THE MARROW OF TRADITION
by
CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
PENGUIN TWENTIETH CENTURY CLASSICS
Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by Eric J. Sundquist
A fictional anatomy of America’s harsh betrayal of the promise of racial equality
One of the most significant historical novels in American literature, The Marrow of
Tradition (1901) is based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, Massacre of 1898.
Called a “race riot” by the inflammatory Southern press and engineered by white
Democrats who had seen their political control slip into the hands of Republicans,
many of whom were black, it was in fact a coup that restored power to the
Democrats by subverting the principles of free democratic election. Some of Charles
Chesnutt’s relatives lived through the violence, and their accounts inspired this
powerful and passionate novel.
PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS
THE MARROW OF TRADITION
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was raised in North
Carolina, where he served as a teacher and principal in black public schools before
returning to Cleveland to pursue a double career as the head of a legal stenography
firm and as a fiction writer. Although he was perhaps the best-known AfricanAmerican author of fiction in his day, achieving his first critical success in the short
stories collected in The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of His Youth and Other
Stories of the Color Line (1899), Chesnutt was never able to make a living from
writing alone. His three published novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The
Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), as well as his 1899
biography of Frederick Douglass, secured his reputation, if not his wide popularity.
Chesnutt was awarded the Spingarn Medal for distinguished literary achievement by
the NAACP in 1928, and he died in 1932.
Eric J. Sundquist has taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of
California at Berkeley, UCLA, and Vanderbilt University, where he is Gertrude
Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English. Among his books are To Wake the
Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature and Culture (1993), The
Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction (1993),
Faulkner: The House Divided (1983), and, as editor, Frederick Douglass: New
Literary and Historical Essays (1990).
INTRODUCTION
One of the most significant historical novels in American literature, The Marrow of
Tradition (1901) is built upon a historically accurate account of the Wilmington,
North Carolina, race riot of 1898. Engineered by white Democrats who had seen
their political control of the city slip into the hands of Republicans, many of whom
were black, and Fusionists, an upstart party composed of dissident Republicans and
Populists, the “riot” was in fact a coup or revolution that restored power to white
Democrats by completely subverting the principles of free democratic election.
Some of Charles Chesnutt’s relatives lived through the violence, and he traveled to
Wilmington in 1901 as part of a tour of southern states to collect material for his
novel. Shocked by the revolution’s flagrancy and the federal government’s
inability—or unwillingness—to respond, Chesnutt wrote to his editor, Walter Hines
Page, that it was “an outbreak of pure, malignant and altogether indefensible race
prejudice, which makes me feel personally humiliated, and ashamed for the country
and the state.”
The Wilmington revolution had its roots in the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877
and the deterioration of black civil rights through legislative and court action, as well
as increasing racial violence, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. A
more immediate cause lay in the elections of 1894 and 1896, in which many
Democrats throughout North Carolina lost their positions to Republicans and Fusion
candidates, some of whom were African American or appointed African Americans
to various civil service positions. Nonetheless, the charge of “Negro domination” at
the center of the subsequent Democratic campaign referred in reality less to actual
numbers than to a sense on the part of whites that they had lost economic and
political control of certain cities. In Wilmington, for instance, where black voting
had remained at a higher level than in some other parts of the South in the aftermath
of Reconstruction, the numbers were typical: Three of ten aldermen were black, and
one out of three on the school committee; there was a black coroner, a black deputy
superior court clerk, and a black justice of the peace; the health board was all black,
as were two out of five fire stations; fewer than half of the city’s policemen were
black, but there were various black mail clerks and a number of black professionals
and craftsmen. If one were to judge only by racial balance, the numbers were not
inappropriate in a city where the majority population was black (11,000 to 8,00;
14,000 to 10,000 in New Hanover County altogether). The white backlash was
prompted not by numbers alone, however, but by the violation of a widely held
doctrine of white supremacy. Many whites objected to being summoned before a
black judge, to being arrested by black police officers, or to having their homes
inspected by black sanitation officers, and they were unwilling to share any but the
most minimal forms of authority with African Americans, especially those who
replaced white Democrats in political positions.
The campaign against “Negro domination” was nowhere more virulent than in the
North Carolina press. At a time when leading national magazines and newspapers
were promulgating black minstrel caricatures and routinely running inflammatory
headlines and stories about black crimes and lynch mobs, the newspapers of
Wilmington and Raleigh, the greatest offenders during the 1898 revolution, were
hardly exceptional. The Raleigh News and Observer ran a series of articles vilifying
black leaders under headlines such as “Unbridled Lawlessness on the Streets” and
“Greenville Negroized.” The Wilmington Messenger (the city’s leading Democratic
newspaper, edited by Thomas Clawson, and the primary model for Major Carteret’s
newspaper in Chesnutt’s novel) was at the forefront of political bigotry. For example,
the paper regularly referred to John Campbell Dancy, the black customs collector for
the port of Wilmington appointed by President McKinley, as the “Sambo of the
Custom House.” Two months before the watershed election of 1898, the Kinston
Free Press published an article that listed black officials in numerous counties and
towns emblazoned with the headline “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Present throughout
such propaganda were explicit or implicit fomentations of white supremacist
violence on the basis of alleged black sexual crimes. It was this issue, the primary
touchstone of post-Reconstruction race violence on numerous occasions, that
provided the spark setting off the Wilmington revolution and that Chesnutt, in a most
personal way, intricately wove into the plot of The Marrow of Tradition.
Soon after the publication of his novel, Chesnutt expressed the hope that he had
written “the legitimate successor of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand,” the two works that were his idea of America’s
most influential literature. The novel was not destined to have such popularity in his
lifetime, but his statement indicates an admiration for his predecessors’ capacity to
render propaganda in fictional form. Although he once spoke of his color-line stories
as “sermons,” none of Chesnutt’s other fiction is so overtly political as The Marrow
of Tradition. Another African-American writer, Wilmington native David B. Fulton,
writing under the pseudonym “Jack Thorne,” recounted the events of the revolution
in a minor documentary novel titled Hanover; or, The Persecution of the Lowly: A
Story of the Wilmington Massacre (1900). But neither in its craft nor in its
comprehension of the complex psychology of white supremacy and black resistance
was Fulton’s novel the equal of The Marrow of Tradition. Among African-American
writers of his day, in fact, perhaps only W. E. B. Du Bois surpassed Chesnutt in his
ability to fuse the creative and the ideological in his writing on behalf of black
America.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Chesnutt’s novel about Wilmington (he
changed the name to Wellington) was an act of revenge against his ancestors, but his
fascination with genealogy grew directly form what he once referred to as his
“ragged family tree.” Descended from white grandfathers on both sides of his family,
he saw clearly that the conventions of miscegenation prior to the Civil War
characteristically allowed for interracial passion but destroyed its legal foundations
and thus the full emotive and economic legacy that might flow from it. Born in 1858,
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was the son of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anna Marie
Sampson. Both were free blacks who left North Carolina in 1856 to settle in
Cleveland, where they were married and Charles was born, before returning to
Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1866. Although the evidence is not exact, it appears
that both Chesnutt’s mother and his father were the illegitimate offspring of white
men, Waddell Cade and Henry Sampson, and their black mistresses, Ann M.
Chesnutt and Chloe Sampson Harris (the latter married a black man named Moses
Harris). Chesnutt’s white grandfathers provided a certain amount of property for
their black children but far less, as might be expected, than went to their legal white
heirs. Because Chesnutt bore the family name of his grandmother—in an era and a
region preoccupied with patrilineage—it is no surprise that many of his short stories,
his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), his third and last published
novel, The Colonel’s Dream (1905), and The Marrow of Tradition all dwell in part
on the lives of black women and their mixed-race children. Like Janet Brown Miller
in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt stood on the other side of the color line,
deprived of an inheritance that he could not claim as his own whether he chose to or
not.
Educated in Fayetteville, Chesnutt studied world literature and foreign languages,
and early in his life he began keeping a journal that recorded both his literary
aspirations and his painful struggle against race prejudice. In one 1880 entry he
wrote: “The Negro’s part is to prepare himself for recognition and equality, and it is
the province of literature to open the way for him to get it—to accustom the public
mind to the idea; to lead people out, imperceptibly, unconsciously, step by step, to
the desired state of feeling.” As the son of mixed-race parents, Chesnutt was acutely
aware of the sometimes paradoxical social position of mulattoes, whose light skin
often gave them social and economic advantages even as it defined all the more
strikingly the harsh reality of a system of segregation based not on color alone but
often on the mere suspicion of “black blood.” Chesnutt’s early journal entries
indicate that he once considered passing for white himself, as had some of his
relatives (he too was light-skinned enough to do so), but he rejected such a solution
to the race dilemma. After his marriage to Susan Perry in 1878 (one of his two
daughters, Helen Chesnutt, would later write an important biography of her father)
and after serving briefly as a teacher and principal in black schools in Fayetteville
and Charlotte, Chesnutt moved north, working first as a journalist for a financial
newspaper in New York before settling in Cleveland in 1884, where he found work
as a court stenographer. Following his admission to the Ohio State bar, Chesnutt
built a very successful firm devoted to legal stenography and document preparation.
Except for a short period of time near the turn of the century, his literary career
would never provide him enough security to abandon the law entirely. Nonetheless,
his legal career offered him a particularly good perspective on American race
relations at a moment when the law itself was being put in the service of destructive
racial prejudice.
Chesnutt began contributing sketches and stories to national magazines by the mid1880s, but his first significant publication was “The Goophered Grapevine,” which
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887. It was the first of a number of “conjure
stories,” the best-known of which were collected in The Conjure Woman in 1899.
One of the most innovative contributions to American literature in the late nineteenth
century, Chesnutt’s conjure stories (a few of the best do not, in fact, appear in The
Conjure Woman) are typically constructed as narrative dialogues between the
carpetbaggers John and Annie, who have moved south in the aftermath of the Civil
War to cultivate a former plantation, and Julius McAdoo, their ex-slave employee,
whose stories of slave culture offer an incisive analysis of race relations in a doublelayered postbellum and antebellum framework while at the same time casting a
critical eye on their immediate model, the widely popular Uncle Remus stories of
Joel Chandler Harris. At the same time that he was writing the conjure stories, which
Chesnutt feared was a genre limited by its reliance on dialect, he also began to
compose a series of tales devoted principally to the mixed-race population to which
he himself belonged. Chesnutt’s color-line stories, many of them collected in The
Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), offer a penetrating
look at the psychological and social results of Jim Crow laws and customs, not least
among African Americans, for whom color prejudice in these stories is directed not
against whites but against darker-skinned blacks: those who have typically not had
the educational advantages of Chesnutt’s own class or who serve as a stark reminder
of “slave culture.” Chesnutt’s color-line stories, like his conjure tales, are at their
best haunting, psychologically and philosophically astute studies of the nation’s
betrayal of the promise of racial equality and its descent into a brutal world of
segregation.
As Chesnutt’s diverse stories demonstrate, no writer between Stowe and William
Faulkner so completely made the family a means of delineating America’s racial
crisis, during slavery and afterward. Throughout the stories one sees families pulled
apart by slavery—perhaps to be reunited in postwar years but in some instances to be
physically obliterated by acts of cruelty that are inventively interwoven with
Chesnutt’s magical depiction of conjure (an African-based spiritualism or magic) as
both a weapon of black folk resistance to slavery and a symbolic representation of
the survival of bondage in the post-Reconstruction era. In the color-line stories, as in
The House Behind the Cedars, a book on which he worked throughout the 1890s,
families are destroyed by forms of color prejudice that are both external and internal.
The protagonist of The House Behind the Cedars, for example, is a light-skinned
African-American attorney who, unlike Chesnutt, has chosen to pass for white in
order to pursue his profession. When John Walden convinces his sister to do the
same, she is led into a melodramatic tragedy of cultural division and recrimination in
which Chesnutt measured the cost, to blacks and whites alike, of the taboos that
surrounded segregation and the phenomenon of “passing.”
Because the color line ran through his own body and family heritage, Chesnutt’s
ambiguous identity became his means of examining the doubleness of American
racial life from within its most vexing liminal role. In this respect, he somewhat
resembled the great nineteenth-century black leader Frederick Douglass, whose
biography Chesnutt wrote in 1899. As he remarked in accepting the Spingarn Medal
for distinguished literary service from the NAACP in 1928, long after his brief fame
as a writer had passed, his own racial mixture was one source of his profound
creativity: “My physical makeup was such that I knew the psychology of people of
mixed blood in so far as it differed from that of other people....It has more dramatic
possibilities than life within clearly defined and widely differentiated groups.’ In
Chesnutt’s own significant published statements about racial mixing—“The Future
American: A Complete Race Amalgamation Likely to Occur” (1900) and “Race
Prejudice: Its Causes, Results, and Cures” (1904)—he rejected the philosophy f
black separatism as a mirror image of white Jim Crow and instead idealized a
physically homogenous social order. Like his own life, however, his fiction was
proof that such an ideal social order of “future Americans”—especially one based on
racial mixing—was far in the future.
The Wilmington violence did not spring directly from an instance of racial mixing,
but both in historical fact and in Chesnutt’s imaginative reconstruction of the events
leading up to the revolution, the political and legal crisis over segregation, a
formalized extension of the psychological crisis over interracial sexuality, can be
traced to the historical complexities that were ingrained in Chesnutt’s life and had
become the primary subject of his literary career. Nothing makes this more clear than
the fact that Chesnutt’s “ragged family tree” resembled that of a key figure in the
Wilmington revolution—not a politician and not a white man, but an AfricanAmerican newspaper editor named Alexander Manly.
The very light-skinned Manly was the grandson of Charles Manly, governor of North
Carolina from 1849 to 1851. Like Chesnutt’s grandfathers, Governor Manly had not
only a white legal wife and children but also several slave mistresses and mixed-race
children by them. Born in 1866, the son of one of the children that Governor Manly
had manumitted with small property grants, Alexander Manly attended Hampton
Institute and, after moving to Wilmington, became a house painter and served as
registrar of deeds before responding to the need for a black newspaper by starting his
own, the Wilmington Record. Manly’s successful but unexceptional career flared into
sudden prominence in August of 1898 when he wrote an editorial that attacked the
lynching of black men speciously charged with sexual assault on white women. Such
an African-American rebuttal of the white racist canard was by no means new, but
Manly’s editorial could not have been better timed to be exploited in the Democratic
political campaign.
The source of Manly’s notorious editorial lay in the remarks made before an
agricultural meeting in Tybee, Georgia, the previous year by Rebecca Latimer Felton,
the wife of former congressman W. H. Felton and later famous as the first woman to
become a United States senator. Commenting upon the seeming decline in rural
security and a rising fear of black criminals, Felton Rallied her audience with a
forthright call for lynching: “When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to
organize a crusade against sin, nor justice in the court house to promptly punish
crime, nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence
and virtue...[and] if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the
ravening human beasts—then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”
When the speech was attacked in the Boston Transcript, Felton responded in the
Macon Telegraph, charging that northern newspapers, with their misguided liberal
sentiments about black civil rights, were responsible for encouraging black crime.
Felton’s prominence on account of her speech lasted well beyond the events of 1898.
When a black man named Sam Hose was accused of rape and murder in April of
1899, Felton and others were employed by the Atlantic Constitution to write opinions
for a symposium devoted to the prevention of such crimes. The day after his arrest,
Sam Hose was castrated and burned alive in a ghastly public ritual attended by some
two thousand people. His body was mutilated and cut into souvenirs for the jering
crowd, and it was perhaps the Hose case that Chesnutt had in mind when he wrote in
The Marrow of Tradition of the white savagery that led lynchers to carry off
“fragments of [the victim’s] mangled body as souvenirs, in much the same way that
savages preserve the scalps or eat the hearts of their enemies.” When the prominent
Emory College professor Andrew Sledd attacked lynching in the Atlantic Monthly,
citing the Sam Hose case, Felton replied in the Constitution that Sledd was a traitor
to the South, deserving of tar and feathers. The ensuing letters to the editor favored
Felton’s position.
Titled “Mrs. Felton’s Speech” and apparently published for the first time well after
Felton’s initial speech, Alexander Manly’s reply condemned lynching and the role of
white journalism in fanning the flames of racist attack. He argued calmly that if
whites would only deal fairly with blacks and treat crimes by all races equally, then
blacks could be counted on to join in the campaign against both sexual attack and
vigilante justice. But he also suggested sarcastically that whites should “guard their
women more closely...thus giving no opportunity for the human fiend, be he white or
black.” Freely chosen love affairs between white women and black men, he argued,
easily fall prey to the stereotypical sexual pathology of white supremacy: “Every
negro lynched is called a Big Burly Black Brute, when, in fact, many of those who
have been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not black and
burly, but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall
in love with them, as is very well know to all.” Although the Democratic press
typically quoted only this part of Manly’s editorial, clearly calculated to elicit a
visceral response, he had included the further admonition to Mrs. Felton to “tell your
men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a colored woman....You
cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of
ours.”
Manly, of course, was only speaking the truth and only following a line of argument
already advanced by such outspoken southern African-American congressmen as
North Carolina’s George H. White and South Carolina’s Thomas E. Miller. His
published opinions were no more shocking than those expressed earlier in the
famous 1892 antilynching editorials of Ida B. Wells, who argued in the Memphis
Free Speech that the “thread bare lie” of the rape charge will eventually bring about
a reaction in public sentiment “very damaging to the moral reputation of their [white
women.” Well’s offices were burned, and she was driven from Memphis. But in her
subsequent national campaign against lynching, she too did not hesitate to defend
those “poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by
white Delilahs” and to focus on the hypocritical fact that “any mesalliance existing
between a Southern white woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for
the charge of rape.”
If Manly’s opinion was warranted and his public declaration heroic, it was also
foolhardy in its provocation. The Wilmington Messenger, like Chesnutt’s whitesupremacist paper in The Marrow of Tradition, led the charge against Manly with
such headlines as “Negro Editor Slanders White Women” and “Infamous Attack on
White Women,” while the Atlanta Journal reprinted Felton’s speech under the
headline “Lynch 1000 Weekly Declares Mrs. Felton.” Newspapers throughout the
South and some in the North reprinted or excerpted Manly’s editorial in order to
attack his views, and journalists nationwide later held the editorial responsible for the
Wilmington “riot.” In a speech before an enormous Fayetteville rally in October, led
by a whit-supremacist organization known as the Red Shirts, South Carolina senator
Benjamin Tillman asked, “Why didn’t you kill that damnnigger editor who wrote
that?” But manly, for the moment, was worth far more alive than he would have been
dead, and the most important aspect of the editorial was the strategic use to which it
could be put. The lynching fever that broke out upon the appearance of Manly’s
editorial was deliberately held in abeyance; the Democratic campaign against the
Republicans and the Fusionists kept alive the passions awakened by Manly but also
directed them toward election day. As Chesnutt would write in fictionalizing the
episode: “A peg was needed upon which to hang the coup d’état, and this editorial
offered the requisite opportunity.”
Whether in political or interracial terms, “fusion,” which also saw colloquial usage
as a term for miscegenation, was a threatening affront to white masculinity. Like
wise, the pun latent in Manly’s name was one crucial to his reply to Felton and
subsequently to Chesnutt’s deployment of Manly’s name was one crucial to his reply
to Felton and subsequently to Chesnutt’s deployment of Manly’s thesis in The
Marrow of Tradition. Whereas Felton longed for the “manhood” necessary to protect
virtuous white women from violation at te hands of black “beasts,” Manly’s editorial
subverted the concept of white manhood by leveling racial distinctions in the
commission of sexual crimes and by iconoclastically attributing control of their
sexual lives and racial preferences to white women. As Chesnutt also knew, the
charge of rape that frequently accompanied the lynchings of southern black men,
whatever the evidence, reversed the visible historical fact that a significant portion of
the current African-American population were the descendants of acts of interracial
passion—often the white rape of black women, but sometimes too affaires of love—
evident in the generation of Chesnutt’s and Manly’s own grandfathers. The gender
politics of the Wilmington would stand in the community.” On the advice of his
friend Congressman Theodore Burton, Chesnutt sent copies of The Marrow of
Tradition as at best an alternative view, rather than a refutation of Dixon’s
Negrphobia, history has vindicated Chesnutt’s argument.
In The Marrow of Tradition, as in Chesnutt’s short stories, the antebellum and postReconstruction worlds coexist. An antagonistically joined product of slaveholding
sexual customs, the doubled legacy of the patriarch Samuel Merkell-his family of
white descendants and a parallel family of black descendants—leads directly to the
further social legacy of hysteria about “Negro domination.” The lynching tree,
Chesnutt argues, is a natural offshoot of the “ragged tree” of patrilineal sexual
exploitation and disinheritance that underlies nineteenth-century American race law
prejudice and binds together the twin fortunes of the Miller and Carteret families.
Displacing the Carterets in the Major’s ancestral home, Dr. Miller and his wife, Janet,
are the symbol of black usurpation and, in the novel’s terms, of the threatened
ascendancy of black genealogy over white. Olivia Carteret’s anxiety about Janet
Miller springs in part from their relationship itself and their twinlike appearance; in
part from her jealousy that Janet has been blessed with a son while she has no child
until her son, Dodie, is born (and her later fear that Janet has conjured Dodie); and in
part from the fact that William Miller, through the effort and dignified labor of his
father, the son of a slave, and his own hard study of medicine, has achieved
comparative material success. The entangled narratives of the two families of
Samuel Merkell, parallel to those of Alexander Manly’s grandfather and Chesnutt’s
two grandfathers, demonstrate that although the “weed” of slavery has been cut
down, “its roots remained, deeply imbedded in the soil, to spring up and trouble a
new generation.”
The crisis of conscience that Olivia Carteret undergoes when she learns of her
father’s marriage to Janet’s mother, a black woman, during Reconstruction, and
hence the legitimacy of the marriage certificate and the will that divides his property
between them, puts her in what Chesnutt calls a “moral pocket,” prompting at the
same time a new anxiety on her part that people will “assume that she, Olivia
Carteret, or her child, had sprung from this shocking mésalliance.” Cognizant of his
own father’s illegitimacy and the fact that his parents’ families (like the ancestors of
Alexander Manly) had received legacies out of generosity rather than recognized
legal right, Chesnutt in his conception of Samuel Merkell’s estate and his double
legacy measured the limits of North Carolina’s recognition of “blood” as a form of
property. he had argued against the prevalent equation of mixed blood with
illegitimacy in his 1889 essay “What Is a White Man?,” and both The House Behind
the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition put the question of legitimacy in the
context of legal inheritance. Significant rulings governing the law of miscegenation
that paralleled the rise of segregation law held that blood could be conceived of as
property. (Such conceptions of “blood” could take many forms, including the
argument advanced by Albion Tourgée in his brief to the Supreme Court in the
landmark segregation case of Plessy v. Ferguson, where he maintained that Homer
Plessy, who was light-skinned enough to pass for white, was deprived of his
“property” of “whiteness” by being forced to sit in a segregated train car. Although
he is not light enough to pass, Dr. Miller is likewise banished to the Jim Crow car at
the outset of The Marrow of Tradition) During Reconstruction there were attempts to
make white men responsible for their mixed-race offspring and thus make their
property inheritable by those children. However, the pervasive illegality and
derogation of interracial marriage that accompanied the rise of segregation left many
mixed-race persons bereft of such property rights. Absent a legal obligation in the
form of a marriage contract, inherited white blood might well prove meaningless to a
“black” person; but the presence of such a contract could, on the other hand,
guarantee its legitimacy.
Olivia Carteret’s discovery of Janet Miller’s legal rights rests primarily on the
legitimacy of the marriage contract, which thus turns out to be of more technical
importance than Samuel Merkell’s will. Because the marriage occurred during the
military occupation of Reconstruction, it was valid by North Carolina law. The
novel’s intricate plotting of the discovery as Olivia first burns the will, then burns the
marriage certificate, only to realize that she is now worse off than before, unable to
reveal the legacy to Janet without revealing s well her father’s “unpardonable social
sin” of marriage to a black woman, puts melodrama in the service of a wrenching
movement toward racial understanding. Even so, the novel’s absorption in the use to
which a sacrilegious assault upon white womanhood can be put receives its most
radical critique in Olivia’s hysteria, where not just white miscegenation but also
white interracial love must be repressed until it has authorized a volcano of racial
carnage.
The two chapters describing Olivia Carteret’s crisis of conscience stand in a pivotal
position: Preceding them is the chapter devoted to the final deployment of Manly’s
editorial as the linchpin of the revolution; and following is the chapter in which the
revolution’s violence finally breaks forth on the eve of the election. the question of
legal inheritance, a question of racial identity as well as one of human compassion
and love, therefore stands at the center of racist conflagration. Olivia’s hysteria about
her heir, Dodie, and the possibility that she or he will be mistaken for the
contaminated black heirs of Samuel Merkell’s scandalous marriage, is the
counterpart to the racial hysteria promoted by her husband and his peers as a means
to circumvent the legal political process and insure the electoral victory of white
Democrats. Both acts employ deceit and violence as a means to preserve white
property and political rights, not just reviving the rights of a slaveholding past but
betraying them as well. heir to the New South’s revivified command of the “Negro
problem,” willingly handed over by northern legislators and courts anxious to
accommodate the post-Reconstruction campaign for economic and political reunion
of the sections, Dodie Carteret is born into a world of crude bigotry, lynching, and
race hysteria. He is the white heir of the philosophy of Jim Crow at its high noon,
well summarized in William B. Smith’s contemporaneous argument for the necessity
of segregation in The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1906): “If we sit
with negroes at our tables, if we disregard the colour line in all other relations, is it
possible to maintain it fixedly in the sexual relation, in the marriage of our sons and
daughters, in the marriage of our sons and daughters, in the propagation of our
species?”
The male hysteria that Chesnutt examines in The Marrow of Tradition springs in part
from the loss of economic and political power suffered by the South in the aftermath
of the war and felt keenly by male leaders, and in part from the instability of gender
relations that resulted. “Negro domination” did, in fact, threaten the manliness of the
white southerner, though not in the way it was often represented. male hysteria was
not simply about rape or other affronts to white womanhood: It was about votes and
the loss of white southern virility. Black sexual assault was the cloak behind which
disfranchisement was hidden, part of the greater charade of plantation mythology
that set out to restore southern pride and revive a paradigm of white manliness that
the legacy of the war and th economic and political rise of blacks during
Reconstruction had called into question. By the 1880s, ceremonial bereavement had
begun to give way to ceremonial celebrations of southern heroes, one aim of which
was to revive the stricken image of masculinity. Monuments to the dead appeared
now in town squares rather than in cemeteries. A significant literature on combat
heroism, magazines such as the Confederate Veteran, speaking tours by Jefferson
Davis and other deposed leaders, veterans’ parades, reunions, and festivals organized
by the United Confederate Veterans and similar organizations—all of these means
were employed to adulate the heroic efforts of the Lost Cause. The worship of fallen
leaders and soldier-heroes was foremost a means of restoring a psychically
acceptable sense of the manhood lost in military defeat, in the extraordinary sacrifice
of young men’s lives, and in the vast northern appropriation of southern wealth. On
the model of heroes of the American Revolution, Confederate officers, especially the
fallen, were shrouded in the myth of Christian knighthood; and the United Daughters
of the Confederacy, for example, yoked Christian service to patriotism in awarding
the Cross of Honor to aging veterans. Confederate sacrifices were memorialized in
stained-glass installations; evangelical songs were given Confederate lyrics; and the
hagiographical search for heroes assumed overt theological dimensions, with the
sacrifices of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and others compared to the Passion of Christ.
By the 1890s, moreover sectional reunion, fueled by northern complicity in the
production of the plantation myth and the decimation of African-American civil
rights, made the restoration of southern masculinity a national enterprise. The revival
of a Confederate ethos provided at once a necessary healing, a further mechanism for
sectional reunion, and a distorted reconceptualization of antebellum life. Inherent in
that mythology was the glorification of genealogical dynasties and patriarchal
ancestors, or the erection of false ones as a surrogate for unstable contemporary
manliness. As Thomas Dixon apparently recognized, to judge from the great
popularity of his Ku Klux Klan novels, the entire nation was ready to participate in
the sexual sacrifice of African Americans, and it was nationalism rather than
sectionalism that benefited most from the triumph of the Old South mythology. The
image of noble knighthood riding to the rescue of women and family that Dixon and
D. W. Griffith (in his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, based on Dixon’s novels)
exploited with such precision permeated the national fascination with plantation
mythology in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
The sexual dynamic of sectional reunion, with its resulting betrayal of AfricanAmerican civil rights, is compactly represented in The Marrow of Tradition in two
instances in which the dissolute aristocrat, Tom Delamere, mimics his grandfather’s
black servant, Sandy Campbell. Even if one were to discount the explicit puns on
Alexander Manly’s name that appear throughout the novel, the picture of Tom’s
“degeneration” and lack of manliness is a constant ironic reminder of the role he
plays in reasserting the failed masculinity of the white South. Tom’s first imitation of
Sandy, when he impersonates him as part of a black cakewalk staged for a group of
northern visitors to Wellington, is a symbolic incarnation of the political charade
through which the South, seeking northern economic investment and freedom from
federal oversight, demonstrated control of the “Negro problem” while promoting an
idyllic neo-Confederate mythology. The northern visitors are shown the best of
plantation ideology on their carefully composed tour that concludes with Tom’s
cakewalk, and they are easily persuaded, Chesnutt writes, that “a certain charity
should be extended towards those who in the intense and righteous anger of the
moment should take the law into their own hands and deal out rough but still
substantial justice; for no negro was ever lynched without incontestable proof of his
guilt.”
