Wedded to Race: Charles Chesnutt's Stories of the Color Line

Abstract

Wellington, title character of Charles W. Chesnutt's 1899 short story Uncle Wellington's Wives, must grapple with an unusual marital problem. (1) It is problem absent from most nineteenth-century fictions regarding marriage, and yet it was confronted by thousands of those whom Chesnutt called the newly emancipated race. Wellington learns from the only colored lawyer in North Carolina that Aunt Milly, woman he had married when he was in slavery, or befo' de wah, is not his lawful (219). The lawyer informs him that although Aunt Milly be [his] wife in one sense of word, she is not so from legal point of view. Without any legal ties binding him to Aunt Milly, Wellington is free to leave her. He anticipates material benefits from his leaving and even imagines some moral ones. Along with load of legal jargon lawyer freely dispenses, he also advises Wellington not to act on his opportunity, [he has] very good wife now (219). But Wellington does not heed lawyer's advice. The news has given him a feeling of unaccustomed lightness and freedom. He had not felt so free since memorable day when he had first heard of Emancipation Proclamation (219). However, that feeling of freedom is soon curtailed with his efforts to cross color line by marrying white woman in North. Wellington learns that even though he is not legally married to Aunt Milly, he is bound to her by force more powerful than the sanction of law (219). Their attachment, based upon their shared experience of slavery, is less concrete but more profound than terms of legal Uncle Wellington's Wives is one of nine stories in Chesnutt's short story collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of Color Line (1899). As its title suggests, collection is distinguished by connections among slavery, race, and marriage that Wellington's matrimonial experiences exemplify. Like Wellington, characters of Chesnutt's Stories of Color Line exhibit remarkable ignorance regarding laws and conventions of marriage that is inevitable consequence of slavery. Chesnutt's stories function, at least in part, as way of illustrating significance of marriage to former slaves and their descendants--those who, as Ann duCille points out, generations were denied hegemonic, 'universal truth' of legal marriage. (2) Marriage, Wellington learns by abandoning his slave wife to pursue greater wealth and social status in North, is partly, and yet not simply, matter of individual freedom and choice. If multitudes of former slaves were to choose their marriage partners so as to cross color line, line itself would be eliminated over generations. But if same choice were made merely by an individual or subset of former slaves, result would be, at best, frustration and lack of progress. As Wellington finds, individual's marriage choice may incite discrimination by observers from other side of color line should he attempt to cross it. Alternatively, as Chesnutt illustrates in other Stories of Color Line, an intra-racial color line, dividing light-skinned blacks who have option of intermarriage from dark-skinned blacks who do not, may be substituted for interracial one. Yet latter possibilities are not only ones representing how, to Chesnutt, newly-won freedom of marriage is qualified by unsettling consequences. Nor, I will argue, are they even most notable ones. When former slaves decide not to cross line with their marriage choices--opting instead to secure and protect relationships formed before war, and thus to demonstrate loyalty, honor, fidelity to their slave pasts and commitment to race--Chesnutt suggests that outcome is no better. In fact, Chesnutt casts surprisingly critical eye on movement to legitimate slave marriages during Reconstruction, movement celebrated by historians of marriage and slavery alike. …