2009/08/16 by John N. Swift, Gigen Mamoser · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies #American and British Literature Analysis #American Sports and Literature #Superstition #Curse #Realm #History #Philosophy #Art #Literature #Theology #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1353/alr.0.0033
openalex publication_date 2009/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Chesnutt's "dave's Neckliss" and the Curse of ham Charles w. Chesnutt published "dave's Neckliss" in the october 1889 Atlantic Monthly, the fourth of his "Uncle Julius" tales of antebellum Southern plantation life.Narrated like its predecessors by Uncle Julius to his white employers, John and Annie, it involves a slave (the title's dave) falsely accused of stealing a ham, and punished by his master by being made to wear the stolen ham on a chain around his neck.when the punishment is lifted and the ham removed, dave apparently loses his mind, first creating and wearing a symbolic ham, then announcing that he himself is becoming a ham, and finally hanging himself in a smokehouse among the other hams.Chesnutt frames this strange story, as usual, as one of Uncle Julius' strategically self-interested entertainments for John and Annie.In this case, the old man's narrative wins him the couple's Sunday ham (or its leftovers): the day after hearing the story, Annie admits to her husband that "I couldn't have eaten any more of that ham, and so I gave it to Julius." 1 "dave's Neckliss" stands out among the Uncle Julius stories for a number of reasons, as readers have noted.It doesn't involve magic or conjuring, which is perhaps one reason for its omission from The Conjure Woman in 1899: in william Andrews' words, it "approaches the idea of a slave's metamorphosis [into a thing] from a subjective, psychological standpoint." 2 Rather than simply repeating an old tale, Uncle Julius himself plays an active role as the discoverer of dave's hanging body.The violent cruelty of slavery-at least partly concealed in earlier Uncle Julius stories-is unmistakable and immediate in "dave's Neckliss."And Chesnutt himself saw the story as different, perhaps the last of the Uncle Julius series, when he sent And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.And he said, Blessed be the LoRd God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; andCanaan shall be his servant.(Genesis 9: 20-27 KJV)This narrative has not surprisingly been the subject of extensive and colorful Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions.For our purposes, and for Chesnutt's (regardless of the specific nature of ham's offense against his father, or of just why the curse landed on the grandson rather than the son, or of how ham's name and posterity became associated with dark skin), the story and its historical interpretations provided two important origin paradigms, fundamental to nineteenth-century American Christian thinking.First, it offered a clear, divinely ordained taxonomy for all humanity, which arranged itself in three categories, as descendants of Japheth, Shem, or ham.with european expansion and the evolution of racialized thought, these became respectively the european, the Asian, and the African; the white, the yellow (or red), and the black; or, in some specific American configurations, the Anglo-Saxon, the Jew, and the Negro. 6Second, the story of Noah's curse defined those three groups in their relations to one another: and to the line of ham and Canaan it assigned the fetters of servitude as a God-given destiny.The ways in which the curse of ham thus provided an important Christian prop to antebellum pro-slavery thought are generally well known, and we won't rehearse them here. 7Put simply, slave owners could and did claim divine intention for the servile status of their slaves.we will shortly sketch the less well known and quite different uses to which ham and the hamitic origin-stories were put following the Civil war and Reconstruction.For now, though, we want simply to emphasize the degree to which ham's name and curse, and the identification of black Americans as the "children of ham," were familiar cultural currency in the South and all of the United States, the most visible markers of a pervasive, deeply American nineteenth-century Christian discourse concerning racial identity, slavery, and society.Ministers, theologians, scientists, politicians, reformers, and amateur anthropologists repeatedly deployed ham as a starting point for understanding the obvious difference, historical and physical, of the Negro, or, more broadly, for defining racial and cultural identity.Chesnutt had made central use of the ham curse in an earlier satirical short story of 1886, "The Fall of Adam," in which a literal-minded character calls it the "cuss o' Caanyun" and questions how "cussin'" could have ever produced blackness. 8he would refer to ham swift and mammoser Essays