Studies in American Fiction

Master Clock Time and the Antecedents of Colored People's Time

Chesnutt's stories are rife with Black characters who, suffering from want of sleep, find a means for using sleep-deprivation symptoms to their advantage. In this way, they learn to play on the racial stereotype of what eventually became known as "colored people's time" (CPT). Etymologist Barry Popik traces the emergence of the derogatory initialism CPT to 1912, while historian Mark Smith locates CPT's nonpejorative antecedents in the nineteenth-century South: "CPT is a useful shorthand to describe how African Americans as a class of laborers resisted planter-defined time during and after slavery. CPT was an intuitive intellectual and social construct serving to repudiate the demands of time-conscious southern agrarian capitalists, old and new."⁹ Chesnutt's earliest story, "The Goophered Grapevine," was written in 1887 and featured first in the Conjure collection. The story opens with John's description of the town center: "There was a red brick market-house in the public square, with a tall tower, which held a four-faced clock that struck the hours, and from which there pealed out a curfew at nine o'clock."¹⁰ The town clock's persistence in the postwar era is representative of how "planter-defined time" merged with the standard clock time that developed at the turn of the century. O'Malley explains that master time and its dictation of a slave time became the standard for industrialized and electrified clock time, and Smith adds that "because slave masters could not force slaves to internalize time, slaves helped open a window of resistance to planter-defined time, and it was a window which [laborers] used when they could."¹¹ CPT then became a way to counter white regimes of labor time and complicate ideas of white southern restfulness.

Julius's storytelling represents an effort to impose one's own sense of time on those in positions of power. In this respect, Julius is representative of the freed people [End Page 3] Smith discusses, who "rather than accept the premise from which planters operated and engage in negotiations about the length of time to be worked and thereby accept the legitimacy of clock-defined labor . . . often refused outright to even debate the merits of planters' definitions of fair compensation for their labor power"¹² According to Smith, white southerners assumed that enslaved workers were inept at comprehending clock time, but it "may well have been a clever ploy [by the enslaved] . . . to manipulate white time definitions and racial stereotypes by feigning ignorance and causing, for want of a better phrase, temporal inconveniences."¹³ Julius and his progeny, hired to work on John's vineyard, are often described in ways that bear out Smith's account of CPT's antecedents. Julius's grandson Tom, for example, is denigrated by John for being "very trifling," and John complains that he "was much annoyed by his laziness, his carelessness, and his apparent lack of any sense of responsibility" (91). Tom's behavior can be understood through Smith's description of Black workers, whose "careful withdrawal and rationing of their labor power" was interpreted by their employers as "lethargy."¹⁴ John remains unaware that Julius is teaching Tom how to negotiate labor power by playing on John's misguided notions of race.

Julius's lessons may be a response to some formerly enslaved writers, who worried over Black youths' susceptibility to internalized stereotypes of Black enervation. In The Future of the American Negro (1899), Booker T. Washington explains that "The Negro, it is to be borne in mind, worked under constant protest . . . and he spent almost as much effort in planning how to escape work as in learning how to work. Labour with him was a badge of degradation. . . . Out of these conditions grew the habit of putting off till to-morrow and the day after the duty that should be done promptly to-day."¹⁵ Philip Alexander Bruce makes a similar observation in his 1889 autobiography The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: "As laborers, the members of the new generation . . . have a marked disposition to doze and sleep."¹⁶ These testimonies evince Black writers' fear that white accusations regarding an epidemic of indolence among Black workers were true. By contrast Chesnutt's stories are reluctant to validate stereotypes of Black youth. Instead, his satirical plantation fiction calls into question Blacks' "marked disposition to doze."¹⁷

In this way, Chesnutt aligns himself with W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that forced labor had made African American boys the "personification of shiftlessness."¹⁸ Du Bois clarifies that "they are not lazy," explaining that convict labor and the lingering customs of slavery have led to a particular behavior among Black youth: "They'll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured honesty. . . . [T]hey are improvident because the improvident ones of their acquaintance get on about as well as the provident. Above all, they cannot see why they should take unusual [End Page 4] pains to make the white man's land better, or to fatten his mule, or save his corn."¹⁹ The idea that there is a futility—even a danger—in being a good worker within the Black community is explored in several of Julius's stories, beginning with "The Goophered Grapevine." Critic William Andrews has dubbed the story's protagonist Henry as "the indefatigable worker."²⁰ Yet Henry's drudgery only leads to his being circulated from plantation to plantation. Henry's body eventually gives out under the strain of labor: "Henry . . . des went out sorter like a cannel. Dey didn't 'pear ter be nuffin de matter wid 'im, 'cep'n' de rheumatiz, but his strenk des dwinel' away 'tel he did n' hab ernuff lef ter draw his bref" (13). Being strained to the point of death is Henry's ultimate "reward" for being an ideal worker. In his reading of "Po' Sandy" (written in 1888 and published as the second story in the Conjure collection), Richard Brodhead notes that "in slavery the more capable one is, the more others desire to own his labor; . . . to be a slave means to be at someone else's disposal, literally not to be able to be where one wishes to be."²¹ As Du Bois explains, Black laborers resisted taking "unusual pains to make the white man's land better" because they understood that hard work got them no closer to owning their own land or maintaining their own sense of space. Instead, diligent labor often led to further exhaustion and exploitation. Thus, the enslaved and their descendants developed practices to avoid objectified labor through subversions of plantation time, a cultural phenomenon that played on stereotypes of Black somnolence. It is important to note, however, that these efforts were not the source of the CPT stereotype but rather mere plays on an already developing white, racist conception of the "lazy" African.

