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| Charles W. Chesnutt's Literary Career - An Overview Charles Chesnutt lived from 1858-1932. In 1887, he published a short story in a national publication for the first time when "The Goophered Grapevine" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. This story along with other stories about conjuring, goophering, and working magic were published in 1899 as part of the collection, The Conjure Woman. These stories are narrated by a white Northerner who, having moved to the South for his wife's health, has bought a scuppernong vineyard in the Lumberton Road - Wilmington Road Area, an area where the Chesnutt family owned a farm. At the heart of each of each of these stories is a tale told by an ex-slave Uncle Julius about conjuring and goophering the power possessed by a few to magically transform men into mules, wolves, and trees. These stories served to counter the romanticized, sentimental depictions of the Old South as presented by Joel Chandler Harris' "Uncle Remus" tales, or in the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page, one of whose Black characters says, "Dem wuz good ole time, marster -- de bes' Sam ever see!" On the surface Chesnutt's stories seem humorous and harmless, and yet the more carefully you read them, the more you see that they are an indictment of slavery; they show husbands and wives, parents and children are routinely separated from one another, and human beings are bought and sold like farm animals. In his conjure stories, Chesnutt may have been working a little magic of his own with his readers. The stories concealed the race of the author so that many of Chesnutt's early readers probably assumed that the author, like the stories narrator, was white. The success of The Conjure Woman led Houghton-Mifflin to publish a second collection of Chesnutt short stories entitled The Wife of His Youth in late 1899. In some of these works, as in the conjure stories, Chesnutt focuses on the days of slavery. "The Passing of Grandison," for example is a clever satirical treatment of the paternalist slave owner and the old faithful slave who outwits his master to earn his and his family's freedom. Other stories in the collection are set in South during the reconstruction era and show the harsh consequences of the slavery past. In "The Sheriff's Children," for example, a southern white man comes face to face with his black son. In "Uncles Wellington's Wives," the main character leaves the South in hopes of greater opportunities in the North, only to discover that in the "Norf", "A colored man might be as good as a white man in theory, but neither of them was of any special consequence without money, or talent, or position." (250-251) In two of the stories, "The Wife of His Youth" and "A Matter of Principle," Chesnutt ridicules the intraracial prejudices and pretentiousness of members of the "Blue Vein Society," Blacks who take pride in their skin that is so light their blue veins are visible. In 1900 Chesnutt published a biography on Frederick Douglass and his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, a work that had originally been a short story. Set in "Patesville," the novel tells the story of John and Rena Walden, who, like Chesnutt's own father and mother, are the children of a black woman and a white man. At the opening of the novel John returns to Patesville to take his sister with him to South Carolina where he is passing as white. Rena's fate exposes the tragic consequences of the race prejudices that permeate the South, the kinds of prejudices from which Chesnutt wanted to escape in leaving for the North. Anyone who knows this area will immediately recognize Patesville in The House Behind the Cedars as Fayetteville. As early as January 1900, Walter Hines Page, who had helped Chesnutt publish his earlier works readily identified Patesville as Fayetteville. Page, who was from North Carolina and had been married in Fayetteville, wrote to Chesnutt after reading an early version of the novel, I suppose you are wise in using old Judge Strange's name, old Mrs. McRae's, and all the familiar old family names and landmarks of Fayetteville, but some of our friends down there will be -- well, I will say interested. I congratulate you on the local color and the accuracy of your descriptions of the town and the country. You seem to have caught the spirit of the whole community. Interestingly, the names Strange and McRae do NOT appear in The House Behind the Cedars. (Though there is a Judge Straight.) Page's comments perhaps led Chesnutt to think it was NOT wise to be so exact with names. Through his family in North Carolina, Chesnutt kept informed of political events in the South, and in 1901 he visited Fayetteville and Wilmington to gather information about the 1898 race riots in Wilmington (his fictional name is Wellington). These events provided the inspiration for Chesnutt's next novel, The Marrow of Tradition, published in 1901. Much more complex in plot and theme than Chesnutt's first novel, The Marrow of Tradition expresses the racial animosity that had fueled the riots. A white newspaper man, Major Carteret, who is from an aristocratic family, is joined by a Ku Klux Klanner and political opportunist in a campaign against "Negro domination." Blacks respond in different ways: There are those who accept their inferior status; others, like Josh Green, who answer violence with violence; and, still others, like Dr. Miller, who hope for reconciliation between the races. Despite the violence of the riots -- Dr. Miller's hospital is destroyed -- there seems to be a slight glimmer of hope offered by the novel, as Major Carteret comes to recognize his own moral failings. Chesnutt's The Colonel's Dream was published in 1905. In this novel, set in Clarendon, North Carolina in the 1890s, Colonel Henry French, from an old southern aristocratic family, returns to the South after a twenty-five year absence. Though conditions in Clarendon, a town which embodies the degeneracy resulting from slavery, are much worse than in either Patesville (Fayetteville) or Wellington (Wilmington), there are details about Clarendon that seem to be based loosely on sites in the region. The name "Clarendon" once referred to the Cape Fear River and surrounding areas. The town is close to Carthage, where Chesnutt's family spent the summer on several occasions, and there is an "Opera House" in Clarendon as in Fayetteville when Chesnutt lived here. Colonel French attempts to use the wealth he has amassed in the North to bring new life to the languishing economy of Clarendon, and to bring about social reform. Although welcomed initially, the Colonel encounters various obstacles that lead him finally to abandon his dream. At a time when Thomas Dixon was publishing his widely-read white racist novels such as The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907), Chesnutt never achieved the commercial success he had hoped for with his fiction. Perhaps because of the commercial failure of his fiction, and the changes in American literary tastes, Chesnutt, after 1905, was unable to find publishers for a play, "Mrs. Darcy's Children," a short novel, Paul Marchand. a collection of stories, "Aunt Hagar's Children," and a novel entitled, The Quarry. The last short story that Chesnutt wrote, "Concerning Father," which remained unpublished, seems to be based on the relationship of his grandmother Ann Chesnutt and her white lover, Waddell Cade. Despite his failure to publish after 1905, Chesnutt remained a respected figure in American literature. He was recognized as an equal by leading American literary figures of his day such as William Dean Howells and Walter Hines Page, and was among those invited to a special celebration of Mark Twain's birthday in 1905. In 1928, the NAACP awarded Chesnutt the Spingarn Medal for his "pioneer work depicting the life and struggles of Americans of Negro descent..." More than a century after Chesnutt began publishing fiction scholars have shown a renewed interest in his works. In addition to the re-release of works published in his lifetime, several unpublished works have finally been published. An early novel, Mandy Oxendine, was published in 1997 by the University of Illinois Press, and Paul Marchand, Free Man of Color, which Chesnutt wrote in the 1920s, has been published by the University Press of Mississippi. In addition, Princeton University Press has published a volume of Chesnutt's letters and Duke University Press has published The Journals of Charles Chesnutt edited by Richard Brodhead. This renewed interest seems to be spurred by more than an interest in history. Rather, contemporary readers recognize the continuing relevance of Chesnutt's reflections on race, the color line, and their implications for politics, society, and individual relationships. For additional online works, click here A list of published Chesnutt's works - from Berea College's Digital Archive with links to other sites of interest Click for Chesnutt bibliography, from Dr. Donna Campbell, Gonzaga University Perspectives in American Literature - Information, Bibliography |