Charles
Chesnutt
The House Behind the Cedars
Biography
• Born in Cleveland in 1858 to “free persons of
color” parents
• After the Civil War, Chesnutt’s family
returned to Fayetteville, North Carolina,
where he grew up.
• Attended a school funded by the Freedman's
Bureau
• Worked as a teacher and eventually as a
school principal in Charlotte and in
Fayetteville.
• Despite his personal success, Chesnutt
resented the racial oppression of the South.
• 1878 Married Susan Perry. Believing a more
hospitable environment existed in the North,
he moved his family to Cleveland in 1884.
Passed the bar exam, created a successful
legal stenography business.
Publishing Success
• Began publishing short stories in
1885.
• "Dave's Neckliss" was among the
first stories written in black dialect
by a black author, using the
language to convey not only
authenticity but also moral
complexity.
• “Conjure Tales” about antebellum
South were his most successful
type of story. His were subtly more
complex than the Uncle Remus
style stories that were popular
after the Civil War.
Publishing Woes
• Little publishing success with novels about
racial and social identity in contemporary
South:
• The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
• The Marrow of Tradition (1901) based on the
Wilmington Massacre of 1898, when whites
took over the city and threw out the elected
biracial government.
• Stopped writing fiction in the early
twentieth century, devoting his energies to
business and to organizations dedicated to
improving the lot of African-Americans.
• In 1928, the NAACP awarded Chesnutt its
Spingarn Medal for his life's work.
• Died in 1932.
Reconstruction and Aftermath
• After the Civil War, Northern army occupied
the South and attempted to establish black
civil rights
• Army intervention in the South ended with
Compromise of 1877
• Whites in the South tried to reestablish
supremacy in social, economic and legal
spheres.
• Widespread disenfranchisement of
freedmen, intimidation by KKK
• Jim Crow laws imposing legal racial
segregation, reinforcing the system of white
supremacy and second-class citizenship for
blacks
Living the Color Line
• Chesnutt's work dealt primarily with
the South, and especially with themes
of interracial sex and the phenomenon
of people legally defined as "black"
whose relatively light skin color
enabled them to "pass" as "white.”
• His novels are often called “novels of
the color line”
• Chesnutt’s Ancestry: Parents were free
blacks from North Carolina. Paternal
grandfather was a white slaveowner,
probable other white relatives.
• He claimed to be seven-eighths white,
and identified as African American.
Chesnutt could "pass" with relative ease
for a white man, although he never
chose to do so.
Socio-Legal Racial Definition
• In the 19th century and in many
southern states at the time of his
birth, Chesnutt was considered
legally white. In South Carolina,
for instance, one’s racial
classification was based on social
reputation (if people thought you
were white, you were white).
• Under the “one drop rule” that
became adopted in the 1920s in
most of the South after the Civil
War, one was classified as legally
black because of having some
known African descent (the
metaphorical “drop of black
blood.”
Race vs Class vs Gender
• Not as simple as “black and white”
• CLASS: distance and competition between
families who had long been free people of
color, especially if they were educated and
property-owning, and the masses of
illiterate freedmen making their way from
slavery.
• GENDER: Beginning of the Twentieth
Century marks an incomplete transition
from the “Cult of Domesticity” to the era of
the “New Woman.”
• OTHER RACES: Molly and her children are
part Indian. Narrator notes that in New
Orleans, she and her children would be
“creoles” or “quad/octoroons”, a caste
between “blacks” and “whites”