The Goophered Grapevine

“The Goophered Grapevine” illustrates the impact of African American folk culture and regional realism on American literature after the American Civil War. This influence is reflected in Chesnutt’s narrative structure and characters.

This short story is made up of a framing narrative and a narrative within that story, formally called an “interpolated narrative.” This narrative structure is typical of works that have been influenced by oral culture. In oral cultures, including West African and early African American culture, important cultural values and shared history were transmitted orally, usually in the form of stories. Chesnutt uses various literary devices to honor and revise this oral tradition. He uses dialect to represent Julius’s deep Southern accent. Chesnutt, unable to present a living, breathing Julius to his readers, instead presents, in paragraph 20,a detailed description of what it looks like when Julius tells his story, while the response of his listeners and the lesson they draw from the story are presented in the frame narrative.

The most significant way that Chesnutt revises African American oral tradition is in what he does with the characters typically found in regional literature and dialect stories like the Uncle Remus tales. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” the framing story is told by a nameless narrator from the North who is interested in investing in the post-Civil-War South. Chesnutt presents him as a sympathetic character by mentioning his wife’s illness as one of his motivations for moving. This sympathetic portrayal is reinforced by presenting the narrator as a model Northerner who treats his African American workers fairly, despite their pilfering of the grapes, and who gives Julius McAdoo a generous salary.

This sympathetic narrator of the frame story serves as a kind of interpreter for the audience. His attitude toward Julius and his Black workers presents Northern investors as people interested in setting a disordered South aright, not as greedy industrialists set on taking advantage of the South, typified in the stereotype of the carpetbagger. The narrator’s appreciation for the values of fairness, good management, and tolerance serve as an example to Chesnutt’s readers as they contemplate what is to be done for the South and the formerly enslaved people of the South on a national level.

His distance from the South and its history of enslavement is also important since it contributes to his portrayal as an objective voice on the South and because they make him sensitive to the value of local color—the wild settings, habits, and languages of this part of the South—to a national audience. Through this narrator, Chesnutt offers a figure who is capable of bringing regional culture, specifically African American folk and oral culture, to a modern audience in an entertaining way.

The interpolated narrative is told by Julius McAdoo, a formerly enslaved person on the McAdoo plantation. Although the narrator gets both the first and last words in the story, Julius’s account of the plantation’s history is the only firsthand one. While his dialect and stereotypical descriptions of African Americans are now associated with negative portrayals of African Americans in popular and literary culture, a reader of Chesnutt’s day would have noticed some important distinctions between Julius’s story and characters in other dialect or regional stories set in the South. Typical dialect stories present a nostalgic vision of the antebellum South, one in which the plantation myth—a South of benevolent owners who were put upon by their child-like enslaved people and lived a gracious life amid white-pillared mansions and magnolias—is never challenged or historically contextualized.

The South Chesnutt has Julius present is not that South. This portrayal of the South is one in which Chesnutt forces the reader to consider the economic relationship between the enslaver and enslaved person and presents a South that is subject to history. This South is one in which the enslaver is an uncouth and ruthless man, his heirs lack the energy to salvage the plantation, and enslaved people engage in large and small acts of rebellion. Whites do not always know best, as illustrated by the contrast between McAdoo’s bewitchment and the enslaved people's understanding that the Yankee’s methods will destroy the grapes.

Even more subversive is the audaciousness of what Julius tries to accomplish with his storytelling.Julius uses this story of the goophered grapevine as a means of protecting property he has appropriated from his former owner.While Julius is unable to keep the frame narrator from taking the plantation, his encounter and the story gain him partial reparations in the form of the overly-generous wages he receives from the narrator. This outcome reinforces an important element of oral and folk culture: namely, that stories have power and value beyond entertainment.