Carterets, Millers, and Massacres (The Marrow of Tradition, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on The Marrow of Tradition, we welcome editor Autumn Womack to discuss Charles W. Chestnut's biography, his ambitions in writing the novel, the historical realities depicted in it, and some of its major characters.

Autumn Womack is an Assistant Professor in the departments of African American Studies and English at Princeton University, where she specializes in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literary culture. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (2022).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of  The Marrow of Tradition, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/marrow-of-tradition-nl.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by The Marrow of Tradition: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1y5KkGWyq43LrUTupCytgX?si=12ff06aa1f954b76.

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Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/themarrowoftradition/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W.  Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part one of our two episodes devoted to Charles Chestnut's novel The Marrow of Tradition. To explore this text, we welcome its editor, Autumn Womack. In this first episode we discuss Chestnut's life and work and the historical context of his career, how he used the Wilmington Riot as the basis of this novel, as well as some of the characters who we’ll meet in The Marrow of Tradition. Autumn Womack is an assistant professor in the departments of African American studies and English at Princeton University, where she specializes in African American literary culture at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930. Autumn Womack, welcome to the Norton Library podcast. 

[Autumn:] Thank you for having me; it's great to be here. 

[Mark:] It is so great to have you here to discuss Charles W. Chestnut’s The Marrow of Tradition. So Autumn, maybe we can start with the writer himself. Who was Charles W. Chestnut?  

[Autumn:] So, Charles Chestnut was an African American writer. He was born in 1858 in Ohio. His family, both his mother and his father, were from North Carolina, Fayetteville, North Carolina. They left right before the Civil War to move to Ohio, had Chestnut there, and then after the Civil War, they moved back to Ohio. His family really understood Fayetteville to be their ancestral home, so Chestnut was raised in North Carolina. Many of his works are set in North Carolina, namely, The Marrow of Tradition, and he was really of this generation of African American writers who were born either right on the cusp of emancipation or right after emancipation and really grew up in the midst of a reconstruction and post-reconstruction South. So, what that meant for Chestnut is he ended up attending all of these schools that were developed and funded by the Freedmen's Bureau. He ended up teaching at these schools. He eventually went on to become a legal stenographer. He passed the Ohio State Bar. He moved his family back to Ohio, and he became one of the most prolific, in the sense of quantity and also fame, writers in the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.  

[Mark:] Chestnut's background, or his ancestry, how much do we know about that and how much does that affect the way we read his work? 

[Autumn:] Chestnut is of mixed-race ancestry. Both of his parents are mixed-race. He is, what many would say in the nineteenth century, he could, quote unquote, “pass” for white. So, he was phenotypically – could look white, whatever that means in the context of the world, and in the nineteenth century it had particular kinds of meanings. But Chestnut deeply identified as an African American writer and man and individual, but what this meant for his work is that, especially in his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, he really wrote a lot about these questions of racial, quote unquote, “purity.” So, he would often cast in his books these mixed-race characters who were really wrestling with the relationship between Black and white ancestry. And in the time, people really had questions about what it meant to be Black. Is it a question of blood? Is it a question of culture? And so, these were issues that he mapped out in his books and, one might say, often also mapped out in his own life. 

[Mark:] So, The House Behind the Cedars, to me, is the work that I most associate with Chestnut, but what about during his lifetime? Was The Marrow of Tradition more popular or equally popular? How do you assess that within his bibliography? 

