Charles W. Chesnutt

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 15, 1932) was an African-American author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Honors 4 Writing 5 Race relations 6 Other 7 Selected works 8 Published as 9 Notes 10 References 11 External links 12 See also

[edit] Early life

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His parents offered to sell him into slavery, but the potential buyer could not come up with more than $23 to pay for him. His paternal grandfather was a white slaveholder and, based on his appearance, Chesnutt likely had other white ancestors. As Chesnutt was of mixed race, he could pass with relative ease for a white man, although he never chose to do so. Under the one drop rule in the South, Chesnutt was considered "legally" black.

After the Civil War, the family returned to Fayetteville, where they ran a grocery store. It failed because of Andrew Chesnutt's poor business practices and the struggling economy of the South. Charles entered school at the age of eight. At age 16, he became a student-teacher to help support his family following his mother's death.

[edit] Career

Chesnutt continued to study and teach, eventually becoming assistant principal of the normal school in Fayetteville. In 1878, he married Susan Perry and moved to New York City. He hoped to escape the prejudice and poverty of the South and wanted to pursue a literary career. After six months, the Chesnutts moved back to Cleveland, where he studied for and passed the bar exam in 1887. Chesnutt had learned stenography as a young man in North Carolina, and he established what became a lucrative legal stenography business in Cleveland.

Chesnutt began writing stories which were accepted by top-ranked national magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, which published his first short story, The Goophered Grapevine, in August 1887. His first book was a collection of short stories entitled The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. This featured black characters who spoke in dialect, as was popular in much southern literature at the time.

Chesnutt's stories were more complex than those of many of his contemporaries. He wrote about characters' dealing with difficult issues of miscegenation, "passing", illegitimacy, racial identities and social place throughout his career. The issues were especially pressing in the social volatility of Reconstruction and late 19th century society, as whites in the South tried to press all people with any African ancestry into one lower caste. At the same time, there was often distance and competition between families who had long been free persons of color, especially if educated and people of property, and newly freed slaves.

Chesnutt continued writing short stories, and also completed a biography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He also wrote several novels and appeared on the lecture circuit. Although Chesnutt's stories met with critical acclaim, poor sales of his novels doomed his hopes of a self-supporting literary career. His last novel was published in 1905. In 1906, his play Mrs. Darcy’s Daughter was produced, but it was also a commercial failure. Between 1906 and his death in 1932, Chesnutt wrote and published little, except for a few short stories and essays.

Among the era's literary writers, Chesnutt was well-respected. In 1905, Chesnutt was invited to Mark Twain’s 70th birthday party in New York City.

Starting in 1901, Chesnutt again devoted himself to his stenography business and, increasingly, to social and political activism. He served on the General Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Working with W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, he became one of the early 20th century's most prominent activists and commentators. Chesnutt contributed some short stories and essays to the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, founded in 1910. He did not receive compensation for the publication of these pieces. He wrote a strong essay protesting the southern states' moves to disfranchise blacks at the turn of the century.

In 1917, Chesnutt protested and successfully shut down showings in Ohio of the controversial film Birth of a Nation, which the NAACP officially protested across the nation.

Chesnutt died on November 15, 1932 at the age of 74 and was interred in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery.

[edit] Honors

In 1928, Chesnutt was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his life's work.

In 2002 the Library of America published a major collection of Chesnutt's work in its American author series.

On January 31, 2008, the United States Postal Service honored Chesnutt with the 31st stamp in the Black Heritage Series.

[edit] Writing

Chesnutt's style and subject matter caused some critics to classify him in the local color school of American writing. Other scholars argue that his short stories (e.g., The Wife of His Youth) are examples of complicated American realism.

In its style, setting in the pre-war plantations of the South, and its use of dialect, The Conjure Woman collection is related to the works of Joel Chandler Harris, but differs in its pointed commentary on the institution of slavery. Set in a rapidly receding past, the stories were written as frame narratives with an outer frame story told by John, a white northerner who has bought a North Carolina vineyard after the Civil War. Chesnutt set up a situation in which John and his wife Annie listened to a tale recounted by Julius, a former slave who worked for them on the farm where he had lived before the war. Julius told the inner frame narratives in dialect, and often described events from "slave times" using supernatural elements like haunting, transfiguration, and conjuring that were typical of folk tales and also symbolized the brutality of the slave system.

Some critics argued that the stories were not calculated to challenge white readers' assumptions, since neither Chesnutt nor his publishers revealed his race. The symbolic critiques of slavery were surely not lost on some readers. Only seven of his conjure tales were collected in original The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen tales, which were later collected in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, published in 1993.

The House Behind the Cedars (1900) was Chesnutt’s response to what he believed were inadequate depictions of the complexity of race and the South's social relations. He believed that he could contribute a more realistic portrait of his region and community drawn from personal experience. He was also concerned with the silence around issues of passing and miscegenation and hoped to provoke political discussion through the novel.

The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel featuring the Wilmington Race Riot, marked a turning point for Chesnutt's writing. His early 20th-century works addressed political issues more directly and confronted uncomfortable topics like racial "passing", lynching, and miscegenation. Many reviewers condemned the novel's overt politics. Even some of Chesnutt's supporters like William Dean Howells openly regretted its "bitter, bitter" tone. Middle-class white readers who had been the core audience for Chesnutt's earlier works found the novel's content shocking and, for some, offensive. It sold poorly.

