Charles W. Chesnutt his own goals and care for his circle. While Julius's tales recall the "Uncle Remus" tales published by Joel Chandler Harris, they differ in that Uncle Julius' tales offer oblique or coded commentary on the psychological and social effects of slavery and racial inequality. While controversy exists over whether Chesnutt's Uncle Julius stories reaffirmed stereotypical views of African Americans, most critics contend that their allegorical critiques of racial injustice took them to a different level. Seven of the Uncle Julius tales were collected in "The Conjure Woman". Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen Uncle Julius tales, the remainder of which
Uncle Remus context, as they are set on a former slave-owning plantation and portrayed in a passive, even docile, manner. Nevertheless, Harris's work was, according to himself, an accurate account of the stories he heard from the slaves when he worked on a plantation as a young man. He claimed to have listened to, and memorized, the African American animal stories told by Uncle George Terrell, Old Harbert, and Aunt Crissy at the plantation; he wrote them down some years later. He acknowledged his debt to these storytellers in his fictionalized autobiography, "On the Plantation" (1892). Many of the stories that he