Sleep Surveillance and Subversion in "A Deep Sleeper" and "Mars Jeems's Nightmare"

Chesnutt plays on stereotypes of Black somnolence and laziness to chart the push and pull of time control between white landowners and Black inhabitants before the Civil War and after. The parallel between pre- and postwar subversions of master time is best illustrated in the story "A Deep Sleeper" (1893), one of the "'nonconjure' conjure tales" excluded by Houghton Mifflin from The Conjure Woman collection.²² The tale cleverly upends cultural assumptions about Black lethargy and, as Bruce Blansett astutely observes, critiques the era's medical pseudoscience: "'A Deep Sleeper' is an overt satire of both Dysaesthesia Aethiopis and of the belief in Black persons' propensity for sloth."²³ Blansett argues that Chesnutt's tale questions the legitimacy of white medicine, but he stops short of describing it as an outright challenge to the views of doctors like Cartwright. Also outside the scope of his study are the ways in which "A Deep Sleeper" serves as lens through which to read the remaining "Uncle Julius" tales. By understanding how sleep [End Page 5] is used subversively in this particular text, readers can begin to discern other, subtler moments in which sleep functions as a medium for social exchange elsewhere in the tales.

"A Deep Sleeper" opens with John's meticulous measurement of time: "It was four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, in the month of July . . . [in] the Sabbath stillness" (42). John notices Julius returning from his service as deacon of his community church and orders him to deliver a watermelon. Rather than respect Julius's Sabbath, John expects him to subscribe to his own "master" schedule. Julius responds by sabotaging John's Sunday plans, forcing his own measurement of time on his employer. As William Gleason notes, both the inner and outer tales reveal "acts of black resistance to planter-defined space."²⁴ Beyond offering resistance to white spatial control, however, Chesnutt's tale also poses a challenge to planter-defined time. One enslaved character, Skundus, pretends to be asleep, for instance, but he claims his own sense of time through his secret meetings with Cindy in the swamp. In the outer tale, John's desire for a watermelon—which has been grown in a patch long tended by Julius and his kinfolk—represents, as John Edgar Wideman explains, a "system of black-white power relationships in the South" and the "struggle to establish personal space and territorial rights."²⁵ By distracting John with his tale of a "monst'us pow'ful sleeper" who once "slep' fer a mont'" (44), Julius wins a battle in his war with John over "territorial rights," as during the time he is telling John the tale, his supposedly sleepy grandson is stealing the watermelon. Claudine Raynaud reads Skundus's tale as a "slave tale variation on the theme of 'Sleeping Beauty': the male slave escapes and tricks the master through a pretend deep sleep. Sleep means subtracting oneself from the reality of slavery, i.e. not working."²⁶ By guiding Tom through a similar reenactment in having him feign sleepiness and steal the watermelon, Julius simultaneously plays on and reinforces John's racist assumptions about Black lethargy. Julius, like Skundus, uses time to his advantage by distracting John while Tom lays claim to the watermelon patch.

Tom's half-asleep demeanor, which John assumes owes to the influence of Skundus's story, makes it hard to exploit him. Such a disposition contrasts with that of enslaved characters such as Henry and Sandy who only suffer for their productive labor. The fates of the ideal workers are dismal, whereas Skundus achieves success at the end of "A Deep Sleeper." Consequently, Julius advocates for the "squatter" mentality described by Du Bois, that leads Black people to "loaf before your face and work behind your back."²⁷ This is just what Julius instructs Tom to do in "A Deep Sleeper," a lesson that resonates with an observation made by Chesnutt in a 1900 speech discussing ownership of former slave plantations: "To the old plantation which they buy is attached, by a sort [End Page 6] of squatter right, an old colored man, formerly a slave of the proprietor."²⁸ Rather than present himself and his grandson as vagrants, Julius implies that he and his family have "squatter rights" to John's land.

Moreover, Julius plays on John's perception of Black dialect—which John relates to Black laziness—to force patience on his listener. Julius thereby entrances John, leaving him temporarily spellbound and vulnerable to Julius's control over time's passage. With his enthralling storytelling, Julius works his own conjuration on John and his family. Julius's speech hypnotizes his listeners, and the lessons he imparts across the tales slowly alter his audience's perception of southern Black culture. Taking his time in telling his stories, Julius forces listeners to accept his own dictation of time. Defying a tradition of white enslavers' attempts to alter an enslaved person's sense of time, Chesnutt shows how Black workers developed their own skills of time manipulation to avoid exploitation.

Julius's wordplay also underscores the advantage that enslaved people took of whites' assumptions about CPT's antecedents. A prime example is how Skundus's assumed narcolepsy enables him to marry his sweetheart Cindy. His trickery is so masterful that the doctors themselves conclude that Skundus "had be'n in a trance fer fo' weeks" (49). The hired physicians diagnose Skundus with "a catacornered fit" (144) and instruct Dugal to prevent future episodes by granting Skundus and Cindy cohabitation. Blansett notes the ambiguity surrounding Julius's use of "catacornered" rather "catatonic." observing that "with the neologism 'catacornered fit,' Julius conflates the sense of a cataleptic fit with that of an oblique or slanted (catacornered) act. The malapropism suggests that 'deep sleeping' could be a cover for other activity (in Skundus's case, sneaking off to linger in the swamp by Cindy's new plantation, or in Tom's, stealing the watermelon) as well as a biological condition."²⁹ Julius purposely plays on the word "catacornered," hinting that in his subversion of the notion of the deep-sleeping slave Skundus anticipates such a diagnosis and elicits the doctors' prescription. Implicit in "A Deep Sleeper" is a historical practice in which enslaved people used deception, cunning, and medical discourse to "conjure" the supposed experts whose role it was to define and diagnose.

