The Site of the House Behind the Cedars

    John Warwick continues his walk down Bow Street to Front Street (Person Street] where he follows a young woman whom he recognizes as his sister. After an approximately ten-minute walk he arrives at his old home, the "house behind the cedars." There has been much speculation about the exact location of the house that is memorialized in this novel, but the best guess seems to be that it was located on the corner of C and Poison streets. (The fictional house is on a two-acre lot, so perhaps Chesnutt was visualizing the house as located on the lot between Person and Russell Street.) On this site was a house and lot owned by Charles' father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt. In an article in the July 1949 issue of Crisis magazine, John W. Parker, a former English professor at Fayetteville State University, states that the real "house behind the cedars" stood on this site until 1948, when it was torn down for commercial reasons. Parker describes the house as a "gable-roofed, frame cottage set down in a profusion of flowers and shrubs with numerous forked cedars on either side of a winding walk that led to Person Street.' (p. 206) This description seems vaguely similar to Chesnutt's account of the house in the novel:

He... peered through a narrow gap in the cedar hedge. The garden walks were bordered by long rows of jonquils, pinks, and carnations, enclosing clumps of fragrant shrubs, lilies, and roses already in bloom. Toward the middle of the garden stood two fine magnolia trees, with heavy, dark green, glistening leaves, while nearer the house two mighty elms shaded a wide piazza, at the one end of which a honey-suckle vine, and at the other a Virginia creeper, running over a wooden lattice, furnished additional shade and seclusion. On dark or wintry days, the aspect of this garden must have been extremely somber and depressing, and It might well have seemed a fit place to hide some guilty or disgraceful secret.

    The cedar hedge and the other greenery in the novel are designed to hide a secret. John Warwick's mother, Molly Walden, like Chesnutt's own grandmother (on his father's side) had been the mistress of a white man who had given her this house. The real "house behind the cedars" had been left to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt by his white father, Waddell Cade. (In his will, A.J. Chesnutt left to his wife the "house and lot on C Street which was given me by my father." in Andrews, p. 2)

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