Tom Delamere’s parodic imitation of Sandy Campbell inthe cake walk anticipates
the more serious incident inwhich Tom will dress as Sandy to commit the robbery of
his own aunt, Polly Ochiltree, which results in her death,and it therefore functions as
one of several careful links between te political plot of the novel—the
disfranchisement of black voters and the ensuing riot—and the melodramatic plot of
family romance and generational, cross-racial coflict. When Tom mimics Sandy the
first time, Sandy is comically cast out of his congregation for his purported sinful
follies; when Tom mimics him the second time, Sandy is arrested for murder and
nearly lynched.
Like Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller, Tom and Sandy are doubles: They resemble
each other to the degree that Tom’s cakewalk charades can be successful; and given
the fondness of the grandfather, old Delamere, for Sandy, as well as Sandy’s
apparent devotion to him, there is a hint that there may be a blood relation between
them. Both old Delamere and Sandy are presented sympathetically by Chesnutt. As
Tom’s charades demonstrate, however, their paternalistic relationship has beome
undermined by irony as it survives into the contemporary era of Jim Crow. Old
Delamere is a man of character, despite his overt paternalism, but character is not
enough. When Delamere’s insistence that Sandy is innocent of the crime fails to
move Carteret, he declares that there was a time “when the word of a Delamere was
held as good as his bond.” As Carteret remarks, however, “this man is no longer your
property. The negroes are no longer under our control.” Sandy is no longer property,
yet his resulting freedom places him at the mercy of lynch law. Old Delamere barely
succeeds in saving Sandy; he cannot prevent the white supremacists of the new
generation from fabricating an image of “family honor” that will protect Tom from
prosecution and, once old Delamere dies, from betraying his written will (which
leaves most of his estate to William Miller’s hospital) on the grounds that his
“property belonged of right to the white race, and by the higher law should remain in
the possession of white people.” Even though Tom is not immediately involved in
the revolutionary plot to seize political control of Wellington, his concealed crime
provides a rallying point for the campaign of the white Democrats. When Sandy is
rescued from lynching, the protagonists of the revolution, Major Carteret, General
Belmont, and Captain McBane, turn to the next-best tool of propaganda: an
antilynching editorial published in the Afro-American Banner and modeled on the
actual editorial by Alexander Manly.
Tom’s two impersonations of Sandy portray him on the one hand as the minstrel
darky and on the other as the criminal black brute. The revolution in WilmingtonWellington follows a comparable logic of stereotypes. As Chesnutt argues, “a new
Pharaoh” has risen in the North who is oblivious to the civil rights of blacks.
Governed by falsified statistics of black crime, by “coon song” images of AfricanAmerican culture, by purportedly scientific arguments about black physical and
moral “degeneration,” by imperialist conceptions of race superiority, and by the
apparent necessity of lynchings, the nation’s new racial conscience has been led to “a
sort of impasse, a blind alley, of which no one could see the outlet.” The welcome
creation of a plantation myth covered the underlying violence of southern (and
American) life, both during and after slavery, so that when it burst forth in a violent
torrent in November of 1898, as well as in other so-called “race riots” at the turn of
the century, or in public lynchings, it could be written off as the necessary
suppression of black criminality and “Negro domination.” Tom’s first cakewalk ends
with Lee Ellis’s speculation regarding Negroes that “no one could tell at what
moment the thin veneer of civilization might peel off and reveal the underlying
savage.” By the end of the novel, the truth of the metaphor is revealed in its reversal:
The white supremacist massacre leaves many dead, and William Miller’s hospital
lies “in smouldering ruins, a melancholy witness to the fact that our boasted
civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of
primal passion.”
Although the exact course of the Wilmington violence—which in fact occurred not
before but after the 1898 election—is difficult to re-create, its ideology and results
are clear enough. The period leading up to the election was suffused with the threat
of violence throughout the state. Many polling places were patrolled by armed whiter
men to prevent blacks from voting, and ballot boxes were stuffed at gunpoint. If the
election passed without any great outburst of violence, however, the tension had not
been dissipated, only increased. More to the point, the violence that did finally ensue,
as Chesnutt recognized, was simply an extension of the political lawlessness and
terror that had guaranteed a Democratic victory by the simple threat of bloodshed. At
stake were the voting rights of African Americans, which the white radicals were
determined to strip away by one means or another.
Wilmington Democrats, along with those of a like mind throughout the state, had
begun to seek the disfranchisement of black voters soon after the previous elections.
In the early months of 1898 a group of leading Wilmington Democrats calling
themselves the “Secret Nine” (Chesnutt reduced them to the “Big Three”) began to
plot a counteroffensive, eventually forming a group of clubs that went under the
banner of the White Government Union and merged with the growing statewide
white-supremacy movement. One of its leaders, Alfred Moore Waddell )a source for
Chesnutt’s character General Belmont), claimed that the Wilmington revolution was
a means of “manfully overthrowing” an intolerable tyranny on the order of the
American Revolution. His assertion thus linked all the elements of the Confederate
revival: the reanimation of proslavery principles dating to the age of the American
Revolution; sectional autonomy and the revisionist view of Reconstruction as a
mistaken effort at racial equality; and the assertion of white southern “manliness”
through the emaculation of black Americans. In North Carolina as elsewhere in the
South, the primary mechanism of the new revolution was the denial of black voting
rights, guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been assed during
Reconstruction in 1869. Mississippi’s disfranchisement of African Americans
through a series of punitive voting requirements (poll taxed, literacy tests, and the
like) was declared constitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1898. North
Carolina was one of several states that sought successfully to employ a statute that
more nakedly targeted black voters—namely, the grandfather clause, which allowed
only those men to vote who had themselves voted, or whose father or grandfathers
had voted, before 1867. Although some white men were also excluded from the polls
as a result, almost all black men were thus deprived of their voting rights and were
clearly the intended victims of the law.
But the grandfather clause that was passed in North Carolina would not go into effect
until 1900. In the meantime, white intimidation and violence had to take its place.
When the re-created that violence in The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt manipulated
historical fact and placed the riot before the election, thereby revealing the logic of
disfranchisement as one that blurred violence and legal process in United States
racial justice. As the postwar civil rights amendments were dismantled in the
succession of law s and court decisions leading to Plessy v. Ferguson—especially
United States v. Reese (1876), United States v. Cruikshank (1876), and United States
v. Harris (1883), which dealt with mob intimidation of black voters—the separation
of federal from state control sacrificed the individual’s basic civil rights to the
protection of law. The Supreme Court’s support of disfranchisement laws gave free
play to what General Belmont rightly designates the “age of crowds.” In North
Carolina’s campaign against the black franchise, Alfred Waddell, made mayor of
Wilmington in the aftermath of the revolution, remained a key player, telling whites
to warn away any African-American voter they encountered at the polls: “If he
refuses, kill him, shot him down in his tracks.” Such violence, after the bloodletting
of 1898 and restrictions upon black voting enforced by intimidation, proved
unnecessary: North Carolina blacks lost their vote by a 59-to-41 margin.
Chesnutt recognized that legal segregation unleashed the mob, which in turn
furthered segregation by disfranchisement. Perhaps on no other topic was he aroused
to such continued passion. Reflecting on the proposed North Carolina amendment in
an 1899 letter to Walter Hines Page, he wrote that “the Supreme Court of the United
States is in my opinion a dangerous place for a colored man to seek justice. He may
go there with maimed rights; he is apt to come away with none at all, and with an
adverse decision shutting out even the hope of any future protection there, for the
doctrine of stare decisis is as strongly entrenched there as the hopeless superiority of
the Anglo-Saxon is in the Southern states.” Chesnutt also contributed an essay titled
“The Disfranchisement of the Negro” to The Negro Problem, a volume edited by
Booker T. Washington in 1905; he regularly took more openly radical stands than
many black leaders; and he carried on a continued argument over the franchise in
correspondence with Washington in particular during the next several years.
Although he protested the grandfather clause for the lie that it was, Washington
favored property and education restrictions that inevitably put blacks at a
disadvantage. In one of his replies to Washington, Chesnutt argued against all such
roadblocks to black voting and, with unusual venom and also unusual race
consciousness, condemned white southerners as generally “an ignorant, narrow and
childish people....I make no pretense of any special love for them. I was brought up
among them; I have a large share of their blood in my veins: I wish them well, and
first of all I wish that they may learn to do justice....I admire your Christ-like spirit in
loving the Southern whites, but I confess I am not up to it.” Given Chesnutt’s white
ancestry, the symbolism of the “grandfather” clause must have struck him, as it
would have Alexander Manly, as an instance of special irony.
In light of Chesnutt’s perspective on the black vote, one is able to see more clearly
why he violated historical fact in The Marrow of Tradition and placed the riot before
the election. In our very first glimpses of Carteret as editor, we find him joining the
essential rhetorical themes of North Carolina’s antiblack campaign in an editorial
arguing that “the ballot in the hands of the negro was a menace to the
commonwealth” just as great as the “commingling” of the blood of “two
unassimilable races.” After their campaign for white supremacy flags, unable to
generate sufficient momentum on the issue of disfranchisement alone, Carteret,
Belmont, and McBane retrieve the Barber (Manly) editorial but reserve it for more
effective use later in the campaign, when it will appear in the sensational context
generated by the hysteria surrounding Polly Ochiltree’s apparent murder and Sandy’s
near-lynching.
When the Big Three finally reprint the scandalous editorial, they do so expressly to
bypass political process. Belmont suggests that because it would be two years before
North Carolina’s “nigger amendment”-that is, the grandfather clause that would
guarantee black disfranchisement—could go into effect, the white-supremacy
campaign needs to resort to tactics of intimidation to swing the upcoming election.
Carteret reproduces the Barber editorial as a means to mobilize support for the
violent revolution. BY having Carteret discover Barber’s editorial, then twice hold it
in reserve to be used in a calculated way once the statewide election campaign has
opened, Chesnutt echoed the rather deliberate deployment of the Manly editorial in
Wilmington’s actual politics. In placing the fictional riot before the election,
Chesnutt also underlined the rhetorical fiction of the attack on Manly—the fact that
the proclamation of endangered white womanhood, which could be used to even
better effect in the aftermath of Polly Ochiltree’s death, was a n obvious ploy to
mobilize white hatred of black jobholders and lack voters. Both the timely use of
Manly’s dangerous editorial and the backdating of the riot in his novel allow
Chesnutt to dramatize the truth of disfranchisement.
The “White Declaration of Independence,” presented publicly by the White
Government Union on November 9, the day after the election, still focused attention
on Manly, by now an icon of “Negro domination” that yoked professional
achievement to the specter of criminality. After a preamble that declared black
suffrage unconstitutional and rejected the notion of any African-American political
rule, the Declaration insisted that the reins of government be taken by those whites
who owned 90 percent of Wilmington property and paid commensurate taxes; called
for jobs currently held by blacks to be turned over to white; and demanded aht Manly,
the author of “an article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communities
result in the lynching of the editor,: be driven from town. Once the Secret Nine and
their supporters had drawn up the Declaration of Independence, a committee headed
by Waddell met with thirty-two of Wilmington’s leading blacks, many of them
professionals in medicine, law, real estate, and the like. The white supremacists put
the Declaration’s resolutions to the blacks on November 9 and demanded an answer
by the following day—although only one answer, complete submission to white
political and economic control, was acceptable. The Black leaders drafted a
heartbreaking but understandable reply to the white supremacists’ ultimatum:
We, the colored citizens to whom was referred the matter of expulsion from the
community of the person and press of A. L. Manly, beg most respectfully to say
that we are in no way responsible for, nor in any way condone the obnoxious
article that called forth your actions. Neither are we authorized to act for him in
this matter; but in the interest of peace we will most willingly use our influence to
have your wishes carried out.
The reply to Waddell drafted by the Wilmington blacks could hardly be construed as
a n act of cowardice in view of the overwhelming odds that they faced, but it
reflected the climate of fear in which many African Americans, professionals and
common people alike, lived at the turn of the century. Although North Carolina
whites had been virtually unanimous in their condemnation of Manly’s original
editorial, prominent Wilmington and Raleigh black leaders were split: Some bravely
defended Manly’s statement of the obvious truth, while others disassociated
themselves from his scandalous views.
For reasons that remain obscure, Armond Scott, the attorney charged with delivering
this reply to Waddell, mailed it rather than carrying it in person, and it therefore
missed the deadline. Whether receipt of the formal reply would have made any
difference to the white supremacists, however, is a fine question, so volatile was the
atmosphere surrounding the election. Masses of armed white men once again
gathered in Wilmington on November 10, two days after the election; and although
blacks had been forbidden to buy ammunition and to meet in groups for weeks
preceding the election, there were also numbers of armed blacks. The mob included
men from neighboring towns and farms who had appeared in a show of racial
support, while blacks, including Alexander Manly, had already fled town or were
hiding in their homes or outside of the city. (There is some evidence that Manly left
before election day; but it was also reported that one of Chesnutt’s cousins, who was
Manly’s employee, went to the office of the Wilmington Record the night of
November 9 and helped Manly bury printing equipment, in anticipation that the
building would be burned.) However the actual firing started—it seems to have
begun at the Sprunt Cotton Compress—there is no question that the white mob was
intent upon furthering the suppression of black civil rights by driving African
Americans, especially professionals, out of Wilmington. A force led by Waddell
armed itself at the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory and attacked the Wilmington
Record, ransacking the press and burning the building to the ground. Within hours,
the “riot” was in full force, and those blacks able or willing to defend themselves by
force were massively outgunned. Whites not only had a far superior supply of rifles,
handguns, and ammunition, they also had the support of an activated state militia and
the use of a rapid-fire Colt gun mounted on a carriage and at least two cannon. The
fighting spread across the city in a random, chaotic fashion, with many whites
passing directly from vigilantism to criminality.
