The use of dialect in literature provides not only a reflection of realistic character speech patterns, but also an opportunity for social and political commentary within a text. In short fiction, such as Charles Chesnutt’s “Po’ Sandy” (1888), the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in this seemingly-simple Conjure Tale adds an element of realism and also the opportunity for the reader to adopt a racialized perspective on an American Gothic tale, utilizing the dialectic language to provide commentary on social and political issues. African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or the distinct African-American dialect of English, is a language distinct in its grammar and vocabulary, often racially discriminated-against and dismissed as “slang” or a degradation of Standard English, which it is clearly and completely not. AAVE, with its own rules and structure, serves as a complete language in its own right. The below chart shows a gradient from the least-to-most expressions of AAVE in literature, with "Po' Sandy" ranking with a high expression of true AAVE, with the use of both AAVE phonological forms and AAVE grammatical forms.
Chesnutt, in his short stories, utilizes and normalizes AAVE in his storytelling, promoting understanding and acceptance of the dialect in popular literature.
The short story involves the Marambo family and their slave Sandy, who is transformed into a tree by his lover to stop the Marambo family from sending Sandy away to labor for their grown-up children in their own households. The story, told in a frame-narrative, features a narrator who is a black former slave in the Postbellum south (Julius) who is recounting stories of the pre-Civil War plantation to the new owners, a white Northern couple. Told by Julius and in his Southern African-American Vernacular English, the short stories serve to provide a kind of moralistic tale, to ingratiate hoodoo and African-American folktales with the American Gothic tradition, and to serve a purpose for Julius within the narrative of his frame: for example, “Po’ Sandy” serves Julius by encouraging the new owners to not destroy an old school house on the property (purported in the story to have been built from the wood of Sandy’s tree) in which he plans to hold his own church services. That Julius is telling the conjure tales in his own words, and using his own dialect to persuade and manipulate the plantation’s new owners, asserts a larger narrative of racial acceptance by forcing the standard dialect to understand and accept the African-American dialect. There is purpose, too, in having Julius tell the story to John and Annie, the new white owners. John continuously tries to assert a distinction between fantasy and reality in Julius’s conjure tales, while Annie seems to understand that the tradition of the conjure tale is representative of “an authentic effort to ‘articulate the past historically.’” With AAVE essential as the voice in this articulation.
In a description of Chesnutt’s works, fellow critic Richard E. Baldwin said that Chesnutt himself serves as “the ultimate conjure man, hoping that by ‘wukking de roots’ of black culture he might be able to work a powerful goopher on White America and lead it accept the equality of the black” that Baldwin uses dialect in this description of Chesnutt reinforces the purpose of the linguistic choice in-text: the story is empowered by the language, and subversively the common or standard dialect is forced to understand and accept the African-American dialect as it appears in literature—reflecting Baldwin’s hopes that Chesnutt’s works will have a similar impact on American racial relations. Chesnutt, himself a white-passing African-American, wrote and published a number of political essays, though “Po’ Sandy” comes from a short story collection titled The Conjure Woman. That popular American literature—and furthermore the standard dialect—was infiltrated by Chesnutt (a white-passing author) who promoted storytelling in African-American dialect establishes a paradigm for the linguistic role in social and political commentary.
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