Charles W. Chestnutt's Marrow of Tradition

Charles W. Chestnutt's The Marrow of Tradition remains to this day a testament to the historical re-telling of the Wilmington Riots of 1898. Called "one of the best sociological studies of the Wilmington riot" by W.E.B DuBois (Dubois qtd in Edmonds 188), Chestnutt uses the formal features of the historical novel as a strategy for re-imagining the tensions between white and black during North Carolina's post-Reconstruction period. With multiple African-American voices, The Marrow of Tradition attempts to give back the voice that had been choked off during this tumultuous time.

Almost twenty years before the riots, however, Chestnutt records in his journal an urgency for representation of black consciousness in literature:

I intend to record my impressions of men and things, and such incidents or conversations which take place within my knowledge, with a view to future use in literary work. I shall not record stale Negro minstrel jokes, or worn out newspaper squibs on the "man and brother." I shall leave the realm of fiction, where most of this stuff is manufactured, and come down to hard facts. There are many things about the Colored people which are peculiar, to some extent, to them, and which are interesting to any thoughtful observer, and would be doubly interesting to people who know little about them. (Chestnutt 126)

Thus, adopting a complete bald representation for black consciousness (and not that of an oversimplified "ironic perception and social identification" as John M. Reilly argues [Reilly 32]), Chestnutt writes the novel in order to understand, to dig into the non-visible realities and socio-pathology of the events leading up to the massacre of November 10, 1898.

Chestnutt's initial visits to Wilmington three years after the riots gave him enough energy to come to terms with the recent history. That Wilmington was for the most part an African-American city; that its Fusionist leaders allowed for that majority to hold seats in office; that it was not an uncommon sight to see black police officers, firemen, lawyers, collectors, and independent businessmen (Edmonds 158); that its African-American voice could be heard in the Wilmington Record - the world's first African-American newspaper; that all of these advancements had been literally burned to the ground, Chestnutt felt impelled to recapture the history (Keller 189). These pieces of historical change have now seen the light of day (outside of the novel) thanks to the painstaking documentation of Helen Edmonds' The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina and June Nash's updated article "The Cost of Violence." The schism of the fact and fiction becomes severed: The reader now sees what Chestnutt had seen. Nash locates a Mr. Holbrook who, eighteen years old at the time, believed to be part of an African-American elite. "But this was citywide, and a Negro was a Negro, and then it didn't matter how nice you were or how bad you were. You were just a Negro" (Nash 168); Nash also speaks to the sister-in-law of Wilmington Record editor Alex Manly (whose article - refuting lynching on the claim that it was a tool for the protection of white womanhood, when it was white womanhood, Manly claims, who easily fell in love with the "big burly black brutes" [Edmonds 158] - this article was used as a tool by the white papers, The Wilmington Morning Star and The Messenger, who reprinted the article to solidify the impulses of the outnumbered white supremacy and to overthrow the Republican and Fusion Parties): "Now the thing that precipitated the riot were the ignorant group of poorer whites…. They precipitated it because they resented the jobs that the Negroes were holding down, and their businesses and their offices" (Nash 159). Edmonds identifies the white reporters who championed white supremacy in order to disenfranchise the black vote, called "Secret Nine" (Edmonds 156); and their eventual burning of the offices of Manly's Wilmington Record. Already the reader becomes witness to the history that underlies Chestnutt's rendering, and can draw parallels to the fictional and historic impulses within and without the novel.

The power of The Marrow of Tradition seems grounded in the reclaiming of the word. The actual burning of the Manly's Wilmington Record represented the removal of language and the reinforcement that the dominant race owned the power of language. In Chestnutt's account, that African-American voice is first manipulated before it is dismantled. In a "Big Three" meeting General Belmont states:

"That editorial in the negro newspaper is good campaign matter, but we should reserve it until it will be most effective. Suppose we just stick it in a pigeon-hole, and let the editor…have all the rope he wants…and he'll be sure to hang himself…. In the mean time we will continue to work up public opinion, - we can use this letter privately for that purpose… The Afro-American Banner will doubtless die about the same time." (89)

It is no small parallel the immediacy of Chestnutt's novel coincides with the burning of the Wilmington's Record. To take away the resources of the word is to remove the voice of an entire American race. This in turn reduces the voice to primitive, infantile gestures of diphthongs and the basest guttural pronunciations. In re-writing the history of the Wilmington massacre, Chestnutt not only re-draws this history at point-zero, but more importantly, reclaims the act of speaking and writing for African-Americans, as well.

Yet, Chestnutt receives criticism for this writing. In his assessment of African-American novelists, G. Lewis Chandler writes:

"Art must not subserve, as a primary aim, a practical purpose, a bone of contention, a thesis. This is the glaring fault in… Charles W. Chestnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. [The] novel…[is] plastered with propaganda, with the urge to protest and vindicate. …[The] author in true propaganda technique invariability load[s] the dice; and without artistic symmetry and restraint… tend[s] to oversimplify and slice thinly a complex situation, all to fit a preformed thesis." (Chandler 27)

However, Chestnutt's novel is driven by urgency, not the luxury of aesthetics (The Marrow of Tradition was published only three years after the Wilmington riots). Russell Ames writes: "His method was first to disarm his readers with conventional scenes and seeming stereotypes - for example, with idyllic relations between servants and aristocrats - and then in lightening flashes to reveal the underlying facts of injustice and rebellion" (Ames, 201). If there is a lack of what Nabokov calls the "shiver of artistic satisfaction" (Nabokov 382), then there is certainly an abundance of thunderous noise in those "lightning flash revelations." As General Belmont states, "This is an age of crowds" (81); indeed, this is a crowded, noisy masterpiece, chapters pushing here for a voicebox (Sandy's misfortune with the law, Josh Green's inarticulate vendetta towards his mother's killer, Janet's pain over her sister's dismissal) and on the other side, chapters pulling there to steal that voicebox away (the organization and meetings of the "Big Three," the refusal to admit Dr. Miller to the operation, Tom Delamere's manipulation of Sandy in Mrs. Ochiltree's murder). There is a lingering of Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks in Chestnutt's retrieval of the past: "To speak… means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (Fanon 17-18). And in the center of these voices is Dr. Miller. During the riots, Dr. Miller ponders the future of his and his race's representation:

So thoroughly diseased was public opinion in matters of race that the negro who died for the common rights of humanity might look for no need of admiration or glory. At such a time, in the white man's eyes, a negro's courage would be mere desperation; his love of liberty, a mere animal dislike of restraint. Every finer human instinct would be interpreted in terms of savagery. (296)

Indeed it was. Three days after the riot, with the by-line "Wilmington's New City Government Had Done Its Work Well," Raleigh's News and Observer reported:

"There was a frantic crowding toward town halls, a dethroning of those who misrule, a banishment of those who are obnoxious, and a destruction of places hated for their association…. Everything was done in Wilmington in due form and strictly in accordance with law. All those concerned in it were lovers of order and justice."

(News and Observer, quoted in Nash 162)

Chestnutt points out this tragedy of misrepresentation and distortion in the beginning of the riots. In the expository panorama of the riot, as it begins on "a day as fair as was ever selected for a deed of darkness" (274), Chestnutt writes the unwinnable dilemma of the African-American: "If [the negro] resisted any demand of those who halted him - But the records of the day are historical; they may be found in the newspapers of the following date, but they are more firmly engraved upon the hearts and memories of the people of Wellington." (274-275)

In "Keeping an Old Wound Alive: The Marrow of Tradition and the Legacy of Wilmington," Jae Roe writes of Chestnutt's difficulty in the historical and political complexities between retracing the past and coming to terms with the present; and, of course, the onus of responsibility in achieving the tightrope balance of verisimilitude. In examining the above quote, Roe states: "This observation serves not merely to emphasize historical record, but to place greater emphasis on the counter-memory that revises the official version of history." (Roe, 233). The quote also serves to remove the reader out of the context of the action of the novel: With a swift tense shift from the fantastic-storybook past to the written-in-steel present, Chestnutt maneuvers the reader into the actuality of the event, into the preservation of an unthinkable history.

Alessandro Manzoni's influential On the Historical Novel lays bare what has become for the Marrow of Tradition its complex terrain between author and audience, literary immortality and American history:

But suppose this writer were not to deal with his readers just as he deals with himself, were not simply to convey to them the pure unadorned knowledge that his painstaking research has earned him. Suppose instead he were to set it aside…. Suppose to make it more vital, he were to make it two different lives and take as a means what before was strictly an end? (Manzoli, 77)

Again, at the center of these "two different lives" remains Dr. Miller, who struggles with history and identity, action and reaction, sitting still and crouching low between black and white. After he's firmly implanted to the black section of the train in his return home, he ponders the advancements of his race - and the location of his own position:

"Those who grew above it must have their heads cut off… must be forced back to the level assigned to their race; those who fell beneath the standard set had their necks stretched, literally enough, as the ghastly record in the daily paper gave conclusive evidence. (61)

And when dealing with hard facts of history, the author's presumptions are removed at the exact moment of publication. Whatever historical or cultural impulses drove the author during the developmental period of the writing process, the author must submit to the power of critical difference in his or her achievement - particularly in matters as complicated as historical race relations in southern American. Just as vital to the reading of The Marrow of Tradition is Susan Mizruchi's modernized version of understanding the strength the historical novel possesses once it has left the author's ink and blood: "[Skepticism] frees us to listen to what literature itself has to tell us about the past, and about ways of recovering it" (Mizruchi 10). And, time and time again, at the center of this recovery are Dr. Miller and his impressions of the riot - sometimes in scene, sometimes in the future of the black consciousness:

Never will the picture of that ride fade from his memory. In his dreams he repeats it night after night, and sees the sights that wounded his eyes, and feels the thoughts - the haunting spirits of the thoughts - that tore his heart as he rode through hell to find those whom he was seeking. (286)

Strangely, what has unfairly been viewed as an aesthetic weakness of the novel for its slim rewriting of the riot - its unbalanced summary-and-scene presentation, its glaring opposition of personality between Dr. Miller and Josh Green (Elder, 185), its refusal "to stand either inside or outside the segregated space of African American authorship" (Knadler 429) - is in fact Chestnutt's careful handling and overall strategy towards understanding history. In the novel, the massacre receives far less attention than other episodes. Yet, the action of the riot is not the novel's chief concern: What Chestnutt is dealing with is the riot's build-up and unseen consequences. "For many months there were Negro families in the town whose children screamed with fear and ran to their mothers for protection at the mere sight of a white man" (275). Chestnutt is working for preservation of race - even in his most ambivalent modes. And those ambivalent modes can be seen in the whitewashed African American characters: "[Sandy] had inherited the feudal deference for his superiors in position, joined to a certain self-respect which saved him from sycophancy" (130). Yet, the reader sees him ignoring the coachman which carries Mrs. Ochiltree and Mrs. Carteret, thus reinforcing an essentialist superiority over his own race: "It would not have been becoming in him, either, while conversing with white ladies, to have noticed a colored servant" (131). In Mammy Jane, the reader glimpses the same visceral brainwashing and codified positioning:

"Well, Jane," returned the major sadly… "the old times have vanished, the old ties have been ruptured. The old relations of dependence and loyal obedience on the part of the colored people, the responsibility of protection and kindness upon that of the whites, have passed away forever…."

"Dat's w'at I tells dese young niggers…w'en I hears 'em gwine wid deir foolishness; but dey don' min' me. Dey 'lows dey knows mo' d'n I does, 'ca'se dey be'n l'arnt ter look in a book. But, pshuh! My ole mist'ess showed me mo' d'n dem nigggers 'll l'arn in a thousand' years!..."

"If all the colored people were like you and Jerry, Jane," rejoined the major kindly, "there would never be any trouble. You have friends upon whom, in time of need, you can rely implicitly for protection and succor." (43-44)

Yet each of these "friends" stands the test of these ill-sided friendships during the riot: dead and bloodied, carcassed and faceless (although Sandy makes no appearance in the riots, one could argue that once his slaveholding master Mr. Delamere dies, so too does the whitewashed Sandy, who is virtually written off in the novel once his trial ends, wearing the death-rag hand-me-downs of Delamere and imported to the Carterets, where he is never seen again). Another echo of Fanon can be heard in these conversations and their brutal aftermath: "For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man" (Fanon 110). In other words, their service is a subjugated service, and that Sandy, Jerry, and Mammy Jane openly admit to their dominated status only reinforces the genocidal goal of "The Big Three."

In fact, while some of the harsher critics may chide at Chestnutt's indulgence into the love-troika between Clara-Ellis-Tom (Robert Bone contends that "an element of melodrama pervades the whole novel" [Bone 38] and Stephen Knadler criticizes Chestnutt's "attempts to trespass back and forth the color line" [Knadler 429]), the core of their episodes underscores the social disorganization and psycho-sexual confusion of the white race.

"For every historical force or historical necessity represented in drama is abstract in an artistic sense," Georg Lukács writes in The Historical Novel, "if it is not adequately and obviously embodied in concrete human beings and concrete human destinies" (Lukács 109). This destiny and human complexity is revealed at the novel's denouement, where the roles of master and subject are reversed. In their time of despair, both Mr. and Mrs. Carteret beg entrance to the Miller's house to save their son from the croup, thus switching the modes of power. With this begging at the door, Chestnutt gives the African-American great power: The power to deny, the power to restrict. Janet proclaims:

Now, when this tardy recognition comes, for which I have waited so long, it is tainted with fraud and crime and blood, and I must pay for it with my child's life… I throw you back your father's name, your father's wealth, your sisterly recognition. I want none of them, - they are bought too dear! … But that you may know that a woman may be foully wronged, and yet may have a heart to feel… you may have your child's life, if my husband can save it. (328-329)

However, Chestnutt denies this oversimplification of switched power roles, and instead of vengeance, opts instead for humanity; instead of acceptance of family bonds, opts for the equality of separation; instead of close-ended snipping, opts for the limited time-to-spare surgery between white and black.

Works Cited

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(2nd Qtr 1953): 199-206.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

Chandler, G. Lewis. "Coming of Age: A Note on American Negro Novelists." Phylon

IX, 1 (1st Qtr 1948): 25-29.

Chestnutt, Charles W. The Journals of Charles W. Chestnutt. Ed. Richard Brodhead.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

Chestnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Edmonds, Helen G. The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina: 1894-1901.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951.

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1982.

Keller, Frances R. An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chestnutt.

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Knadler, Stephen P. "Ultratragic Mulatto: Charles Chestnutt and the Discourse of

Whiteness." American Literary History VII, 3 (Autumn 1996).

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Manzoni, Allessandro. On The Historical Novel. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press,

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Nash, June. "The Cost of Violence." Journal of Black Studies IV, 2

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of Wilmington." African American Review XXXIII, 2 (Summer 1999): 231-243.