups in terms of body parts that were either beneficent to or holding back the progress of a social body as a whole. There were, according to this view, elements of society that had been evolutionarily left behind, that were yet in “lower,” child-like stages of (social) evolution and that would ultimately perish if they did not evolve, since society had to progress towards ever more perfect forms of civilization. Spencer’s evolutionary scale was, as Jackson and Weidman point out, “a unilinear one. Mankind was a unity, not because all human beings were the same, but because the different human groups stood at different steps in the same process” (80). Even if this did not necessarily imply taking active measures against those allegedly “deficient” elements of the social body that were supposedly evolutionarily left behind in the way the eugenics movement proposed, it provided, for Spencer and many of his American followers, a justification of laissez-faire policies that included opposition e.g. to public education or sanitation laws. In order to evolve, it was deemed essential for the social body to “excret[e] its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members to leave room for the deserving” by letting “nature” take its course (Spencer, Social Statics 355). In the late-nineteenth century U.S., Spencer’s “synthetic philosophy” thus lent a cold and cynical “scientific” rationale to explicitly racist policies, as it suggested that the “poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong […] are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence” (354).

If this was the kind of evolutionary thought that Chesnutt alluded to by quoting Spencer, the more specific idea he invited his readers to take into account in relation to his own views was Spencer’s take on transformations of matter. The part of First Principles from which the quote in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” stems is concerned, as I have pointed out in the beginning of this chapter, with how matter rearranges itself over long stretches of time in accordance with the law of evolution. On the one hand, Spencer suggests that all matter evolves and metamorphoses, that therefore “the condition of homogeneity is a condition of unstable equilibrium,” and that “to grasp the process of redistribution of matter and motion […] is scarcely possible.” On the other hand, he simultaneously puts forward that “the process as a whole [is] tolerably comprehensible” through evolution as the all-embracing, “natural” law of progress (Principles 401). His deductive reasoning is based on the premise that

Nature in its infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development. Each successive result becomes the parent of an additional influence, destined in some degree to modify all future results. […] As we turn over the leaves of the earth’s primeval history […], we find this same ever-beginning, never-ceasing change. We see it alike in the organic and the inorganic—in the decompositions and recombinations of matter, and in the constantly-varying forms of animal and vegetable life. […] With an altering atmosphere, and a decreasing temperature, land and sea perpetually bring forth fresh races of insects, plants, and animals. All things are metamorphosed […]. (Social Statics 45)

He goes on to suggest that the same is also true for humankind, since “[s]trange indeed would it be, if, in the midst of this universal mutation, man alone were constant, unchangeable. But it is not so. He also obeys the law of indefinite variation. His circumstances are ever changing; and he is ever adapting himself to them” (46). In this respect, Spencer’s evolutionary thought itself can be read as involving a concept of trans-corporeality based on the notion that “[a]ll things are metamorphosed” (45). His idea of the “material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world” (Alaimo 2), however, is a harmful one that racializes social bodies through biological metaphors, suggests changes only over extensive periods, and premises an inevitable progress towards perfection.

In this context, the Julius stories, beyond introducing a trans-corporeal vision of the black body, engage in what I want to term an “epistemological resistance.” As Chesnutt’s philosophy of environmental knowledge, epistemological resistance in the Julius stories works in two senses. In one sense, and more profanely, the texts epistemologically resist by satirizing Spencer’s philosophy, primarily through the character constellation in the frame narrative. In another, they provide a more radical, deconstructive critique of the possibilities and limits of a human knowledge of the non-human non-discursive material as such.