While Chesnutt lightheartedly satirizes the racism of white medicine and squatter rights in "A Deep Sleeper," he assumes a darker tone in "Mars Jeems's Nightmare" (1898), foregrounding the harsh realities of slave labor. Featured third in the Conjure collection, John begins the story by expressing his disgust for Tom's work ethic. He has hired the young man at Julius's request but quickly regrets the decision and terminates him. Tom's drowsiness and the inner tale's portrayal of the white enslaver Jeems, who suffers from a sleep-induced bewilderment, can be read as depicting similar conditions [End Page 7] of overwork and sleep deprivation that impeded and disoriented Black workers. Julius hopes his story will protect his grandson from what Brodhead characterizes as "a new cult of efficiency and productivity" that arose after Reconstruction.³⁰ Upon concluding the tale, Julius tells John and Annie: "Dis yer tale goes ter show . . . dat w'ite folks w'at is so ha'd en stric', en doan make no 'lowance fer po' ign'ant niggers w'at ain' had no chanst ter l'arn, is li'ble ter hab bad dreams" (101). Julius's closing comments correlate Jeems as the "noo man" with Tom and his postwar generation for they, like Jeems in his conjured form, are paradoxically neither enslaved nor free. As Henry Wonham explains, "Mars Jeems's transformation . . . provides a remarkably subtle commentary on Tom's uncertain predicament as a 'new negro' in the post-war plantation setting. Born in freedom and thus unfit to assume [a] servile role . . . , Jeems becomes the story's instructive representative of Tom's dilemma."³¹ Thus, "Mars Jeems's Nightmare" illustrates the universal suffering of unrelenting labor, and the story warns against replicating the same environment on postwar plantations.

According to Julius, Mars Jeems prohibits nearly all social customs among his captives. Solomon, an enslaved man whose paramour is sent away, consults a conjure woman to transform Jeems into a less harsh enslaver. Her solution is a potion that will give Jeems a "monst'us bad dream" (98), which causes the white enslaver to be transformed into an enslaved Black man with no recollection of his former self. After Solomon doses him with the conjure woman's potion, Jeems goes off on business and leaves the running of the plantation to his hired overseer Nick. After his transformation into an enslaved man, Jeems is brought to the plantation where Nick beats him mercilessly, first for not knowing his own name and later for "laziness en impidence" (96). After days of abuse and toil, Jeems is so exhausted that he eats the cure for his conjuration—Solomon's proffered sweet potato—without ever waking up: "De nigger wuz layin' in a co'nder, 'sleep, en Solomon des slip' up ter 'im, en hilt dat sweet'n' 'tater 'fo' de nigger's nose, en he des nach'ly retch' up wid his han', en tuk de 'tater en eat it in his sleep, widout knowin' it" (98). Upon waking, Jeems shows a disgust for his own manufactured "cult of infinite productivity": he fires Nick, shortens the working day, and grants his captives limited social freedoms, such as the ability to marry and hold celebratory gatherings.³² The moral of the story is that one's environment—not some innate, racial trait—forces the body into the condition Cartwright defines as dysaesthesia aethiopis. Julius's effort to get John to abandon his belief in the stereotypical lazy Black is part of Chesnutt's larger endeavor to refute popular medical and scientific discourses that upheld the idea of Black inferiority.

Rejecting the notion of genetically transmitted markers, Chesnutt correlates racial stereotypes with bodily responses to environmental factors.³³ When Solomon encounters [End Page 8] his bewildered enslaver at the end of the tale, Jeems explains that he has had "a reg'lar, nach'ul nightmare" (98). Julius's word choice implies that Jeems's night terror is common among the sleep-deprived and enslaved. Earlier in the tale, for example, the sleep of enslaved characters is disturbed after they hear Jeems ask his overseer to run the plantation in his absence: "De way [Nick] . . . snap' de rawhide he useter kyar roun' wid 'im, made col' chills run up and down de backbone er dem niggers. . . . En dat night dey wuz mo'nin' en groanin' down in de qua'ters, fer de niggers all knowed w'at wuz comin'" (95). Rather than find respite in rest, they doze anxiously—possibly in fear of being punished by Nick for oversleeping—a common, real-life occurrence, as Frederick Douglass recalls In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855): "More slaves are whipped for oversleeping than for any other fault. Neither age nor sex finds any favor. The overseer stands at the quarter door, armed with stick and cowskin, ready to whip any who may be a few minutes behind time."³⁴ Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) likewise attests to the dread brought on by fears of oversleeping: "With a prayer that he may be on his feet and wide awake at the first sound of the horn, [the enslaved person] sinks to his slumbers nightly."³⁵ While in "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," Julius is unclear as to whether the "mo'nin' en groanin'" in the slave quarters emanate from those asleep, half-awake, or wide-eyed, that is suffering from night terrors or deprived of sleep altogether in anticipation of the overseer's whip at dawn, what he does make explicit are the pervading modes of oppression under slavery, forces that dictated every waking—and sleeping—moment.

In emphasizing the nighttime angst common among enslaved people, Chesnutt highlights the anxieties provoked by nightly surveillance. One of Jeems's rules, as Julius explains at the start of his tale, is that "w'en night come [the enslaved] mus' sleep en res', so dey'd be ready ter git up soon in de mawnin' en go ter dey wuk fresh en strong" (94). Historically, one part of an overseer's job was to conduct "random spotchecks of slaves' sleeping quarters" to ensure each person was asleep. These inspections, Reiss notes, "were seen as matters of life and death."³⁶ The consequence of this nightly torture is dramatized allegorically in "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt" (1899), the sixth tale in the Conjure collection. There, Julius recounts a story of vengeance in which Jube terrorizes the enslaved Dan (who killed Jube's son in self-defense) through a conjuration in which he takes Dan out of bed night after night and rides him like a beast: "Dis cunjuh man 'mence' by gwine up ter Dan's cabin eve'y night, en takin' Dan out in his sleep en ridin' 'im roun' de roads en fiel's ober de rough groun'"(84). As a result, Dan feels "ez ti'ed ez ef he had n' be'n ter sleep" (84). Eventually, Jube tricks Dan into believing that his abuse derives from an evil witch, who by night assumes the form of a black cat. Jube then proposes that Dan must be transformed into a wolf in order to kill the witch. The drama climaxes in Jube's [End Page 9] kidnapping Dan's wife, Mahaly, transforming her into a black cat, and leading Dan to mistakenly murder her out of a dire desperation for rest. Whereas Julius details the animal transformation at the tale's conclusion—Dan becomes lupine and Mahaly feline—he does not specify what form Dan takes on when he is ridden nightly by Jube. In this way, the story suggests that it is Dan's own body in a somnambulist state that is routinely mistreated. "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," therefore, provides a fantastical portrait of a common occurrence among the enslaved, who, suffering constant abuse from forces outside their control, awoke each morning from a state of perpetual sleeplessness.