Later testimony indicated that the number of African Americans killed in the
violence was certainly greater than the twelve or fourteen that appeared in official
Democratic estimates. More important in the long run was the fact that thousands
were driven from their homes (so that Wilmington and New Hanover County went
from significant black majorities to marginal white majorities within less than two
years) and their property destroyed or illegally confiscated. The outpouring of protest
against the Wilmington violence by Du Bois and other black leaders (Booker T.
Washington was characteristically silent) met with little response from Congress or
President McKinley. The long legislative and judicial implementation of Jim Crow
had made mobs immune to federal control, and politicians and journalists alike
succeeded in hiding the truth of Wilmington behind a mask of legal necessity. Those
blacks who did not see that Manly was only a convenient scapegoat complained, as
did one woman in a letter to President McKinley, that many innocent people had
been made to suffer for the sins of Manly. Such a division of African-American
opinion, hardly surprising in an era dominated by the views of middle-class
accommodationists, is re-created in Chesnutt’s dialogue between moderation and
radicalism in the contesting opinions of Dr. Miller and the blacker, poorly educated
rebel figure, Josh Green.
In one of his few obvious authorial intrusions into The Marrow of Tradition,
Chesnutt remarks in the aftermath of the riot that “the negroes of Wellington, with
the exception of Josh Green and his party, had not behaved bravely on this critical
day in their history.” Still, he continues, those who had fought were dead, while
those “who had sought safety in flight or concealment were alive to tell the tale.”
The dialogue between Miller and Josh that runs through the novel defines two poles
that can approach each other but never merge. It also defines a tension crucial to
Chesnutt’s structuring of the novel and to his own ambivalence about the political
identity of black culture. More than once Miller advises Josh to put away his
“murderous fancies,” while Josh replies that “ef a nigger wants ter git down on his
marrow-bones, an’ eat dirt, an’ call [the white man] ‘marster,’ he’s a good nigger,
dere’s room fer him. But I ain’t no w’ite folks’ nigger, I ain.’ I don’ call no man
‘marster.’”
Because of Miller’s dominant presence in the novel and Chesnutt’s problematic
identification with him as a middle-class professional with doubts about the wisdom
of violent resistance to white supremacy, Josh Green is a difficult figure to interpret.
Whereas his nemesis McBane had one partial real-life model in Mike Dowling, a
leader of the Red Shirts (like Benjamin Tillman, moreover, McBane is one-eyed),
Josh is a figure of folk consciousness apparently drawn from no actual participant in
the Wilmington riot. (There was a Josh Green, identified as a wood and coal dealer,
among the group of blacks constituted to answer Waddell’s ultimatum, but there is
no evidence that he resembled Chesnutt’s Green in his radicalism. Likewise, there
were several Millers among the black population, but none that closely resembled
Chesnutt’s character.) His dialect, which stands in sharp class contrast to Miller’s
refined conventional speech, aligns him with Chesnutt’s other lower-class black
“folk” figures in the color-line stories, the conjure tales, and The House Behind the
Cedars. At the same time, Josh represents something very different from the other
dialect-speaking characters of the novel, who take their place in Chesnutt’s broad
spectrum of class and cultural types, both black and white, in teh novel. In teh case
of Mammy Jane and Jerry Letlow, for example, their rather stereotypical dialect
helps consign them to the plantation typology of the “old-time Negro,” evolutionary
social types who would eventually give way to men and women with greater selfesteem and professional aspirations. Mammy Jane (who dies calling out to her old
white mistress in heaven) and her son Jerry (the gullible consumer of skin-bleaching
products who calls out to Carteret for help), says Chesnutt, are representatives of a
historical phase of black subservience that must be overcome if leaders like Miller
are to have any chance at successful “uplift.”
In the case of Josh, however, dialect is more evidently a language of resistance and
revolt, a countertype to the class-bound political moderation of Miller. As an outlaw
himself created by the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered his father, Josh personifies an
increasing ambiguity in relation to the law that was characteristic of the AfricanAmerican folk hero in the 1890s as hopes for black political and civil rights
crumbled and white-supremacist violence became more frequent and publicly
spectacular. Analogous, perhaps, to Robert Charles, the “outlaw” black figure at the
center of the New Orleans race riot of 1900—a “riot,” like that in Wilmington, that
was more of a white rampage—Josh Green is not just a representative of the “Negro
problem” as white Wellington defines it; he also has something in common with the
“bad nigger,” a hero figure that appears throughout much black folklore and the
blues in characters such as Railroad Bill or Stagolee, as well as in literary adaptations
from Henry Blake in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (1895) to
Bras-Coupé in George Washington Cable’s the Grandissimes (1880) to the later
protest heroes of Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and other naturalists.
The protagonist of black prose and poetry of the late nineteenth century was
inevitably a figure caught between assimilation and protest. The best-known public
expression of that difference was the ideological contest between Booker T.
Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois; Chsnutt’s dramatization of the gap between
Miller and Josh is its best literary expression, highlighting explicitly the divergent
meanings of wisdom and heroism in the formation of a cultural ideology. Miller, the
advocate of restraint and moderation, gives an answer to the threatened racist
violence consonant with the conciliatory answer that Wilmington’s black leaders
presented, however untimely, to Waddell. They disavowed Alexander Manly, and so
does Miller, who thinks Barber’s publishing of the editorial extremely ill advised so
long as Wellington’s blacks are living “in a sort of armed neutrality with the whites.”
When the riot breaks out, and Josh comes to Wellington’s black professionals
“lookin’ fer a leader,” Miller’s practical advice against resistance is “not heroic,”
though it is, Chesnutt seems to say, “wise.” Yet his resigned Washingtonian bluntly
by Josh: “I’d ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog!”
In their mirroring acts of killing each other, one might say, the radicals Captain
McBane and Josh Green cancel each other out. From Chesnutt’s point of view, both
are outlaws who represent a loss of control. On the one hand there is Carteret and
Belmont’s loss of control over the unruly mob, where the newspaper’s “civilized”
language of racist argument is finally stripped of its mask and reduced to the
uncomprehending shouts of the mob that swallow up Carteret’s unavailing attempts
to restore order. On the other there is Miller’s loss of control over the forces led by
Josh, which leap into suicidal confrontation with the white mob. the difference,
nonetheless, is obvious: Carteret, Belmont, and McBane, like the Secret Nine of
Wilmington, already represent lawlessness. As Chesnutt puts it when McBane
remarks that they need not hypocritically hide their intentions to drive offensive
black professionals out of Wellington, “It robbed the enterprise of all its poetry, and
put a solemn act of revolution upon the plane of a mere vulgar theft of power.”
McBane’s characteristic honesty throws an important light upon the actions of the
white middle class in Wellington, for it shows in further detail what Chesnutt’s
collapse of the chronology of the revolution is meant to express: that in the age of
segregation the law authorized violent seizures of power and, conversely, that the
fabricated specter of black lawlessness was a shield behind which white lawlessness
might be hidden.
With his hospital, the symbol of his commitment to “his people” of the South,
destroyed in the riot, Miller still remains a sign of forgiveness and reconciliation—
both in his final act of personal generosity to the Carterets and in his mere survival.
As Chesnutt painfully recognized, however, the professional class to which Miller
belongs (and which in 1900 made up only about 1 percent of the nation’s black
population) was the special target of the Wilmington revolution. Himself a member
of that class, Chesnutt could hardly have been optimistic. If his own conftemporaries
found The Marrow of Tradition a harsh and biter novel, later readers have often
found it closer in tone to the moderation of William Miller, stopped short of
righteous, radical protest by incompletely resolved tensions. Nevertheless, no novel
of the period provides a better anatomy of the racial politics of the nation in the
aftermath of Reconstruction and its descent into harsh segregation. For America
itself, as for the restoration of African-American political and civil rights that had
eroded year by year since Reconstruction, said Chesnutt at the end of his novel, there
was time enough but none to spare.
I. AT BREAK OF DAY
Major Carteret 守在奄奄一息的 Olivia Merkell 身旁，他的父亲兄弟在内战前后
死去，正是依靠了她才有了立足点，创办了 Morning Chronicle。多年没有孩子
的他们却在愿望快实现的时刻遇到了困难，连 Dr. Price 也无能为力。现在半夜
里，Dr. Price 下楼小睡，让 Major 陪护 Olivia。Dr. Price 问了伺候过 Olivia 母
亲的老仆人 Jane 关于女主人的情况，原来几个月前，Jane 就提醒 Olivia 大龄生
子需要多加小心，并主动要来服侍她。后来 Jane 说到以前的事情“当老主人
Elizabeth Merkell 将死时，她的妹妹 Polly 即现在的 Polly Ochiltree 来看她，被
要求抚养 6 岁的 Olivia 长大，接管房子。但是当时的男主人 Mars Sam 不希望
Polly 来，因为他怕她，Miss Polly 要求赶走当时 Sam 喜欢的女仆 Julia，两人于
是吵架，结果 Miss Polly 把 Olivia 带回自己家，Sam 和 Julia 留在原处只是支付
女儿的抚养费。后来 Julia 有了个孩子，但 Sam 不久就死了，于是 Polly 回来赶
走了 Julia 和她的孩子。Julia 后来过的艰辛，嫁给一个男人后就死了。她的女
儿 Janet 被好心的老师送到北方读书回来后加给了有钱的老 Adam Miller 的儿子
Dr. Miller，婚后他们创办了医院和学校培训黑人护士。Janet 和 Olivia 很像双
胞胎，Adam Miller 买下了老 Carteret 的房产，他死了以后，Janet 夫妇就搬进
去住了，这使 Major Carteret 懊恼。更糟的是，今年他们得了个漂亮的小儿子
让 Olivia 看到徒自伤心于是就病倒了。”这时，Major Carteret 下来喊他们一起
上去看情况，黎明时分，孩子诞生，母子平安，大家松口气特高兴。细心的
Mammy Jane 发现孩子左耳下有个小胎记，让他联想到厄运，但没告诉其他
人。几天后，她把孩子洗澡水放入小瓶请一个黑人女巫施法加了些芦苇根，猫
的脊椎骨和其他神秘的东西，在月圆之夜埋在后花园以保佑这个新生命。
II. THE CHRISTENING PARTY
小孩名字叫 Theodore Felix，小名 Dodie，在命名洗礼会上，Mammy Jane 和她
在 Morning Chronicle 办公室当门房的孙子 Jerry 有幸可以同白人们一起参加。
次日星期一晚上，Major 在家举办了洗礼晚会，由于 Mrs. Carteret 的健康状
况，只邀请了一些私密人士：St. Andrew 的教区长，教母 Mrs. Polly
Ochiltree，远亲兼 sponsors 之一的老 Mr. Delamere 和他的孙子 Tom Delamere，
Major 的密友编辑 Lee Ellis 还有 Major 同母异父的 18 岁妹妹 Clara Pemberton。
第一个到的是年轻的 Ellis 在客厅等，之后老弱的 Mr. Delamere 被老仆人 Sandy
送来，见到在门口的 Mrs. Ochiltree，同意让 Sandy 帮助招待晚会以替代扭伤脚
的黑人管家 Peter，但表明自己非常健康行动有力。Sandy 很高兴请求回去换件
好看的衣服来，这时妩媚的 Tom Delamere 也来了。Clara 一到，两个小年轻都
被她的美丽迷住了，但 Ellis 对 Clara 和 Tom 说话多感到嫉妒。Tom 向 Clara 辩
解自己迟到有因，可 Ellis 知道那是谎言因为他刚才在 Clarendon Club 看到
Tom 在打牌。尽管当年 Major 不赞成母亲改嫁但对妹妹 Clara 还是很好。Mr.
Delamere 在旁说风凉话认为他们两个成婚肯定美好，Ellis 无语。Rector 因去看
一个垂死的女人不能来了，Sandy 赶来，晚宴开始。Polly 不断挖苦 Ellis 自
娱，Jane 把宝宝抱下来大家传看后带回楼上。大家拿出礼物，Mr. Delamere 的
银勺子，Tom 的套餐巾的环，Ellis 的银表，Mrs. Ochiltree 的象牙 rattle，Tom
和 Clara 都回忆起这是 Polly 的雪松箱子里的玩意，他们小时候都看过，里面还
有其他宝贝。Sandy 恭敬严肃地站在一边，只有 Tom 一直认为他是个黑鬼。当
Sandy 离开一会时，Major 暗示 Polly 刚才提到箱子是不应该让黑人听到，Mr.
