Charles W. Chesnutt: Author wasn't afraid to show his true color
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Myron Pitts
Charles W. Chesnutt, Fayetteville’s famous author, is due to get his own stamp in January.
I have always liked Chesnutt, not only because his work opened my eyes to a whole world of black literature that had been shielded from me in high school. I also have deep respect for Charles Chesnutt for staying black when he could have easily passed for white.
To be frank, many in the black community could stand to show more pride in their heritage; its lack leads from everything to gangsta rap to the fatherless-ness epidemic.
Chesnutt grew to manhood in the 1860s and 1870s, when America’s color line stood as strong as the wrought iron shackles from the slave ships. One drop of black blood meant, and to some degree still means, a person was black. Or mulatto. But mainly, “not white.”
Many blacks who had fair skin like Chesnutt’s “passed,” figuring correctly the land of the free would be a little freer for them. Chesnutt in his journals wrote that he tried to pass once in his teens but decided as an adult to never do so again.
He received what little education he took here and became the second principal of what would become Fayetteville State University.
He grew tired of the limitations imposed upon his talent and moved to New York, then Cleveland, where he began his writing career in 1899. Passing became a common theme in his work. Within literary circles, he soon became a star, responsible for at least two classics, the short story collection, “The Conjure Woman” and the novel “House Behind the Cedars.”
Over time, he has gained a wider audience and is taught at many universities, including the University of North Carolina, where I discovered “The Conjure Woman” my sophomore year in an African-American literature class. I didn’t know until then that Fayetteville had produced a major writer.
“Conjure Woman,” “Cedars” and Chesnutt’s journals are all excellent, says Peter Valenti, an FSU English professor who is helping to organize a Jan. 23 celebration to mark the stamp’s release.
“When you realize he achieved this without any formal education to speak of — it’s just really amazing.”
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THREE REASONS YOU SHOULD KNOW WHO HE IS
Charles W. Chesnutt, who was raised and spent his early teaching career in Fayetteville, is widely considered the first major black novelist. His works in the early 1900s are taught at universities nationwide.
His family name is stamped on a couple of local buildings. The Charles W. Chesnutt Library at Fayetteville State University was christened in 1988. Anne Chesnutt Middle School is named for Chesnutt’s sister, who was an educator and county supervisor.
Chesnutt’s writing, particularly the novel “House Behind the Cedars” and a shortstory collection, “The Conjure Woman,” put Fayetteville on the literary map. Sort of. Chesnutt uses the name Patesville for our thinly disguised town.
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Intelligence, pride
Chesnutt looks pensive on the stamp, which is decorated in shades of brown. He is the 31st honoree in the postal service’s Black Heritage Series, which has featured everyone from poet Langston Hughes to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
California artist Kazuhiko Sano painted the portrait from a 1908 photograph, going for a look the postal service wanted to show “intelligence and dignity.”
I see pride and confidence, too.
I could never imagine Chesnutt uttering the nonsense said recently by basketball coach Isiah Thomas in open court. Thomas, found liable of sexually harassing a black female employee, said matter-of-factly that it was not as bad when a black man called a black woman the b-word as when a white man did it.
A local preacher I know has an expression for these kind of remarks: “Stinkin’ thinkin.”
Compare Thomas’ words to Chesnutt, who lived when racial injustice was naked and brutal. During the times of segregation and the Wilmington race riots, which Chesnutt wrote about, and born into fair skin that could have gotten him out of the drama — he still thought it was just fine to be black.
Late Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt reminds my late great-great octoroon grandfather(s) and all of them born in between North & South Carolina borders... Roosevelt D. Odom, Jr.
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I have read some of Charles Chestnutt's writings I like his works, he is one of my favorite writers. He was whiter than many whites and Hispanics of today. He was a mulatto because that is what he was raised. He was definitely white in phenotype. As for passing well he was white in phenotype and less black than many mulattoes. Booker T. Washington was bi racial and so was Fredrick Douglass but Charles was whiter than them in phenotype. Charles seen to be of the Octoroon class of mulattoes and therefore, was more of a white man. I think he said he was only 1/16 black. Charles Chestnutt wrote a lot about mulattoes during Jim Crow and their relationship to blacks and whites.
The Doll read below it is one of my favorite stories by chestnutt.
Posted: Mon 15 Oct 2007 23:09 Post subject: Difference between Mulatto Elite and blacks
Just because Mulatto Elite members like Chestnutt didn't publicly contest their consignment to the "Negro Race" doesn't mean that they liked it or didn't notice that they were difference from blacks in culture, looks and ancestry.
Dunbar is called an "all-black" school from the beginning, but is obvious that it was "Mulatto Elite" during its hayday.