Like Jube, enslavers and their hired overseers employed tactics to regulate captives' sleep, ensuring that they had just enough energy to get through a day's work. Enslaved people were allowed a very specific window of time in which to rest that depended on what currently needed to be done on the plantation. According to Reiss, "Taking charge of the sleep-wake cycle was a way to break slaves, to make maximum profit, and to protect the white slaveholding class from retribution. Slaveholders had to strike a careful balance: they had to allow enough sleep for their captive workforce's labor to be profitable, yet not so much that they might be clear-eyed and energetic enough to escape."³⁷ This "careful balance" of intended sleeping hours stymied enslaved people's efforts to attend to their own needs. Recalling his worst years of slavery, Douglass portrays the experience of incessant exhaustion as akin to a "beast-like" state: "Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished."³⁸ Douglass's description of being stuck in a state "between sleep and wake" recalls Cartwright's definition of dysaesthesia aethiopis in which the enslaved individual must endure a state of half-wakefulness. In his biography, Chesnutt draws attention to Douglass's limited access to rest and cites the moment in My Bondage where Douglass elaborates on his Sunday respite, the only time of the week he had to fill his belly and rest his body.³⁹ Chesnutt's studies of Douglass and other formerly enslaved writers may have inspired Henry's declaration in Chesnutt's The Colonel's Dream (1905) that "environment controls the making of men. Some rise above it, the majority do not."⁴⁰ Chesnutt's 1905 work not only stressed the effect of the environment on people but also the fact that the "making" or construction of human traits like sleepiness was rooted in environment rather than biology. [End Page 10]

Sacrificing Sleep: Bodily Trauma in "Dave's Neckliss" and "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny"

Douglass's pairing the deprivations of food and sleep correlates with a common theme in the "Uncle Julius" tales, where suffering from want of bodily needs forces characters to choose between one or the other. Such decisions are painfully rendered in portraits of familial provision. Chesnutt first addresses this in "The Goophered Grapevine," when Julius tells John that "befo' de wah, in slab'ry times, a nigger did n' mine goin' fi' er ten mile in a night, w'en dey wuz sump'n good ter eat at de yuther een'" (7). Lack of sufficient food supplies led those enslaved to sacrifice sleep and commit thievery, particularly under the cover of night. Food theft propels the inner plot of "Dave's Neckliss," written in 1889 and rejected for publication in the Conjure collection. After "one dark night w'en somebody tuk a ham fum one er de smoke-'ouses" (37), the story's protagonist is falsely accused of stealing the cured pork. Despite having long been an obedient and productive worker, Dave is assumed guilty and forced to wear a ham chained around his neck for months. In the tale's conclusion, John reflects that "Dave's Neckliss" is unique among Julius's tales in that it enables one "to study, through the medium of his recollection, the simple but intensely human inner life of slavery" (33). Scholars have likewise read the story in such a way, arguing that Dave eventually believes he is a ham, thus illustrating how slavery degrades the individual psyche.⁴¹ In particular, Julius describes the ham's intrusion on Dave's sleeping habits as acutely traumatizing: "Ef he turn ober in his sleep, dat ham would be tuggin' at his neck. It wuz de las' thing he seed at night, en de fus' thing he seed in de mawnin'" (38). Contributing to Dave's mental collapse, then, is his lack of sufficient sleep while tethered to the ham.

After Dave is separated from the remaining pork bits, he begins tying a pine knot around his neck when he goes to sleep, leading Julius to state that "fac', it 'peared lack Dave done gone clean out'n his mine" (39). Paradoxically, Dave finds comfort in the night by simulating the very thing that originally disrupted his sleep. His mental collapse is marked by his dependency—to achieve rest—on an object that replaces the original one that was meant to objectify and dehumanize him. His decline culminates in suicide: Dave hangs himself in the smokehouse over an open fire, as Julius says, "fer ter kyo" (42). Blansett argues that "'curing' in this passage melds Dave's identity with the essence of a ham by signifying both a means of preserving food and the pathologizing of African Americans by the scientific and medical communities during this time period."⁴² "A Victim of Heredity, or, Why the Darkey Loves Chicken," another rejected story written the same year as "Dave's Neckliss," underscores this idea. The story's outer frame illustrates how hunger and desperation continued to plague southern Blacks under Jim [End Page 11] Crow. It begins with John's endeavor to "protect [his] property": "I therefore kept close watch one night, and caught a chicken-thief in the very act" (71). John locks his captive in the smokehouse for the night, recalling the place where Dave killed himself. John explains that he had "made up my mind . . . that an example must be made of this miscreant" (71). The next morning, John discovers that Sam Jones is "insignificant looking" and "very much frightened" and learns that he is providing for "a large family and sick wife." Despite these facts, John is emphatic that he must enforce the "social order," concluding that Sam ultimately acted due to a "trifling disposition" and inability to "let chickens alone" (72).⁴³ Through John's deployment of racial stereotypes to justify his mistreatment of Black community members, Chesnutt unmasks pseudoscientific typologies of race that labeled African Americans as predominantly gluttonous and slothful. These stereotypes are even more grossly disturbing in light of the fact that sheer deprivation gave rise to them. From the sleepy slave to the incessantly hungry Black, white society essentialized Blackness in ways that punished Black bodies for merely requiring the basic necessities to sustain human life.

