Charles W. Chesnutt

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell (1858–1932), short story writer and novelist. Charles W. Chesnutt was the most influential African American writer of fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1899 to 1905, during which time he published two collections of short stories and three novels, Chesnutt skillfully enlisted the white-controlled publishing industry in the service of his social message. More successfully than any of his predecessors in African American fiction, Chesnutt gained a hearing from a significant portion of the national reading audience that was both engaged and disturbed by his analyses and indictments of racism.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, the son of free African American emigres from the South, Charles Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, during the turbulent Reconstruction era. By his late teens he had distinguished himself sufficiently as a teacher to be appointed assistant principal of the local normal school for persons of color. But his marriage in 1878 and his impatience with the restrictions of his life in the South fueled his ambitions to find better opportunities in the North where he might pursue a literary career. In 1884, Chesnutt moved to Cleveland, where he settled his family, passed the Ohio state bar, and launched a business career as a legal stenographer.

In August 1887, the Atlantic Monthly printed Chesnutt's “The Goophered Grapevine”, his first important work of fiction. Set in North Carolina and featuring an ex-slave raconteur who spins wonderful tales about antebellum southern life, “The Goophered Grapevine” was singular in its presentation of the lore of “conjuration,” African American hoodoo beliefs and practices, to a white reading public largely ignorant of black folk culture. In this story, Chesnutt also introduced a new kind of African American storytelling protagonist, Uncle Julius McAdoo, who shrewdly adapts his recollections of the past to secure his economic advantage in the present, sometimes at the expense of his white employer. In March 1899, The Conjure Woman a collection of “conjure stories” based on the model established in “The Goophered Grapevine”, made its debut under the prestigious imprint of Boston's Houghton Mifflin publishing house. The most memorable stories in the collection, such as “The Goophered Grapevine” and “Po' Sandy”, portray slavery as a crucible that placed black people under almost unbearable psychological pressures, eliciting from them tenacity of purpose, firmness of character, and imaginative ingenuity in order to preserve themselves, their families, and their community.

In the fall of 1899, Houghton Mifflin published a second Chesnutt short story collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. The majority of the stories in The Wife of His Youth explore the moral conflicts and psychological strains experienced by those who lived closest to the color line in Chesnutt's day, namely, mixed-race persons like himself. After reading The Wife of His Youth, some critics, like the noted white novelist William Dean Howells, wrote admiringly about Chesnutt's realistic portrayals of life along the color line. But other reviewers were put off by his unapologetic inquiries into topics considered too delicate or volatile for short fiction, such as segregation, mob violence, miscegenation, and white racism.

Around the same time, Chesnutt closed his prosperous court-reporting business in Cleveland to pursue his lifelong dream—a career as a full-time author. In the next six years he published three novels of purpose, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel's Dream (1905), which surveyed racial problems in the postwar South and tested out a number of possible social, economic, and political solutions. The House Behind the Cedars, a novel of passing, was generally well received, and The Marrow of Tradition was reviewed extensively throughout the country as a disturbing but timely study of a contemporary southern town in the throes of a white supremacist revolution. Yet by the time Chesnutt began writing The Colonel's Dream, the story of a failed attempt to revive a southern town blighted by exploitation and racism, the author knew that his brand of fiction would not sell well enough to sustain his experimental literary career. Although he continued writing and speaking on various social and political issues after The Colonel's Dream, Chesnutt was able to publish only a handful of short stories in the last twenty-five years of his life. Among African American readers, however, admiration for his achievement never waned. In 1928, the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal for his “pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggles of Americans of Negro descent, and for his long and useful career as scholar, worker, and freeman of one of America's greatest cities.”

In 1931 in “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem,” an essay in literary autobiography, Chesnutt accepted the fact that writing fashions had passed him by, but he took pride in pointing out how far African American literature and the attitude of the white literary world toward it had come since the days when he first broke into print. Although he was too modest to do so, Chesnutt might have claimed an important role in preparing the American public for the advent of the New Negro author of the 1920s. In a basic sense, the new movement followed his precedent in unmasking the false poses and images of its era in order to refocus attention on the real racial issues facing America. Today, historians of African American writing point out that Charles Chesnutt deserves credit for almost singlehandedly inaugurating a truly African American literary tradition in the short story. He was the first writer to make the broad range of African American experience his artistic province and to consider practically every issue and problem endemic to the American color line worthy of literary attention. Because he developed literary modes appropriate to his materials, Chesnutt also left to his successors a rich formal legacy that underlies major trends in twentieth-century black fiction, from the ironies of James Weldon Johnson's classic African American fiction of manners to the magical realism of Charles R. Johnson's contemporary neo-slave narratives.

[See also Aun' Peggy; Rena Walden.]

Bibliography

• Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, 1952.
• Sylvia Lyons Render, ed., The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1974.
• Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 1978.
• William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1980.
• Richard H. Brodhead, ed., The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1993.
• Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, 1993.
• Ernestine Pickens, Charles W. Chesutt and the Progressive Movement, 1994.
• Joseph R. McElrath and Robert C. Letiz, eds. “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905, 1997.
• Henry B. Wonham, Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1998

William L. Andrews

writer; journalist; school principal; teacher

Personal Information

Born on June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, OH; died on 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.

Life's Work

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.

Worked in Railroad Office

Restless, 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 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.

Created Characters of Mixed Race

"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.

Novels Described Post-Reconstruction South

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 Marchand, F. M. C., and The Quarry, remain unpublished. Chesnutt died in Cleveland on November 15, 1932.

Awards

Spingarn Medal, NAACP, 1928.

Works

Selected writings

• The Conjure Woman (stories), Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
• The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
• Frederick Douglass (biography), Small, Maynard, 1899.
• The House Behind the Cedars (novel), Houghton Mifflin, 1900.
• The Marrow of Tradition (novel), Houghton Mifflin, 1901.
• The Colonel's Dream (novel), Doubleday, Page, 1905.

Further Reading

Books

• Andrews, William L., The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
• Hatch, Shari Dorantes, and Michael R. Strickland, eds., African-American Writers: A Dictionary, ABC-Clio.
• Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Men, Gale, 1998.
• Smith, Valerie, et al., eds., African American Writers, Scribner's, 1991.

• Additional material was obtained online at Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2000.

— James M. Manheim

Quotes:

"Impossibilities are merely things which we have not yet learned."