A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt
I. The ambiguities of uplift
And if Judge [Albion] Tourgée, with his necessarily limited intercourse with colored people, and with his limited stay in the South, can write such interesting descriptions, such vivid pictures of Southern life and character as to make himself rich and famous, why could not a colored man, who has lived among colored people all his life; who is familiar with their habits, their ruling passions, their prejudices; their whole moral and social conditions; and habit;—why could not a colored man who knew all this. . . why could not such a man, if he possessed the same ability, write a far better book about the South than Judge Tourgée of Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe has written? Answer who can!
—The Diary of Charles Chesnutt, March 16, 1880, on the publication of Albion Tourgée’s novel about race relations in the South during Reconstruction, A Fool’s Errand
For the American Negro, the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries were more critical than the Reconstruction years of 1868 to 1876.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois1
In the late summer of 1899, John Stark’s sheet music company published Sedalia, Missouri, resident Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Joplin’s composition was to become the most popular of all the instrumental pieces of the Ragtime era, the one that all ragtime pianists played, the piece that all ragtime players wished they had written. Contrary to the expectations of some Black middle-class strivers and many White tastemakers at the end of the nineteenth century, “Maple Leaf Rag” emerged as the most important and impressive, the most accomplished, piece of music composed by a Black American, and one of the most enduring. Alas, it was ragtime, not high Eurocentric-oriented art of the sort that many Black creatives, even Joplin himself, were aspiring to produce.
In March of the same year, Riverside Press (Houghton-Mifflin) published Cleveland resident Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s first book of fiction, The Conjure Woman, a collection of short stories. No serious fiction writer is supposed to debut with a book of short stories. Chesnutt certainly was aware of this as he knew well, exchanged correspondence and visited with, well-known literary figures such as Albion Tourgée, George Washington Cable, and Walter Hines Page, a fellow southerner. (Chesnutt, though not born in the South, lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, from 1868 to 1883, from ages 10 to 25.) So, Chesnutt knew what the shape of a literary career was supposed to be, and he knew he was taking the crooked path. He wanted to write the Great American Novel. As Chesnutt biographer Tess Chakkalakal writes in A Matter of Complexion, “From his earliest days as a writer, he seemed to believe that he might write a truly great American novel, something along the lines of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, or Melville’s Moby-Dick, or, closer to his time, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or James’s Portrait of a Lady.” (emphasis Chakkalakal, 208) He had, indeed, been laboring on and revising a novel—working title, “Rena”—for nearly ten years. He was stubborn enough not to quit despite the rejections. He had also completed another novel, A Business Career, about a poor female stenographer who falls in love with her male employer. In this instance, the characters were White. This made the publishers’ rounds but had no takers. Unlike “Rena,” he abandoned A Business Career to its fate of being unpublishable during his lifetime. He was determined to make “Rena”’s fate. His perseverance paid off as “Rena,” retitled as The House Behind the Cedars, was published in October 1900, his third book but his first published novel. It was about race. If he could not write the Great American Novel, he felt strongly that he ought to be allowed to write the Great American Race Novel, and not Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée, or any other White writer of the period. After all, if a Black was not to write the Great American Novel, and Whites wanted to horn in on writing the Great American Race Novel, what was left for the Black writer who could not even claim an expertise in writing about his own experience?
As he struggled to get a novel published, Chesnutt wrote lots of stories. In 1887, the Atlantic, one of the best-known and respected literary and intellectual magazines of its day, published “The Goophered Grapevine,” making Chesnutt the first Black writer to have his fiction appear in such a publication. That may be one of the reasons why “The Goophered Grapevine” is the most anthologized story by a nineteenth-century Black writer. It is also the first story in The Conjure Woman, seven stories featuring a sort of Black magical realism about conjurers during the time of slavery, creating reality-changing potions and casting potent spells, for a price (they did not work for free), that the enslaved used to get around the vainglorious exploitation, arbitrary edicts, and capricious punishments of their owners. Julius’s heavy Negro dialect was the popular local literary colorism of the day. Dialect writing, White and Black, was the new literary authenticity.
If he could not write the Great American Novel, he felt strongly that he ought to be allowed to write the Great American Race Novel, and not Mark Twain, Albion Tourgée, or any other White writer of the period. After all, if a Black was not to write the Great American Novel, and Whites wanted to horn in on writing the Great American Race Novel, what was left for the Black writer who could not even claim an expertise in writing about his own experience?
