Fooled by Their Own Kind: Pharmakon and the Many Masked Tricksters in Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine".

This paper explores the multifaceted power of trickster figures evident in Charles W Chesnutt's most frequently anthologized conjure story, "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887). It recounts the intertextual origin of a striking human and nonhuman hybrid character in the story. In an outlandish framed tale narrated by a former slave after the Civil War, Black slaves and their White master trick each other and people outside the North Carolina plantation after a conjure woman's magical "pharmakon" goes awry, causing unintended supernatural consequences for a valuable slave. Incorporating aspects of a belief system Africans brought across the Atlantic, the tale itself is a means to frighten and thereby trick a White 'carpetbagger' from Ohio from purchasing a plantation. Nearly all of Chesnutt's tricksters, like the 'signifying monkey' of Henry Louis Gates' study of the famous African trickster figure, fail to prevail in the end. Through these multiple trickster figures, including instances of Blacks tricking Blacks and Whites tricking Whites, Chesnutt negotiates the complexities of plantation relationships while alluding to the injustices of slavery itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]