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The ‘First Negro Novelist’ Saw the South Clearly
A new biography of Charles W. Chesnutt, by Tess Chakkalakal, explains the friendships and tensions he had with his white literary contemporaries.
A MATTER OF COMPLEXION: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt, by Tess Chakkalakal
On Nov. 10, 1898, thousands of armed white supremacists stormed the streets of Wilmington, N.C., terrorizing Black businesses and residents and overthrowing the port city’s biracial, “Fusionist” government. The state’s most populous and Blackest city had long been a symbol of Black political power and economic possibility in the post-Reconstruction South, with its Black-owned banks, democratically elected Black aldermen and nationally respected Black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record.
The orgy of violence left businesses burned and as many as hundreds of Black men dead, and led thousands more to flee their homes for good.
After posing for photographs before the Daily Record building’s charred remains, the mob — led by the former North Carolina congressman Alfred Moore Waddell — made their way to city hall, where they forced the Republican government to resign. As white newspapers insisted that the violence had been instigated by Wilmington’s Black people and not the paramilitary mob, Waddell and his supporters successfully recast the Wilmington Massacre into a “Lost Cause” narrative of rabid “Negro rule” and virtuous white redemption. According to Waddell, who served as mayor of Wilmington for the next eight years, the only successful political coup in American history was actually a “perfectly legal” transfer of power by a Fusionist government that had “become satisfied of their inefficiency and utterly helpless imbecility.”
Three years after the Wilmington Massacre, in 1901, the North Carolina-born writer Charles W. Chesnutt challenged Waddell’s narrative with the publication of his second novel, “The Marrow of Tradition”: a gripping tale of family secrets, white resentment and Black ambition in the face of post-bellum racial reaction. Though Chesnutt’s masterpiece would later be called “probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day,” by the contemporary scholar Eric J. Sundquist, the book failed to make the commercial splash that its literary complexity deserved. At the height of literary realism, Chesnutt’s work was often overshadowed by contemporaries like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Albion W. Tourgée, white authors who wrote about the so-called “Negro problem” without accounting for the impact of white racial violence. Amid today’s movement against D.E.I. and Black studies, Tess Chakkalakal’s “A Matter of Complexion” makes an urgent case for the importance of Black artistry during racially reactive and violent times.
In the first biography of Chesnutt in a generation, the professor of African American and American literature at Bowdoin College provides a sophisticated analysis of Chesnutt’s short stories — his dialect-heavy “The Goophered Grapevine” was the first work of fiction by a Black writer to be published in The Atlantic, in 1887 — essays, letters and novels, while contextualizing their creation within Chesnutt’s life as a husband, father and sometimes court stenographer. Chakkalakal asks the reader to see the “First Negro Novelist” as he saw himself: a writer and student of American letters at a time when the literary marketplace struggled to take him seriously.
