Charles Waddell Chesnutt,
(1858-1932)
Chesnutt was a pioneering African American writer, known especially for short stories that realistically depict the full range of black experience. His writing focused especially upon the experiences of blacks of mixed racial ancestry.
Chesnutt’s family heritage gave him the features that barely distinguished him from whites, but determined his social status as lower than that of white Americans.
“I occupy here a position similar to that of Mahomet’s Coffin. I am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl-neither “nigger,” white, nor “buckrah.” Too “stuck-up” for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites.”
Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and mother Ann Maria (Sampson) Chesnutt were both free blacks who had immigrated to Ohio but moved back south to Fayetteville, North Carolina, shortly after his birth. Chesnutt had a reputation for being largely self-taught, he also attended a school founded by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency created to aid the former slaves after the Civil War (1861-1865). After working as a schoolteacher and then as a principal in Southern schools during his late teens and early 20s, Chesnutt decided he was too stifled by Southern racism and returned North to expand his opportunities.
In 1884 he settled in Cleveland and studied law, ultimately passing the bar exam and beginning a career as a legal stenographer. In 1887 his first major story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” was published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly and ” was praised by both black and white reviewers and brought the author national attention.
Chesnutt continued to publish stories, and in the late 1890s his works were collected in two volumes by Houghton Mifflin, the eminent Boston, Massachusetts, publisher. The Conjure Woman appeared in March 1899, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Chesnutt’s tales attack white prejudice and racism in their varied forms. But they also explore the “color line” drawn not only between whites and blacks, but also within the black community. His stories include serious considerations of skin color prejudice and the impulse of African Americans to “pass” as white that are unusual in the literature of the time.
Chesnutt began writing full-time, a biography of Frederick Douglass (1899) and he published three novels, In The House Behind the Cedars (1900) The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). His novels found a wider readership than any previous African American novels but nevertheless did not sell well enough to allow him to continue as a full-time writer.
In 1906, Chesnutt wrote a play in four acts, “Mrs. Darcy’s Daughter,” but again failed to find a producer to make it a financial success. At this moment, he set his literary carrier aside and got absorbed in social and political activities, devoting his time to preparing speeches and writing articles in defense of his race. Together with prominent black activists, such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Chesnutt advocated the reform of the racial conditions in the South and better treatment of black population of that region. In 1908 he addressed the annual conference of the Niagara Movement. In 1910 Chesnutt became a founding member of the NAACP.
Chesnutt was forced by the poor sales of his novels to resume his full-time career as a stenographer after the publication of The Colonel’s Dream. But his black audience did not forget his influence on African American literature. In 1928 the NAACP gave him the Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, for his “pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggles of Americans of Negro descent.” Chesnutt’s work remains in print, and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature calls him “the first writer to make the broad range of African American experience his artistic province and to consider practically every issue and problem endemic to the American color line worthy of literary attention.”
In the 1990s three novels of Chesnutt’s that had gone unpublished during his lifetime were released:
⦁ Mandy Oxendine (1994)
⦁ Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (1998), a novel of New Orleans in the early 19th century
⦁ The Quarry (1999) which brings his familiar concerns with mixed-race identification into the early-20th-century world of the Harlem Renaissance (Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois)
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Reference Library 2005