her first volume of poetry, From Memphis and Pe-
king. The President’s Daughter is the sequel to Sally
Hemings, relating the tale of one of Hemings and
Jefferson’s daughters.
Chase-Riboud has won several awards for her
art, poetry, and writing. In addition to the John
Hay Whitney Fellowship, she won the Janet Hei-
dinger Kafka Prize for Excellence in Fiction by an
American Woman in 1980. In 1988 she won the
Carl Sandburg Prize as best American poet. She
has also won a National Fellowship of the Arts.
Chase-Riboud continues to live in Paris, France,
and is currently working on the third novel in her
Sally Hemings series.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Munsch, Andrew, and Greg Wilmer. “Barbara Chase-
Ribaud.” Voices from the Gaps. October 19, 1998.
Department of English, University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis. Available online. URL: http://voices.
cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/chaseribaud_bar-
bara.html. Accessed September 29, 2006.
Selz, Peter, and Anthony F. Janson. Barbara Chase-Ri-
boud, Sculptor. Edited by Harriet Whelchel. New
York: Abrams, 1999.
Kim Hai Pearson
Brian Jennings
Chesnutt, Charles W. (1858–1932)
Born to free parents in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858,
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was fascinated at an
early age by the stories and folktales he heard in
his father’s store. The family returned to the South
after the end of the Civil War. His mother and father
had left Fayetteville, North Carolina—their home-
town—in 1856. Both his maternal and paternal
grandfathers had been the white masters of their
respective children. Set free and given a small in-
heritance, Chesnutt’s parents had left the South for
the freedom of the North, but as inhabitants of the
“color line,” they did not find themselves free from
prejudice (often from other African Americans) in
Ohio. His parents’ struggles, as well as his own as
a light-skinned African American, informed much
of Chesnutt’s work, especially his stories of “pass-
ing” African Americans and the price they paid for
hiding their true identities. Chesnutt’s writing also
emphasizes the problems faced by families like his
own living in the tumultuous South following the
Civil War and later the Reconstruction.
Chesnutt was a stellar student and eventually
became a teacher and then a principal, all at a rela-
tively young age. In 1878 he married Susan Perry.
Soon after, in the wake of growing racial hostility
in North Carolina (where Chesnutt had lived most
of his life), the couple moved to Cleveland, Ches-
nutt’s birthplace. He worked various jobs while
developing his writing, producing several stories.
As the father of two young daughters, however, he
could not risk living solely by his writing. A liter-
ary career did not hold much promise for African
Americans in the 1880s.
Chesnutt passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887 and
later opened his own legal stenography business.
In the same year, “The Goophered Grapevine” ap-
peared in Atlantic Monthly. He also worked steadily
on a novella, called “Rena Walden.” Despite numer-
ous revisions, he could not find a publisher for the
piece, but he continued to write short fiction, and
by 1890 he accumulated enough stories to con-
sider a collection. Initially, there was no interest
in such a collection until editor Walter Hines Page
suggested to Chesnutt that he gather the “con-
jure” stories together. Chesnutt composed four
new “conjure” tales and included three older ones
for The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. Later
the same year, another collection, The Wife of His
Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, appeared.
With the success of the two collections, Chesnutt
felt confident enough in the progress of his writing
career to close the stenography business.
Intent on producing a novel, Chesnutt returned
to “Rena Walden” and by 1900 found a publisher
interested in the revised manuscript, The House
behind the Cedars. The novel failed to find an au-
dience, and while it did garner some critical atten-
tion, it did not, in the opinion of many reviewers,
live up to the previous short story collections. Nev-
ertheless, Chesnutt attempted another novel the
following year, The Marrow of Tradition (1901).
Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, massa-
cre in 1898, the work drew controversial attention.98 Chesnutt, Charles W.