The Conjure Woman: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Conjure Woman, credited to Charles Waddell Chesnutt, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Conjure Woman, by Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Read by James K. White. Published in 1899 by Houghton Mifflin, Chesnutt's first book, The Conjure Woman, was a collection of seven short stories, all set in "Patesville" (Fayetteville), North Carolina. While drawing from local color traditions and relying on dialect, Chesnutt's tales of conjuring, a form of magic rooted in African hoodoo, refused to romanticize slave life or the "Old South." Though necessarily informed by Joel Chandler Harris's popular Uncle Remus stories and Thomas Nelson Page's plantation fiction, The Conjure Woman consciously moved away from these models, instead offering an almost biting examination of pre- and post-Civil War race relations. These seven short stories use a frame narrator, John, a white carpetbagger who has moved south to protect his wife Annie's failing health and to begin cultivating a grape vineyard. Enamored by remnants of the plantation world, John portrays the South in largely idealistic terms. Yet Uncle Julius McAdoo, the ex-slave and "trickster" figure extraordinaire who narrates the internal story lines, presents a remarkably different view of Southern life. His accounts include Aun' Peggy's conjure spells in "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "Po' Sandy," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," and "Hot Foot Hannibal" as well as those of free black conjure men in "The Conjurer's Revenge" and "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt." These conjure tales reveal moments of active black resistance to white oppression in addition to calculated (and even self-motivated) plots of revenge. (Introduction provided by Documenting the American South)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Conjure Woman
• Author credits: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 7
• Listed recording duration: 3:39:17

Catalogue topics

• fiction
• historical fiction
• short stories

Track guide

1. 01 - The Goophered Grapevine — 33:45
2. 02 - Po' Sandy — 26:54
3. 03 - Mars Jeems's Nightmare — 37:28
4. 04 - The Conjurer's Revenge — 28:13
5. 05 - Sis' Becky's Pickaninny — 28:00
6. 06 - The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt — 32:30
7. 07 - Hot-Foot Hannibal — 32:27

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.