The character constellation of the framing story that involves Julius, John and Annie not only allows Chesnutt to play with a range of possible responses to Julius’s reminiscences that correspond with those from the various audiences he imagined for his texts,Footnote 13 but also to juxtapose competing epistemologies. The triumvirate who convene on piazzas and in carriages in a diegetic North Carolina to discuss Julius’s tales has usually been read as involving two opposing poles, John and Julius, with John’s wife Annie covering an alternative, middle ground. The constellation centrally involves, as Hemenway points out, a “tension between John and Julius [that] is the tension between two systems of thought which operate throughout The Conjure Woman” (298).Footnote 14 This basic pattern is significant with respect to Chesnutt’s epistemological resistance, if one identifies Julius as representative of a trans-corporeal vision of African American environmental knowledge, and John as a representative of Spencer’s evolutionary thought. Not just in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” but throughout the stories, John is depicted as an evolutionist. He stands for a “scientific” Western perspective, as his responses to Julius’s tales as “absurdly impossible yarn” and as “plantation legend[s]” reveal, is sometimes aligned with an exploitative attitude reminiscent of the slaveholders of Julius’s tales, and represents characteristically Spencerian ideas (cf. Conjure 22, 24). In “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny,” for instance, John proclaims, after Julius exposes his belief in a “rabbit-foot,” that “your people will never rise in the world until they throw off these childish superstitions and learn to live by the light of reason and common sense,” thus echoing the notion of a child-stage to describe supposedly evolutionarily less developed groups (103). Similarly, he views him, in “Tobe’s Tribulations,” as someone who “had seen life from what was to us a new point of view—from the bottom, as it were” (113, emphasis mine), and, in “Dave’s Neckliss,” refers to “his curiously undeveloped nature [that] was subject to moods which were almost childish in their variableness” (33). John primarily thinks of Julius in a Spencerian way as exhibiting the “intellectual traits of the uncivilized,” in the sense of “traits recurring in the children of the civilized” (Spencer, Sociology 89–90, qtd. Gould 146). The African American storyteller, although seen as quaint and entertaining, is frequently reduced, from John’s perspective, to a specimen of a left-behind “Negro intellect” (Conjure 113). He stands for those supposedly at “the bottom, as it were,” of an evolutionary trajectory that should in time progress towards “the light of reason and common sense” (113, 103).

As John represents Spencerian evolutionary thought, ridiculing him on the level of the frame narrative becomes at the same time Chesnutt’s way of satirizing Spencer’s ideas and epistemologies. John is mocked not only when he is depicted as an “armchair anthropologist” in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” but also through Julius’s repeated trickster schemes. As one of those memorable Chesnuttean “confidence men” who are sometimes “shown to be the equal, often more than a match for his once-superior victim,” Julius often subversively fools his Northern listeners, especially John, as he frequently pursues more profane goals through telling his tales (Andrews 15).Footnote 15 In “Po’ Sandy,” for example, one purpose of relating the story about an enslaved turned into lumber that has supposedly been worked into the “old schoolhouse,” is to scare off Annie from using this lumber for her new kitchen, so that the building may be used as a new meeting place for Julius’s Baptist congregation (Conjure 22). In “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” the practical goal of Julius’s storytelling is to conceal his beekeeping enterprise in the “neck of woods down by the swamp” that John plans to clear (81); in “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” one effect of recalling a harsh master’s punishment is that John lets a non-satisfying servant recommended by Julius keep his position; and in the first story of The Conjure Woman, Julius’s tale aims at preventing John from buying the vineyard in the first place, since he had “derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines” (13). That John is, to some extent, aware of Julius’s ulterior motives, but seems benevolent enough to let it pass, does not mean that he escapes a mockery that, at the same time, ironizes his arrogant Spencerism. Although he claims to recognize, from the start, “a shrewdness in his [Julius’s] eyes […] which, as we afterwards learned from experience, was indicative of a corresponding shrewdness in his character” (6), he is drawn into—and sometimes loses—in the power plays acted out through Julius’s storytelling.

If Chesnutt’s stories urge readers to beware of one-sided visions of the power plays, the strategic games that are acted out in the texts between John and Julius are also crucial for Chesnutt’s philosophy of environmental knowledge. In this respect, the two characters are a means of juxtaposing two forms of environmental knowledge, and enable Chesnutt to express epistemological resistance against evolutionary thought. Not only are there opposing ethical views towards the land in the sense of “mastery” (John) versus “kinship” (Julius), or a racism on the part of John that involves “viewing Julius as part of the farm,” as other ecocritical readings have suggested (cf. Myers 8; Outka 108). Moreover, the stories epistemologically resist Spencerian discourse, as may be seen, for instance, in “The Conjurer’s Revenge.” The framing story of this text, like many others, begins with John’s proposal of a new scheme for making economic profit off the land. His plan is to “set[…] out scuppernong vines on that sand-hill, where the three persimmon-trees are,” a task for which he intends to acquire a mule, because it “can do more work, and doesn’t require as much attention as a horse” (Conjure 23, 24). Julius, in turn, playing with John’s practical mind, argues for a horse as the more useful “creetur” and seeks to lend weight to this claim with his tale about the club-footed Primus, a formerly enslaved worker on the plantation who supposedly “was oncet a mule” (24). Even as the skeptical John, in this case, is backed up by his wife, who finds that Julius’s story is plain “nonsense” (31), the storyteller proposes that he is “tellin’ nuffin but de truf”—and a useful and strategic if not factual truth his tale provides, if measured along the outcome of Julius’s deeper scheme (31). The tale, in conjunction with his casual mention that he “knows a man w’at’s got a good hoss he wants ter sell” is most effective, as John eventually buys a “very fine-looking” but defective horse instead of a mule, and Julius, apparently deeply involved in the bargain, gains a “new suit of store clothes” (31, 32).

