Dialect to Disguise Guile
The most prevalent use of imagery in the collection is the replication of the dialect Julius uses when telling his stories. Every attempt is made to replicate his stories as if they were actually being spoken to the point that these sections of the stories can often make for difficult reading. Readers at the time the book was published were used to seeing this approach as a means of conveying the speech of black Americans and—more the point—were conditioned by white writers to associated this unsophisticated mode of speech with racial inferiority and intellectual ignorance. As a black writer, however, Chesnutt exploits this conditioning to achieve an ironic effect. Even for readers of the time, the dialect was difficult and Chesnutt makes it purposely so. By forcing the reader to work his way through the stories of Julius, he effective subverts the conditioning. The use of imagery through the incorporation of dialect situates Julius within the stereotype of the ignorant ex-slave and as a result the irony is all the more pointed when it finally hits that he continually gets the better of his supposed intellectual superior, John.
Conjuring Metaphors
Another effective use of imagery is developed by the author as a means of conveying the more abstract horrors of slavery. The stories of conjuring present a series of consequences that collectively present the way bondage brutalizes the soul rather than the body. While it is easy enough to describe physical suffering in a literal fashion, the use of metaphor proves more powerful in the hands of a master like Chesnutt. Thus, his stories avoid the dangers of didacticism by introducing more reader-friendly plot mechanics involving magic, witchcraft and the supernatural. Through the images created by the effect of conjuring, Chesnutt makes more concrete such abstract notions as how the legacy of slavery continues to haunt plantations long after emancipation, how devastation at the loss of loved ones being sold away creates emotional ghosts, how the oppressive control over every aspect of life can lead to taking the most desperate measures imaginable and—a revelation for many readers—what it must feel like to realize that you are no longer viewed a person, but as an economic resource literally of no greater value than the crops you toil amongst every day.
John's Racism
By no means is John a racist on the level of those masters who owned slaved and traded and sold them as property. John is, however, a victim of systemic racist perspectives that are engendered and inherited without conscious apprehension. John proudly views himself as a progressive on matters of race who deals with Julius as a fellow human being worthy of respect. And, indeed, his actions do reveal this. His words, however, unconsciously expose him as a typical white American holding fast to certain views on racial inferiority and this words act as subtle imagery which also serves the purpose of making him a satisfying foil for the irony if Julius being much smarter than his manner of speech implies. The primary mechanism through which imagery implicate John is condescension and his displays this aspect superiority not just directly to Julius by indirectly through Annie. The repetition of a pattern of behavior informing his responses to the fantastical stories of the former slave weave this imagery:
"You wouldn't for a moment allow yourself to be influenced by that absurdly impossible yarn which Julius was spinning to-day?"
"That is a very ingenious fairy tale, Julius…especially the humming-bird episode, and the mocking-bird digression, to say nothing of the doings of the hornet and the sparrow."
“I am glad, too, that you told us the moral of the story; it might have escaped us otherwise. By the way, did you make that up all by yourself?"
This last example is particularly egregious as it moves the liberal white Northerner considerably closer to an expression of outright racism with its implication also being the closest John ever comes to coming right out and attempting to humiliate Julius.
Dehumanization
The dehumanizing aspect of slavery is subtly implicated through literal description, but Chesnutt chooses to utilize imagery as his primary means of communicating this theme. Theme is transformed into symbol to underline the point that the entire system is one dependent upon disconnecting slaves from the very concept of being human. As a result, various slaves in the stories of Julius are transformed in one way or another into a tree, a grapevine, birds, a mule, a wolf, a cat, building lumber and a ghost. This imagery of dehumanization also extends to considerations of the value of human life as slaves are bought and sold as property and even sometimes traded in exchange for animals. The ultimate expression of this imagery is also deeply ironic in its reversal of the standard. In one story, the conjuring results in a white slave master being stripped of his humanity not by being turned into an animal or some other inanimate object, but rather by turned into a slave himself.