Delamere 自信 Sandy 是最忠实的。两人据此小吵了对黑人的看法，Major 认为
是下等和奴性的，Mr. Delamere 则列举了一些成功黑人的例子，发现 Olivia 似
乎由于听到 Miller 而不适于是适可而止，但强调 Sandy 是个绅士，Major 苟同
但提醒 Polly 最好把钱存银行而别放箱子里以防黑贼。Sandy 回来时，Polly 无
视 Major 的提示声称不论谁抢劫她都不会客气的。饭后 Clara 弹了钢琴并和
Tom 一起二重唱，9 点时，Mr. Delamere 和 Sandy 先走了。Ellis 借口到办公室
审稿早走了，而 Tom 之后到 Clarendon Club 打牌赢钱半夜才回家。
III. THE EDITOR AT WORK
第二天，办公室的所有人都来祝贺 Major，他给每人发了雪茄并握手，但对
Jerry 只是点头，Jerry 有点失落，虽然他曾经被 Ellis 握过手，但认为他只是没
背景的年轻白人而已自然不可和 Major 比。Major 开始考虑儿子的将来。办公
桌上有封著名 Promoter 的来信，提供他一个高回报的投资机会，尽管周期会很
长，但他的 Morning Chronicle 和妻子继承的一个当地棉花磨房可以提供充足的
资金，如此的投资利润将使自己的孩子富有并与家族的高贵相称，他的先人有
9 万亩土地和 6 千奴隶。回信同意后，Major 执笔社论，刚刚的州选举，由
Republican 和 Populist 结合成的 Fusion 打败了当权 20 多年的 Democrat，政府
职员大换血，很多黑人出来找工作，这些让 Major 不安。他写到让黑人投票是
危险的，指出黑人与白人永不可能和谐生活除非划分高等和低等，这是 Jerry
带进来了 General Belmont 和 Captain McBane。Belmont 抱怨到黑人的部分当权
和平等的出现，他出身显贵，曾任政府要职。George McBane 则出身穷苦白人
家庭，没有奴隶，但在奴隶制废除后他们的地位和其他白人就平起了。他经营
的产业很好，但 Fusions 当权后，失去了合同，于是投身政治以谋社会地位提
高和自己的利益。Jerry 为他们搬来了椅子，General 点点头，但 Captain 却用独
眼狠狠地瞪他让他赶快退出房间，他不喜欢 Captain，也认为他不是白人中的
高层。但嫉妒羡慕他的富有，希望自己能是个白人。在外面等待时，Jerry 靠
墙坐在板凳上，通过墙洞断断续续听到里面的谈话。这时，McBane 给了
Jerry50 美分去 Mr. Sykes 那买 3 杯 whiskies，回来给了零钱退出房间，他们三
人干杯说 No nigger domination！General 又叫 Jerry 去 Mr. Brown 那买他留的秘
制酒，并说 Jerry 可以保有找零，Jerry 很高兴认为他是 gentleman。他们三个又
干杯庆贺 White Supremacy，随后散伙，Major 完成他的社论。
IV. THEODORE FELIX
才 6 个月，Jane 断定小宝宝是 Wellington 最优秀的婴儿，她患了风湿回自己家
住了，一个年轻 nurse 来替代她，但她仍随时可以来看孩子。Jane 不放心新女
孩临走前告诫她一定要全心全意照顾孩子，但这个毕业于教会学校的新一代有
色人种根本不把 Jane 放眼里。不像奴隶出身的老一代，她和 Olivia 只是劳务关
系而不带任何情感。Major 告诉生气的 Jane 旧时代已经过去，现在的黑人们毫
无教养，但耐心的白人也是有限度的。Jane 说现在的年轻人一点也不好，一个
黑人只要好好尊重白人就会有吃有喝可他们竟不满足，Major 完全同意，夫妇
俩赞扬了 Jane 的忠诚。小 Dodie 把 Polly 送的象牙 rattle 末端吸到气管里，Jane
第一个发现，Major 电话来 Dr. Price，忙活了半天认为手术是不可避免的了，
但需要一个专科医生协助。费城的 Dr. Burns18 个小时后能到，期间 Dr. Price
守护着小孩，Jane 回忆起这个有胎记孩子的不少厄运：曾有怪猫跑到婴儿床
上，Jane 也担心那个魔瓶效力用尽，多次挖出摇晃再埋回并画十字架等以保佑
孩子，这样自己也能睡的好些。
V. A JOURNEY SOUTHWARD
火车上，白人 Mr. Burns 遇到了从纽约上车的 William Miller，虽然皮肤浅棕却
也掩盖不了他的黑人血统，但两人都高大俊朗有修养。Alvin Burns 原是 Miller
的大学老师，结有深厚友谊。Miller 的父亲 Adam Miller 是个奴隶的儿子，勤
恳节俭，自己赎了身，后来拥有了码头装卸的生意，大儿子继承了，二儿子则
受到优秀教育以期后代成为绅士们。父亲死后，Miller 用遗产的一部分成立一
个医院和护士学院并计划加个医学院和药剂学校，他一直向带家人到更自由的
北方落脚，以免歧视，带这里的人民需要他。交谈中，Mr. Burns 请 Miller 协
助手术，晚上，乘务员请旅客从 sleeping-car 转出。这时同舱的 Captain
McBane 请乘务员要求 Miller 离开白人车厢，拿 Virginia 的隔离法压制，Burns
很恼怒，Miller 怕耽误时间同意去黑人车厢，Mr. Burns 要同去却被告之，白人
不能入，于是无奈暂时分开。Captain McBane 却尾随来在 Colored 车厢抽烟，
Miller 向乘务员抗议，Captain 把乘务员痛骂了一顿，乘务员落荒而逃，抽完烟
吐了痰 Captain 才离开。火车在给水站补水时，Miller 看到一个高大黑人拼命
地下车到水槽喝水，上车时他狠狠地盯着坐在另一个车厢的 Captain。在下一
站，一个中国人和跟随主人的黑人护士坐在了白人车厢。Miller 自忖，作为传
统仆人的黑人被允许坐在白人车厢，而作为平等的黑人却不受欢迎。之后又见
到一个白人的狗被牵到行李厢，略觉舒坦。晚上一群农场工人挤了上来，又唱
又跳，好不热闹，Miller 一开始很高兴。随后实在太拥挤又混乱，Miller 到平
台上休息，觉的这些人和那些白人一样让自己不适应。太阳刚下山，车到
Wellington 了，Miller 下车时看到那个魁梧的黑人也嘟囔着下车了。
VI. JANET
Dr. Price 接了 Dr. Burns 并被介绍了 Miller，Miller 先回家去，Dr. Burns 叫他吃
完饭 8 点到 Major Philip Carteret 家帮忙。妻子和 6 岁的儿子接 Miller 回家，他
希望妨碍自己事业的人种歧视只是暂时的。Janet 很高兴 Miller 可以帮助自己
的异母姐姐救孩子，并一直期盼有一日和她的关心能被认可。
VII. THE OPERATION
虽然 Dr. Price 本人不反对黑人参与但担心邀请的其他老医生会有意见，但主要
还是担心从未把黑人平等对待的 Major 的意见。路上向 Dr. Burns 表达了这种
担心，却被告知 Dr. Burns 会负责任坚持让 Miller 来，他们到达时，Drs.
Dudley, Hooper, Ashe 早已恭候大驾了。Dr. Bursn 坚持等 Miller，和 Major 发生
激烈冲突，Dr. Price 想圆场说是手术必须，却不想 Dr. Burns 竟然说否只是因
为自己没偏见，僵持不下。Major 想告诉 Dr. Burns 关于妻子的身世以免 Miller
来，于是 Dr. Price 出面和 Dr. Burns 单独谈了此事，Dr. Burns 终于屈服了，开
始手术。Dr. Price 极不好意思地向后来的 Miller 解释，撒谎说是因为情况紧急
所以无法等他，充分相信的 Miller 在离开时被黑人仆人 Sam 叫住，告知真相，
百味杂陈。面对 Janet 的询问，Miller 说了实话，Janet 讨厌 Major。手术前检查
时，Dr. Burns 发现障碍物转移了，拍了婴儿后杂物被吐了出来，一切都好了。
VIII. THE CAMPAIGN DRAGS
Major 在专栏里鼓动该是开始为白人至上理念斗争的时候了，但应者寥寥，于
是在婴儿脱险后的第二天，“Big Three”再次开会。General Belmont 认为要有支
持，先得说理造舆论，争取北方理解，McBane 认为无须麻烦，只要自己够强
大怎么做都行，但 Belmont 提醒他现在不是旧时代了。McBane 知道自己不像
他们俩出身显贵曾有奴隶，微微被刺痛，Belmont 继续指出要师出有名，
Carteret 赞成并希望战火燃遍全国。General 建议联合媒体，并说竟有人在 NY
说黑人因拼死反击白人的攻击，得到独眼的 Captain 的强力共鸣。
IX. A WHITE MAN’S “NIGGER”
Major 从垃圾桶里翻出一份小报，上有皮肤增白广告，更令他们气愤的一则社
论，里面对 lynch 强烈抨击，决定据此大做文章。General 打发 Jerry 去 Brown’s
买 3 杯 Calhoun cocktails，McBane 说“快点，charcoal”让 Major 有点不喜，
却其实骨子里都贱视黑人，只是为了 gentleman 的面子罢了。Jerry 回来准备守
在门口以想 McBane 是否会记起 change 的决定，偷听到里面谈话，他们准备适
时发表那个社论添加评论以引发白人支持。Jerry 送进酒，退出时很高兴
General 叫住他说可以拿 change，他决定和可以给他 bread and meat 的 AngrySaxon 白人站在一起。离开前，general 善意地提醒 Major 要注意 Tom 的赌博和
酗酒，为了 Clara 的幸福。McBane 在州内游说着有成效，乘事业之便 Belmont
也在北方宣传，Carteret 则负责舆论造势。这次行动各人也有自己打算，
general 想捞取政治资本，Carteret 为了儿子的将来。
X. DELAMERE PLAYS A TRUMP
Major 认为 Tom 应该有度，Clara 的未来不能马虎，当老 Mr. Delamere 派 Tom
来为卖木材登广告时，他慈爱地提醒 Tom 年轻人要有节制，虽然有点生气冲
动，但不清楚到底指什么，Tom 还是虚心地点头退出了。下楼时遇到 Ellis，怀
疑是他透露了赌博的消息。其实 Ellis 也一直注意 Tom 的坏习惯以为自己渺茫
的爱情加分，他认为 Tom 是个堕落的贵族，而自己是个兢兢业业的上班族。
Tom 财务混乱借小钱不还，Ellis 则节俭，虽然订婚一年后他们会结婚，但伪君
子的 Tom 期间只要有意外，Ellis 便有机会了。在 Vine Street 上 Ellis 遇到 Mrs.
Ochiltree 被问 Sandy 说 Tom 常常豪赌和烂醉回家是否属实？Ellis 故意不答却
其实透露属实，聪明的 Mrs. Ochiltree 当然看得出来。她告诉 Clara 和 Mrs.
Carteret 从 Dinah 听到的这些消息，她们不信说 Tom 不可能晚上来的时候不显
示迹象和他的收入不能保证赌博。Clara 认为是 Ellis 捣鬼，白把他当好朋友
了，但还是提醒了 Tom 要注意行为，Tom 一口否认传言，并乘机说服说提前
结婚就可以堵人嘴了，当晚 Clara 就建议了 Major 被同意考虑。Ellis 来访时
Clara 没见他，他从 Mrs. Ochiltree 口中得知婚礼提前半年了，后有在路上被
Miss Pemberton 证实，后来一次见到 Clara 时被冷冷对待讽刺，很伤心。
XI. THE BABY AND THE BIRD
Ellis 离开后，Clara 高兴得上楼抱着宝宝跳舞，Jane 有些怕伤到宝宝，她庆幸
宝宝好几次死里逃生。这时一只树上的 mockingbird 开始唱歌，宝宝很爱听，
大家都在窗前听，在看到了路边马车里 Mrs. Miller 的眼神后，Mrs. Carteret 厌
恶的回身了。Janet 被刺痛，儿子则兴奋看到婴儿，这时宝宝跳出 Clara 的怀掉
出窗外幸亏被及时抓住衣服拉回，Mrs. Carteret 差点吓死。由此联想到上次
Miller 的被赶走，她认为是异母妹妹的邪气害了自己孩子，此后几个星期也不
让 Clara 碰孩子，Jane 也认为 Janet 和那个鸟都有巫术。几天后，Mrs. Carteret
发现了 Jane 系在婴儿床上的一个保佑囊，第一反应是扔，后算了，因为至少
不会有害处。
XII. ANOTHER SOUTHERN PRODUCT
早上医院刚开门时，Miller 认出来的断臂人是父亲码头工作的 Josh Green，并
确定他是那天躲在货厢逃票的高大黑人。因为不堪被一个海员侮辱和人打架，
双方受伤，Miller 建议他得忍受不公，否则有危险。Josh 宁肯战死也不屈服，
因为小时候 Ku-Klux 杀死其父，躏辱其母致疯呆，唯一没带面具的头子被牢
记，他发誓要报仇。Miller 有点敬佩但仍劝阻，要像圣经教导地宽恕他人，
Josh 反驳那是白人的骗局，精神控制，难道感恩我们没被杀害？白人想训练我
们做奴隶，顺从的是好黑人，不听话的是坏蛋，这些都是一派胡言！Miller 差
点被反洗脑，叫 Josh 平静，这样虽然死得英雄可在这个社会却会令其他黑人
更难生存。
XIII. THE CAKEWALK
Sandy Campbell 陷入了大麻烦。一群北方访客因要上马的棉花磨坊在 St. James
酒点受招待，南方人士抱怨尽管他们为黑人提供了教育等等，他们却不如其祖
辈知恩图报。他们说没有一件 lynch 是不公正的，为客观还带客人去参观一个
黑人教堂，一个全国文明的黑人牧师不断想证明地球是平的和地狱只有半里，
尽管如此，除了仆人，北方客人从没机会单独和黑人谈谈。参观后，北方客人
同情南方人的苦处，认为听话并且不会抱怨的黑人不会受压迫，逐渐接受南方
的习俗。在访问最后一晚，酒店老板安排了一次 cakewalk。吧台的 Billy 告诉
Tom 说晚上酒店会有大型 cakewalk，几乎所有黑人员工都参加，可以 Ransom
安排个位置看，Tom 心中有了个计划。晚会大获成功，一个黑男人和房间女清
洁员获得大奖，Ellis 认出那是穿蓝衣的 Sandy，可晚会一结束就匆匆离开了。
次日他被所在教堂批评出席不恰当活动，虽然他极力否认辩白，但妹妹 Manda
Patterson 和一个执事的儿子指认昨晚就是他。即使辩白自己昨晚一直在家，他
还是被剥夺了教堂会员资格直到承认错误并忏悔，倔强的 Sandy 伤心无奈。听
到 Sandy 的哀叹，Tom 劝他看开点，振作起来。
XIV. THE MAUNDERINGS OF OLD MRS. OCHILTREE
在那次意外后，一天下午 Mrs. Carteret 去找 Mrs. Ochiltree，前一天则解雇了那
个年轻护士，因为她说为了去看姐妹把 Dodie 带到了 Miller 家。70 多岁衰弱的
Mrs. Ochiltree 爱面子执意一个人住，由两仆人照顾，个性鲜明不顾他人面子的
她也常受排斥。Mrs. Carteret 叫车夫 William 叫醒在院子打盹的 Mrs.
Ochiltree，却无意听到她梦说想嫁给 John Delamere。女仆 Dinah 摇醒了 Mrs.
Ochiltree，她上马车到 Major 家。路上经过 Miller 的医院，那是 Hugh
Poindexter 变卖出去的家产，这让 Mrs. Ochiltree 无法想象。门口见到抱着孩子
的 Janet，Mrs. Carteret 逃，Mrs. Ochiltree 追问 William 得知她是 Julia Brown 的
女儿，说 Olivia 应感谢她保护了她的财产。后又遇到 Sandy，Olivia 问 Mr.