The story, apart from presenting Julius’s skills as a trickster, is revealing as an instance of Chesnutt’s strategies of epistemological resistance. To see this, consider the relation between John’s Spencerian evolutionary thought and Julius’s African American environmental knowledge as a play with their competing ideas about transformations of matter. “The Conjurer’s Revenge” both satirizes Spencerism and problematizes a knowledge of non-human non-discursive materialities in general by showing that absolute truth about such materialities will ultimately remain inaccessible to human sensual experience (in this case primarily vision), whether through John’s supposedly objective, scientific, rational eye, or through Julius’s view on the non-human world.

In a first sense, the story epistemologically resists by mocking John’s abstract and deductive evolutionary thought. The fact that John does “remember seeing” Primus, the man with the clubfoot that is invested with a deeper meaning through Julius’s tale, but does not believe in the storyteller’s explanation, demonstrates his skepticism towards the deeper meaning of matter (Conjure 24, emphasis mine). This is, of course, justified, as Julius’s tale is highly unlikely from a rational perspective, and something few readers, back then or today, would take seriously as a factual truth, especially since it explicitly involves conjuration. However, the story at the same time exposes the hypocrisy of a rational Spencerian perspective John adopts, when it presents his being fooled into buying a sick horse. On the one hand, John sees Primus’s clubfoot yet does not believe in the trans-corporealizing knowledge that attributes meaning to this phenomenon. On the other hand, he also sees and buys yet does not believe in the sickness of a horse, which “appeared sound and gentle” and “very fine-looking” but turns out to be blind and has “developed most of the diseases that horse-flesh is heir to” (31–32). The process of being tricked into buying a sick horse thus turns into a mockery of his deductive logic, which abstractly assumes and deductively reasons, but does not necessarily arrive at a meaning of matter, whether in the case of Primus’s clubfoot or in the case of the horse. John professes to theorize about material “transformations so many-sided” yet his theory does not grasp a true meaning of the non-human non-discursive material world when it is right in front of him. No matter how rationally justified and commonsensical his rejection of Julius’s tale may be, the process itself of evaluating the material on the basis of abstract rationality as well as visual perception is therefore radically criticized. Chesnutt’s text reveals the flaws, arrogance, and blindness of a deductive Spencerian evolutionism, which it unmasks as epistemologically unreliable.

Beyond offering another example of Chesnutt’s mocking of John’s abstract Spencerism, however, the story also exposes a more radical form of epistemological resistance by pointing out that Julius and John make precisely the same mistake concerning epistemological processes. After he has told his tale, Julius begins disputing the idea that the earth is moving around the sun. He claims that “I sees de yeath stan’in still all de time, en I sees de sun gwine roun’ it, en ef a man can’t b’lieve w’at ‘e sees, I can’t see no use in libbin’—mought ‘s well die en be whar we can’t see nuffin” (Conjure 31). Thereby, he expresses a notion that not only goes against John’s scientific knowledge, but also exhibits the same simple but flawed logic John applies to Primus’s clubfoot and the horse. Julius, too, attempts to arrive at a true knowledge of the non-human non-discursive material through sensual, visual experience, suggesting that it must be possible to “b’lieve w’at ‘e [a man] sees” (31). Therefore, as Julius cannot disproof that the earth is moving at the moment in which he makes his statement, and John cannot disproof conclusively, in Chesnutt’s fictional world, that Primus was not indeed “oncet a mule,” Chesnutt reveals that both forms of knowledge are prone to the same ultimate failure. Both epistemologies eventually rely on belief and produce, as discourse, a fractured knowledge but never deliver ultimate truths. If a first form of epistemological resistance lies in the ways in which Chesnutt’s texts mock the established “science” of Spencerism, a second one becomes visible at this point, in a broader, deconstructive critique of human knowledge of the non-human non-discursive material world as such. When John, at the end of “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” laments the “deceitfulness of appearances,” the story arrives at the core of both Julius’s mocking of John and of this fundamental critique of the possibility and limits of an environmental knowledge in general (31).