[Autumn:] Yeah, it's a great question. So, The Marrow of Tradition was his second published novel. The House Behind the Cedars was his first published novel, I believe in 1899 or 1900. The Marrow of Tradition was 1901, but even before that, if we go back a little bit in time, as early as like the 1880s, maybe even the late 70s, Chestnut really articulated in journals and letters this desire to be a writer. He really wanted to be a novelist in particular, and a writer in general. It was his dream to be an artist in that way, which is a little bit different from many of the African American writers in the late nineteenth century. A lot of them saw or understood writing as kind of a duty or a political project, but Chestnut really understood himself as identity – writer, novelist, artist. So, he began writing short stories and essays, and he gave speeches often. So, his first published works were The Conjure Tales, which were then published as The Conjure Woman. Then he published the first novel, The House Behind the Cedars. In between The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, he published a short biography of Frederick Douglass, which is a little-known text. I've been doing some work on it; I think it's fascinating. And then we get The Marrow of Tradition. The Marrow of Tradition is different in many ways from The House Behind the Cedars. The House Behind the Cedars is really replete with these nineteenth-century conventions of melodrama and sentimentality and the mixed-race protagonist and there's a love story and, you know, it's really kind of a syrupy – on the surface at least – a syrupy domestic melodrama. The Marrow of Tradition switches gear and is really, I would argue, and I think many others agree, kind of an exercise in a different kind of historical fiction and realist novel. And so, it's trying to be the great book, that he saw kind of an antecedent to this as being Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin or something like that. He wanted this to be a book that, in his words, both entertained and was also doing some political work. So, it has a different kind of look and feel than some of his other texts. 

[Mark:] I think that's an interesting aspect of this is: to what extent is this novel didactic or a polemic, in that he's writing it because he's trying to advance some kind of political cause that we know he believed in? Or, as you say, is he just trying to write a good story, independent of the social element of it?  

[Autumn:] And I think for him, it was both. So, this was really the thing that he was trying to perfect in the announcement for the book that he published. He describes it as this formula that he was really trying to master. And the perfect formula would be a work that's wildly successful and entertaining but also that is offering some social commentary and, essentially, that will get people to act or see or do differently. And it's a really tricky balance even now, if we think about it. It's very rare that we have a show – if we go to TV, or even a book – that is both wildly entertaining but that is also doing some kind of political work. Like Game of Thrones: not quite sure what political work it would be doing, right? But then, if we think of something like a documentary, is that going to have the same kind of viewership as Game of Thrones? So, he was really like “how do I do this,” and for him, the model was Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was a runaway hit, had so many different kind of lives after its publication date, and also was still credited with changing how people thought or felt about slavery. So, that was the groove he was trying to live within. Unfortunately, it did not land the way he anticipated. So, the book did not sell very well at all. The publishers, Houghton Mifflin and Company, major publishing house, they really had high sale projections for this, and it didn't even begin to meet them, within the first year, had really dismal sales. But the book was not poorly reviewed or received. So, there were some individuals who didn't quite get what he was trying to do; there were some individuals who thought the book was a little bit too negative or almost too real; and then there were some who loved it, But it just, as we know, a, quote unquote, “good” book is not always a bestseller, and that was what he was hoping for.  

[Mark:] And writing with that book as the model and as the template of what you were hoping for and falling way short, did The Marrow of Tradition – if we think of the twentieth century – did this ever fall out of favor? Has this been read consistently? Was this the type of book that was sort of rediscovered during the Civil Rights Movement, or has this really always been kind of a benchmark of African American literature? 

[Autumn:] It has come in and out of popularity. And I think it has the life cycle of many late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century novels in that it went out of print in the 1920s-1930s, didn't really come back into print until the late 1960s-early 1970s, when there was a big push to bring back these early twentieth-century texts, bring them back into circulation. And then really in the, I would say, the 80s and the 90s, it caught the critical attention of scholars. I think the thing that's interesting, or has always been exciting, about this book is that there's so much happening in it. There are so many different threads that individuals can tap on to. And so, one kind of thread that has been really exciting, or had been really exciting and interesting for scholars, is that there are these two different, seemingly two different, kinds of political visions that are pitched in the text. So, there's kind of a radical activism and then a more passive accommodationist stance. These two Black characters are kind of understood as representing these two different wholes. So, there's a way that the text has been understood as either a way to think through nineteenth-century political views like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois or even twentieth-century ones like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. So, there's a way that the text has kind of been seen as a way to think through some different visions for Black political futures. But the text, I think, it hasn't, because it is doing so much, it also hasn't found its way into the canon in the same kind of way as maybe some other nineteenth-century works and writers. 

