Unfortunately, I don’t have many details. I think I’m repressing some of them, because the story upset me rather badly.
**What I remember:
Girl is (perhaps) a slave. Someone uses voodoo? to help her escape slavery, but in reality she is turned into a sentient tree. Someone chops down the tree and can’t hear the girl screaming.
There may be pictures, and there may have been other stories in the volume.**
There is a tree near my house that dropped a limb and now you can see the whole trunk. One portion of the trunk has holes in it that make it resemble a screaming face (think Munch in bark). Every time I see the tree, I have horrible flashbacks to the story of the girl-tree, and it makes me feel rather ill. I thought if I could reread the story I’d get over it.
Was it a girl, not a boy? From Erin Fadden’s page about the book Conjure Tales by Charles Chesnutt.
Searching on “tree” with the Amazon “Search inside the book feature” (information at Amazon), shows that the story was written in dialect. Does that match your story?
I found an etext of “Po’ Sandy” online and while it seems like it almost has to be the story I mean, I’m a little surprised. I would have read this before I was eight and I’m not certain I was reading at that level then. I was reading Narnia, but this seems more advanced than Lewis. I can’t find evidence that anyone ever did an abridged or children’s version of the story, though, and the other tales in the same book are also familiar. I guess I was reading at a higher level than I thought!