The Marrow of Tradition. Charles W. Chesnutt

Sandy Sees His Own Ha’nt XIX. A Midnight Walk XX. A Shocking Crime XXI. The Necessity of an Example XXII. How Not to Prevent a Lynching XXIII. Belleview XXIV. Two Southern Gentlemen XXV. The Honor of a Family XXVI. The Discomfort of Ellis XXVII. The Vagaries of the Higher Law XXVIII. In Season and Out XXIX. Mutterings of the Storm XXX. The Missing Papers XXXI. The Shadow of a Dream XXXII. The Storm Breaks XXXIII. Into the Lion’s Jaws XXXIV. The Valley of the Shadow XXXV. “Mine Enemy, O Mine Enemy!” XXXVI. Fiat Justitia XXXVII. The Sisters

       introduction

      One evening, while teaching a creative writing workshop at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, I had a student ask me which writer was the most intelligent in the history of American literature. Of course each person’s answer to this question is completely subjective, but I gave it a shot anyway.

      “Charles W. Chesnutt,” I said. “He was a genius.”

      Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio, to free blacks from North Carolina. In 1866, his parents returned to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with their family, where Chesnutt’s father, the son of a wealthy white landowner, opened a general store with his father’s financial backing. In Fayetteville, young Charles attended a school for African Americans that had been opened as a result of Reconstruction. Chesnutt, who had grown up reading widely while also listening to the folktales told on the porch at his father’s store, proved himself an exceptional student, curious and driven. In 1875, at the age of seventeen, he left home and moved over one hundred miles east to teach at a rural school for African Americans in Charlotte. Two years later, he would return to Fayetteville to begin teaching at the State Colored Normal School, where