For enslaved women, racial stereotypes were particularly violent, as they demanded that mothers and domestic caretakers assume an automaton-like endurance. Washington, in Up from Slavery (1901), remembers his "mother cooking a chicken late at night, and awakening her children for the purpose of feeding them."⁴⁴ Because enslaved women were expected to stay perpetually alert to their enslavers' needs—particularly in caring for white offspring—they were rarely granted time to spend with their own children. In his 1899 biography of Douglass, Chesnutt notes that "all his impressions" of his mother "were derived from a few brief visits made to him at Colonel Lloyd's plantation, most of them at night. These fleeting visits of the mother were important events in the life of the child."⁴⁵ In his autobiography, Douglass explains that his mother "made her journeys to see me in the night, travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise."⁴⁶ He recalls how his mother, Harriet, walked twelves miles each way only to lie down with him for a few hours. This exhausting trek, in combination with her long working hours, may have contributed to her untimely death when Douglass was only seven. His mother's extreme lack of sleep speaks to the many trade-offs enslaved women were forced to make throughout their lives.

In Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs likewise recalls the exhaustion enslaved women endured, describing an aunt who was forced to sleep on the floor in the entryway of her mistress's bedroom and who consequently suffered six premature births and died very young. Mrs. Flint obsessed over Nancy's diligent attendance to her [End Page 12] nightly repose and "had ruined [Nancy's] health by years of incessant, unrequited toil, and broken rest."⁴⁷ "Finally, toiling all day, and being deprived of rest at night, completely broke down her constitution, and Dr. Flint declared it was impossible she could ever become the mother of a living child."⁴⁸ Upon Nancy's death, Mrs. Flint even requested that they be buried side-by-side so that Nancy might stand guard over her eternal slumber.

Protecting the sleep of the mistress was so entrenched in the customs of antebellum slavery that even in wartime, as Washington recalls, enslaved men guarded over their sleeping enslavers: "Any one attempting to harm 'young Mistress' or 'old Mistress' during the night would have had to cross the dead body of the slave to do so."⁴⁹ Ironically, white enslavers enacted surveillance over their captives every night while simultaneously expecting those same individuals to diligently watch over their sleep. In her 1886 biography of Harriet Tubman, Sarah Hopkins Bradford paints a similar picture of sleeplessness: "When the labors, unremitted for a moment, of the long day were over . . . there was a cross baby to be rocked continuously, lest it should wake and disturb the mother's rest. The black child sat beside the cradle of the white child, so near the bed, that the lash of the whip would reach her if she ventured for a moment to forget her fatigues and sufferings in sleep."⁵⁰ After working all day, enslaved women were forced to spend long evenings with their infant charges and to stay awake throughout the night in anticipation of every cry, facing dire consequences if they gave into the natural lull of nighttime sleep, including lashings and even death. Frederick Douglass provides a harrowing portrait of how fatal the descent into sleep could be for enslaved women:

The wife of Mr. Giles Hicks, . . . murdered my wife's cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age. . . . It was ascertained that the offense for which this girl was thus hurried out of the world, was this: she had been set that night, and several preceding nights, to mind Mrs. Hicks's baby, and having fallen into a sound sleep, the baby cried, waking Mrs. Hicks, but not the slave-girl. Mrs. Hicks, becoming infuriated at the girl's tardiness, after calling several times, jumped from her bed and seized a piece of fire-wood from the fireplace; and then, as she lay fast asleep, she deliberately pounded in her skull and breast-bone, and thus ended her life.⁵¹

Jacobs also details another particularly sinister role women were expected to fill at night: "[The overseer] entered every cabin, to see that men and their wives had gone to bed together, lest the men, from over-fatigue, should fall asleep in the chimney corner, and remain there till the morning horn called them to their daily task. Women are considered of no value, unless they continually increase their owner's stock."⁵² Women were forced to procreate with assigned partners, regardless of their own feelings about [End Page 13] partnership and intimacy. Jacobs also recalls being an object of white lust and that she was often sexually harassed by her enslaver, "whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night."⁵³

While enslaved women seemed to be more vulnerable than men in the system of sleep surveillance that prevailed, as they were at greater risk of being sexually assaulted and were likely more sleep deprived than men, Chesnutt also attributes to them an almost supernatural power through sleep. Throughout the Conjure stories, Chesnutt depicts enslaved women as being particularly adept at interpreting dreams. Cindy, in "A Deep Sleeper," for instance, contributes to the deception of Mars Dugal by claiming to have dreamt of Skundus's return from his long slumber. The next morning when Skundus arrives "rubbin' his eyes ez ef he hadn' got waked up good yit" (48), Dugal sees this as proof of Cindy's prediction, evincing Chesnutt's historical understanding that enslaved women often had premonitions that came true. As Chesnutt explains in his essay "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South" (1901), many southerners believed in the power of the dreamworld. Chesnutt notes that a key source of his information about conjure superstition was old Aunt Harriet, a local North Carolina woman. She was "a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions" Chesnutt claims, and he was "able now and then to draw a little upon her reserves of superstition" (202). He recounts a story she told of having awakened from a dream with the cure for an ailment inflicted on her by a curse. Although Chesnutt is quick to show his skepticism, noting that "education . . . has thrown the ban of disrepute upon witchcraft and conjuration" (199), by scrutinizing the environment that shaped slave culture, he lends veracity to the idea that enslaved women had a special connection to the dream world.