Delamere 身体如何以转移刚才的话题，Sandy 说特别好，Polly 则反讽说都得老
死以撑面子。
XV. MRS. CARTERET SEEKS AN EXPLANATION
车子回到 Mrs. Ochiltree 家，Olivia 询问 Julia 的故事，为什么自己得感谢
Polly。当年她偷听到 Mr. Merkell 临死前叫 Julia 立即去自己办公桌里的信寄出
去并按其中写的做，Polly 赶快赶到隔壁，当 Merkell 死掉 Julia 进来准备拿信
时，Polly 强行赶她却被 Julia 抗拒。Polly 于是躲起来看到 Julia 抱着孩子开了
抽屉，跳出来说她是小偷并看到当她面对的是个空抽屉时的表情，Polly 高兴
无比。她告诉 Julia 现在没有人能证明她的权利她必须离开，并威胁不许说那
个荒谬的承诺否则控告她偷窃，Julia 崩溃离开。说到这，Olivia 想知道那些纸
到底怎么回事，Polly 却说不是告诉过抽屉是空的吗？没能再问到更多，Olivia
回家了。
XVI. ELLIS TAKES A TRICK
几年来 Major 越来越喜欢 Ellis 这个小伙子了，Clara 则厌恶她，Olivia 也不想
他老来打扰订婚的 Clara。一天下午 Major 建议叫 Ellis 一起和他们坐马车去郊
外，路上遇到一些大声说笑的黑人，Major 觉的黑人越来越不尊重人了。到了
酒店，俩女的到阳台休息，Major 和 General 等一干人会面谈话，Ellis 则和俩
女的在一起，半小时后原本说来的去钓鱼的 Tom 还没到，Clara 叫 Ellis 去找找
看。Ellis 无奈 Clara 的冷淡而不知为何，他宁肯被恨也不想被不理睬，因为恨
至少还说明脑子里有他，好多都是由恨转爱呢。酒店领班叫一黑人门童去楼上
房间看了后，门童回来笑着报告说 Tom 在房间里，门也开着，Ellis 问他为何
笑，不答，于是自己去看。原来那屋一群人喝酒打牌，Tom 则醉着睡着了。
Ellis 回去称没找到，Clara 失望说到楼上弹钢琴吧，Olivia 不想去叫 Ellis 陪
她。Ellis 有点窘迫，让 Clara 看到她一定会怀疑是自己安排的，于是建议到海
边走走，但 Clara 执意去楼上。上楼时，正好看到那个门童，于是 Ellis 给他钱
让他走在前面去把 256 房间门关上直到他们走过走廊。弹完琴发现好多人围来
听，Clara 说回去，Ellis 不知对这次策略是高兴还是不高兴。人们聚在海滩的
火堆旁，Olivia 叫 Ellis 去拿些烤牡蛎来。回来时，醒酒的 Tom 来了，解释说
自己钓鱼过热有点不适，生气的 Clara 说下午去弹琴很高兴请 Ellis 陪他去海边
走走，叫 Tom 别来好好休息。走着走着，Clara 问 Ellis 是否知道 Tom 在酒店
里，他是否真生病？Ellis 假装没听到。回去是，Major 坐到了 General 车上，
叫 Tom 和 Clara 他们坐，一路上，大家都没怎么说话，到了家 Clara 和 Ellis 晚
安叫他有空来玩却始终没和 Tom 说话。
XVII. THE SOCIAL ASPIRATIONS OF CAPTAIN MCBANE
在 St. James 酒店，Tom 见到了 Captain George McBane。一心想攫取社会地位
的 McBane 一直想加入只有上流参与的 Clarendon Club，而 Tom 则可以做很好
的介绍人。他和 Tom 一样嗜酒抽烟并和他打过牌，还发现 Tom 会出老千，但
没点破。他邀请 Tom 打牌，假装热情赢了许多，用同样的招数出老千，Tom
留下可观的欠条。当 McBane 说只不过 1000 元时，Tom 不禁一惊他唯一的收
入只是祖父的给予，McBane 笑说不用理会那个纸条。次日中午 Captain 要求
Tom 推荐他入会，Tom 打骨子里看不起他却显然无力偿还债务，他的祖父还不
知道他赌博，想到老 Polly 一个人住还把遗产放房子里，如果她被抢劫那么自
己可以保有的遗产就没有了，思前想后他说这事不能急得暂缓，但答应一定推
荐 McBane。他想去 Club 赌一把看能不能赢到钱却发现自己身上一分没有，而
凭他现在的信誉是不可能空手去赌的，一个想法闪现。他回家看到 Sandy 在整
理那件西服，说仍想不同那次 cakewalk 的事情和说衣服上有些奇怪的污滓。
Tom 叫 Sandy 把自己的存钱给他，虽然极不情愿，Sandy 还是拿了出来，Tom
发现部分是 Confederate 的钱，现在没用了，但还是把其他钱都拿走了。Sandy
很伤心但不会告诉 Mr. Delamere，因为 Dr. Price 说他这么老不能再激动，而且
主人这么好，怎么能让他伤心呢，自己一定要报答主人。Tom 马上去赌，又
输，而且最后出老千时被发现了，出于家族名声的考虑，委员会让 Tom 秘密
退会，并限 3 天还债还发誓永不赌博。
XVIII. SANDY SEES HIS OWN HA’NT
因为老 Delamere 到外地了，晚饭后 Sandy 出去逛遇到 Josh Green 去喝一杯。
11 点多回家路上，Sandy 看到一个酷似自己的人穿着自己的衣服在前面跑，以
为是自己的魂魄，尾随回家后那个自己消失了，Sandy 想一定是喝醉了。见
Tom 房间灯亮于是敲门，Tom 说等会出来，Sandy 没有注意到他房间的凌乱，
只是问是否听到人进来，Tom 想来会说什么都没有，Sandy 确定是自己醉了。
Tom 无心地说还钱可否用金币，同意后给了 Sandy 几个金币，并给了他一个丝
绸钱包。晚上 Tom 烧掉了一些东西，并次晨很早离开对厨子说自己整天都会
去钓鱼。
XIX. A MIDNIGHT WALK
同一个晚上，Ellis 走报社出来回家，得知 Tom 被开除，相信 Clara 迟早会知道
并且不会嫁给这么个不诚实的人。临近 Delamere 家时，看到两个一前一后进
了房子，前面的人肯定是 Sandy 因为穿着和上次洗礼会及 cakewalk 一样的外
套，而后一个人好象也是 Sandy，一阵糊涂后不去想他了。而是回到 Clara 问
题上，现在开始，似乎他和 Tom 的竞争渐渐变得公平了。
XX. A SHOCKING CRIME
次早 Dinah 发现 Mrs. Ochiltree 死了，立即报告 Mrs. Carteret 说老 Polly 被杀，
雪松箱子里的财物全没了。Olivia 匆匆赶去，一路上想起姨娘的好和那天她没
说完的故事和那些文书。现场一片狼籍，Polly 头部重创，箱子被撬开，地上
散落一些珠宝首饰，Olivia 很快发现了一个封好的信封，塞到自己胸里。这时
警探和治安员来了，维护现场，验尸官定性为入室劫杀，消息很快传开。怀疑
一致指向黑人，这是惯例，在南方，白人自发寻找凶手，无须法官或陪审团就
可以判决执行了。
XXI. THE NECESSITY OF AN EXAMPLE
早 10 点时，Captain，General 和 Carteret 自发地在报社集中了，这时一个记者
进来说找到了凶手 Sandy Campbell，是看门的 Jerry 和一个白人举报昨晚看到
他到 Polly 家的。不论 Sandy 如何辩解都是徒劳，人们把他抓了起来。Ellis 也
进了办公室确认看到 Sandy 手拿一捆东西回家的，Carteret 觉的难以置信被
Delamere 如此信任的仆人会做这件事。三人合议要严惩，以树立典型。分析这
不是孤立的事件，而是这么多年南方社会秩序不稳定造成的，黑人是个劣等的
民族而如今却不再是奴隶了。general 叫 Jerry 去买三杯酒来并可以保有零钱，
并赞扬他的检举行为，Jerry 奉承巴结甚至恶毒地赞成严刑 Sandy。会议结束，
他们认为此事有必要大肆宣传一下，重新让人们明白当今社会的不正常。
XXII. HOW NOT TO PREVENT A LYNCHING
黑人律师 Mr. Watson 来告诉 Miller 老 Polly 被杀和 Sandy 将被处以私刑的消
息。被两个人指认的 Sandy 被抓了，作为证物的衣服和那个钱袋及里面的金币
让大多数人认为审判已经多余。这时 Josh 来找 Miller，说昨晚 Sandy 和他在一
起穿的也不是蓝衣服，肯定不是他杀的人。Watson 否决了 Miller 带 Josh 找白
人领导的建议，因为现在他们都已经热血沸腾，这样一个有前科的黑人证词只
会让事情更糟糕。冲动的 Josh 被制止去招人到监狱护 Sandy，Watson 说现在
报纸又出现了人种高低的议论，白人们开始仇视所有黑人，大家最好小心谨慎
点，Josh 忿忿不平。讨论来讨论去没什么好办法，Miller 说可以请一些正直的
白人阻止私刑，两人分头去找让 Josh 留守以免惹麻烦。结果令人沮丧，法官
Everton 无能为力，还认为 Sandy 不可能是无辜的，市长躲起来了，Dr. Price 则
劝 Miller 别插手以免惹祸。看来人种歧视让他们和白人的友谊荡然无存，Josh
等不及了。这时 Miller 突然想到老 Delamere 或许能帮忙，立即出发到
Belleview 去告诉他所发生的事情，叫 Watson 期间关注事态和 Josh 不要冲动，
尽量找出真凶。
XXIII. BELLEVIEW
老 Delamere 是个善良的好人，年轻时是个律师，也曾为 Miller 父亲提供帮
助，Miller 成立医院时，他也到场致辞。找到老 Delamere 说明了情况，他很气
愤竟然有人怀疑 Delamere 家长大的 Sandy，立即决定回去救 Sandy，虽然一直
害怕 Polly 要嫁给自己，他对其死也表示了遗憾。Mr. Delamere 首先去监狱看
Sandy，Miller 则赶回家里。
XXIV. TWO SOUTHERN GENTLEMEN
Mr. Delamere 向 Sandy 了解昨天的过程，但问到金币的由来是，Sandy 死活不
肯说是谁给他的，而是扯了许多他和主人多年来的互相关怀和感人的一幕幕，
最后闭嘴不论主人如何启发他。Delamere 离开时告戒狱长保证 Sandy 的安全。
XXV. THE HONOR OF A FAMILY
老 Delamere 赶去报社要求 Carteret 保证在受到公正审判以前 Sandy 的安全，并
认为黑人的不好是因为白人没教育好他们的缘故，而 Delamere 家的仆人不可
能犯罪。他竭尽全力担保 Sandy 无罪要求报纸像早上号召白人聚集一样叫人们
先解散一保证监狱的安全，他以名誉担保 Sandy 无罪就像自己的孙子 Tom 不
会杀人一样肯定。这时，Carteret 说他已经被蒙蔽太久而失去判断里，告诉他
说昨天 Tom 才因为出老千被开除出俱乐部了还欠了一屁股债务，震惊的老先
生很难过但仍然以生命担保 Sandy 不会让他失望。Carteret 很抱歉自己伤害这
个景仰的旧时代的绅士，他建议如果老 Delamere 能找到其他人在晚 7 点前做
证，则私刑就可能会被避免。于是老 Delamere 离开了说让 Major 在报社等他
回来。
XXVI. THE DISCOMFORT OF ELLIS
得知白人想烧死 Sandy 时，一贯反对私刑的 Ellis 感到不安，他于是开始仔细
回忆，当时有两个 Sandy 呀，另一个到底是谁呢？结合上次的 cakewalk，已经
一系列的回忆，他惊讶地发现那个人竟然是 Tom Delamere。他想为这个可怜
的黑人澄清，却又担心自己的揭发会让 Clara 更讨厌自己，最后折中先去为
Sandy 说情，至于 Tom 的揭发则不一定非得通过自己的嘴说出来。一路上，白
人的情绪已经白热化，一致要烧死 Sandy，准备工作开始进行，列车去接其他
城镇的观众，时间也提前让孩子们可以观看，甚至有人讨论取 Sandy 尸体一部
分做纪念。在监狱入口遇到了老 Delamere，不忍伤害他，只说 Sandy 不是凶手
但不能透露更多，不想 Delamere 似有预感，叫他陪其先一起回家。
XXVII. THE VAGARIES OF THE HIGHER LAW
老 Delamere 叫 Ellis 在马车上等，自己则进了 Tom 的房间，发现了一封信和金
币，并从 Sally 那了解了昨晚的情形，确认了自己的猜测。立即赶到报社把正
和 Captain，General 谈话的 Major 叫出来单聊，告诉他 Tom 是真凶，分析和提
供证物，Major 不得不相信。他要求 Carteret 散发 Sandy 无罪，Tom 有罪的传
单，尽管 Carteret 知道了真相但是这样一来，白人就颜面无存而且 Big Three 期
待的革命就化为乌有了，他建议顾及一下家族名誉，但老 Delamere 说他不认
Tom 这个孙子了，他的家族也不再光彩了。无奈 Major 回去和 General 商量，
然后折中。召开新闻发布会，在 Mr. Smith 的公证下，Mr. Delamere 发誓说
Sandy 昨晚一直和他在一起因此不可能是凶手也不该被处以私刑，但 General
说嫌疑犯还不能被立即释放但会得到保护。次晨听审，Ellis 说所见不是
Sandy，Dr. Price 则证明 Polly 的死是惊吓而非暴力袭击。Sandy 虽然释放了，
但是一开始的新闻影响则传遍全国，反而无人关心后来此事被定性为简单的抢
劫，Delamere 家的名誉也没损害。几天后，老 Delamere 叫 General 帮他写下遗
嘱，给 Sandy3000 美元，其他财产都捐给了 Miller，由 Jeff 和 Billy 做见证，几
天后他就归西了。遗嘱由 General 保管，老人死后，他并没有拿出来，而是决
定以后可以用来对付 Tom。
XXVIII. IN SEASON AND OUT
Wellington 恢复了平静，Major 让 Sandy 做了管家以作为一种补偿，而 Tom 则
当作什么都没有发生。Sandy 又被教堂接受了，Tom 也没来找 Clara 而是离城
好几个月，Ellis 认为现在立即接近 Clara 不合时宜，何况因 Major 投身政治，
报社工作很多。Miller 不知道老 Delamere 的遗愿，只为失去这样一个正直的白
人朋友而叹惋。针对黑人的舆论却没有降低，南北皆如此，Major 到州内游说
修改法律恢复白人至上，以防黑人夺权。宪法引入了 grandfather clause，变相
剥夺了黑人的选举权，但 2 年后才执行。对秋季选举即将来临的 Wellington 而
言，这太迟了，于是三巨头打算提前想办法让黑人不要投票。他们开会讨论利
用上次发现的黑人社论，仔细研究后决定配以注释再刊登出来以煽动反黑情
绪。General 叫 Jerry 又去买酒，回来时问外表变化的 Jerry 他是否生病了，追
问下才发现他买了广告产品，让头发变直，皮肤变白，结果被三巨头讽刺开玩
笑。Jerry 一直以为自己变白就能享有一些特权，但听了 General 对这些药品副
作用的断言，他决定停止使用。当朋友走后，Major 告诉 Jerry 黑人就应该黑，
白人不喜欢黑人变白，并问他是否会参加投票。Jerry 揣摩他的意思说当然不
会，并问是否能保有工作，Major 更鄙视黑人，他竟以为这是白人对他们的贿
赂，更确信白人至上原则。
XXIX. MUTTERINGS OF THE STORM
随后被 Major 加以煽动注释的黑人文章登报，立即激起白人的反感，囤积了武
器弹药，而黑人却很难获得，那个黑人报纸的编辑也躲了起来。策划们很满
意，一场如此改革将令黑人退出各个领导岗位，保证白人特权。形势有利，三
巨头再开会，Major 支持压制黑人但不愿意流血冲突，他们准备整顿市政府，
清理黑人公务员和高级工作人员，包括律师 Watson，市长共和党人 Billings，
但 Major 反对对 Miller 动手。这时，Jerry 跑来说 Ellis 要找 Major 聊聊，又去
买酒，但钱不够多找零，于是自作聪明买 4 杯这样就有零的了。
XXX. THE MISSING PAPERS
Olivia 从阿姨那里得到的遗产少的可怜，因为葬礼、逮捕等一系列事情，她直
到周末才有时间检查那个信封，可听到宝宝哭声后又忧郁了。午饭时问丈夫
Polly 说的其父一半财产归那个 Janet 是不是胡话，答曰当然是，即使是真的，
也不会合法的。于是一会后，她拆开了信封看，发现父亲确实分了大部分财产
给 Janet，随后将遗嘱付之一炬。很快又发现了另一张结婚证明，是其父和
Julia 的结婚证明！那他的遗嘱就是合法的了，震惊中，Olivia 无意识地把这个
证明也烧了。信封上的收信人是 John Delamere，如今他已死，所以她就拆看
信。Samuel Merkell 一直担心二次守寡的 Olivia 会嫁给自己，同时告诉老
Delamere 自己懦弱而不敢公开，其实 Janet 是合法的并非私生女。尽管把所有
资料都销毁了，Olivia 仍然忐忑。晚饭时问丈夫，假如其父和那个黑人女仆结
了婚那么现在的 Janet 地位如何，答曰被认可还得分财产。于是 Olivia 陷入苦
恼，作为有良心的人她应该分财产，可如今资料都被销毁，但保持缄默让她身
心受煎熬。
XXXI. THE SHADOW OF A DREAM
Mr. Carteret 作噩梦，海面上她和孩子坐船遇大风暴，Janet 划过，他们沉船。
醒来思考困惑，虽然 Janet 没能得到父亲遗嘱中的遗产，但她已经蛮幸福的
了，但思来想去为了良心好受，决定以后向 Miller 的医院捐款这样就变相实现
了父亲的遗嘱，但不能让人知道父亲和 Julia 的婚姻是合法的。早上 Major 离
开时要求家里人中午以后千万别到街上，说可能会有政治示威游行，有些担心
的 Olivia 打发看宝宝的保姆去找 Mammy Jane，可她去乡下了。
XXXII. THE STORM BREAKS
下午三点白人纷纷出动，路上黑人都被搜身要求回家，如若反抗就被殴，导致
几个月后不少黑人儿童看到白人就恐惧。Miller 中午到乡下出诊，回来遇到一
群黑人逃亡，一人劝他别回去快躲起来，但担心妻子孩子，他赶了回去，城郊
遇到 Watson。得知，白人解除了黑人武装，强迫市政人员辞职，成立了临时
政府要求一批黑人名流 48 小时内离城，期间黑人已经死伤。到城外为安全
Watson 离开回家，这时 Josh 纠集了一伙人找到他们想让他们当头领带黑人们
反抗，Watson 劝他们不要冲动，拒绝了。Miller 则陈述利弊，说即使现在胜
了，全国的白人也会来屠杀黑人，应当防卫而非攻击，Josh 不怪罪他们执意要
捍卫尊严。Miller 提醒他得为自己年迈的母亲着想却被告知早上已死，Josh 请
Miller 为母亲安排好葬礼，得到同意后，他领着人去棉花磨房招更多人准备反
击，口号“I’d rather be a dead nigger any day than a live dog!”
