CHESNUTT, Charles Waddell

Nationality: American. Born: Cleveland, Ohio, 20 June 1858; moved with his family to Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1866. Education: Educated privately and at local schools. Family: Married Susan U. Perry in 1878; four children. Career: Teacher, North Carolina public schools, 1873-77; assistant principal, 1877-79, principal, 1880-83, Howard Normal School, Fayetteville; reporter, New York Mail and Express, 1883; clerk and stenographer for railway company, Cleveland, 1883; studied law (admitted to Ohio bar, 1887); owned a stenographic business, mid-1880s-1899 and after 1902. Awards: NAACP Spingarn medal, 1928. Died: 15 November 1932.

Publications

Collections

The Short Fiction, edited by Sylvia Lyons Render. 1974.

Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories. 1994.

Short Stories

The Conjure Woman. 1899.

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. 1899.

Novels

The House Behind the Cedars. 1900.

The Marrow of Tradition. 1901; as Tradition. 1994.

The Colonel's Dream. 1905.

Mandy Oxendine: A Novel. 1997.

Other

Frederick Douglass. 1899.

To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt. 1997.

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Bibliography:

"The Works of Chesnutt: A Checklist" by William L. Andrews, in Bulletin of Bibliography, January 1976; Chesnutt: A Reference Guide by Curtis W. Ellison and E.W. Metcalf, Jr., 1977.

Critical Studies:

Chesnutt, Pioneer of the Color Line by Helen M. Chesnutt, 1952; Chesnutt: America's First Great Black Novelist by J. Noel Heermance, 1974; An American Crusade: The Life of Chesnutt by Frances Richardson Keller, 1978; The Literary Careerof Chesnutt by William L. Andrews, 1980; Chesnutt by Sylvia Lyons Render, 1980; Chesnutt by Cliff Thompson, 1992; Charles W. Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement by Ernestine Williams Pickens, 1994; Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction by Henry B. Wonham, 1998.

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A gifted novelist and short story writer, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was the first African American published by a major American magazine and publishing house. He sought to mine original literary material found in remote locales or overlooked social strata. His treatments of slavery and mulattos living on the "color line" were determined attempts to revise popular stereotypes and humanize African-American literary characters.

Chesnutt wrote during a period termed by one black historian as the "nadir" of African-American experience in the United States. Many of the hopes raised by emancipation and the Civil War were dispelled as white supremacy was reasserted in the South and blacks were consigned to a second-class citizenship not demonstrably better—and sometimes worse—than they had faced as slaves. In literature Southern local color writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page extolled the lost plantation society and sentimentalized white and black relationships "befo' de war." Another Southerner, Thomas Dixon, wrote novels such as The Clansman that painted freed blacks as brutes not to be trusted in politics or near white women.

Chesnutt's work controverted these portraits. Like other local color fiction, the stories collected in The Conjure Woman attempt to capture the folkways, dialect, and social manners of quaint peoples living in backwater America. But Chesnutt's conjure tales are more than simply quaint. They reveal the many disquieting aspects of slavery.

Several of the stories treat the breakup of families and the desperate and inventive efforts of slaves to maintain their family bonds. The creative power of conjure is often invoked to counteract slavery's cruelty. "Po' Sandy," for instance, is about a slave who cannot maintain his relationship with his wife because he is lent out to his master's relatives for months at a time. His wife, a conjurer, agrees to transform him into a pine tree so that he cannot again be uprooted from his home. But while she is called away to nurse Mars Marrabo's daughter-in-law on a distant plantation, Sandy is chopped down and sawed into boards for a new kitchen. A similar theme impels "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," about a mother's efforts to keep her baby. Becky's master, Colonel Pendleton, sells her in exchange for a racehorse. After Becky's new master refuses to buy Becky's baby too, both mother and child sicken because of their separation. Asked to solve the problem, the conjure woman sends bees to make the horse lame. Pendleton, who thinks he made a bad bargain, insists on voiding the deal. The mother and child are reunited for life.

As William L. Andrews points out, Chesnutt's masters transcended popular stereotypes as surely as did his slaves. Mars Marrabo and Colonel Pendleton are neither barbarously cruel nor paragons of benevolence. Instead, they are self-interested and callous toward their slaves' welfare. Marrabo offers Sandy a dollar in compensation for selling his first wife. And Pendleton would not have reunited Becky and her child if he had not feared losing in a financial transaction. Even harsh masters are redeemable if they can be shocked out of their callousness. In "Mars Jeem's Nightmare," a conjure woman transforms a heartless master into a slave himself; he awakens a more humane man.

If the characteristics of the slaves and their masters are extended beyond stereotypes, so is the character of Chesnutt's raconteur, the ex-slave Uncle Julius. Ostensibly cut in the mold of Uncle Remus, Julius illustrates a degree of self-interest and guile that transcends that stereotype. Unlike the typical narrators of Southern reconciliation fiction, he does not tell his tales because he is nostalgic for slavery days. He is usually motivated by a desire to manipulate his employers—transplanted Yankees—into acting in his interests instead of their own. Julius's imaginative storytelling acts in a sense as his conjuring power over his employers. In "The Goophered Grapevine" he recites an elaborate tale claiming that the grapes he is enjoying are conjured because he does not want the Northerner owning them. In "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt" he claims that the woods the new owner plans to clear are haunted by a slave changed into a wolf by a vengeful conjure man. His real motive is to preserve for his own enjoyment a bee tree full of honey.

Chesnutt's other famous story collection, The Wife of His Youth, like The Conjure Woman, contradicts popular social prejudices, but in this case the stories chiefly concern mulatto characters. The stories contained in this volume are not fabulous like The Conjure Woman; they provide a more realistic treatment of the problems of people of color. Set in the South or among the bourgeois African-American societies of Northern cities, their overriding purpose, as Chesnutt records in his journal, was to elevate America from "the unjust spirit of caste," which was "a barrier to the moral progress of the American people."

A common topic in The Wife of His Youth is the search for identity and the ambivalences a person of mixed blood experiences on such a search. Chesnutt portrays these ambivalences through the extensive use of irony. For example, "The Sheriff's Children" is an account of a young mulatto man falsely accused of killing a white man in a small Southern town. Ironically, the sheriff who conscientiously protects the young man from a lynch mob is the father who, during slavery, sold the boy and his black mother. Thus, the son's reunion with his father can only be a bitterly ironic one. Indeed, the young man's entire life has been filled with the unresolvable conflict of the tragic mulatto: "You gave me a white man's spirit, and you made me a slave, and crushed it out." Another layer of irony is added when the sheriff's daughter, the accused's half-sister, shoots her brother in order to save the sheriff. The story's title suggests that the sins of the father are visited upon his children. In historical terms the unnatural events caused by the sheriff's original neglect of duty suggest that the postwar South continued to suffer for its prewar racial exploitation.

Chesnutt also effectively used satire to explore comic dimensions of the color line. In "A Matter of Principle" Cicero Clayton, a bourgeois gentleman of light skin, states that the solution to the race question in America is "a clearer conception of the brotherhood of man." However, it is "a matter of principle" with him that he refuses to be grouped with or associate with dark-skinned Negroes. When he fears that a congressman from South Carolina who is coming to pay suit to his daughter is dark-skinned, he feigns a case of diphtheria to get out of the situation. Ironically, it turns out that the congressman was light-skinned, eligible, and marries a rival of Cicero's daughter.

Chesnutt's preoccupation with African Americans' attempts to maintain their dignity in the face of the dehumanizing effects of slavery and postwar color prejudice resulted in two rich collections as well as dozens of uncollected short stories. Drawing on the superstitions of folk characters, he captured the manner in which the creative imagination was employed to aid in a wholesome survival. Employing irony, he depicted the ambiguities in the lives of mulatto characters as they adjusted to a life of marginal freedom.

—William L. Howard

See the essays on "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Wife of His Youth."