Rather than rely on gender stereotypes that associate women with the realm of fancy and men with the world of facts, Chesnutt depicts the dreamworld as one of the means by which enslaved women process the trauma they endure in their waking lives. At night, if enslaved women were not suffering from sleeplessness, they were often undergoing worse torture: experiencing night terrors that replayed the atrocities of daily life. Historian Jonathan White explains that "the horrors and realities of slavery made indelible marks on the minds of slaves, sometimes keeping them from sleeping, and other times infiltrating their dreams."⁵⁴ Harriet Tubman is one well-known historical figure who claimed to have drawn her powers of evasion and subversion from premonitions she had while asleep, and her prominence may have influenced Chesnutt's interest in enslaved women, trauma, and insights drawn from the dreamworld. According to Earl Conrad, her twentieth-century biographer, Tubman had narcolepsy, a condition caused by a head injury she endured at the hands of an overseer when she was a teenager.⁵⁵ In her 1886 [End Page 14] biography, Bradford highlights "the turns of somnolency" to which Tubman had "always been subject." She explains that her head injury "left her subject to a sort of stupor" that came "upon her in the midst of conversation" or during whatever she was doing and that threw "her into a deep slumber" from which she would "presently rouse herself" and then "go on with her conversation or work."⁵⁶ In The Rising Son (1874), William Wells Brown similarly notes that Tubman was commonly known for "taking her seat, [and] at once drop[ping] off into a sound sleep."⁵⁷ White explains that accounts of her dreams have "appeared in newspapers, children's books, and adult nonfiction. . . . One fugitive slave in Canada said in 1860 that . . . 'De whites can't catch [Tubman], kase you see she's born wid de charm,'" the charm being her ability to render predictions from dreams.⁵⁸ Vivid dreaming is a common symptom among those suffering from sleep disorders such as narcolepsy.⁵⁹ Although Chesnutt lacked the medical knowledge we now have for interpreting such symptoms, he was keenly aware of the connections—both oppressive and uplifting—between southern environmental factors and the effects of sleep deprivation on those suffering under enslavement. Tubman's sleep revelations—considered to be a "charm" that eluded "de whites"—suggest that vivid dreaming is not merely a symptom of sleep deprivation and posttraumatic stress disorder but was also at the time an avenue for processing trauma and subverting white southern oppression.⁶⁰

In "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny" (1898), included as the fifth story in the Conjure collection, Chesnutt uses the dreamworld to express the trauma Becky undergoes after being separated from her son. Becky's anguish mirrors the melancholy that John's wife, Annie, experiences, possibly as a result of childlessness, in the outer frame of the tale. Annie's neurasthenia is evident from the first lines of the Conjure collection.⁶¹ "The Goophered Grapevine" opens with John's recalling the purpose of their relocation from Ohio to North Carolina: "Some years ago my wife was in poor health, and our family doctor . . . advised a change of climate" (3). At the start of "Sis Becky's Pickaninny," Annie is in a depression so deep that "nothing seemed to rouse her" (102). After witnessing Annie's sorrowful countenance, Julius tells a story that represents Chesnutt's efforts to transcend the racial boundaries that doctors, such as George Beard, established between white neurasthenia and Black hysteria.

After Becky's husband is sold away, which is when Julius starts his story, she consoles herself with the company of her son, Mose. Like Douglass's mother, Becky can only spend time with her son at night after long days working in the fields. Becky becomes even more desolate when her enslaver Kunnel Pen'leton trades her for a horse. He offers Mose as a free addition to the deal, but the trader refuses, telling Pen'leton: "I'll keep dat 'oman so busy she'll fergit de baby; fer niggers is made ter wuk, en dey ain' [End Page 15] got no time fer no sich foolis'ness ez babies'" (105). But Becky doesn't forget—neither awake nor asleep—and both she and Mose become ill as a result of the separation. Aunt Nancy, Mose's caretaker, consults the conjure woman, Peggy, who transforms Mose into a hummingbird so that he may see his mother. After their joyous visit, Becky "dremp all dat night dat she wuz holdin' her pickaninny in her arms, en kissin' him, en nussin' him, des lack she useter do back on de ole plantation whar he wuz bawn. En fer th'ee er fo' days Sis' Becky went 'bout her wuk wid mo' sperrit dan she'd showed sence she'd be'n down dere ter dis man's plantation" (107). Just like sustenance or sleep, spending time with Mose—either in the real world or in her dreams—has a nourishing effect on Becky. However, Aunt Nancy eventually becomes too exhausted to carry Mose to and from Aunt Peggy's. Becky begins to panic when he does not appear and after she dreams for three nights that Mose has died. Her agitation grows to such an extent that her new enslaver sends her back to Pen'leton's plantation, where she is reunited with her son.

As in "A Deep Sleeper," the inner tale of "Sis Becky's Pickaninny" concludes with an enslaved person exhibiting stereotypes of Blackness that Julius challenges by slyly revealing the subversive power of such behavior. In this case, Becky's hysterical demeanor enables her return to Mose. In the outer tale, Annie listens to the story with "greater interest than she had manifested in any subject for several days" (110), and when John calls it a "very ingenious fairy tale" (110), Annie chastises him: "Why John! . . . The story . . . is true to nature, and might have happened half a hundred times, and not doubt did happen, in those horrid days before the war" (110). Lorne Fienberg has observed that "by according the tale a truth value, [Annie] suggests a new status for Uncle Julius as historian and chronicler of his culture. Even more perplexing is the apparent therapeutic value of the tale, which seems to set Annie instantly on the road to recovery from her illness."⁶² Annie's "perplexing" comment that Becky's story was "true to nature" may represent Chesnutt's ironic allusion to a singular distinction between Becky's hysteria and Annie's neurasthenia: while the former is forced to deal with her personal trauma amid bodily exploitation and prolonged sleep deprivation, Annie is afforded the restorative rest she requires to work through her depression. Thus, Chesnutt's fiction proposes that it is not a Black individual's innate "nature" that makes one hysterical and a white counterpart composedly neurasthenic; rather, it is their adverse environments.

