254 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900prompted by crafty abolitionists to do so. When required to, the Grandison of the
title plays up to this stereotype. “Deed, suh,” he tells his master. “I wouldn’ low none
er dem cursed low-down abolitioners ter come nigh me, suh”; “I sh’d jes’ reckon I is
better off, suh, dan dem low-down free niggers, suh!” Hearing this, his master finds
“his feudal heart thrilled at such appreciative homage.” However, given the
opportunity to escape, Grandison not only seizes it for himself; he takes his wife, his
mother and father, his sister and brothers, and his “Uncle Ike” with him as well. The
“passing of Grandison” and his family shows his protestations of loyalty to have
been simply a pose, a ruse. Like his creator, he uses a familiar, comforting generic
image of the South as a mask, a means of realizing his own more subversive aims.
Following his two collections of stories, Chesnutt published three novels: The
House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s
Dream (1906). The House Behind the Cedars is set in the same environs as virtually
all his fiction: the South – the fictional town of Patesville, North Carolina again –
“a few years after the Civil War.” It tells the story of two African-Americans, a brother
and sister, who pass for white. It is remarkable because nothing is said about the
racial identity of either brother or sister in the earlier chapters. In a novel of passing
designed to create sympathy for those whose access to respectability is impeded
only by what Chesnutt calls “a social fiction,” the validity of their claim is intimated
by “passing” the characters for white on the reader, for a while, as well. It is also
remarkable because the two protagonists deliberately choose passing as a way of
pursuing status and success. Passing is presented, not as morally duplicitous, but as
virtually the only means left to an unjustly segregated people to enjoy, as Chesnutt
puts it, “the rights and duties of citizenship.” In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt
takes a broader canvas. Basing his story on a racial massacre that occurred in North
Carolina in 1898, he dramatizes the caste structure of a small town. And he begins
from the premise that, although “the old order has passed away,” its traditions
remain “deeply implanted in the consciousness of the two races,” with the whites still
“masters, rulers” and the blacks still occupying “a place the lowest in the social scale.”
The Colonel’s Dream, in turn, describes the attempt of one idealistic white man,
blessed with economic power and moral influence, to resist racial intolerance and
help a small North Carolina town mired in economic deprivation and social injus-
tice. Chesnutt was, in effect, contributing an African-American perspective to three
prominent genres of late nineteenth-century social-purpose fiction in these three
works: the novel of miscegenation and passing, the romance of history and politics,
and the “muckraking” novel written to expose the plight of the deprived. But all
three works failed to find a public, and Chesnutt largely gave up writing to devote
himself to becoming what he later called “a moderately successful professional
man.” In 1931, in an essay titled “Post-Bellum-Pre-Harlem,” Chesnutt admitted that
literary fashion had passed him by. However, he also expressed his pride that
African-American writing had come far since his own days of writing. For that, as
he surely sensed, he had to take some credit. He was a major innovator, not only in
the regionalist and local color tradition, but in several forms. He showed his succes-
sors new ways of writing about black folk culture and the emerging black middleGGray_c03.indd 254ray_c 03 .indd 254 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM