Charles Chesnutt: Crossing the Colour Line

Abstract

Richard H. Brodhead, ed. The journals of Charles Chesnutt. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. 181 + illustrations. Richard H. Brodhead, ed. The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales: Charles W. Chesnutt. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. 207. Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) is one of those small miracles of late-nineteenth-century American literature. Born into a free black family that returned to North Carolina from Ohio where they remained during the Civil War (Chesnutt's father fought for the Union Army), Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville and came to adulthood as something of an intellectual anom- aly. Ambitious, articulate, disciplined, gifted, and diligent, Chesnutt achieved the highest social and professional levels available to him in the South, becoming the principal of the State Colored Normal School in his early twenties. Rather than being satisfied, however, his very achievement seemed to spur ambition, and he eventually abandoned southern racial constraints to become a successful businessman and author in Ohio. Indeed, he was the first African-American writer to cross the colour line in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly.