Slavery Through the White-Tinted Lens of an Embedded Black Narrator: Séjour’s “The Mulatto” and Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss” as Intertexts

Abstract

One of familiar conventions of nineteenth-century southern plantation short fiction is frame narrative, featuring retrospective accounts by slaves or former slaves. origin of this form, Victor Sejour's The Mulatto, is first short story by a U.S.-born African American. (1) Set in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), The Mulatto inaugurated pattern of using an embedded slave or former slave narrator who recounts a harrowing tale of oppression, inhumanity, and psychological suffering under bondage. story was written in French and published in March 1837 issue of Parisian antislavery journal La Revue des Colonies, a monthly periodical owned and sponsored by a society of men of (O'Neill 14). (2) A free man of color, a colonial mulatto, and a native of New Orleans, Sejour migrated to Paris to continue his education and to embark on a career of successful authorship, principally a playwright, in an environment far less repressive than in antebellum South (O'Neill 1). Frances Smith Foster, in noting Sejour's achievement a playwright in France, sees this as proof of international acclaim for a writer of African descent (632). As first work to treat pattern of atrocities of slavery in plantation Americas, The Mulatto serves an intertext for subsequent works that employ an embedded African American slave or former slave a raconteur. One such text is Charles W. Chesnutt's dialect story Dave's Neckliss, originally published in Atlantic Monthly in October 1889 and acclaimed by Richard Brodhead one of [Chesnutt's] most powerful works from any phase of his career, in that it shows Chesnutt projecting both a more dignified, more capable black figure than elsewhere in Uncle Julius tales (17-18). While it seems doubtful that Chesnutt had ever read or even heard of Sejour's story, since it was not translated into English until 1995 for inclusion in Norton Anthology of African American Literature, still The Mulatto and Dave's Neckliss share key intersections. Both may be viewed within a postcolonial context in that they feature colonizers who exploit and victimize African slaves whom they regard inferior and subordinate; both exhibit freedom of African American voice; both share parallels in subject matter--psychological trauma, oppression and dehumanization of slaves, and suicides of principal African American slave characters. Most significantly, both reflect limitations experienced by black writers working within restrictive space of Euro-American literary conventions of melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt) for purpose of appealing to a largely white reading audience. To execute this, Sejour and Chesnutt employ racial tinting of embedded narrators and of protagonists of stories they recount. Both black writers assume guises of white auditors of embedded stories of their narrators, Antoine and Julius, a slave and a former slave. Adopting this stance and approach partly negates and compromises effect of what black narrators say well how they choose to present their narratives; in other words, it restricts range and credibility of their principal narrative voices through melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt), respectively. Moreover, The Mulatto and Dave's Neckliss connect in yet another way. According to Jon Smith, the literature, cultures, and identity politics of U.S. South are seen important ... because they share several traits with those of global South--a history ... of colonial plantations, race slavery ... [and] vibrant African cultural survival (125). In noting some of general similarities among geographical areas known Plantation George B. Handley generally observes, the historical patterns that characterize U.S. South also connect to a larger region of Americas ... creat[ing] a region of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean nations, Caribbean coasts of Central and South America, Brazil, and U. …