Marrow of Tradition

Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers. Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and African American Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Columbia University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Università degli Studi di Venezia. He is the author of Ethnic Modernism, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, and Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” His edited works include A New Literary History of America (with Greil Marcus), African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (with Glenda R. Carpio), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (with Marc Shell), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America, The Return of Thematic Criticism, Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, The Invention of Ethnicity, and the Norton Critical edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.

• Introduction by Werner SollorsCharles W. Chesnutt's Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition (1901)Acknowledgments The Text of The Marrow of TraditionContextsFAMILY BACKGROUNDFrances Richardson Keller o [Chesnutt's Parents]SELECTED LETTERSTo Walter Hines Page, Nov. 11, 1898To Walter Hines Page, Mar. 22, 1899To Booker T. Washington, Oct. 8, 1901To Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Oct. 26, 1901From Booker T. Washington, Oct. 28, 1901To Booker T. Washington, Nov. 16, 1901To Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Dec. 30, 1901To William Monroe Trotter [Jan. 1902]From W. E. B. Du Bois to Houghton Mifflin, Mar. 8, 1902To Mrs. W. B. Henderson, Nov. 11, 1905LITERARY MEMORANDACharles W. Chesnutt o [Plot Notes] Sample Pages from Chesnutt's Hand-Corrected Proof Sheets of The Marrow of TraditionESSAYSFrom The Courts and the NegroFrom What Is a White Man?The White and the BlackThe Disfranchisement of the NegroTHE 1898 WILMINGTON RIOTRebecca Latimer Felton, Alexander L. Manly, and the Daily Record EditorialJohn E. Talmadge o [Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Felton]Rebecca Latimer Felton o Mrs. Felton Speaks Biographical Sketch of Alex Manly Alex Manly o Editorial From Cause of Carolina RiotsThe North Carolina Race ConflictFrom Takes Mrs. Felton to Task for SpeechMrs. W. H. Felton's Reply to Dr. Hawthorne's AttackNov. 10, 1898: A Day of Blood North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources o Wilmington Race Riot Draft Report1898 Wilmington Riot Commission o FindingsHell Jolted Loose White Declaration of Independence Negro Rule Ended, Washington Post (Nov. 11, 1898) The Riot at Wilmington, Washington Post (Nov. 22, 1898) A Forgotten Issue, Boston Globe (Nov. 20, 1898) Is It Negro Rule? Independent (Nov. 24, 1898) The South and Negro Suffrage, New-York Tribune (Nov. 25, 1898) Portrait of Alfred Moore Waddell Alfred Moore Waddell o The Story of the Wilmington, N.C., Race Riot, Collier's Weekly (Nov. 26, 1898) Black Side of the Race Issue, Washington Post (Dec. 4, 1898) The Wilmington Riot, Cleveland Gazette (Dec. 10, 1898)Letter by a Negro Woman to President William McKinley (Nov. 13, 1898) African Americans Killed or Wounded Men Banished from Wilmington during and after the November 10 Violence The Wilmington Riot, Chesnutt's Relatives, and African American Fiction Sylvia Lyons Render o [Violence]Richard Yarborough o Violence, Manhood, and Black HeroismTHE CAKEWALKSheet Music from the 1890s Dusky Dinah: Cake-Walk and PatrolSambo at the Cake Walk Remus Takes the Cake Way Down South: Characteristic March, Cake-Walk and Two-StepCakewalk in the Contemporary Press A Negro Festival, New-York Tribune (July 20, 1870) A Cake Walk, San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 6, 1873) H. S. Keller o The Cake Walk," Puck (Sept. 7, 1887) They Walked for a Cake and Glory, Chicago Daily Tribune (Feb. 18, 1892) The Cake Walk, New York Times (Feb. 18, 1892) Took the Cake, Boston Globe (Aug. 23, 1892)CRITICISMSELECTED CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS AND EARLY ASSESSMENTSThe Race Question in Fiction, The Sunday Herald [Boston] (Oct. 27, 1901)Hamilton Wright Mabie o The New Books, The Outlook (Nov. 16, 1901)Our Holiday Book Table, Zion's Herald (Dec. 4, 1901)Mr. Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, New York Times (Dec. 7, 1901)A New Uncle Tom's Cabin, St. Paul Dispatch (Dec. 14, 1901)Katherine Glover o News in the World of Books, Atlanta Journal (Dec. 14, 1901) Charles Alexander o Our Journalist and Literary Folks, The Freeman [Indianapolis] (Dec. 28, 1901) Mr. Chesnutt and the Negro Problem, Newark Sunday News. (Dec. 29, 1901) A. E. H. o Fiction, The Chautauquan (Dec. 1901)William Dean Howells o From A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction, North American Review (Dec. 1901) T. Thomas Fortune o Note and Comment, The New York Age (July 20, 1905)Sterling A. Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee o [Racial Conflict in Fiction]RECEPTIONSylvia Lyons Render o From Charles W. Chesnutt William L. Andrews o From The Literary Career of Charles W. ChesnuttCHARACTERSJohn Edgar Wideman o Charles W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of TraditionP. Jay Delmar o Character and Structure in The Marrow of TraditionErnestine Williams Pickens o White Supremacy and Southern Reform Samina Najmi o From Janet, Polly, and Olivia: Constructs of Blackness and White Femininity in The Marrow of TraditionJUNGIAN AND FOUCAULDIAN APPROACHESMarjorie George and Richard S. Pressman o From Confronting the Shadow: Psycho-Political Repression in The Marrow of TraditionRyan Jay Friedman o From "Between Absorption and Extinction": Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical RacismPLESSY V. FERGUSON AND THE MARROW OF TRADITIONU.S. Supreme Court o Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537 (1896) Brook Thomas o The Legal Argument of Charles W. Chesnutt's NovelsTHE MARROW OF TRADITION AND HISTORYJoyce Pettis o The Literary Imagination and the Historic Event: Chesnutt's Use of History in The Marrow of TraditionJae H. Roe o From Keeping an "Old Wound" Alive: The Marrow of Tradition and the Legacy of Wilmington Eric Sundquist o From Charles Chesnutt's CakewalkREALISM, TRAGIC MULATTO, VIOLENCERyan Simmons o From Simple and Complex Discourse in The Marrow of TraditionStephen P. Knadler o From Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness Bryan Wagner o Charles Chesnutt and the Epistemology of Racial ViolenceCharles W. Chesnutt: A ChronologySelected Bibliography