Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt |
Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt
The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2001
pages 30-43
E-ISSN: 1534-1461
Print ISSN: 0038-4291
DOI: 10.1353/slj.2001.0012
William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University
Writing fiction one hundred years ago, Charles W. Chesnutt believed that America’s racial future was best embodied in himself, a mixed-race American. A light-skinned mulatto living on the color line, he argued that racial amalgamation, through passing and miscegenation, would slowly erode the rigid white-black dichotomy of America’s caste system. Eventually, he foresaw, America would become one race, as his stories of light-skinned protagonists on the color line seemed to predict. Unfortunately for his literary reputation, this racial prescription for a New America was premature. By the time of his death in 1932, the Harlem Renaissance had celebrated a New Negro who was no light-skinned assimilationist, but one who, like Langston Hughes, stood on the racial mountaintop of a proud, culturally distinct, dark-skinned self. It is now a century after Chesnutt’s first book publications, and America is changing. Racial amalgamation, according to federal statistics, occurs at a more rapid pace than ever before. From 1970 to 1990, marriages between blacks and whites rose from two percent of all marriages to six percent. The number jumped to over twelve percent by 1993 (“With This Ring”). Nearly ten percent of black men marry white women..
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Tags: Charles W. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Southern Literary Journal, William M. Ramsey, William Ramsey