Sylvia Lyons Render lecture, "Charles W. Chesnutt, the Dissenter," at the University of Iowa, June 19, 1975

Speaker 1: The following is a presentation from The seventh annual Institute of Afro-American Culture, held at the University of Iowa, June 15th to the 27th, 1975. Charles W. Chesnutt, the dissenter, is the subject of this lecture by Sylvia Lyons Render, a specialist on Afro-American literature and culture in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Introducing Dr. Render is Dr. Darwin Turner, Chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: Continuing what is beginning to be known as Home Week in North Carolina, Speaker 4: [inaudible] Darwin Turner: We're presenting Professor Sylvia Lyons Render, who was reared in Nashville, Tennessee where she graduated from Tennessee A&I as class valedictorian and a member of the scholastic honor society. She earned her Master's Degree from Ohio state in English, her PhD from George Peabody. Professor Render has held fellowships or awards from the American Philosophical Society, the Southern Education Foundation, a cooperative program in humanities sponsored by UNC and Duke that Professor Redding also had a fellowship in from the Ford Foundation from the American Philosophical Society. She's presently a member of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association. Professor Lyons Render has taught at Florida A&M University, which we have to sneak in somewhere- Sylvia Lyons Re...: Hell yes. Darwin Turner: At North Carolina Central University, she's been a guest teacher at George Peadbody, she served as a consultant for various associations and organizations including the North Carolina State Department of Education, she's been a consultant and humanities Chairman of the Selection Committee for the Ford Foundation Advanced Studies Fellowships and a consultant for the Macmillan company as she is at present. At present, she is a specialist in Afro-American literature and culture in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. Now because I tend to prefer teachers rather than librarians and bureaucrats I'm very delighted that Professor Render is going to return to a North Carolina University, even if it is North Carolina Central, next fall. Darwin Turner: She's published many articles on black literature but she is perhaps best known as one of the foremost authorities on Charles Chesnutt. She's published articles on Chesnutt in the CLA Journal, in North Carolina Folklore and in the Encyclopedia Britannica. I'm certain that many of you have seen the book, which was included on your bibliography, on the second bibliography which was sent to you, she edited and wrote the introduction for the Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt and she is presently preparing the publication of what is going to be the definitive biographical critical volume of Charles Chesnutt. Because I've been accused of being somewhat concerned about males from time to time, rather than simply females, I would like to point out that, I guess I have a personal connection with a son of Sylvia Lyons Render, Frank Render who has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for equal opportunity and who is presently serving as Assistant to the President for Community Affairs at Federal City College in Washington. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce professor Sylvia Lyons Render. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Thank you, you see I'm taking the liberty of sitting, last night I think I got the idea that everybody would be free and easy and we would just be one big group together, or a small group together. And I suppose I'd like to say first of all that I don't mind Dr. Turner's having mentioned my son, I like males myself and I said, just last Monday, in speaking for an International Women's Year to a group composed mainly of women, since one never puts personal data on a vita, that the best thing I ever did was to have a son and I still hold to that. I'm humanistic as I hope you will gather now and in the course of what I have to say, which will be about Chesnutt and I have assumed that most of us have some knowledge of Chesnutt and therefore have taken the liberty of narrowing what I have to say about him considerably, hoping to introduce some materials not yet in print, and hoping to convince you that Chesnutt was a dissenter. Sylvia Lyons Re...: And if I stumble a little bit, blame the people who kept me up last night after I got here and should have gone to bed. My draft is very rough, Charles W. Chesnutt, 1858 to 1932, the first Afro-American writer of fiction to receive unqualified critical acclaim was a dissenter. The basis of his dissent was the failure of the US government to fully enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which guaranteed the Afro-Americans, free people of color and former slaves alike, equal rights under