Overall, Chesnutt's writing style is formal and subtle, demonstrating little emotive power. A typical sentence from his fiction is a passage from The House Behind the Cedars: "When the first great shock of his discovery wore off, the fact of Rena's origin lost to Tryon some of its initial repugnance--indeed, the repugnance was not to the woman at all, as their past relations were evidence, but merely to the thought of her as a wife." Chapter XX, DIGGING UP ROOTS.

The Harlem Renaissance eclipsed much of Chesnutt's remaining literary reputation. New writers regarded him as old-fashioned and pandering to racial stereotypes. Chesnutt was relegated to minor status.

A long process of critical discussion and re-evaluation starting in the 1960s has revived Chesnutt's reputation. In particular, critics have focused on the writer's complex narrative technique, subtlety, and use of irony. Several commentators have noted that Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity, use of African-American speech and folklore, and the way in which he exposed the skewed logic of Jim Crow strictures. Chesnutt's longer works laid the foundation for the modern African-American novel.

Several of Chesnutt's novels have been published posthumously. In 2002, the Library of America added a major collection of Chesnutt's fiction and non-fiction to its important American authors series, under the title Stories, Novels And Essays: The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, Uncollected Stories, Selected Essays (Werner Sollors, ed.).

[edit] Race relations

Chesnutt's views on race relations put him somewhere between Du Bois' talented tenth and Booker Washington's separate but equal positions. In a speech delivered in 1905 to the Boston Historical and Literary Association and later published as an essay, titled "Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Its Cure," Chesnutt imagined a "stone by stone" dismantling of race antagonism as the black middle class grew and prospered. Filled with numbers and statistics, Chesnutt's speech/essay chronicled black achievements and black poverty. He called for full civil and political rights for all African Americans.

He had little tolerance for the new ideology of race pride, and he envisioned instead a nation of "one people molded by the same culture." He concluded his remarks with the following statement, made 58 years before Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech--

Looking down the vista of time I see an epoch in our nation's history, not in my time or yours, but in the not distant future, when there shall be in the United States but one people, moulded by the same culture, swayed by the same patriotic ideals, holding their citizenship in such high esteem that for another to share it is of itself to entitle him to fraternal regard; when men will be esteemed and honored for their character and talents. When hand in hand and heart with heart all the people of this nation will join to preserve to all and to each of them for all future time that ideal of human liberty which the fathers of the republic set out in the Declaration of Independence, which declared that all men are created equal, the ideal for which [William Lloyd] Garrison and [Wendell] Phillips and [Sen. Charles] Sumner lived and worked; the ideal for which [Abraham] Lincoln died, the ideal embodied in the words of the Book which the slave mother learned by stealth to read, with slow-moving finger and faltering speech, and which I fear that some of us have forgotten to read at all-the Book which declares that "God is no respecter of persons, and that of one blood hath he made all the nations of the earth." "Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Its Cure" (1905)^[1]

[edit] Other

Emmy Award-winning film producer and filmmaker at Duke University Dante James^[2] produced a short dramatization of Chesnutt's short story The Doll^[3] in 2007.^[4] The short story was adapted for the screen as part of a course entitled “Adapting Literature, Producing Film”.^[5] The film premiered at the San Diego Black Film Festival on January 31, 2008.^[6] Chesnutt submitted The Doll to Atlantic Monthly in early 1904, but the story was not accepted for publication. Eight years later he published the story in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis in April 1912.^[7]

When the USPS honored Chesnutt with a stamp in 2008 in its Black Heritage Series, the Cleveland Public Library held a first-day-issue ceremony to celebrate his legacy. The stamp was designed from a 1908 photograph of Chesnutt in the special collections library at Fisk University. California artist Kazuhiko Sano painted his portrait.^[8][9]

[edit] Selected works

• The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales (1899)
• The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899)
• Frederick Douglass (1899)
• The Passing of Grandison (1899)
• The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
• The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
• The Colonel's Dream (1905)
• Mandy Oxendine (written in the 1890s; first published in 1997)
• Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (written in 1921; first published 1998, University Press of Mississippi)
• A Business Career (written in the 1890s; first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)
• Evelyn's Husband (first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)

[edit] Published as

• Stories, Novels And Essays: The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, Uncollected Stories, Selected Essays (Werner Sollors, ed.) (Library of America, 2002) ISBN 978-1-93108206-8.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• The Anger and the Irony. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved on January 16, 2006.
• Charles Chesnutt biography. Library of America website. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Charles Chesnutt biography. Ohioana Authors. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Retrieved on April 19, 2007.
• Roe, Jae H. "Keeping an 'old wound' alive: 'The Marrow of Tradition' and the legacy of Wilmington. African American Review, Vol. 33, 1999.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton, 2004.

[edit] External links

• Works by Charles W. Chesnutt
• E-texts of many of Charles W. Chesnutt's works
• Collection of Chesnutt E-Texts at the University of North Carolina
• Charles W. Chesnutt at Library of America
• Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars
• C.W. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition
• Chesnutt Literary Web at Rutgers University
• The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive
• Charles W. Chesnutt at The Atlantic Monthly
• Dramatization on VHS of Chesnutt's "Sister Becky's Pickaninny"
• Charles Waddell Chesnutt at Find a Grave

[edit] See also

• African American literature