A short life of the author
Charles W. Chesnutt was the first African American writer to master the short story and the novel as forms of art — not as vehicles for propaganda or uplift, though his work served both purposes, but as literary achievements that could stand beside the best fiction of his white contemporaries. His stories and novels explored the complexities of race in America — passing, miscegenation, racial violence, the absurdities of the colour line — with a sophistication and psychological depth that were virtually unprecedented in American fiction of the 1890s. That his work was largely forgotten for decades after his death and has been recovered only in the past fifty years is itself a story about race and the American literary canon.
Life on the Colour Line
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, the son of free Black parents of mixed racial ancestry who had emigrated from Fayetteville, North Carolina. After the Civil War, the family returned to Fayetteville, where Chesnutt was educated at the Howard School (a Freedmen’s Bureau institution) and eventually became its principal. He was light-skinned enough to pass for white — and chose not to, a decision that was central to his identity and his fiction.
He taught himself German, French, and Latin; studied law; passed the Ohio bar examination; and eventually settled in Cleveland, where he established a successful court-reporting and legal stenography business. His literary career was a parallel endeavour, pursued in evenings and early mornings while he maintained the business that supported his family.
The Conjure Woman
The Conjure Woman (1899), Chesnutt’s first book, is a collection of dialect stories set on a former North Carolina plantation, narrated by Uncle Julius, an elderly former slave who tells tales of conjuration — spells, transformations, and supernatural interventions — to his new white employers. The stories operate on multiple levels: they are entertaining folktales, they are subversive commentaries on slavery’s cruelties, and they are sophisticated literary performances that use the conventions of the “plantation school” (Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page) against themselves.
Each story appears to be a charming piece of local colour, but each conceals a devastating critique of slavery. In “The Goophered Grapevine,” the transformation of a slave into a vine is both a comic tale and a metaphor for the reduction of human beings to commodities. In “Po’ Sandy,” a slave is turned into a tree to protect him from being sold — and is then cut down and made into lumber, a parable of slavery’s destruction of Black bodies and families.
The Novels
The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) explored the world of light-skinned, educated, mixed-race African Americans — the “Blue Vein” society — with a nuance that no American writer had previously achieved. The title story, in which a prosperous mulatto man must choose between his dark-skinned first wife (a former slave) and his place in light-skinned society, is one of the finest American short stories of the nineteenth century.
The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is a novel of racial passing — a young mixed-race woman who passes as white is discovered and faces the destruction of her social position and romantic prospects. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), based on the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, is Chesnutt’s most ambitious and most politically radical novel — a panoramic narrative of racial violence in a Southern city that indicts white supremacy with a directness that was shocking to contemporary readers.
Decline and Recovery
The Marrow of Tradition sold poorly, and its frank treatment of racial violence alienated white readers. The Colonel’s Dream (1905), a novel about a white reformer in the South, also failed commercially. Chesnutt largely abandoned fiction after 1905, returning to his legal stenography business and devoting his energies to civil rights work. He received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1928.
His literary reputation was recovered in the 1960s and 1970s by scholars who recognised him as a pioneer of African American literature. He is now regarded as one of the most important American writers of the late nineteenth century — a writer whose work anticipated, by half a century, the concerns and techniques of the Harlem Renaissance and the African American literary tradition that followed.
Chesnutt and the Mask
The central strategy of Chesnutt’s fiction is what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called “signifying” — the use of an apparently conventional literary form to deliver a subversive message. The Conjure Woman stories signify on the plantation tradition by adopting its conventions (dialect, folk charm, nostalgic setting) and using them to expose slavery’s horrors. The Blue Vein stories signify on the genteel literary tradition by presenting characters whose refinement and education are undeniable — and who are nonetheless destroyed by racial prejudice. Chesnutt’s use of the mask — the gap between what his fiction appears to be and what it actually does — makes him a more radical writer than he initially seems, and connects him to a tradition of coded Black expression that runs from slave narratives through Ellison’s Invisible Man to the present. His journals, published posthumously, reveal a man who understood exactly what he was doing: writing fiction that could pass as entertainment while carrying a freight of social criticism that his white readers would absorb before they recognised its implications.
Collecting Chesnutt
The Conjure Woman (Houghton, Mifflin, 1899) in first edition is one of the most important African American literary titles and a significant collecting target. The Wife of His Youth (Houghton, Mifflin, 1899) and The Marrow of Tradition (Houghton, Mifflin, 1901) are also collected. First editions of all three are uncommon in fine condition.