Nowhere to Sleep in the "Sleepy South"

The contrast between Black sleeplessness and white restfulness in the southern space is a common theme throughout Chesnutt's works. In particular, the tales indicate that [End Page 16] while many enslavers punished their captives for exhibiting symptoms of lethargy, whites routinely embraced and encouraged idleness among their own and indulged in or even celebrated the South's sleepy atmosphere. In the opening tale ("The Goophered Grapevine"), John finds pleasure in the "almost sabbatic [town] in its restfulness" (4) and in the leisurely distraction of Julius's oration while detesting any evidence of lethargy presented by the Black employees on his new plantation. John's hypocrisy—his embracing the idea of the South as a sleepy region for white repose while simultaneously insisting that Black workers must labor to contribute to industrial growth—becomes increasingly apparent throughout the tales.

From the beginning, he and Annie "had already caught some of the native infection of restfulness" (5) and, as the stories progress, John grows more and more dormant.⁶³ Chesnutt depicts John as a neoantebellum planter whose romanticized interpretation of southern agrarianism leads him to oversee production simply at his leisure.⁶⁴ His acceptance of the idea of a white "sleepy South" speaks to a cultural desire on his part to return to a time when whites' entitlement to rest was clearly distinct from Blacks' enforced productivity.⁶⁵ By playing on the formulaic plantation tale and its descendants in postwar regionalist fiction, Chesnutt confronts efforts to idealize the historic South as a respite from northern industry, suggesting instead that southern white people are more industrially behind the times than their modern Black counterparts. Moreover, Chesnutt emphasizes that stereotypes of CPT, which derided "Black people as lazy" during the Progressive-Era efficiency movement, emerged out of a white adherence to Taylorism, a management system that nonetheless assumed nonwhite workers would undertake industrial work.⁶⁶

Jennifer Fleissner articulates a specific convention of local color fiction that Chesnutt sought to challenge: "A narrator standing in for the wearied fin-de-siècle urbanite typically finds respite in visiting rural outposts that retain the slow pace and quirky specificities of a fast-fading way of life."⁶⁷ George Tryon, a character in Chesnutt's first published novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is, like John, a "fin-de-siecle urbanite." In the novel's twelfth chapter, Tryon and Dr. Green pay a visit to Judge Straight's office:

[The Judge] was seated by the rear window, and had fallen into a gentle doze—the air of Patesville was conducive to slumber. A visitor from some bustling city might have rubbed his eyes, on any but a market-day, and imagined the whole town asleep—that the people were somnambulists and did not know it. The judge, an old hand, roused himself so skillfully, at the sound of approaching footsteps, that his visitors could not guess but that he had been wide awake.⁶⁸ [End Page 17]

The judge, the narrator implies, is keen to avoid being caught asleep on the job. Interestingly, the inhabitants of Patesville (the same fictional town where John takes up his residence in the "Uncle Julius" tales) are depicted as unwitting "somnambulists." Chesnutt suggests here that white southerners like the judge clandestinely indulge in a lethargic lifestyle: powerful white people embraced the idea of leisure while simultaneously carrying on as if they were constantly productive, alert and on guard. This same fear of being caught asleep features in The Marrow of Tradition (1901); Polly Ochiltree depends on her Black maid Dinah to snap her awake when she drifts off. In one scene, Dinah shakes the old woman "vigorously," and Polly's response reveals her worries about being caught dozing: "'Dinah,' exclaimed the old lady, sitting suddenly upright with a defiant assumption of wakefulness, 'why do you take so long to come when I call?'"⁶⁹ Failing to acknowledge her descent into sleep, Miss Ochiltree pretends to have been awake and accuses Dinah of neglect. Polly's failure to admit to snoozing exemplifies how whites indulged in having Black servants watch over their resting bodies while hypocritically resenting them for any possible slip in hypervigilance.

In the cultural moment in which Chesnutt was writing, there was widespread fear of the threat that imagined Black insurrection posed to white rest in a postslavery nation. The first installment in Thomas Dixon's Ku Klux Klan trilogy (1902) is replete with white characters who cannot sleep for fear of Black invasion and retribution. At one point, white South Carolinians gather to pray "for deliverance from the ruin that threatened the state under the dominion of . . . the negroes": "In many places they . . . held all-night watches and prayer meetings. . . . About ten o'clock in the morning, pale and haggard from a sleepless night of prayer and thought, the Preacher arose to address the people." ⁷⁰ These anxieties expressed by southern whites resonated with those of plantation owners long before the war. Nat Turner's slave rebellion, for example, served as a historical marker for the instigation of nighttime anxiety among southern whites. In August 1831, Turner and other enslaved rebels used the cover of night to slaughter enslavers throughout Southampton County, Virginia. Fears of being murdered in their sleep led plantation owners to further restrict the liberties of both the enslaved and free Blacks in the aftermath of the massacre. In Charleston, for instance, wealthy landowners encircled their homes with chevaux-de-frise—wrought-iron fences topped with spears—to prevent marauding Blacks from murdering them in their sleep.⁷¹ In a postwar setting, white southerners worried that Black communities—empowered by abolition—would use the cover of night to attack their sleeping bodies.