the constitution. In one of his many pronouncements on this subject, this time in an address, Rights and Duties, before the Bethel Literary and Historical Society in Washington, DC on October 1st, 1908, Chesnutt described these natural rights of man, and now I quote, "The right to life, the right of personal liberty, to sell one's labor in the best available market and an equal opportunity to share in accordance with fitness of effort or effectiveness." So you see, equal opportunity is not new, not even the phrase. Sylvia Lyons Re...: For Chesnutt dissent also extended logically to color discrimination among all people with any known or discernible African background. His ultimate vision of all people was as members of the human race and thus, fundamentally equal. The strength of Chesnutt's convictions may be appreciated more fully when one realizes that as a voluntary Negro, and I'm assuming that everybody knows what a voluntary Negro was, he was free to choose between living as black or white in this country, at a time when Afro-Americans were held in very low or no esteem. He was working with George Washington Cable, supplying data for the Open Letter Club in 1889 when a Mr. Joseph Bidwell of Texas expressed popular views such as these, Bidwell believed in the past, present and future inferiority of Negros as a race, attributable to a fundamental difference in the physical, mental and moral structure of the two races. He held further that a race antagonism between blacks and whites existed when the two were brought in contact the Negro must always occupy the inferior position. The continuation of such a state of affairs in the South was Bidwell's justification for concluding that, quote, "Mere human theories and legislative enactment cannot overturn the subtle and eternal laws of nature and of God." Sylvia Lyons Re...: At the same time in real life, at the turn of the century in the early 1900s, James K. Vardaman had been elected Governor of Mississippi on a platform of hostility to Negros, the Maryland legislature had authorized Jim Crow Cars and disfranchised black males, women weren't voting, of course, and racial education had been forbidden at Berea College, the Supreme Court had refused to act on disenfranchisement cases. Blacks were being lynched in Ohio as well as in Mississippi and Arkansas. So it would seem that if one could, one might have every reason to get out. Chesnutt could have chosen to pass, thereby relieving himself simultaneously of the almost insurmountable handicap of being an Afro-American at the time and of being pre-occupied for the rest of his life with trying to solve the Negro problem in his writings. He was tempted, in an article dated July 31st, 1875 in one of his journals, he noted, "Twice today, or oftener, I had been taken for," and he puts in quotes, "'white,' at the Palm this morning one fellow said he'd be damned if there was any nigger blood in me. At Coleman's I passed, on the road an old chap, seeing the trunks, took me for a student coming from school. I believe I'll leave here and pass anyhow, for I'm as white as any of them. One old fellow said today, 'Look here, Tom, here's a black as white as you are.'" Sylvia Lyons Re...: Various circumstances of Chesnutt's early life enabled him to see that feelings of superiority based on race or color were unjustifiable and apparently contributed to his decision to remain black. He was well-acquainted with the Fayetteville, North Carolina colored society, of which he was an active member for about 19 years, from age seven through 25. Moreover, because of his constant contacts with whites in his father's downtown store, in a nearby bookstore owned by a white in the private library of another local white citizen, in his contacts with white tutors, politicians, businessmen and educators, Chesnutt gained insights on white character, which I believe prevented him from developing feelings of inferiority which enforced separation, controlled contacts and psychological conditioning usually fostered in the minds of blacks. Moreover, having himself been mistaken for white on many occasions, as I've noted in part, rendered the concept of white supremacy wholly untenable to Chesnutt and it's practice therefore, totally unjustifiable. Sylvia Lyons Re...: I think it's difficult for those of us who do not stand on the line, really to realize the feelings of a person who, one minute is taken for black and another taken for white and knows that he is the same person and therefore he really thinks seriously about these artificial lines. And that's what he had to deal with all of his life. Chesnutt may be further appreciated as a dissenter when one realizes that he chose not only to live black, but also to speak out about the injustices being suffered by Afro-Americans when conditionings were worsening for them. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, rather, the tunnel seemed to be heading down into even more impenetrable darkness. Our country, just beginning to become a world power at the turn of the century, held in the main this pervasive belief, the superiority of the whites, and the inferiority of the blacks. I know everybody knows that, but I have to say it to remind us of how things were with Chesnutt. Moreover, this belief was being given added credibility by the persuasive arguments of theologians, anthropologists, historians and scientists as well as writers of fiction. Sylvia Lyons Re...: And let me name for you just a few titles, you remember Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, or his, The Negro: The Southerner's Problem. Smith's The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn, Robert Shufeldt's The Negro a Menace to American Civilization, William Calhoun's The Caucasian and the Negro in the United States, Philip Bruce, The plantation Negro as a freeman and Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and America. Just a few of the titles... Oh, and let me name another, The Negro, A Beast. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Yeah, well, Chesnutt, who had expressed hope for continued improvement in race relations in a diary entry of April 1879 thereafter noting the current, dissited by criticizing the spreading race prejudice sharply. I could cite you many, many things that he wrote or that he said, but I'd just like to mention a letter of March 28th, 1890 to George Washington Cable, one to the right Reverend William M. Brown, bishop of Arkansas, the protestant Episcopal Church, and still another dated May 9th, 1902 to Congressman Crumpacker, form which I should like to read just this little excerpt, to show you something of the tenor of his writings. Sylvia Lyons Re...: "There has always been a great deal of Southern claptrap about the disastrous results that would follow the intermingling of blood. Such intermingling as there has been, and there has been a great deal, has been done with the entire consent and cheerful cooperation of the white race, and I am unable to see any disastrous results that have followed so far. I am sure that your attitude in congress will always be in favor of justice and fair play. There are proper places for matters of race and color to be discussed and perhaps to very properly regulate social conduct, but I am entirely convinced that under the constitution of the United States the government should not, in any way, draw or recognize a color line." Sylvia Lyons Re...: He told it like it was. Let me go back, I don't have this in my text, but with an adult audience like this, I must tell you something about the letter from the Reverend Brown. This was, in Chesnutt's reply, was indication of one of the few times he lost his composure, because what Reverend Brown asked him, if he did not think it was God's will that blacks... Reverend Brown was black too, not intermingle, and Chesnutt said, "If God had intended it that way, he would have so constructed the races that there could have been no mating." He said it in more polished phrases. Speaker 4: More polished or more dramatic? Sylvia Lyons Re...: No, more polished. Again, once, between 1904 and 1906 in addressing a white audience, he said, "I know that your minds are clouded by a multitude of diverse opinions, nor am I sanguine enough to hope that they are entirely free from prejudice, and by that I mean the influence of ancestral tradition and current opinion. I know that able arguments are presented everyday by forceful writers entirely of your own blood, to convince you that the white race was ordained to overrun and rule the whole earth and that those who would resist them are or share with them, are flying in the face of providence. I know that ministers of Christ preach the gospel of human degradation and justify it by the necessity of preserving the white race to the world and that politicians preach the same doctrine from the necessity of preserving the world to the white race." I have quoted this extensively at this point, for two reasons, first, to show that as a citizen Chesnutt protested about the second class status of blacks openly, thus identifying himself as a dissenter. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Secondly, so that we may see from the outset, that Chesnutt was aware that in promoting equality for the Negro, in his fiction and in his non-fiction, he was taking an unpopular position which might well be rejected by the predominantly white reading public when his motives became clear to them. If you've read some of his early works, you'd know that his motives are not quite as apparent. In a letter to Booker T. Washington, dated November 5th, 1901, Chesnutt agrees that the medium of fiction offers a golden opportunity to create sympathy throughout the country for our cause. "It has been the writings of Harris and Page and others of that ilk that have furnished my chief incentive to write something from the other side of this very vital question. I know I am on the weaker side in point of popular sympathy but I am on the stronger side in point of justice and morality and if I can but command the skill and power to compel attention, I think I will win out in the long run, so far as I am personally concerned and will help the cause which is vastly more important." Sylvia Lyons Re...: Thus, he pursued a course of action he annunciated in an undated piece called The Writing of a Novel in which he states that an author should choose a subject about which he is informed and about which he has convictions, Chesnutt's subjects fit that pattern. It should not be surprising, therefore, that in addition to wishing to write for aesthetics satisfaction, Chesnutt determined to write for quote, "A high and holy purpose." The object of which, and I'm quoting again, "would be not so much the elevation of the colored people, as the elevation of the whites. Where I consider the unjust spirit of caste, which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it, to scorn and social ostracism, I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people." And he wrote this in 1880 before he really got launched on his career. Sylvia Lyons Re...: This statement of purpose also implies Chesnutt's intent to delineate the shortcomings of whites, contrary to the bulk of the writings of the time. Besides the moral justification of this perspective, Chesnutt no doubt hoped that the, "effect of novelty," and that's a phrase quoted, which might be created when, and again I quote, "All things are presented in a new way or from a different source or to those whose attention has been directed to them before." Unquote, would win enough readers to permit him to continue his writing career. This is from an undated letter to some students, enclosed in a letter of April 10th, 1923 to a high school teacher in Trenton, New Jersey. You know Chesnutt was a teacher as well as a lawyer and a writer and a father and an upstanding citizen. In treating miscegenation and mixed marriages, Chesnutt shows whites more at fault than blacks and maybe since I don't recall having said it, I'd better say that I am limiting my discussion, now that we're getting into it, to only two aspects of his writing. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Just two of the themes, miscegenation and mixed marriage and color prejudice among blacks. In treating the first of these themes, Chesnutt chose whites more at fault than blacks, but he's too much of a realist to be absolute in his judgements. The blacks are not all pure and the whites are not all impure. Moreover, he treats these matters, of greater importance during his day than now, in a variety of ways. In The fall of Adam... How many of you've read it? Well, maybe I can read you an excerpt from it, this is really a beautiful myth and as expressed in a country sermon given by ex-slave, Elder Gabriel Gainey. Sylvia Lyons Re...: In this very moving address to his congregation on a bright, spring Sunday morning, down under the trees in North Carolina, Elder Gainey details the fall of Adam and the origin of black folks. He so moves one brother in the amen corner that the brother forgets the etiquette of the church and gets up and asks the question about mulattoes and is promptly shushed up. This little incident which really isn't required for rounding out the tale, nevertheless gives it an added dimension and certainly reflects the socially approved mode of treating such a subject in those days, with silence in public. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Chesnutt, on the other hand, adds his views on intermarriage and miscegenation repeatedly and non-fiction as well as in narrative form and he justified this when the question was raised once, by saying that, well, he had heard this brought up in a meeting of educators down in Alabama and he thought he might as well talk about it himself. He believed that marriages were generally happier and more successful when individuals married within their ethnic groups. One great disadvantage was the resultant social penalties imposed upon each couple rather than inability of the races to relate. To him, outlawing intermarriage denied equality on the one hand, and on the other, relieved the white parties of rightful responsibilities for their actions. In 1910, noting that of a US population of about 108 million about one hundred and a half million of the approximately 11 million non-whites could easily pass, not only were mixed, but could pass. He averred that any movement to preserve racial purity should have been started 300 years earlier by the white men who had begun the mixing and had the power to effectively terminate it at any time during the intervening years. Sylvia Lyons Re...: He was also active in politics, not as a candidate, but when he found out that House Bill number 27, outlawing intermarriage in Ohio, had been introduced in the 80th General Assembly of the State of Ohio, during 1913, he immediately took steps to have it defeated. He did likewise when a similar bill was introduced in the US House of Representatives in 1914. He refers to the former bill in a speech, The Race Problem, which he gave before a group of upper-class white ladies on March 25th, 1913 and he also sent a copy of the defeated bill along with a letter in which he outlined how he and others had lined up their political strategy to defeat it, to Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois at the National Office of the NAACP on April 28th of the same year. I'm saying all this so that you will know how active Chesnutt was, beyond just writing. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Chesnutt's interest in the issue is also apparent in his fiction, miscegenation or mixed marriage is anticipated, proposed or accomplished in these stories and novels, Her Virginia Mammy, The Sheriff's Children, Cicely's Dream, Uncle Wellington's Wives all in The Wife of His Youth and so forth, with which you may be acquainted. The Dumb Witness, White Weeds and The Doll, maybe not as familiar to you, and all three of his novels, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition and The Colonel's Dream. We shall have time now to examine only a few of these situations in detail, to see how Chesnutt develops variations on these themes but the overall treatment suggests that such unions have little chance to succeed. Sylvia Lyons Re...: This clearly reflects a social climate of the age and is in line with our calling Chesnutt, I think, a realist, sometimes a naturalist. However other implications are not in tune with the age, and this too justifies our calling him a dissenter, as I hope you will agree when we are finished. For instance, the failure of the alliances seems due more to social pressures and to flaws of character than to any wrong inherent in the act that is a marriage or the union, lawful or unlawful, as in the farcical, Uncle Wellington's Wives. How many of us have not read that story? Speaker 4: You said have not? Sylvia Lyons Re...: Have not. Speaker 4: [inaudible] Sylvia Lyons Re...: Okay, well those of us who have, indulge me for just a minute. Though the good looking mulatto coachman Uncle Wellington is shiftless, to a fault, and his loquacious Irish cook bride, the former Mrs. Flannigan is fickle, greater employment and housing problems are one consequence of their very short, illegal marriage. They probably wouldn't have made it anyway, because of their personalities but because one was black and the other white, obstacles were put in their way to doom it to failure. This is one of the few stories of this kind which has a fairly happy ending. Again, the white partner, whether male or female is always the aggressor in Chesnutt's stories, as in patently illustrated in Uncle Wellington's Wives. Because when Mrs. Flannigan looked at Uncle Wellington she turned her attention from another likely suitor and saw to it that he always got the best food in the house. Sylvia Lyons Re...: She talked him to death and she fed him to perfection and only after times really got hard, after they lost their jobs and she was convinced that Uncle Wellington just wasn't going to work no-how, up there in Groveland, which really is Cleveland, she one day, gave him 50 cents and told him to go off and fish as he liked to do. And when he came home, everything was moved out of their little shack except his clothes. Oh, this really, it's a beautiful story, because Uncle Wellington learns his lesson, he has to hitch-hike his way back to North Carolina and when he gets there he's wiser and thinner, and his [inaudible] black, industrious wife who has remained faithful, you know how we black women particularly are about these good for nothing, good looking men, has resisted all the blandishments of the preacher. And it just happens, coincidentally, that Uncle Wellington arrives on a Sunday evening, when the minister is there once again, proposing. Sylvia Lyons Re...: And he happens to come around to the side of the house and hear it, and she says, "Well, I'm sorry, Elder, but I guess I just can't do it." And he runs to the wood pile, grabs up an arm full of stove wood, runs into the house and says, "Well here, Honey, here's the wood that you sent me for." Just as thought he had been gone only for a few minutes. And says, "Elder, won't you have dinner with us tonight?" It's really beautiful. The Afro-American females are notably circumspect in their extramarital relations with Caucasian males, showing none of the primitivism ascribed to them by white writers. Chesnutt makes sure that we don't even ascribe Viney's tempestuous thwarting of the plans of Malcolm Dudley in The Dumb Witness, which is very much like an episode in The Colonel's Dream, altogether to her black blood. He mentions that she also has some Indian blood, but when he tells her, when Dudley tells Viney, who has been his housekeeper paramour for 15 years, that he is going to marry the widow, Mrs. Todd, and she had better act right about it, Viney raises Cane and the next afternoon marches herself downtown to see Mrs. Todd. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Whatever she told the lady, made her refuse to see Mr. Dudley the next time he came, although they were engaged, and she left town. Despite the model behavior of the majority of these women, normal happiness escapes them, all of those who ally themselves with whites, and they and their children pay dearly for their race mixing, no matter what advantages they enjoy for a short period. The mothers eventually lose some of their self esteem as Miss Molly does in The House Behind the Cedars. Without exception, the children are either denied their patrimony or as in the case of John and Rena Walden and Janet Miller in The Marrow of Tradition or they don't get any, in fact they're rejected as is Tom, in The Sheriff's Children, his father sells him down the river with his mother when he needs some money to pay a debt. Again, like Rena Walden in House Behind the Cedars and Clara Hohlfelder in Her Virginia Mammy, they have identity problems, which no doubt caused them to feel as Chesnutt once described himself as, neither fish nor foul. Sylvia Lyons Re...: It is really ironic that Clara will have a chance to find married happiness with the white aristocrat, Dr. John Winthrop by being falsely assured that she is 100% white and having the charade carried on by Dr. Winthrop whose sudden awareness that Clara has a colored mother makes no difference in his love for his fiance. He is unique among Chesnutt's males in this respect as is the happy ending of the story. Conversely, Chesnutt shows in the satiric, White Weeds, how many of you know that one? No? Okay. That's in my book, and if you don't understand what I've compressed here, I'll explain it a little more at length later. But he shows in this satire the virulent effect of antipathy for even associating with a person who may have a modicum of black blood, though no sign of it is evident in her appearance or in her standing in the Danforth University community. Professor Carson's fiance Miss Marian Tracy is not only charming, but also, and I am quoting, "By common concent of the university faculty and student body, the most beautiful woman of her years in Attica." However, the doubt about her purity of blood planted in Professor Carson's mind on the afternoon of their wedding night and left unresolved by his wife, since he had not raised the question before the ceremony, kills him within a year. Sylvia Lyons Re...: As a blonde Benedict explains to his wife, during that fateful exchange, after the wedding guests had departed and before their marriage has been consummated, "Nothing could even make me feel that the touch of a Negress was not pollution. Beside my mother's deathbed, I swore a solemn vow that this sin should never be laid at my door. To me, and those who think like me, men and women are either white or black.Those who are not all white are all black. Were I married in fact to a woman even seemingly as white as you, yet not entirely white, I should feel guilty of mortal sin. I should lie awake at night, dreading lest my children should show traces of their descent from an inferior and degraded race. I should never know a moment's happiness." The spoofing melodrama here and elsewhere in this amusing yet pathetic story has, as you know, truth. But Chesnutt pursues the same theme with deadly seriousness in The House Behind the Cedars, as I'm sure most of you are aware. And I know Dr. Turner knows it backward and forwards, since he wrote an introduction for it. Sylvia Lyons Re...: But in this book he builds up his case against race prejudice as reflected in social disapproval of intermarriage with the meticulous care of a trial lawyer. I'm sure that those of you who've read this moving psychological novel will agree that Rena Walden, better known as Rowena Warrick is in every way qualified to become the wife of George Tryon, except that she's in part Negro. She's beautiful in appearance and in personality, even babies and animals are drawn to her, did you notice that? With the finishing school training her brother John affords her prior to becoming the mistress of his, shall we say, almost palatial home in the best upper-class white Southern tradition, she wins total acceptance by the community. That and her successful conquest of Tryon's heart are symbolized by her becoming the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Annual Tournament, nor does her new station as a white lady make her turn away from her mother, Frank Fowler and others who had been part of her life as Rena Walden. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Indeed, her concern for ailing Miss Molly, her mother, was the main cause of her undoing and her unselfish concern for others after her downfall resulted in her complete undoing and her tragic death. Even George Tryon, conditioned essentially like Professor Carson finds his love greater than his prejudice. But he, again like Carson, is shown lacking in the chivalry supposedly a hallmark of the Southern white gentleman. We must remember that after George finds out about Rena's racial antecedence his attitude changes, whereas before he had been most circumspect in his behavior, later literally, with Jeff Wain's help he drives Rowena out of her mind by his socially compromising behavior. Hence, the explicitness of her written refusal to see him again, after she has begun life anew as a colored person. Finally, we should remember that although George undoubtedly loves Rowena, we are left in doubt about the honorable nature of his intentions because he never once again mentions marriage. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Not questionable, however, is the corrosive effect of race prejudice upon the integrity of these men and of other white characters in Chesnutt's fiction especially Sheriff Campbell in The Sheriff's Children. The unnamed protector of Miss Molly in House Behind the Cedars, Sam Merkle in The Marrow of Tradition and Malcolm Dudley in both The Dumb Witness and The Colonel's Dream. They may intermarry, but they don't really function as husbands and they practice miscegenation. Chesnutt dissents not only in his more forthright assessment of guilt in inter-racial male, female relationships but also in his ridicule of mulattos, octoroons and other fair skinned Afro-Americans known popularly as blue veins. Now we'll get on a lighter plane since we've been dealing in, shall we say, tears and death and disappointment. He doesn't spare them either, he really puts them down about their prejudice against fellow blacks with darker skin tones, that is unless the latter had straight hair. Sylvia Lyons Re...: This incidentally, is just one of the manifestations of the impact of white values upon black consciousness, as I'm sure we all recognize. Both the Southern and the northern varietes of the blue veins appear in Chesnutt's fiction, notably in The House Behind the Cedars, The Wife of His Youth and A Matter of Principal, and I'm not going to be as long winded about this as I was about the intermarriage and miscegenation. Thus in House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt depicts Miss Molly and her sect, admission to which is a light complexion and straight hair, as shallow snobs. Miss Molly, for all her airs and you know she does put them on, is illiterate, knowing his mother's inability to write, John Warrick addresses envelopes to himself in which she is to enclose the letters she gets other people to write for her in order to keep his identity secret and she even has the nerve to go next door to ask Frank sometimes to read them, if you recall. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Indeed, her inability to read the note of warning to keep Rena at home while George Tryon is in Patesville, precipitates her fatal disclosure of Rena's racial identity. Further, Miss Molly is so taken by mulatto Jeff Wain's physical appearance that she doesn't attempt to probe his character before entrusting Rena to his care because his color is right for him to become a son in law, and so is his station as a school teacher. On the other hand, although dark brown Frank Fowler has been a good neighbor to the Waldens all his life, Miss Molly can not bring herself to invite him as an equal to the party honoring Wain and Rena. Remember how she gives him a half handed invitation and he sits out on the back porch and eats refreshments? In The Wife of His Youth, and this is a short story, Chesnutt observes that the original blue vein society of Groveland and these are a little more hoity-toity, is more quote, "White than black" by accident and perhaps by some natural affinity. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Their exemplary leader, Mr. Ryder, denies that they have any color prejudice, instead calling attention to the anomalous position of people of mixed blood, suspended as they are between the blacks and the whites, he points out the expediency of lightning the breed in anticipation of becoming identified as white in a white dominated society. And Chesnutt defends his position too, he says, "If prejudice can not be overcome, why not pass? If that's the only way you can make it?" He does this several times, nevertheless, in the short story The Wife of His Youth, the blue vein society approves of Mr. Ryder's ethical decision to acknowledge, as a wife of his youth, the little old black woman who obviously