Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman

In Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, the narrator relates a sequence of tales about his African-American servants in the South after the Civil War. The stories share a single dynamic: the African-Americans tell extraordinarily tall tales and insist on their veracity to such an extent that the narrator, out of indulgence for his wife, whom he presents as terribly indulgent to the African-Americans, must repeatedly change his behavior out of respect for their apparent superstitions.

As the tales continue, Chesnutt's point comes clear by stages. The ex-slaves have a different approach to truth and falsehood, at least when they have to deal with white people. They assume they following:

1) A African-American cannot tell a white anything and be believed.
2) A African-American cannot help a white person beyond following instructions without causing problems.

Therefore, the African-Americans make up stories to draw the whites in to behave as the African-Americans would wish. Most of these events involve garnering some small advantage for the African-American, his friends or family. But on some occasions it clearly involves quite a bit of work and imagination just to save white people from their own folly as well. This comes out most clearly in an involved plot involving prolonged insistance that a certain road is haunted, just to bring together two lovers who have been fighting.

For the Northern narrator, the entire manner of speech is at first unfamiliar; in fact, he never presents himself as mastering it. He patronizes the African-Americans obtusely and presents himself as over-generous in doing so. The plot undercuts his attitude quite clearly, presenting the African-Americans as wise beyond their education and position. However, the whole effect seems to imply that they're charmingly ignorant and folksy-charming in a very Aunt Jemima Stephen Fetchit kind of way.