The Conjure Woman

A Northern couple buys a run-down vineyard in North Carolina after the Civil War, and Uncle Julius, who was once enslaved there, tells them the plantation's old stories of conjure: a man turned into a tree, grapevines that live and die with the man who eats their fruit. Behind the folk tales is a sharp picture of slavery and of the people who profited from it. Chesnutt's first book, with two related stories added at the end.