Ham and Slaves
The predominant imagery at work in the narrative is the association drawn between ham and slaves. The ferocious manner in which Julius devours six slices of ham in the framing section is an ironic undermining of the racist assumption that all black people love ham. The imagery then becomes extended to the stolen smoked ham being worn as punishment around Dave’s neck and its transformation into the story’s central metaphor for the dehumanization of slavery. Dave goes from missing the presence of the ham to asserting that he is himself becoming a ham, further cementing the association between ham and slaves. The imagery reaches a climax in the smokehouse when Dave goes there looking to be “cured” of his affliction. The affliction is only metaphorically turning into a ham since that is a symbol of already being a slave.
The Awakening of Annie
Counterpointed imagery is utilized to subtly reveal that Annie—rather than the self-satisfied “deep thinker” John—is moved by the story Julius tells about Dave toward a deeper understanding of the slave experience and its dependence upon dehumanization. The story opens and closes with Annie’s dialogue. The story commences with Annie asking “Have some dinner, Uncle Julius?” This image of a white woman extending an invitation to an aging former slave subtly implies that Annie is already making a move toward an awakened consciousness. It is an invitation that comes with strings attached-neither she nor John actually sit down and join Julius for dinner—but it is still something unlikely to be replicated by most women her age raised in the South and probably very few Northerners like herself, either. The story concludes with her admitting to her husband, "I couldn't have eaten any more of that ham, and so I gave it to Julius." The imagery here is robust with unstated meaning. That she cannot eat the ham herself divulges that she has at least tentatively made the connection between ham and dehumanized slaves which escaped her husband’s notice. Furthermore, the act of giving the ham to Julius is an implicit acknowledgement that his story belongs to him whereas John—by the very act of being the de facto narrator of the story—is asserting a claim to his right to be the one to tell Julius’s story.
The Uncle Julius Show
In many stories with a framing device, it is the interior narrative that really accounts for everything. The frame often exists just as a mean of getting around the difficulties of getting to the central narrative. In the case of “Dave’s Neckliss” because there is simply so much going on that contributes to interpreting what the story is about, the framing is actually just as essential as the central narrative. Because one of the things that the story is about is how black narratives are mediated through white perspectives, one of the most astonishing examples of imagery occurs at the beginning of the story and Chesnutt reveals himself to be so in control of the act of writing that it doesn’t even feel like it is especially significant:
I threw myself into a hammock, from which I could see Julius through an open window…
When he had cut the sixth slice of ham (I kept count of them from a lazy curiosity to see how much he could eat) I saw him lay it on his plate...
…he paused, as if struck by a sudden thought, and a tear rolled down his rugged cheek and fell upon the slice of ham before him.
The focus here seems to be the almost ritualistic manner in which Julius attacks the ham which Annie has invited him to eat. Perhaps only a subsequent reading might reveal that the real significance of the paragraph excerpted here is not Julius, but John. John is outside his home on the porch in a hammock—a representation of white privilege. He is watching Julius through a window almost as if watching a story unfold on a television screen---and this story was written half a century before television even started being mass-produced. John is the outsider watching black history through a filter and inscribing upon the narrative his own opinions and interpretations of the facts presented in a brilliantly evocative bit of imagery.
Dialect
If ham is the predominant visual imagery in the story, then the utilization of dialect in the account given by Uncle Julius is certainly the dominant example of literary imagery. The significance of it use becomes apparent with any line spoken by Julius chosen at random. For instance:
"En w'en de een' er de year come, Mars Dugal' turnt Mars Walker off, en run de plantation hisse'f atter dat."
This is the manner in which every line of the narrative told by Julius is presented. Chesnutt wrote in this style because it was popular among white readers of black fiction and it ensure sales. It is worth noting, however, that this was the last short story Chesnutt would publish in a magazine utilizing dialect. The irony is that it is easy to see why Chesnutt would want to move onto writing stories in standard conversational English while at the same time recognizing the use of dialect was so essential to his “Uncle Julius” stories. As indicated, part of the overall theme of this and other Uncle Julius stories is to comment upon the way that black history is mediated and controlled by white society. The use of heavy dialect like this contributes to that theme by revealing just how difficult it would be for the average white reader to make it through an entire book-length history if were presented in this fashion. So the imagery created by the use of such dialect is one that reveals the difficulty of white readers understanding black culture. In order to make it understandable, it needed to be filtered through a white translation. Of course, the reality that Chesnutt was aching to show by moving away from his dialect stories was that black people did not really converse in language like this. Like whites, African-Americans were perfectly capable—and perfectly used to—communication in the same standard conversational English as used by any other immigrant culture.