Toward the end of Dixon's The Leopard's Spots, Gaston, the protagonist, boards a sleeper car bound for Atlanta in search of his romantic interest, Sallie, described as "a [End Page 18] daughter of the old-fashioned South."⁷² Gaston orders the porter to awaken Sallie, but the porter, speaking in the Black southern vernacular characteristic of plantation fiction, refuses: "Lordy boss, I cain do dat. Hit ergin de rules."⁷³ The porter-as-protector of the sleeping southern belle, Dixon implies, is the proper role for post-Reconstruction southern Blacks. In Chesnutt's "The Conjurer's Revenge," written in 1889 and featured as the fourth story in the Conjure collection, Julius critiques the railroads themselves, schooling John on the their exploitation of Black labor. John sees the railroad as a boon because it will enable him to get his produce to the North more easily, but Julius suggests that, to generate enough shippable product, John will need to purchase an additional horse for plowing. When John replies that he'd rather purchase a mule, Julius tells him: "I doan lack ter dribe a mule. I's alluz afeared I mought be imposin' on some human creetur; eve'y time I cuts a mule wid a hick'ry, 'pears ter me mos' lackly I's cuttin' some er my own relations, er somebody e'se w'at can't he'p deyse'ves" (24). John evinces little understanding of the mule metaphor in Julius's tale but, as Robert Stepto points out in an explanatory note to the story, "As symbols of agricultural life in the South, mules have been historically associated in U.S. culture with enslaved African American laborers, often to racist ends" (24). Through John and Julius's dialogue, Chesnutt associates the mule metaphor with the new railroad, a connection that possibly alludes to the mass employment of African American men as railroad porters at the turn of the century. Like mules forced to bear heavy loads, porters were required to cart around the possessions of white rail travelers. And for those on Pullman sleeper cars, porters also had to diligently protect the privacy of snoozing passengers, just as the enslaved and freed Blacks in the Reconstruction Era had been forced to do.

More broadly, Chesnutt correlates plantation farming and railroad expansion with objectified Black labor to highlight the limited professional opportunities for postwar southern Blacks: railroad work or sharecropper tenancies. One represented (literal) mobility, the other stasis, but neither greatly improved on the exploitative conditions Black southerners endured during slavery. From the time the Pullman Company was founded in 1867, as Alan Derickson has shown, it "hired only African American porters for its sleeping cars," and sleep deprivation was typical for these porters.⁷⁴ Over the next forty years, Pullman continued to employ Black men without offering them much protection under labor laws.⁷⁵ Derickson refers to a Pullman conductor's account in 1901 who "estimated that [porters] got four or fewer hours sleep per night" and expressed admiration for a particular porter's "ability to keep wide awake when he is a living corpse from want of sleep."⁷⁶ Not only were Black porters required to function on little to no sleep but they were also deprived of private sleeping quarters and were expected instead to "sleep in [End Page 19] public places, mainly in the men's lounges and restrooms of the sleeping cars."⁷⁷ Despite working on trains composed of numerous sleeper cars, Black service workers were denied access to these cars for sleeping.

Finding a space to sleep in was also a challenge for Black laborers who remained in the South. Whereas Pullman porters were expected to snooze in public spaces, Black southerners who shared cramped quarters—or had no home at all—were not permitted to sleep outdoors due to vagrancy laws that became more strict in the years after Reconstruction. Policing Blacks for sleeping in public spaces led to, as Jeffrey Myers notes in his reading of the Conjure tales, "a convict-lease system, where inmates, often convicted of nothing more than 'vagrancy,' labored under essentially slave conditions" that "plantation owners . . . of an increasingly industrialized South, benefitted from."⁷⁸ In Chesnutt's oeuvre, Peter's suffering in The Colonel's Dream most acutely exposes the effects of both railroad labor and vagrancy laws. Upon returning to his hometown in North Carolina, the novel's protagonist, Henry, encounters Peter, a formerly enslaved man from his childhood plantation. Peter recounts his life since their separation, describing his work as a "railroad contractor . . . until overwork had laid him up" (28). Later, the old man is arrested for vagrancy and auctioned off as a convict laborer. Luckily for Peter, Henry is the purchaser, who provides Peter with shelter and provisions not afforded the other poor souls sold off to landowning southern whites. Thus, railroad exploitation and vagrancy laws exemplify two of the many methods employed by white elites to force Black southerners into the "new cult of efficiency and productivity," as described by Brodhead, in which African Americans in the decades following Reconstruction were deprived of the means to attend to their personal needs, particularly by being denied time to do so and places to do so in.

At the onset of the twentieth century, the cultural phenomenon of adapting to less and less sleep became a sign of masculine strength in the urban North. Inventor Thomas Edison was the popular embodiment of restricted sleep as a means for success, leading to a cultural trend that Derickson refers to as "heroic wakefulness."⁷⁹ Booker T. Washington is another historical figure who adhered to such a practice. In Up from Slavery, Washington writes that "the ability to sleep well, at any time and in any place, I find of great advantage. I have so trained myself that I can lie down for a nap of fifteen or twenty minutes, and get up refreshed in body and mind."⁸⁰ As the title of his memoir implies, Washington believed that efforts to overpower the body's natural temptation to sleep deeply for long stretches of time was instrumental to Black uplift in a post–Civil War United States. His adherence to heroic wakefulness may also reflect his efforts to counter stereotypes of Black lethargy, which, as I have shown, only became more entrenched after [End Page 20] slavery was abolished. Diverging from the views held by Black leaders like Washington, Chesnutt subtly suggests that Black southerners should elevate their own bodily needs over the demands of the cultural and industrial clock. Like Solomon in "Mars Jeems's Nightmare" who feeds Jeems a mystical sweet potato, Chesnutt attempts to conjure his readers so that they may awaken from his nightmarish tales of overwork, exhaustion, and internment with a newfound understanding of racial exploitation.

In the end, Chesnutt's stories require patience on the part of the reader to thoroughly understand them. According to William Andrews, the reason "A Deep Sleeper" was rejected for inclusion in the Conjure collection was because editor Walter Hines Page did not take the time to understand it: "The proverbial laziness of the Black man is a ploy by which to outlast the more impatient white man. . . . [O]nly an acute reader (perhaps not even Page himself) would detect these thematic undercurrents. On the surface, the general reader . . . would only find a story of a slave's improbable triumph over a rather dull-witted and credulous master."⁸¹ As new readers of Chesnutt's tales, we must embrace the patience the stories require of us, taking the time to thoroughly appreciate Julius's layered and complex storytelling. Only then can we begin to glimpse the suffering long endured by African Americans throughout the history of the U.S. South and especially the intensification of that suffering through medical and scientific stereotypes of Black embodiment. [End Page 21]