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 relativeslived 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-knownAfrican-American 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 thecity 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 economicand 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 morevirulent 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 onnumerous 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 AFool’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 theother 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 mid-1880s, but his first significant publication was “The Goophered Grapevine,” which appeared inthe 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 double-layered 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 froman 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 African-American newspaper editor named Alexander Manly.