Chicago Defender
One of the most highly regarded, valued, and in-
formative African-American newspapers in print
before, during, and after the Harlem Renaissance.
Credited especially with rallying southern blacks to
migrate north, this newspaper founded in 1905 by
ROBERTABBOTTpaid close attention to issues
that affected, shaped, and informed African-
American life.
Bibliography
Johnson, Abby Arthur, and Ronald Maberry Johnson.
Propaganda & Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of
African American Magazines in the Twentieth Cen-
tury.Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1979.
Chicago Whip
An African-American newspaper founded in
CHICAGOby JOSEPHDANDRIDGEBIBBand other
colleagues. Unlike its fellow city paper the
CHICAGODEFENDER,whose readership was com-
prised primarily of blue-collar African Americans,
the Whipcatered to middle-class blacks.
Bibliography
Kramer, Victor, and Robert Russ, eds. The Harlem Re-
naissance Re-Examined.Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1997.
Chinaberry Tree, The: A Novel of Ameri-
can Life Jessie Fauset(1931)
The third novel published by JESSIEFAUSETin
which she attempted to explore the stigmas of ille-
gitimacy, interracial romance, and the tortured
psyche of a mixed-race woman in a small northern
town.
Fauset wrote the novel while living in NEW
YORKCITYand taking an early-morning French
class at COLUMBIAUNIVERSITY. She published the
work with the New York City–based firm of Freder-
ick A. Stokes and dedicated it to “Ellen Winsor,
My Friend.” In a 1932 interview that was pub-
lished in the SOUTHERNWORKMAN,Fauset cred-
ited her schedule as the primary force that enabled
her to finish the novel. “And never would I have
got my novel done in such good season if it hadn’t
been for taking that French course and being
thereby forced to get up early every day,” she told
journalist Marion Starkey (Davis, xvii). Her dili-
gence paid off; the novel further intensified her
reputation as a writer of merit. “If Jessie Fauset’s
two earlier novels had not already established her
as one of the more interesting and important of the
Negro novelists,” read the New York Timesreview
of the novel, “The Chinaberry Tree,would certainly
do so.” She was praised for “writ[ing] with discre-
tion and artistic fidelity” and for refraining from
the impulse to “exploit the obviously dramatic or
sensational phases of Negro life... She has
chosen... to portray the sensitive and cultivated
Negro, whose handicaps and problems, as far as
they are specifically racial, have been forced on
him from the outside by the accidental fact of his
inclusion in a predominantly white society” (NYT,
10 January 1932, BR7).
The novel focuses on the lives, relationships,
and trials of the women in the Strange family. The
surname immediately marks the women as differ-
ent and alien, and it hints at the twisted and de-
manding past that continues to impact their lives.
The protagonist Laurentine Strange lives with her
mother Sarah Strange, also known as Sal, in the
town of Red Brook, New Jersey. Laurentine is the
child of the long-term relationship between Sal
and the now-deceased Colonel Francis Halloway,
her white employer. When Melissa Paul, a young,
brash niece and the daughter of Sal’s sister Judy, “a
pretty, rather rawboned girl, bold and tactless,”
(Fauset 3) comes north to stay with the two
women, the issues of paternity, romance, and do-
mestic fantasy come to the fore. Like her sister,
Judy also has transgressed. Her social scandal re-
volves around the affair that she had with a mar-
ried man nearly two decades earlier. Over the
course of the novel, Laurentine struggles to find
acceptance and love. She is plagued and under-
mined by the idea of her illegitimacy. The loud
claims of legitimacy, and thus desirability, that her
cousin Melissa makes contribute to Laurentine’s
melancholy. Yet, Laurentine strives to locate the
honor in interracial relationships like that of her
parents which existed beyond and in defiance of
rigid, fiercely protected codes of white gentility and
social decorum.
The novel’s title refers to a chinaberry that
grows in the Stranges’ garden. The tree, like the
family surname, also maintains the focus on theChinaberry Tree, The: A Novel of American Life 79