Po' Sandy

Sandy’s story and the frame narrative that surrounds it is set in Patesville, North Carolina, widely understood to be a fictional representation of Fayetteville, where Chesnutt lived for much of his life. Chesnutt makes John the first narrative voice in the story, but Julius gets the last word. The story shows how an intelligent, newly freed Black American can get what he wants even in the face of racial injustices. 

“Po’ Sandy” was well received at the time of publication, and many literary critics have read it in the tradition of slave trickster tales that tell of the manipulation of one character by another. Critics in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries, however, often read the story as a sophisticated piece of political writing. Paul R. Petrie writes that Chesnutt “set himself the task of using fiction to transform the hearts and minds of a politically powerful, elite white readership, upon whose conceptions of African Americans every possibility of civil and social reform depended” (Petrie, Paul R. “Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, and the Racial Limits of Literary Mediation.” Studies in American Fiction, Johns Hopkins University Press, vol.