XXXIII. INTO THE LION’S JAWS
Miller 赶回家，因为坐在马车里没被截留，被躲在地橱里的 Sandy 告知 2 点时
妻子孩子去拜访 Mrs. Butler 了。立即往市中心去找，路上看到死尸，后被拦截
下车，为首的是一个平时卖医疗器材的职员，在此非常时刻，Miller 也忘记了
审慎而有些不耐烦，被搜身后赶快上路。下一路口又被检查，这次是一个自己
的邻居他表示抱歉但无奈今天的局势，随后不断被检查，路障，绕道等等，后
来遇到了 Ellis。善良而为自己同胞愧疚的 Ellis 主动陪 Miller 去 Mrs. Butler 家
以防 Miller 再被劫，快到时分手，Miller 蛮以为妻子孩子肯定老实地呆在那却
发现房子一片死寂。
XXXIV. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW
呼唤出 Mrs. Butler 却被告知骚乱开始后因担心自己的安危，Janet 带着孩子出
去找自己了。夜幕来临，为了方便找，Miller 步行遇到 Josh 他们说白人准备烧
毁黑人的房产和设施，劝说无效分手。随后看到奄奄一息的 Aunt Jane
Letlow，她口中却还念叨着去见女主人，Miller 一下紧张起来，白人已经对妇
女儿童下手了！
XXXV. “MINE ENEMY, O MINE ENEMY!”
到晚七点时，三巨头策划的示威已经演变为了暴动，白人三三两两一起见到黑
人就杀。Josh 带着武装的哥们往医院走去保护教堂和学校，白人则开始散布黑
人要开始反击屠杀白人的谣言，也集结前往。Josh 叫大家躲进医院防守等事态
平息。躲了一天的 Jerry 见事态愈发严重，非常害怕，绝望地出来想找 Major
保护他，被 Josh 撞见了，不论如何哭诉被强行带进医院。他们筑好工事，不
耐烦的 Josh 命令 Jerry 闭嘴。对峙开始，McBane 喊话要求黑人解除武装否则
格杀，Josh 回复除非白人也放下武器，谈甭了，白人中首先有人开枪，战斗开
始。其实不少白人领导人已经试图缓和局势，但人们的情绪以被点燃，而
McBane 是唯一一个坚持到现在，欢喜事态恶化的领导者。Major 和 Ellis 赶来
试图叫大家停火，只是徒劳反被认为是鼓励和刺激。白人开始放火烧医院，黑
人处于劣势，Jerry 手持白帕冲出请准备离开的 Major 救他，却被射杀。Major
更本没听到他的呼唤，和 Ellis 离开，自我安慰目前状况非自己所愿，而黑人
自也有责任。火势渐大，Josh 率众破门做最后一搏，黑人伤亡惨重，气势如虹
的 Josh 吓退白人喽罗，中数枪仍将尖刀刺入 McBane 心脏，含笑满意而死。白
人散去，医院毁灭。
XXXVI. FIAT JUSTITIA
Major 和 Ellis 回家发现大门紧闭，好久 Clara 才开门，说黑人仆从差不多都逃
走了，因为 Jane 没来，Mrs. Albright 派她的护士来帮助看护哮喘的小 Dodie。
Clara 主动寻求 Ellis 的安慰，Major 上楼询问情况，Olivia 说 Dr. Price 出诊了，
电话找不到 Dr. Ashe 而暴动开始后，药店就关门了。护士说孩子很危险叫
Major 试着去找找 Dr. Hooper 顺便带些冰块来，于是他立即下楼叫 Ellis 先回报
社把报纸弄好，留一个版面给他，但若 12 点前没到就先出报纸。忽略周围的
一切狂奔到 Dr. Ashe 家，被其妻告知出诊看受骚乱惊吓的 Mrs. Wells 了，推荐
去找 Dr. Yates，结果他的助理 Dr. Evans 说老师下午因马受骚乱惊吓摔断了胳
膊。暴动逐渐平息，反抗的黑人都死了，那些躲起来的小心翼翼地探出头看事
态，一见白人又都躲起来了。Dr. Evans 跟着 Major 回去路上经过 Dr. Thompson
家，得知他也出诊看一个枪伤病人了。回家时，孩子已经危急了，而 Dr.
Evans 能力不济，推荐 Dr. Miller，在此危急时刻，Major 同意了，Dr. Evans 去
找 Miller。然而回来告知 Miller 因上次的拒绝要求必须 Major 亲自去请他，
Major 欣然同意飞奔出去。Major 恳求 Miller 救他的孩子，结果被嘲讽斥责，
看到另一个房间里，Janet 在死去的儿子前哀号。Miller 拒绝了，说他不能此时
留妻子一人在危险中，Major 充分理解 Miller 也知道这是罪有应得，鞠躬后转
身回家期盼奇迹。孩子愈糟，Miller 向他们解释了情况，Evans 表示了解，但
被悲痛控制的 Olivia 疯狂地冲出了家门，她脑子里只有两件事：孩子将死，
Miller 能救他！
XXXVII. THE SISTERS
拼命敲门，苦苦哀求，Miller 不为所动，斥责白人的罪行这是报应！绝望的
Olivia 跪下了，请求上帝，诅咒 Miller 没良心，但又哀求，Miller 有点小感
动，但想到这个女人曾清高地无视自己的妻子——她的亲妹妹的存在，想到妻
子多年来的痛苦，Miller 叫她去恳求 Janet，而他将听从妻子的决定。Janet 发
泄了一通斥责 Olivia，对方只是苦苦哀求，两人痛哭，这时 Olivia 叫了声妹子
说她得救自己的亲人呀，被反驳 25 年来才第一次承认妹妹的存在。Olivia 于是
告诉她的合法身份，被误解为多年的掩藏和抢劫如今做交换，辩护说也才知道
不久，现在是为了父亲的遗愿，想归还她应得的一半财产。多年想得到的认可
终于可以被承认了，然而代价却是儿子的生命，失去的一切却在已经有了幸福
生活的时候来临，Janet 百感交集，她再次斥责了 Olivia，当 Olivia 也深切理解
这是公平的要放弃时，Janet 却拒绝了父亲的遗产、名号、荣耀，最终让 Miller
随其回去救孩子。
EXPLANATORY NOTES
[1：21]Appomattox: Appomattox County Court House, in south-central Virginia,
was the Civil War site of the surrender of the Confederate forces, led by General
Robert E. Lee, to Union forces, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, on April 9, 1865.
[4 ： 17]Polly Ochiltree: Although the figures appear to have little in common,
Chesnutt borrowed the name Ochiltree from that of his own stepmother (and young
cousin), Mary Ochiltree, who married Chesnutt’s widowed father, Andrew Jackson
Chesnutt, in 1871.
[10:34]conjure woman: The conjure woman or conjure man was a figure in AfricanAmerican communities, during slavery and after, said to be able to heal illness,
influence the course of events, and place curses or counteract them through various
kinds of magic, often homeopathic in nature. Deriving to some degree from African
practice, conjure’s psychological and spiritual dimensions are as important as its
physical effects. Chesnutt wrote a number of short stories that featured the actions of
conjurers, the best known being those tales collected in The Conjure Woman (1899).
In an essay devoted in part to conjure, “Superstitions and Folklore of the South”
(1901). Chesnutt appeared to take a skeptical attitude, as his essay’s title suggests.
Especially in light of his stories, however, it seems evident that he was far from
dismissive of conjure or, at the least, that he recognized it as an African-American
folk belief of particular cultural importance.
[12:16]King Charles the Martyr: Charles I (1600-1649) was king of Great Britain
from 1625 to 1649, when he was executed for treason by a rebel army led by Oliver
Cromwell.
[16:17]manly: Throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt examines the
concepts of masculine heroism and manliness, in many cases seeming to pun on the
name of Alexander Manley.
[23:19]widow’s cruse: After the prophet Elijah is aided by a widow, her meat barrel
and oil cruse are thereafter miraculously kept full.
[23:21]Fortunatus’s purse: Fortunatus is the hero of a medieval legend who is given
an inexhaustible purse by the goddess of Fortune. The gift brings about the ruin of
Fortunatus and his sons, leading to the moral that worldly goods do not guarantee
happiness.
[29:15]Quaker: Known generally for a commitment to pacifism and social justice,
Quakers were particularly active in antislavery activities before the Civil War.
[30:21]Fusion: The Fusion party was composed of Republicans, many of them black,
and dissident Populists. In the elections of 1894 and 1896, Democrats throughout the
state, as well as in Wilmington, lost their positions to Republicans and Fusion party
candidates, some of whom were African American or who appointed African
Americans to various civil service positions. There were eleven black legislators in
the North Carolina general assembly in 1897, for example, the largest number since
the previous decade—this at a time when black political participation was being
suppressed throughout the South. The 1898 coup engineered by white Democrats
through a campaign of intimidation and violence restored them to power in both city
and state offices. “Fusion” also had colloquial usage as a term for miscegenation, and
Chesnuutt plays on its several connotations. (See the Introduction for more details.)
[38:29]John C. Calhoun: Calhoun (1782-1850) served as a congressional
representative form South Carolina before being elected vice president in 1824
(under John Quincy Adams) and again in 1828 (under Andrew Jackson). After
breaking with Jackson over the doctrine of nullification, Calhoun resigned to enter
the Senate, where he was a strong advocate of states’ rights and a defender of slavery,
views he elaborated on in a number of essays collected posthumously in books such
as Disquisition on Government (1851).
[39:22]Ham: When God destroys the world in a great flood on account of its
wickedness, Noah’s family, including his son Ham, is saved in an ark. After he is
cursed for looking upon his father’s nakedness, Ham and his descendants, the
Canaanites, are condemned to be the slaves of his brothers’ children (Genesis 9:2225). Arguments for slavery often appealed to the story as a justification for the
enslavement of African Americans. In a bizarre racist variation on the theme, the
mixed-race author Charles Carroll maintained in The Tempter of Eve (1902) that Eve
was seduced by an apelike Negro, rather than a serpent, and that God’s punishment
was a response to this original sin of miscegenation. According to Carroll’s argument,
a pair of Negroes boarded the ark along with the pairs of animals, and miscegenation
began all over again after the flood.