Quote:
Rose-Colored Views of an All-Black School
By Brian Gilmore
Sunday, September 2, 2007; B02
Washington Post
Last week, students from Washington's Paul Laurence Dunbar High School headed back to a school that hasn't changed in more than a century, at least in one way: Nearly all its students are black.
According to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, this can be a good thing. In June, when the court issued a ruling forbidding school districts to use race-specific plans to diversify schools, Thomas pointed to Dunbar as proof that African American students can excel in racially isolated environments. "In the period 1918-1923," he wrote, Dunbar was a "prominent example" of an "exemplary black school."
I'm not sure which is more surprising: to find Thomas on the same page as black separatists -- a part of the black community he's usually at odds with -- or to see the lone black justice praising an elite club that probably wouldn't have had him as a member. For even in its glory days as a single-race school of high achievers, Dunbar wasn't free from discrimination. It was simply discrimination of a different kind.
The late Howard Shorter was one proud Dunbar graduate, and he loved to tell stories about the grand old days of black Washington, when folks drove big cars along U Street, dressed to the nines, called shots, made big deals -- all on their own turf.
"Integration ruined everything," he would often grumble to me when we worked together at a public interest law firm in the late 1990s.
But Shorter, like Thomas, was invoking the Dunbar High of yesteryear, the storied and celebrated high school my mother graduated from in the 1940s, the school that produced countless African American luminaries during the awful days of Jim Crow.
This was the near-mythical place depicted in the documentary "Duke Ellington's Washington," a school where blacks outscored their white counterparts on standardized tests. In 1900, when it was known as the M Street High School -- the name changed to Dunbar in 1916 -- African Americans from other parts of the East Coast moved to Washington so their children could attend the school. Ellington himself noted in his autobiography that "the proud Negroes of Washington" protested school integration plans because they didn't want white students to bring them down.
Dunbar graduates often went on to earn degrees from Ivy League colleges. Several made history. Charles R. Drew, who graduated in 1922, pioneered advances in the use of blood plasma. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. attended Dunbar in the 1890s and became the first black Army general; Sterling A. Brown, who graduated in 1918, went on to a career as a noted poet and English professor. Anna J. Cooper, a leading feminist scholar, was a principal of the high school, and the celebrated Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset taught there. The school also boasted a faculty full of teachers with doctorates.
When I told my mother about Thomas's mention of Dunbar in the June decision, she, too, recalled a place she called "ours" and a time when there was a sense of community everywhere, when your teachers walked to school beside you because they lived in the same segregated neighborhood where your school, your doctor and everything else was located. My mother also says it never dawned on her that black students would integrate with whites in their schools because they were receiving a great education at Dunbar, which "was all they knew."
But as the award-winning poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, who graduated from Dunbar in 1982, noted, even if there were opportunities for blacks at his alma mater, it didn't mean that everyone was welcome. "The halls were then and are still today full of photographs of graduating classes full of light-skinned blacks," he said.
The black elite of the period enforced a well-known color caste system, according to Audrey Elisa Kerr, author of "The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington DC."
Kerr quotes former Dunbar students as describing light-skinned blacks as "privileged." "The social experience of the 'fairest' of Dunbar students was marked by their ability to 'pass' [for white] in and around Washington D.C. after school," she writes.
That put black strivers who happened to have darker skin at a distinct disadvantage. Had he been around in those days, that category would have included Thomas.
This is especially ironic because, according to "Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas," Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher's recent biography of the justice, color divisions within the black community have tormented him for most of his life. Perceived slights by the light-skinned black elite in his home town helped drive his opposition to affirmative action, which he considers something of a spoils system for this group.
All the romantic reverie about the good old days comes to a crashing halt when you bring it back to Dunbar's current challenges. While the old Dunbar was an exception to the rule, today's school looks much more like the educational reality in the rest of black America. About 98 percent of its students are black. It has a well-regarded pre-engineering program, and last year, its students earned $1.5 million in college scholarships. But the school still faces tough obstacles. Slightly more than half its students come from low-income families. Just 29 percent scored as proficient or better in reading; in math, the figure was 27 percent. The last school year saw 27 violent incidents on the school grounds.
"Dunbar has everything," said Joseph Murray, who taught at the high school for 20 years before retiring in 2003. "High achievers, average students and some students who don't want to do anything." It also has its share of social problems outside its doors, including one he noticed a lot over the years: drugs.
