Chesnutt, Charles W. 1858–1932

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Charles W. Chesnutt 1858–1932

Author

A chronicler in fiction of history’s darkest days for blacks in the South after the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt was considered the dean of African-American fiction by many of the writers who came after him. Chesnutt was the first writer of fiction to explore black life from a variety of different perspectives; his short stories and novels include a broad selection of social types and have themes that range from comedy to gloomy realism. Although he was only partially successful in realizing his ambitious goal of introducing white Americans to the experiences of blacks, many of Chesnutt’s works remain well known. He is especially noted for a group of stories that make use of southern black folklore in a fashion dramatically different from the cheerful versions of black folktales that generations of schoolchildren have enjoyed.

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858. His parents were free blacks from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who returned there in 1866 after the end of the war. The fathers of both his parents were white, and as an adult Chesnutt could easily have passed for white himself, but chose instead to affirm his heritage. The family operated a grocery store in Fayetteville, and Chesnutt’s education seemed on the verge of ending when he reached the age of 14 and was expected to shoulder more of the store’s workload. But Chesnutt’s school principal was so impressed by his talents that he prevailed upon Chesnutt’s parents to let their son stay on as a combination student and teacher. Chesnutt became a teacher in nearby Charlotte at age 16, teaching himself Latin, German, French, and, most important for his future livelihood, secretarial skills. In 1878 he married Susan Perry.

1.275qRestless, Chesnutt moved north to New York, leaving his growing family in North Carolina; he had already begun to think vaguely about a writing career. He worked as a writer and clerk in New York’s Wall Street area for a time, and then went back to his birthplace of Cleveland. There he landed a job in the offices of the Nickel Plate Railroad company and reunited his family. Becoming a clerk in the office of the company’s lawyer, he studied law himself and earned a top score on the Ohio bar exam in 1887. Literary concerns weighed heavily on his mind, but with a family to support, Chesnutt opened what became a prosperous court reporting business and confined fiction to his spare time.

The medium of the short story came naturally to Chesnutt, and he quickly experienced success. He wrote various types of stories, some of them aimed mainly at finding commercial success and establishing a track record of publication. Others, however, were original in their day and remain unique documents of Southern black life for today’s readers. His very first published story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” was issued by the Atlantic Monthly in 1887; it was one of a group of stories, written in Southern black dialect, that featured folk tales told by an old black gardener named Uncle Julius McAdoo.

These stories resembled the popular Uncle Remus books of Joel Chandler Harris in their focus on black

At a Glance…

Born June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, OH; died November 15, 1932, in Cleveland, OH; son of Andrew Chesnutt (a grocer); married Susan Perry (a teacher), June 6, 1878; children: Ethel, Helen Maria, Edwin, Dorothy. Education: Largely self-educated.

Career: Writer, court reporter, and educator. Taught at public schools in North and South Carolina, 1872-77; New State Normal School, Fayetteville, NC, assistant principal, principal, 1877-83; worked as journalist in New York, 1883; Nickel Plate Railroad Co., Cleveland, OH, legal clerk, 1884-89; private court reporting practice, 1890-1920s; published story collection The Conjure Woman, 1899; published three novels of post-Reconstruction South: The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream, 1900-05.

Awards: Spingarn Medal, NAACP, 1928.

folklore, much of it with a distinctly African quality. Chesnutt’s stories, however, carried deeper meanings, presenting edgy, metaphorical treatments of the terrible realities of slavery and of the interaction between master and slave. A collection of Chesnutt’s stories of this type, The Conjure Woman, was published in 1899 by Houghton Mifflin. Chesnutt often asked his publishers not to mention his racial background in their advertising, pointing out that the ideas in his books should be judged on their own merits. Reviewers nevertheless noted the unique perspective of The Conjure Woman from the start.

“The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites,” Chesnutt wrote in his journal (quoted in African American Writers). He believed that if they were presented with honest, accurate depictions of the range of black experience, whites could make moral progress beyond the “unjust spirit of caste” that gripped the nation as a whole. Many of his writings touched on the lives of mixed-race people such as himself, and several of them, including “The Wife of His Youth,” addressed the problem of black-on-black prejudice according to skin color. In that story a member of a social club satirically named the “Groveland Blue Veins” experiences moral growth when he acknowledges the existence of a dark-skinned wife he had left behind years ago.

“The Wife of His Youth” lent its title to a second collection of Chesnutt stories published in 1899, and Chesnutt then felt that his reputation had advanced far enough for him to close his court reporting business and write full time. He produced three novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). In addition to these prolific labors he published a short biography of Frederick Douglass.

All of these novels were realistic treatments of the post-Reconstruction South, and the general reading public did not find them easy to take. The House Behind the Cedars, the story of a black girl who passed for white in a small South Carolina town, was well-received. But The Marrow of Tradition, which investigated the background of a Ku Klux Klan attack on a town’s black population and included a militant character who urged armed resistance to white domination, failed to sell well and was thought too controversial even by generally sympathetic reviewers in the Northern literary establishment.

Younger black writers followed Chesnutt’s works closely, however, and in 1928 his pioneering role in creating a distinctive African-American literature was recognized by his reception of the Spingarn Medal bestowed by the National Association of Colored People. Chesnutt moved away from writing fiction, although a comic short story of 1904, “Baxter’s Procrustes,” is considered among his best. Like some of his other works it features no black characters. Chesnutt wrote essays on racial problems and became closely involved with the black intelligentsia of the day; a friend of both the accommodationist Booker T. Washington and the more aggressive W.E.B. DuBois, Chesnutt played a role in black political leadership that deserves further investigation. Though he had done much to inspire the black literary, social, and intellectual flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance, Chesnutt failed to appreciate its greatest accomplishments. Two novels he wrote during the 1920s, Paul , and The Quarry, remain unpublished. Chesnutt died in Cleveland on November 15, 1932.