Chesnutt’s radical epistemological resistance involves not only, as in “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” a deconstruction of the link between supposedly true knowledge and (visual) perception, but also figures more generally in the changing representations of the trans-corporeal black body throughout the stories. In this respect, recall my proposal that these texts should not simply be understood as “conjure stories” but as “stories of the trans-corporeal black body.” The majority of transformations through conjuration, on the one hand, may be clearly differentiated from Spencerian transformations of matter. John’s character allows readers to adopt a logic that justifies belief in evolutionary notions of trans-corporeality while rejecting the magical forms of trans-corporeality involved in conjuration, since the former supposedly involve long stretches of time while the latter seems scientifically impossible as happening within seconds. The magic of conjuration or “goopher” does to human and non-human matter in the blink of an eye what, according to evolutionism, might happen only over extensive stretches of time across generations of living species. Where Spencer, in his idea of evolving societies, emphasized the “unchanging habits” and the “greater rigidity of custom” that marked certain (racialized) human groups and that he saw as proof of a slow progress of evolution (qtd. Jackson and Weidman 81), Julius’s metamorphoses of man into non-human materialities and back require only that a conjure man or woman begins, in an instance, to “work their roots.” With respect to transformations through conjure, one may therefore discern clear boundaries between the two epistemological models. Readers are offered, in other words, a seemingly solid ground through John’s rational perspective in those moments in which the trans-corporeality of the black body is expressed through “goopher.”

In those cases where the trans-corporeality of the black body does not involve conjure, on the other hand, the question of metamorphosing matter becomes much more ambivalent. In such moments, Chesnutt’s texts cunningly deconstruct a fundamental epistemological ground. A story like “Lonesome Ben,” for instance, does not involve magic, but nonetheless interacts with the concept of conjuration present in the majority of the stories through a shared notion of trans-corporeality. The text crucially presents not only Julius’s tale about how poor, lonesome Ben is transformed through (mal)nutrition and digestion, but also depicts bodies in the frame narrative that are physically metamorphosed by the same process. The inhabitants of the neighborhood are “of a rather sickly hue,” and John and Annie, during a carriage ride, see with their own eyes the trans-corporeal changes Julius problematizes with respect to Ben (Conjure 51). As they observe “a greater sallowness among both the colored people and the poor whites thereabouts than the hygienic conditions of the neighbourhood seemed to justify” (51), and witness how a “white woman wearing a homespun dress and slat-bonnet” gathers a “lump of clay in her pocket with a shame-faced look” for later consumption (52), they can experience and verify a trans-corporeality of the black body.

Reading this scene in the larger context of Chesnutt’s stories of the trans-corporeal black body makes clear that his radical epistemological resistance also plays out precisely through the tension that exists across the texts between the trans-corporealizations of black bodies through conjuration and those through other means. That bodies are trans-corporeal entities that interact with their surroundings, none of the characters in the frame narrative disputes. In fact, the idea is a premise for the set-up of the stories in the first place, since readers learn, in the beginning of the lead story that the reason for John and Annie’s moving to North Carolina is that Annie “was in poor health” and needed “a change of climate” (Conjure 3). In this sense, the possibility of trans-corporeal relations of human bodies is the very cause for the existence of the stories as such. It is the skeptical John, who acknowledges that “[t]he ozone-laden air of the surrounding piney woods, the mild and equable climate, the peaceful leisure of country life, had brought about in hopeful measure the cure we had anticipated” (102). What is problematized by Chesnutt is the truth-value of a human knowledge of the non-human non-discursive material—whether this means the truth-value of evolutionary or African American environmental knowledge. Although the texts do not categorically deny the usefulness or effectiveness of such knowledge, they refrain from suggesting any kind of capital-T-Truth.