lacks the ruddy complexion, social graces and intellectual attainments of the young widow Ryder had intended to marry. The high moral import of this story, reinforced by its serious tone, is unmistakable. The message is conveyed as clearly as in the lighter, satirical A Matter of Principal. Sylvia Lyons Re...: The prosperous Brotherhood Clayton, whose title is ironic as we know, wanting to be identified with whites, avoids associating with blacks. He has also conditioned his nearly white daughter Alice, all she needs is a little white face powder to do the trick, to wish that she were wholly so. Moreover, no man of pronounced pigmentation, regardless of his intelligibility otherwise, is acceptable as a husband for Alice. Preying on their deep-seated color bias, Jack, a clever, poor relative therefore causes Alice to lose the catch of the season to her hated rival, Miss Lura Watkins. In the end Alice is reduced to accepting the attentions of her, quote, "last chance, Jack." There's no denying what Chesnutt is saying here, I think. Sylvia Lyons Re...: He's been unfairly accused of being partial to the blue veins in real life as well as in fiction, and you noticed I say unfairly. Because I don't believe most people have read all of his fiction and all of his essays and his speeches. If you will review the fiction you will find that some of his most admirable characters are unmistakably Afro-Americans. Frank Fowler is his most noble character, in fact, if there were to be a shining knight or a knight in shining armor, it's frank Fowler. Josh Green in The Marrow of Tradition is the most physically courageous, Tom Taylor in The Doll is the most disciplined, how many of you know The Doll? Would you agree? Speaker 4: [inaudible] Sylvia Lyons Re...: Well, we'll have to talk about it maybe. Uncle Julius, I know you will say with me is the most conniving and in a way the smartest. And Elder Gainey in The fall of Adam is the most entertaining. Dave in Dave's Neckliss too, is impressive as is Phillis in The Marked Tree. Well, you don't know these people yet, but I hope you will soon. Beyond these characterizations and the themes of his intra-race color problem stories, Chesnutt declares in the Disfranchisement of the Negro that, "The rights of mixed bloods are not one whit more sacred than those that at mixture..." Forgive me, let me go back over this. He declares in the Disfranchisement of the Negro that the rights of mixed blood are not one whit more sacred because of that add mixture than those of pure Negros. You see, he makes no distinction between what he demands for mixed bloods and what he demands for blacks. And I don’t think many people know this. Sylvia Lyons Re...: He is also unequivocal in his statement in Rights and Duties that the first duty that a man owes to himself and his children is to assert, to maintain, to defend his rights by every means within his power, and he doesn't say colored man or mulattos or octoroons or light people, he says every man. But if we won't take Chesnutt's word for it, let's listen to what Du Bois says in paying his last tribute to Charles W. Chesnutt. "Chesnutt was of that group of white folk who because of a more or less remote Negro ancestor, identified himself voluntarily with the darker group, studied them, expressed them, defended them and yet never forgot the absurdity of that artificial position and always refused to admit its logic or its ethical sanction. He was not a Negro, he was a man. But this fact never drove him to the opposite extreme, he did not repudiate persons of Negro blood as social equals and close friends. If his white friends, and he had legion, could not tolerate colored friends, they'd need not come to Mr. Chesnutt's home. He had no patience, if his colored friends demanded racial segregation and hatred, he had no patience with them. Sylvia Lyons Re...: Married and friendship in his broad and tolerant mind knew no lines of color or race and all men, good, bad and indifferent were simply men. Thus, Charles W. Chesnutt did not find it necessary or desirable to blind himself to the shortcomings of his own people, neither was the author concerned about improving only the lot of blacks, though this came first with him. The abiding theme of Chesnutt's dissension was his desire for equality for blacks, and now I'm quoting him again, "Not any particular kind of equality, but simply equality with whatever the word may justly imply. No man is free who is not as free as any other man, by that test, the Negro must stand or fall. And the important thing for all of us is not whether he shall stand or fall, but that he shall have an equal chance." Chesnutt's words and actions of record as author and as man, to me, reflect an admirable consistency of attitude and adherence to principal which I hope some day will enable all his readers to commend him as an accomplished artist and as a man of integrity."