Despite the moonlight and magnolia-tinted literature of White Southern writers of the period looking back at the plantation in nostalgia and casting slavery as a benign, even kindly, institution of childish slaves and forbearing, indulgent masters and mistresses that The Conjure Woman seems to imitate, Chesnutt’s stories are not nostalgic, and the humor is decidedly ironic. Some of the stories are witty in an unusual way, in the offhand way Julius describes certain incidents rather than the incident itself. A sort of humor is embedded in the Negro dialect itself, especially as Julius tells his stories and the White characters in the tales are speaking Negro dialect too. The frame of the stories is that formerly enslaved Julius tells these tales to his new employers, the narrator and his sickly wife, both White Northerners who have come South for the sake of the wife’s health. This frame is like that used by Joel Chandler Harris for his book of Uncle Remus tales (first published in 1881), where an old Black former slave in the twilight of his rustic but homey cabin tells animal stories to a young White boy. In The Conjure Woman, it is intimated by the narrator after every tale that Julius has an ulterior motive for telling the stories other than simply entertaining his White employers. Julius is something of a trickster, maybe. The stories give the sense of being folklore without being folklore at all.
As Tess Chakkalakal writes, “Since each of the stories straddle the period before and after the Civil War—the antebellum and postbellum periods of American history—it is difficult to pin down the precise moment of the stories.” (195) This blending of time is what makes the stories feel like folklore and a bit like minstrelsy. She adds, “This was the first book Houghton had printed and published by an African American author. It was a big deal.” (196) Elsewhere, she states, “Never in the history of American publishing had a major publishing firm produced a work of fiction by a non-white, or slightly colored, or African American writers… Most books written by Black people in the United States were self-published, having only very small distribution.” (198) Chesnutt was recognized by Houghton as a “slightly colored author,” because he was, by his own account, “seven-eighths White.” But by American racial rules, he was a Black man, which he accepted, although he chafed a bit at being confined to race as the subject of his writing. Like Joplin, he had to use the materials at hand to make it commercially and creatively in the world of art in America. For Blacks at the turn of the twentieth century, their most expressive vehicles were top-tapping music and dialect-flavored folklore, both trying to rid themselves of the taint of minstrelsy to become something, well, true. This became Black America’s complicated high art at the turn of the twentieth century.
II. The imperatives of ambition
For if the element of race prejudice were removed from our national life, there would be an end to the race problem, even though other conditions should remain exactly as they are. Grave questions there would be, of poverty, of ignorance, and of other things; but the Negro would have no special grievance.
—Charles Chesnutt, June 1905
…a world which yields [the Negro] no true self-consciousness…
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk2
Tess Chakkalakal’s fine biography of Charles Chesnutt (not the first, by any means) tells the story of a man, offspring of free people of color, light enough to pass for White but did not, a child of the Reconstruction and an adult of the Jim Crow era, who was determined to be a writer, a great writer, not a mere scribbler. “Every time I read a good novel, I want to write one,” he told his diary in 1882. “It is the dream of my life—to be an author!” (75) He envied the White professional writers around him who could make a living from writing, who controlled the literary magazine market and the book publishing industry. Chesnutt gained more leverage, little enough though it was, in the White book and magazine publishing world than any Black writer of his time. Chesnutt never could live from his professional writing, despite the acclaim he received from the White literary establishment during the heyday of his career. He did not envy his Black contemporaries—poet, novelist, and lyricist Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and novelist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, novelist Sutton Griggs, novelist and journalist Pauline Hopkins—although he may have appreciated the efforts of some of them. Chakkalakal writes, “He seemed to feel that the books by Black writers that had been published were not ‘good,’ at least as [William Dean] Howells employed the term in his literary criticism of the time.” Chesnutt wrote in his journal, “If they were not written by a colored man, they would not sell enough to pay for the printing. I read them merely for facts, but I could appreciate the facts better if they were well presented.” (208)
Chesnutt began working at the age of fifteen, not terribly unusual for his time, as a schoolteacher in 1873 in Charlotte, after he failed to be admitted to the United States Naval Academy. He had been a gifted student but was unable to finish his own education. He never earned a college degree, never even earned the equivalent of a high school diploma. In many ways, he acutely felt this inadequacy all his life, which made him a ferocious autodidact. He taught himself Greek and Latin as well as other languages. When he was finally able to visit the continent in 1896, his belated Grand Tour, he was able to speak French well. He read voraciously, surely as well-read as many of the White literary lights of the day. His compulsion was self-improvement, so he was typically American in that regard. When he left teaching in 1883, he became such a skilled court stenographer that he operated his own business. In this way, he was able to support his family, including sending two of his daughters to Smith College and a son to Harvard. Money was often tight, but Chesnutt, steely in his determination, always managed to pay his bills. He worked hard as a schoolteacher, and he worked hard as a stenographer. He even passed the bar exam, becoming a lawyer, to better pursue his career as a court stenographer.
