In Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, seven tales based upon Negro superstitions, Uncle Julius recalls Uncle Remus and Page’s Uncle Billy, but differs from them in his craftiness. He tells his stories not merely to entertain, or to bewail the beautiful past, toward which he is ironic, but to gain his point in the present. His dialect is worked out in great detail, but is not so readable as that of Uncle Remus. There is good local color throughout, and some interesting characters emerge.
The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) deals mainly with problems of race. The title story tells of a successful Negro in Groveland (Cleveland), the “dean” of the “Blue-Veins,” who, on the eve of his engagement to a beautiful widow, theatrically acknowledges a little old black woman who had been his wife in slavery days and had helped him to freedom. A Negro mother denies her octoroon daughter in order for her to marry a New Englander of Mayflower lineage in “Her Virginia Mammy,” a story like Cable’s “Madame Delphine” but less convincing and gripping. In “The Sheriff’s Children” a mulatto prisoner, falsely accused of murder, is defended from a mob by a sheriff who turns out to be his father. Desperate and cynical, the son is about to kill his father to escape when he is shot by the sheriff’s daughter. In “The Web of Circumstance” a Negro blacksmith, falsely accused of stealing a whip, is sentenced to five years in the penitentiary on the same day that a white murderer is sentenced to one year. “The Passing of Grandison” shows a cunning slave, pretending to despise the abolitionist North, returning to his “understanding” master. He does so, however, only to manage the escape of all his kith and kin. “A Matter of Principle” satirizes the color line within the race: Clayton, an uppercrust near-white Negro, who “declined to associate with black people,” pretends that his house is quarantined in order to keep a black Congressman from calling on his daughter. The Congressman turns out to be a mulatto, “well worthy” of Clayton’s daughter.
The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt’s first novel, is concerned likewise with the color line. Rena, another octoroon heroine, is insulted by whites and oppressed by her mother and a mulatto suitor. Honorable devotion comes to her only through an upstanding black hero, but this cannot forestall her pathetic death. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), less conventional, is better. White characters range from the aristocratic General Delamere to his debauched grandson Tom; Major Carteret, demagogue for white supremacy; and McBane, ex-slave driver who knows one solution: “Burn the nigger.” Negro characters range from Dr. Miller, a skillful physician, to the militant Josh Green; the loyal Sandy, and Jerry, a “white man’s nigger.” Sandy is framed for a murder in the first part of the book. A bloody riot, based on the one at Wilmington, N. C., is described in the second part. The white demagogues whip up the mob to fury, because a Negro newspaper has denounced lynching. Josh Green, who is willing to die rather than be shot down like a dog, who puts aside “fergetfulness and fergiveness,” leads the aroused Negroes, when the upper-class Negroes believe that nothing can be done. The novel closes, however, on a note of forgetting and forgiving: Dr. Miller, whose own child was killed in the riot, goes to the home of his wife’s white half-sister, to save her child with his very great medical skill. With all of its melodrama, the story has power; badly plotted, it still tells a great deal about social life in the South. Chesnutt idealizes some Negro characters, but candidly faces the weaknesses in others. Most important, however, is his going beneath the surface to social causes.
Chesnutt’s last novel was The Colonel’s Dream. Colonel French, an ex-Confederate officer of “family,” dreams of resurrecting his native section and bringing it into the ways of prosperity and justice. As in so many novels of the time, his dream is not realized. He has opposed to him William Fetters, convict labor contractor, mortgage shark and political boss, together with the reactionary traditions and the inertia of the South. When the casket of his aged Negro slave, who had given his life for the Colonel’s son, is dug up from the family burial plot and placed on his porch with a K.K.K. warning that the color line must continue even in death, he sees that his crusade is doomed. After this novel Chesnutt fell into an almost unbroken silence. Perhaps he felt the doom of his own crusade to bring about justice.
Whether he was pessimistic about his crusade or not, his achievements in fiction were worthy. Answering propaganda with propaganda, he might be expected to have certain faults. He was overinclined to the melodramatic, to mistaken identity, to the lost document turning up at the right or wrong moment, to the nick of time entrance. His characters are generally idealized or conventional. His “better class Negroes” speak too literary a language and are generally unbelievable models in behavior. Although attacking the color line within the race, he makes great use of the hero or heroine of mixed blood, and at times seems to accept the traditional concepts of Negro character. Even so, however, his characters stand nearer to the truth than those of Thomas Page or Thomas Dixon; he does not force them into only two grooves. There is no gainsaying his knowledge of the southern scene, or of the Negro upper class in northern cities. Unlike Dunbar he is opposed to the plantation tradition, sharply critical of southern injustice, and aware of the sinister forces at work in Reconstruction. Deploring the abuses of that era, he still sees, like Tourgée, that the story of a South victimized by carpet-baggers and scalawags is only a convenient half-truth. He gives high praise to the Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms who swarmed over Dixie to lift a second bondage from the freedmen. He shows exploitation, riots and lynching mobs, as well as the more refined exercising of prejudice. Often pompous and roundabout, in the manner of his times, he nevertheless knew how to hold a reader’s interest. We must concede that he was melodramatic in plotting, but evidences of a skillful master’s hand can still be found. He knew a great deal, and all things considered, he told it well.
Summary. Deriving somewhat from the abolitionists, the best of the authors of this chapter attacked the plantation tradition, but with the sharper weapons of the growing realism. Twain’s Jim and Roxana, Tourgée’s Nimbus, Chesnutt’s Josh Green, and even Cable’s Bras Coupé and Madame Delphine (though they belong to a nearly legendary past) are far more convincing than Uncle Tom, Topsy and Hildreth’s Archy Moore. Unlike their more popular contemporaries who defended the plantation tradition, these authors, at a risk, recorded the injustice that Negroes met with everywhere in “the tragic era.” They knew that worshipful house-servants or depraved freedmen were not the sole actors in the story, and as lovers of truth and justice they wanted the full story told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why was Cable considered untrue to the Old South?
2. In what respects is Bras Coupe unusual in fiction about Negroes?
3. Compare the octoroons in antislavery novels with those in novels by Cable, Twain, and Tourgée.