On "His Virginia Mammy" by Charles W. Chesnutt (6821 words) ***

In this tale from Reconstruction days, a white man falls in love with a pretty woman who doesn't know her ancestry. Like Moses, she's been pulled from a river and raised by adopted parents, these, Germans with a particular status that, though lost, doesn't make the white man fret. In fact, nothing does--or would--he's so in love with the gal. But the girl is concerned that her real parentage might not come from decent stalk, and so she refuses to marry, until one day she meets an old black woman who is able to tell her all about her wonderful parents and the ship on which the daughter was rescued from. What's rather heartbreaking about this story is the willed ignorance that all three of these major protagonists allow to stand in for truth. A mother knows her daughter is better off not as a daughter. A suitor and his love know this too. And so do we. While one may blanch at the idea of living a lie, it's hard not to see it as the best situation in an unjust world. Read the story here.

On "The Marrow of Tradition" by Charles Chesnutt ***

This book made me angry. Revenge is not a feeling I usually get to "enjoy," but Chesnutt's book seems gauged to do just that, stir up feelings of animosity. It's essentially a text about the wrongs done to African Americans in one southern town, which serves as an microcosm for the South itself, during the latter days of Reconstruction, just years before the right to vote would be take from former slaves via state constitutions and laws.

In this small town, a white man marries a black woman in secret and leaves a tiny bit of his fortune to his colored daughter. His white daughter from a previous marriage gets most of the estate. But that's not good enough for her aunt, who arranges to steal the will and cast the black wife and her daughter out of home. The secret lives on with only the aunt.

Meanwhile, a set of newspaper men in town are tired of Republican blacks taking the political positions, tired of blacks getting "uppity," so they decide to take back the town for themselves. Even though the state constitution will change in two years, that's not soon enough. These men set out to create a riot that will displace the black leaders. In the course of the novel one after another black man will be taken advantage of, killed, belittled, pushed aside. When rage arises at the end, one can't help but feel with the oppressed people.

Written in the early 1900s, I have to wonder to whom Chesnutt was writing. This clearly wasn't a book that would have been popular in the South.

You can read the novel here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Passing of Grandison" by Charles W. Chesnutt (6736 words) ****

In this humorous sketch, a son sets out to do something adventurous to win the heart of his love. Adventurous, in this case, is to free a slave. But his father, being a slave owner, isn't to keen on the slave the son sets out to free by taking north on vacation. Instead, the son is settled with the loyalist of slaves, whom the son can't get rid of no matter how hard he tries to tempt him. Or so we are led to believe. In its use of double-spoken deceit, this one fits in with Chesnutt's Conjure Woman tales. Read the antics here.

On "The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line" by Charles W. Chesnutt ****

Wanting to read something outside the highly formulaic Conjure Woman tales, I opted to read yet another book of Chesnutt's short fiction to see if his other stories were as entertaining, and indeed they are. These nine stories focus mostly on people of mixed ancestry in the Reconstruction South. In many, light skinned African Americans struggle to better themselves most often by trying to mimic the white power brokers of society and by trying to deny the less savory (i.e., black) parts of their own selves. This doesn't come in for kind treatment by Chesnutt, as often these people, through their imported prejudice, end up denying real opportunities to themselves, as happens in "A Matter of Principle."

But the consequences of not following such a code also don't lend themselves to being treated particularly well either. Darker skinned people, the subject of the last few stories in the collection, find themselves shut out of funerals for people they love or herded off to jail for things they didn't steal. In each case, the prejudice that rests within post-Civil War society brings down the newly freed people and their descendants.

In college, I tended not to care as much for African American fiction because of its heavy political content. As I've gotten older, however, stories of social injustice such as these have appealed more. Call it perspective, perhaps, hearing what others say about people of given cultures or races and knowing also what is gendered in my own heart as a human being who has grown up amid such racism and how that affects my own thinking whether I wish it to or not. Stories such as Chesnutt's provide historical context for issues that linger to our present day, even if the prejudice is no longer as overt. You can download the collection here.

On "The Goophered Grapevine" by Charles W. Chesnutt (4710 words) ****

This first tale in The Conjure Woman introduces readers to the general structure of all of the stories to follow and also introduces us to Chesnutt's main characters: Julias McAdoo, the former slave; and his Yankee employers, the frame story narrator husband and his wife Annie. Here, the narrator is considering whether to buy property down south when he runs into McAdoo while inspecting some land. McAdoo's tale of a bewitched grapevine intends to discourage the man from buying the property, in part one comes to believe because McAdoo would no longer be able to benefit from the land's scuppernongs himself. Nevertheless, although the land is purchased anyway, in true form, McAdoo comes out all right, given his storytelling prowess. Read the story here.

On "The Conjure Woman" by Charles W. Chesnutt ****

The Conjure Woman is a curious book of seemingly similar tales, involving an old former slave named Julius McAdoo and his white Yankee turned southern employers. Each tale is placed within a frame. The Yankee has some scheme he asks McAdoo about or some delay in the day's program that McAdoo fills with a story to entertain or instruct. McAdoo's tale then takes off, and in each a conjure woman figures greatly. Each story also benefits McAdoo in some way. When the employer decides to tear down an old schoolhouse to build a new kitchen, McAdoo tells a story about a man who gets turned into lumber. The husband doesn't believe the tale, but often his soft-hearted wife is snookered, either by the tale or by McAdoo's overall conniving, and things like schoolhouses remain so that McAdoo's church can meet in it. The tales quickly become formulaic and predictable, and the use of dialect Chesnutt employs has fallen out of fashion (indeed, it's irritating at points trying to figure out what McAdoo is saying), but overall the book still, over one hundred years later is entertaining. Download the book here at Project Gutenberg.