Charles ChesnuttThe House Behind the Cedars

Biography• Born in Cleveland in 1858 to “free persons of

color” parents• After the Civil War, Chesnutt’s family returned

to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he grew up.

• Attended a school funded by the Freedman's Bureau

• Worked as a teacher and eventually as a school principal in Charlotte and in Fayetteville.

• Despite his personal success, Chesnutt resented the racial oppression of the South.

• 1878 Married Susan Perry. Believing a more hospitable environment existed in the North, he moved his family to Cleveland in 1884. Passed the bar exam, created a successful legal stenography business.

Publishing Success• Began publishing short stories in

1885. • "Dave's Neckliss" was among the

first stories written in black dialect by a black author, using the language to convey not only authenticity but also moral complexity.

• “Conjure Tales” about antebellum South were his most successful type of story. His were subtly more complex than the Uncle Remus style stories that were popular after the Civil War.

Publishing Woes• Little publishing success with novels about

racial and social identity in contemporary South: • The House Behind the Cedars (1900)• The Marrow of Tradition (1901) based on the

Wilmington Massacre of 1898, when whites took over the city and threw out the elected biracial government.

• Stopped writing fiction in the early twentieth century, devoting his energies to business and to organizations dedicated to improving the lot of African-Americans.

• In 1928, the NAACP awarded Chesnutt its Spingarn Medal for his life's work.

• Died in 1932.

Reconstruction and Aftermath• After the Civil War, Northern army

occupied the South and attempted to establish black civil rights• Army intervention in the South

ended with Compromise of 1877• Whites in the South tried to

reestablish supremacy in social, economic and legal spheres. • Widespread disenfranchisement of

freedmen, intimidation by KKK• Jim Crow laws imposing legal racial

segregation, reinforcing the system of white supremacy and second-class citizenship for blacks

Living the Color Line• Chesnutt's work dealt primarily with the

South, and especially with themes of interracial sex and the phenomenon of people legally defined as "black" whose relatively light skin color enabled them to "pass" as "white.”

• His novels are often called “novels of the color line”

• Chesnutt’s Ancestry: Parents were free blacks from North Carolina. Paternal grandfather was a white slaveowner, probable other white relatives.• He claimed to be seven-eighths white, and

identified as African American. Chesnutt could "pass" with relative ease for a white man, although he never chose to do so.

Socio-Legal Racial Definition• In the 19th century and in many

southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt was considered legally white. In South Carolina, for instance, one’s racial classification was based on social reputation (if people thought you were white, you were white).

• Under the “one drop rule” that became adopted in the 1920s in most of the South after the Civil War, one was classified as legally black because of having some known African descent (the metaphorical “drop of black blood.”

Race vs Class vs Gender• Not as simple as “black and white”• CLASS: distance and competition

between families who had long been free people of color, especially if they were educated and property-owning, and the masses of illiterate freedmen making their way from slavery.

• GENDER: Beginning of the Twentieth Century marks an incomplete transition from the “Cult of Domesticity” to the era of the “New Woman.”

• OTHER RACES: Molly and her children are part Indian. Narrator notes that in New Orleans, she and her children would be “creoles” or “quad/octoroons”, a caste between “blacks” and “whites”