66 Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932)
Matthew Teutsch
Introduction
In May 1880, just before his 22nd birthday, Charles Waddell Chesnutt penned in his journal his aspirations and motivation for becoming an author. Chesnutt wrote, “I shall write for a purpose, a high, holy purpose, and this will inspire me to greater effort.” Continuing, Chesnutt identified his intended audience, white readers, stating, “The object of my writing would be not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites” out of their views of superiority over Blacks and others based solely on “legal fictions.” Chesnutt, in 1887, passed the Ohio bar exam and started a business as a legal stenographer. Throughout his work, Chesnutt addresses the “legal fictions” of the color line and, like Mark Twain, Paul Laurence Dunbar, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and others, challenges the legal distinctions that, as he wrote in his journal, creates “an unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to invade the whole nation.”
Chesnutt’s parents were free African American emigres from South Carolina who moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where Chesnutt was born in 1858. After the Civil War and during the tempestuous Reconstruction era, the family returned to the South and lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Here, Chesnutt went to school and came of age. In 1878, he became the assistant principal of the African American normal school in Fayetteville. That same year, he married Susan Perry. Racial oppression in the South after Reconstruction increased the couple’s desire to move North to escape subjugation, first to New York in 1883 then eventually to Cleveland in 1884 where they settled. As well, Chesnutt’s experiences further fueled his desire to become a writer and to, as he wrote in his journal, “strike for an entering wedge in the literary world.”
Chesnutt’s literary career began in August 1887 when his story, “The Goophered Grapevine” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Subverting the plantation tradition established by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt’s story take place in North Carolina where the exslave Uncle Julius McAdoo weaves a tale for the new white landowners, Ohioans John and Annie. Chesnutt’s story, while on the surface appearing within the plantation tradition, undermines it through the representation of “conjuration” and through Julius’ adaptation of the past for his white audience that leads to an economic advantage for the former slave.
Two years later, in 1889, the Atlantic printed “Dave’s Neckliss.” From the outset, Chesnutt frames the story as a psychological examination of the oppressive nature of slavery and Jim Crow racism. After seeing Julius tear up when eating ham, John frames the story by stating that Julius, through his recollections, displays “the curious psychological spectacle of a mind enslaved long after the shackles had been struck off from the limbs of its possessor.” Dave’s tragic death allows John, as a stand