This is the reality of education for black children in the 21st century: high levels of achievement, dubious statistics and social problems never faced before. And then there's the constant: segregation. In the end, the shame of it all is that the debate about black children and education is still a racial issue, more than 50 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
Thomas is correct: African American children can perform well in racially isolated environments. They have done so before Brown and after Brown. But what does the Dunbar example mean today, when highly qualified black faculty and black middle-class students have so many other options?
It is great for us to bask in the glory of the past. But Thomas and others in the black community who like to romanticize that past must take a long hard look at all of Dunbar's lengthy record -- not just the sunny parts. Only then can we ask ourselves whether policies that tolerate extreme segregation do black children any good.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 131 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Thu 25 Oct 2007 16:15 Post subject: Chesnutt had reasons to reject "passing"
Although he could have identified as white fairly easily, Chesnutt's fiction makes it clear that his sympathies were more on one side of the color line than the other. Not that he fails to grasp its arbitrary and irrational nature; OTOH I think he makes a point of it. Nonetheless, after seeing the horrors perpetrated by white North Carolinians around the turn of the century, he had an understandable distaste for white Southerners. (Despite the fact that some white Southerners were also targets of "Redeemer" terrorism if they did not fall in line with the new order.) Because he saw black Americans victimized by whites, he "sided" with the one sixteenth rather than the fifteen sixteenths (or whatever it was.) The Marrow of Tradition might be his best book to read for political content. Sympathy for oppressed people likewise probably has something to do with people identifying as Native American when their ancestry is largely European.
Chesnutt is lmost the opposite of Broyard, who chose "passing" as unmixed white due in part to *lack* of sympathy with black political struggles.
Dunbar is called an "all-black" school from the beginning, but is obvious that it was "Mulatto Elite" during its hayday.
There are some who contest this.
And Gilmore misinterprets Thomas' remarks. What Thomas is saying is integration with whites (or anyone else) isn't necessary for black children to receive a good education and he is correct, BTW. That doesn't mean that segregated schools are necessarily good either.
Posted: Thu 25 Oct 2007 21:05 Post subject: Re: Difference between Mulatto Elite and blacks
Powell wrote:
Just because Mulatto Elite members like Chestnutt didn't publicly contest their consignment to the "Negro Race" doesn't mean that they liked it or didn't notice that they were difference from blacks in culture, looks and ancestry.
Unless you have somehow uncovered evidence that Chestnett didn't like being assigned to "the Negro Race" or that he was different from blacks in culture and ancestry, I am going to assume this is your personal opinion and not one embraced by Chestnutt himself.
Posted: Fri 26 Oct 2007 02:49 Post subject: Re: Chesnutt had reasons to reject "passing"
kpauljohnson wrote:
Although he could have identified as white fairly easily, Chesnutt's fiction makes it clear that his sympathies were more on one side of the color line than the other. Not that he fails to grasp its arbitrary and irrational nature; OTOH I think he makes a point of it. Nonetheless, after seeing the horrors perpetrated by white North Carolinians around the turn of the century, he had an understandable distaste for white Southerners. (Despite the fact that some white Southerners were also targets of "Redeemer" terrorism if they did not fall in line with the new order.) Because he saw black Americans victimized by whites, he "sided" with the one sixteenth rather than the fifteen sixteenths (or whatever it was.) The Marrow of Tradition might be his best book to read for political content. Sympathy for oppressed people likewise probably has something to do with people identifying as Native American when their ancestry is largely European.
Chesnutt is lmost the opposite of Broyard, who chose "passing" as unmixed white due in part to *lack* of sympathy with black political struggles.
Oh, come on! People who are accused of "passing" just want to be themselves or stop living a lie. "Blackness" is the lie. As for this alleged "*lack* of sympathy with black political struggles," what the hell is that? Attempts are being made to smear Broyard as right-wing (sometimes called "conservative") because he did not accept the "one drop" lie. Nearly every writer for "Interracial Voice" has been called "racist" by some members of the "soul patrol."
Posted: Fri 26 Oct 2007 03:19 Post subject: Re: Difference between Mulatto Elite and blacks
anonymouse wrote:
Powell wrote:
Just because Mulatto Elite members like Chestnutt didn't publicly contest their consignment to the "Negro Race" doesn't mean that they liked it or didn't notice that they were difference from blacks in culture, looks and ancestry.
Unless you have somehow uncovered evidence that Chestnett didn't like being assigned to "the Negro Race" or that he was different from blacks in culture and ancestry, I am going to assume this is your personal opinion and not one embraced by Chestnutt himself.
A man who wrote as much as Chestnutt did about "white" members of the Mulatto Elite and their unhappiness in dealing with forced hypodescent was trying to tell us something, don't you think? It is also no acccident that these mixed-white characters were paragons of middle-class (white) virtue.
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