[49:16]“visible admixture” of African blood: A “visible admixture” of blackness was
among the legal definitions for being African American in some states at the turn of
the century. Whereas social custom sometimes defined as black anyone with “one
drop” of Negro blood—a custom Chesnutt explored in The House Behind the
Cedars—legal statutes usually appealed to fractions of African blood (typically at
least one-eighth part), though they also looked at times to overtly social and cultural
definitions, as in the “reputation” of being white. In the North Carolina case of
Ferrall v. Ferrall (1910), for instance, a white man attempting to evade a property
settlement with his former wife because she was “negro within the prohibited
degree” was denied buy the court; finding that the wife was “white” according to the
marriage contract, the court would therefore not permit him to deny her her property
rights or “to bastardize his own children. “ The question of legal inheritance that
arises between the Carteret and Miller families in The Marrow of Tradition (not
unlike that in Chesnutt’s own family history) involves similar issues. (On Ferrall and
other miscegenation cases, see Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” in
Raritan 8 [Fall 1988], 39-69.)
[49:29-30]any sign of that degeneration: Some purportedly scientific and
sociological theories, popular from the antebellum period until well into the
twentieth century, held that “mulattoes,” or mixed-race people, were an inferior
species and were likely over time to demonstrate traits of biological “degeneration.”
(Some arguments suggested the reverse: namely, that miscegenation was the only
way to save from eventual extinction blacks, who would revert to savagery without
the support of slavery.) In White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (1868), for
example, J. H. Van Evrie argued that mulattoes, like mules (the etymology is the
same), had a tendency toward disease, physical disorganization, and sterility. Nearly
a century later, Theodore Bilbo, senator and governor of Mississippi, was still
arguing in Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (1947) that “once the
[white] blood is corrupted, there is no power on earth, neither armed might, nor
wealth, nor science, nor religion itself, that can restore its purity,” leaving posterity
to sink “into the mire of mongrelism.”
[54:4]separate-cat law: State and local segregation laws were declared constitutional
by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that capped
a series of Court decisions dismantling black civil rights that had been gained in the
aftermath of the Civil War. The Plessy case, which challenged the segregated traincar law of Louisiana, was more than a little ironic in that it involved a man, Homer
Plessy, who was light-skinned enough to pass for white but who identified himself as
African American. The Court’s decision in Plessy authorized all manner of
segregation so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for blacks.
Chesnutt shows, as did the history of segregation until the constitutional ruling was
reversed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), that such facilities, when they even
existed, were seldom “equal” and in any case were always stigmatized.
[62:4]The negro was here before” A number of significant historical and sociological
works on Africa and African Americans written by blacks in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries refuted the standard white view that Africans had not
contributed to the progress of civilization and had even preceded Europeans in some
inventions and practices. Among the more important works of Chesnutt’s day were
George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race in America (1883);
William T. Alexander, History of the Colored Race in America (1887); C. T. Walker,
Appeal to Caesar (1909); William Ferris, The African Abroad (1911); and W. E. B.
Du Bois, The Negro (1915). These works provided their audience with a strong
counterargument to the more insidious racist assumptions of evolutionary theory; a
source of communal pride at a moment when African-American rights were under
the greatest assault since slavery; and a reservoir of ideas from which to draw new
conceptualizations of race consciousness.
[62:12] “Blessed are the meek”: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth” (Matthew 5:5).
[69:22]aut Caesar, aut nullus: either Caesar, or no one. The sense is of choosing
between extremes—in this instance, for example, between complete leadership or no
rule at all.
[74:2]Pontius Pilate: The Roman governor of Judea, Pilate followed the will of the
people, despite his own conscience, in condemning Jesus Christ to be crucified.
“When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made,
he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of
the blood of this just person: see ye to it” (Matthew 27:19-25)
[79:7]Sambo and Dinah: Chesnutt here chooses generic stereotypical names for
black men and women as they were often depicted in minstrelsy and in derogatory
political commentary.
[79:13-14]fifteenth amendment: The fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution,
passed in 1869, reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or
previous servitude.”
[85:1-2]an editorial article: Attributed later in the novel to a character named Barber,
the editor of the Afro-American Banner (p.89), the editorial is modeled on a similar
one written by Alexander Manly, the black editor of the Wilmington Record, a
relatively prosperous paper supported by much white advertising, in August of 1898
(see the Introduction). Chesnutt may have borrowed the name Barber from that of
journalist J. Max Barber, an outspoken opponent of Booker T. Washington, who was
to become an editor of the Voice of the Negro, published in Atlanta; like Manly,
coincidentally, he and his magazine would also be forced out of the city by the
Atlanta riot of 1906.
[96:19]cakewalk or “coon” impersonations: The cake walk, popular around the turn
of the century both on the early black musical stage and among many white dancers,
was characterized by highly stylized movements. By the mid-1890s Madison Square
Garden was holding national cakewalk championships for competing hometown
couples from around the country, and the craze reached its peak in the United States
(it also spread to Europe) in 1898 with the opening of Clorindy, the Origin of the
Cakewalk, a stage musical by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In its
African-American form, the cakewalk probably borrowed elements from African
dance, but it appears to have derived most immediately from antebellum slaves’
satiric imitation of the formal dancing of their masters. In stage minstrelsy and
postbellum plantation revues, the cakewalk, especially when performed by whites in
blackface (like Tom Delamere), tended toward burlesque. Likewise, “coon”
impersonations and “coon songs” often incorporated legitimate African-American
dramatic and musical performance, but they typically displayed grotesque racial
stereotypes treated as comedy by both black and white performers.
[110:34]Ku Klux: The Ku Klux Klan, a secret white political organization, originated
in Tennessee in 1866 and spread throughout the South after the Civil War, led in
some instances by former Confederate soldiers and officers. The Klan opposed the
Republican state governments established during Reconstruction and relied on terror
and violence to intimidate African Americans and whites who supported the new
governments. Although the first Klan was effectively disbanded by the early 1870s,
its political philosophy survived and was sometimes glorified in popular culture,
most notably in Thomas Dixon’s novels The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The
Clansman (1906), and D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which
coincided with a twentieth-century revival of the Klan. Directing its animosity
against blacks, Catholics, Jews, Communists, and foreign immigrants, the new Klan
boasted a national membership of 1.5 million people during the 1920s. Although it
has never again had such a following and public influence, the Klan has remained
active in various parts of the United States throughout the twentieth century.
[112:27-28]Mosaic law of revenge: The law of Moses, the ancient law of the
Hebrews, is found in the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. The specific
reference is to Scripture such as Exodus 21-23; Leviticus 24:13-23; and
Deuteronomy 19:21.
[114:33] “Vengeance is mine”: Romans 12:19; cf. Hebrews 10:30.
[127:33]Esau sold his birthright: The son of Isaac, Esau is cheated by his twin (but
younger) brother Jacob, who tricks him into exchanging his birthright as the eldest
son for food, a “mess of pottage.” (Jacob next tricks his father into blessing him,
rather than Esau, thus making him head of the family. The brothers are later
reconciled.) (Genesis 25:27-34)
[144:3]Hall Caine: Thomas Henry Hall Caine (Sir Hall Caine) (1853-1931), a
British novelist.
[179:23]American habit of lynching: The crime of lynching reached a peak in the
United States during the 1890s, when an average of 187 people were lynched each
year, most of them in the South and most of them African-American men. Often
charge with rape or some less horrendous offense to a white woman, no matter how
weak the evidence, such ostensible black criminals, as Chesnutt goes on to show,
were often caricatured in the press as “brutes” and “beasts.” Among others who
reacted to the racial lawlessness of the period, Ida B. Wells sparked a national
campaign against lynching with powerful 1892 editorials written for the Memphis
Free Speech and the New York Age, which were reprinted that same year as a
pamphlet titled Southern Horror: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.
[183:21]scalawags: White southerners who joined with northern Republicans during
Reconstruction were known as scalawags; their northern counterparts who came to
the South for political reasons or economic gain were known as carpetbaggers.
[196:18]famous pirate Blackbeard: Edward Teach (d. 1718) was a notorious pirate
who enjoyed the protection of the corrupt colonial governor of North Carolina, who,
it is said, regularly supplied him with information on outgoing merchantmen.
[218:23]Brutus: Lucius Junius Brutus was a consul and founder of the Roman
republic in 509 B.C., in opposition to the descendants of the last Roman king,
Tarquinius Superbus. When two of Brutus’s sons attempted to restore Tarquin rule,
he ordered their execution.
[233:7]the Mr. Hyde of the mob: In the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1866), by Robert Louis Stevenson, two characters of opposing personalities
turn out to be one man, Dr. Jekyll, who has learned through scientific experiment to
change his identity.
[238:11-12]conquest of an inferior nation: In the Spanish-American War of 1898,
the United States defeated Spanish forces in Cuba, which it occupied militarily until
1902, and the Philippines, which was administered by a colonial United States
government until it became an independent republic in 1946.
[238:25]a new Pharaoh: Derived from the Egyptian word for “Great House,”
pharaoh was a term of respect applied to various reigning kings of ancient Egypt. In
Exodus 6-15, Moses leads the Israelites out of Pharaoh’s bondage, a narrative that
provided a frequently cited analogy for the African-American delivery from
bondage—for example in the famous spiritual “Go Down, Moses”: “Go down,
Moses, way down in Egypt land, tell ole Pharaoh, to let my people go.” Chesnutt
refers particularly to the fact that, beginning with the conclusion of Reconstruction in
1877, northern politicians and courts sought to heal the wounds of war and conciliate
southern political and economic interests through a program of national reunion, in
the process sacrificing black civil rights and increasingly turning over control of the
“Negro problem” to southern states.
[240:14] “grandfather clause”: A ruse to insure that whites, even if they failed other
qualification requirements, could still vote, the grandfather clause allowed any man
to vote who had done so before 1867 or who was the son or grandson of someone
voting then. Because former slaves had been denied the vote at that time, the
grandfather clause excluded almost all contemporary African-American voters.
Although a large number of poor whites also lost the vote, black men were clearly
the primary targets of the grandfather clause in all states. Mississippi and South
Carolina had already disfranchised African-American voters by amendments to their
state constitutions in 1890 and 1895, respectively, with new provisions that excluded
various convicted criminals, required a poll tax, and finally demanded that the
prospective voter read and interpret a section of the state constitution. Louisiana
would follow in 1898 and North Carolina in 1900, both of them making the
grandfather clause the key element in their amendments. Disfranchisement laws were
upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi in 1898, in
which the Court ruled that it had not been demonstrated that the implementation of
such state suffrage laws “was evil but only that evil was possible under them.” The
grandfather clause survived court review until the Supreme Court struck it down in
1915, but other restriction remained to limit or prohibit black voting until the passage
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
[243:29]Your black face is splotched: Jerry has been using some of the early skinbleaching and hair-straightening products that were advertised in many AfricanAmerican magazines and newspapers of the day. In new formulas and sometimes
more progressive formats, such products have continued to be marketed throughout
the twentieth century to blacks who wish to appear more “white” in appearance and
fashion.
[247:5] “The world of fools”: Although it probably comes from a nineteenth-century
magazine or an anthology of popular poetry, this verse may have been written by
Chesnutt himself.
[249:30-31]Paterno’s revolution drove out Igorroto’s government: Chesnutt appears
to have invented these names, which refer to no real persons or events. Conceivably,
he may have had in mind the coming to power of the liberal president José Santos
Zelaya as the result of a coup against the previous conservative regime in 1893.
Zelaya continued modernization of the country, but he ruled as a dictator until he
was forced from office in 1909 by a conservative rebellion supported by United
States military forces, which then occupied Nicaragua for more than a decade.
[261:25]Abraham to her Hagar: When his wife, Sarah, is unable to bear children,
Abraham takes as a second wife Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid. Once she has
conceived, she quarrels with Sarah and flees into the wilderness to give birth to
Ishmael. Sarah later gives birth to Isaac, who becomes Abraham’s favored son,
whereas Ishmael is “a wild man” whose “hand will be against every man” (Genesis
16-17).
[268: title]The Shadow of a Dream: In Hamlet (II, ii, 259-61), Guildenstern says to
Hamlet: “Which dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the
ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.” The Shadow of a Dream is also the title
of an 1890 novel by William Dean Howells devoted to parapsychological themes.
[274:1]riot: Analysts of the Wilmington violence have tended to think that “coup,”
“massacre,” “revolution,” and “rebellion” are more accurate terms than “riot.”
[278:23]the lowly Nazarene: Jesus Christ, of Nazareth.
[293: title]The Valley of the Shadow: “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they
comfort me” (Psalms 23:4).
[298: title] “Mine Enemy, O Mine Enemy!”: “And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou
found me, O mine enemy? And he answered, I have found thee: because thou hast
sold thyself to work evil in the sight of the Lord” (1 Kings 21:20). “Rejoice not
against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord
shall be a light unto me” (Micah 7:8).
[309:30]the fool dieth: “The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of
wisdom” (Proverbs 10:21). “And how dieth the wise man? as the fool” (Ecclesiastes
2:16).
[311: title] Fiat Justitia: Let justice be done. “On a petition to the king for his
warrant to bring a writ of error in parliament, he writes on the top of the petition,
‘Fiat justitia,’ and then the writ of error is made out” (Henry Campbell Black, et al.,
Black’s Law Dictionary, 5th ed. [St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1979], p. 561).
[320:30] as you have sown: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a
man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7).
[328:8] apples of Sodom, filled with dust and ashes: “And the Lord said, If I find in
Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I shall spare all the place for their sakes.
And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto
the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty
righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five?...” (Genesis 18:26-28). “For
their vine is the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are the
grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter: Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the
cruel venom of asps” (Deuteronomy 32:32-33).
美句
Miller was something of a philosopher. He had long ago had the conclusion forced
upon him that an educated man of his race, in order to live comfortably in the United
States, must be either a philosopher or a fool; and since he wished to be happy, and
was not exactly a fool, he had cultivated philosophy.
To die in defense of the right was heroic. To kill another for revenge was pitifully
human and weak: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord.
Long ago she had petrified into a character which nothing under heaven could
change, and which, if death is to take us as it finds us, and the future life to keep us
as it takes us, promised anything but eternal felicity to those with whom she might
associate after this life.
He had even wished that Clara might make some charge against him,--he would have
preferred that to her attitude of studied indifference, the only redeeming feature
about which was that it was studied, showing that she, at least, had him in mind. The
next best thing, he reasoned, to having a woman love you, is to have her dislike you
violently,--the main point is that you should be kept in mind, and made the subject of
strong emotions. He thought of the story of Hall Caine’s, where the woman, after
years of persecution at the hands of an unwelcome suitor, is on the point of yielding,
out of sheer irresistible admiration for the man’s strength and persistency, when the
lover, unaware of his victory and despairing of success, seizes her in his arms and,
springing into the sea, finds a watery grave for both.
The negroes of Wellington, with the exception of Josh Green and his party, had not
behaved bravely on this critical day in their history; but those who had fought were
dead, to the last man; those who had sought safety in flight or concealment were
alive to tell the tale.