A sort of humor is embedded in the Negro dialect itself, especially as Julius tells his stories and the White characters in the tales are speaking Negro dialect too.
Knowing shorthand he felt gave him an advantage over other writers, especially White writers who used Black dialect in their work. Chakkalakal notes, “Chesnutt had been recording the voices of Black people in his journals for years. When he started practicing stenography, Chesnutt would record the voices he heard at church, at school, and in the grocery store. Employing shorthand, Chesnutt had developed a combination of signs, lines, dots, a light stroke, a darker stroke of the pen, to follow the various patterns of speech he heard. … Chesnutt wanted to show Northern writers and readers who these Black people really were, and the kind of story that real Black people told was like nothing white Northern readers and writers had heard before.” (emphasis Chakkalakal,118) How could a Black writer who had lived among Black people all his life and who had written their language down nearly verbatim for years not be able to produce more authentic Black dialect than a White writer? Chesnutt mused.
Chesnutt’s best novel is The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a fictionalization of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, racial pogrom, coup d’etat, where the Whites, through bloodshed, seized power in the town. The incident deeply upset Chesnutt who went South to investigate it himself. It is probably his angriest and most despairing book, and the work is probably taught more in college courses than even his short stories. Occurring two years after Plessy v Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that declared legalized and custom-driven racial segregation constitutional, the latest rise of violent White reactionism did not break Chesnutt’s spirit as much as it recalibrated his psyche and intensified his mission as a public intellectual speaking on behalf of his race. Chakkalakal describes The Marrow of Tradition as “a family drama, a romance, a murder mystery, an inheritance plot, and, of course, the story of a newspaper editor whose racial rhetoric stoked the hearts and minds of its readers to riot against their democratic institutions” (257), a masterful collage of pop culture potboiler and searing social protest. The final sentence of the novel, “There’s time enough, but none to spare,” suggests that Chesnutt did not see the American race dilemma as entirely hopeless, but it was clearly urgent.
Chesnutt tried to be a bridge in Black political circles. He was friendly with the conservative Booker T. Washington; indeed, three of his children wound up working at Tuskegee. But he was also admired by the Black radicals who hated Washington and formed the Niagara Movement that eventually spawned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the first civil rights organization in America. Chesnutt won the NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal, one of the most prestigious honors in Black America, in 1928. To straddle those camps in this way may have been his greatest non-literary achievement.
Perhaps what truly preoccupied Chesnutt was the idea of Black people being defined by their grievance, a grievance that did not end with the outlawing of racial segregation and institutionalized, legalized racial prejudice.
Washington wrote in his autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901): “Every persecuted individual and race should get much consolation out of the great human law, which is universal and eternal, that merit no matter under what skin found, is, in the long run, recognized and rewarded.”3 And this is true in the case of Chesnutt. He worked hard, and he was rewarded with considerable success. His merit was acknowledged as a teacher, stenographer, and creative writer. On the other hand, his racial identity, his life seen “darkly as through a veil,”4 to borrow W. E. B. Du Bois’s metaphor, circumscribed the terms upon which he would be accepted as a writer, restricted what he could write about, confined him in a way that made it unclear exactly what his merit was truly worth or if the Whites around him completely understood it. But the teaching instinct never left Chesnutt, and in this way, through his work, he became, to borrow from Du Bois again, “a missionary of culture”5 to both Whites and Blacks.
Perhaps what truly preoccupied Chesnutt was the idea of Black people being defined by their grievance, a grievance that did not end with the outlawing of racial segregation and institutionalized, legalized racial prejudice. Even if one were to say that race prejudice as a major factor in the lives of most Black people had come to an end (and most Black people would probably not say that), the memory of what fueled the grievance remains vivid and, at times, even raw. The grievance, in this way, is Black people’s red badge of courage, their political cudgel, and, strikingly, their stigma that they cannot escape. Reading Chestnutt’s works, fiction and nonfiction, about the color line reveals these dimensions in compelling ways.
A Matter of Complexion is a solid, well-written biography that is recommended. Appendices that included a chronology of Chesnutt’s life, a list of his publications, books, and articles, and a photograph of his patient wife, who had to endure Chesnutt’s long absences, would have been helpful.