In this regard, Chesnutt’s philosophy of environmental knowledge points out the arrogance of any deductive interpretation of the non-human non-discursive material world. The prime example of such an interpretation is, of course, a Spencerian evolutionary thought that, on the one hand, claims that grasping “the total process of redistribution of matter and motion […] is scarcely possible,” yet, on the other hand, proposes to know “a mode of rendering the process as a whole tolerably comprehensible” (Chesnutt, Conjure 80 = Spencer, Principles 401). Thus, it is enlightening to return once more to Chesnutt’s quote from Spencer and especially to Annie’s key role as the character who cuts off both Julius’s and John’s arguments. She uses the same word, “nonsense,” to interrupt Julius’s tale in “The Conjurer’s Revenge” (Conjure 31), and John’s recitation of Spencer in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” (80). It is crucial how and where the latter happens, namely in the middle of the quoted sentence that begins: “Though the genesis of the rearrangement of every evolving aggregate is in itself one, it presents to our intelligence–” (80). Beyond its obvious mocking of Spencer’s “synthetic philosophy,” the act of interrupting is significant as it marks the scene as a moment of Chesnutt’s self-conscious reflection on his own environmental knowledge. This becomes clear when considering how the interrupted line may go on. While Selinger suggests that “we can in fact finish John’s paragraph in quite a satisfactory fashion” with the words “an appearance of multiplicity: a variety of histories or processes in which transformation occurs” (679), it seems more logical to trace how the passage actually finishes in a perhaps less “satisfactory” but more meaningful fashion in Spencer’s original text.Footnote 16 In First Principles, Spencer goes on: “[…] it presents to our intelligence several factors; and after interpreting the effects of each [evolving aggregate] separately, we may, by synthesis of the interpretations, form an adequate conception” (401). The part of the sentence actually (and not in a scholarly fantasy) cut off and left out in Chesnutt therefore highlights not a “variety of histories or processes in which transformation occurs” (Selinger 679), but stresses, once more, a central idea of Spencer’s philosophy. According to him, although there is an “instability of the homogeneous” that implies an impossibility of absolute interpretation of single “aggregates,” an absolute principle—evolution—from which everything derives exists, due to which “an adequate conception” and interpretation may be formed (Spencer 401).

Considering this process of interpreting “every evolving aggregate” that describes Spencer’s way of reading evolution’s work against the single representations of trans-corporeal black bodies—the “aggregates” of the Julius stories—makes clear that Chesnutt suggests a fundamental difference between his and Spencer’s modes of interpretation. Where Spencerian evolutionary thought contended to be unable to grasp the meaning of every existing particular materiality but pretended to know the ultimate, underlying “Truth” (evolution), Chesnutt cuts off ultimate truths of the materialities presented in his own tales through the changing forms of trans-corporealized black bodies. His use of conjuration in some, and of other strategies of trans-corporealizing the body in other stories unsettles the clear boundaries between the two opposing epistemologies of John and Julius, and ultimately severs an absolute truth from any form of knowledge of the human in its non-human non-discursive materialities. His philosophy of environmental knowledge does not pretend to know, in other words, a capital-T-Truth, but instead emphasizes the power of narration and interpretation within producing useful and effective, as well as harmful and destructive, forms of knowledge about human and non-human non-discursive materialities.

In conclusion, this does not mean a denial or denigration of the empowering potential of an African American environmental knowledge that Julius articulates. On the contrary, as has been seen in the first part of this chapter, the stories emphasize that imagining the black body trans-corporeally could be an important means of remembering the humanity of those harmed in so many ways by the peculiar institution. Recognizing links between the black body and the non-human world was moreover vital for recovering from the trauma of enslavement and for moving the black body out of a racially produced environmental state of exception, and could be a means of “imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step” arguing against racialization (Chesnutt, Journals 140). Yet, Chesnutt’s more abstract philosophy of environmental knowledge at the same time leaves no doubt that he does not presume that any knowledge of the human in its relation to non-human non-discursive materialities, no matter by whom it is articulated, arrives at an absolute truth; the texts “epistemologically resist” this idea that drives evolutionary thought. Just as Spencerian evolutionary thought is interrupted at a significant point mid-sentence in “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt,” significantly directly before it can introduce a principle from which an ultimate meaning of the material may be deduced, the stories as a whole highlight ruptures in a link between human knowledge and an absolute truth about the non-human non-discursive material world. Where Spencerism provides the reassuring notion that a general true principle exists (and is known), Chesnutt, via conjuration and other means, turns the black body into “epistemological quicksand.” Instead of proposing definite truths, the stories use the trans-corporeal black body to focus on the creation of environmental knowledge through narration and interpretation, thereby making it part of their articulation as well as their philosophy of environmental knowledge. Beyond using trans-corporeality to agitate against an environmental state of exception of the black body, Chesnutt therefore thoroughly problematizes the possibilities and limits of environmental knowledge as such. His stories show the perspectivalism of narratives and discourses about non-human materialities, their involvement in power struggles, and their productive as well as destructive potentials. In this sense, too, the stories are rich environmental texts that provide insights through which much may be learned, perhaps even about competing environmental narratives and epistemologies today.