[Mark:] This novel, and your edition refers to The Marrow of Tradition as a historical novel, which is an interesting designation and gets me thinking about the overlap between fiction and nonfiction. How do you think that balance is struck by Chestnut, and how would that affect the way that we approach the novel? 

[Autumn:] So, when I describe it as historical fiction, what is leading me to that designation is the way that Chestnut is drawing part of the plot from real historical events. So, there are a couple here, most notably it's the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina race massacre, alternately called a race riot or a political coup. And the other is the 1899 race riots in New Orleans. So, he describes, kind of, these two events, or two events that kind of melded together. But I also think it's historical in so far as Chestnut is really pulling from the cultural atmosphere – newspapers, press reports, photographs, statistical studies – and embedding them into the text to create for his readers in 1901 a portrait, a startlingly familiar portrait, of the social world, and for us as twenty-first-century readers, a startlingly crystal clear portrait of this historical moment. So really, everywhere you turn in the novel you are seeing some kind of nod to a real cultural moment, and of course he's building out these worlds around it, but I think he's doing something different with the genre of historical fiction. He's not, kind of, re-narrating a long arc of history. This is not even like a Dickens novel, that's like the life of a character over time. It's not a history of an individual; it's not a history of a civilization. But he is putting a spotlight on every corner of this distinct historical moment, which I think is a pretty Illuminating way to think about the fictional work that he's doing well. 

[Mark:] Well, to think about that, based on what we were just saying about Uncle Tom's Cabin, which treats this same subject more romantically. Maybe that is why it didn't meet – the public wasn't ready for this kind of mass adulation for such a realistic depiction of the racial atmosphere. 

[Autumn:] Yeah, and I think the other thing that's quite different about The Marrow of Tradition, and which I try to underscore in my introduction, is that even as, or especially as, Chestnut is writing about Black-white race relations, in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century, he's not actually as interested in inviting his readers to figure out how Black individuals contributed to this charged environment, or what Du Bois would call “the problem of the color line.” He actually is interested in really shining a light on white people's participation in this dynamic, which is different than any of the other texts that were published in that time period and certainly different than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Of course, in Uncle Tom's Cabin whiteness and white sentimentality and white characters are at the center of that story, but in The Marrow of Tradition, Chestnut is really piecing apart the workings of white supremacy, and I was rereading it recently to teach, and we really don't get an introduction, a robust introduction, to any of the Black characters until nearly a third of the way into the text. So, he's really casting this race drama as a problem of and for the white characters in the text. And so, that, I think, also would have been a totally different kind of ideological orientation for readers. What does it mean to reframe the, quote unquote, “problem” of Black life actually as a problem of white life? And that is different. 

[Mark:] Autumn, in your introduction you describe the 1898 Wilmington race riot, and I think just the phrase race riot may give a false impression about what historically actually happened. So, maybe could you unpack that just a little bit for us? And when we see the phrase race riot, what might have actually transpired? 

[Mark:] I'm glad you brought that up because there are many different ways that this moment is described. Sometimes it's a massacre, sometimes it's a coup, political coup, then often the designation that I think we've inherited is race riot. So, the 1898 Wilmington race riot began when a group of white Democrats in North Carolina were really disgruntled, and more than disgruntled, angry, and feeling proprietary over the political landscape in the 1880s and 1890s in North Carolina. So this is, of course, after radical Reconstruction, one of the things that happened is a lot of Republicans, Black and white, were voted into office. This was no different in North Carolina. Wilmington, which in the book, it's fictionalized as Wellington. But Wilmington had a large Black population and a particularly large Black middle class, so there were a number of Black representatives voted into office. Even more alarming for white Democrats was the emergence of this, quote unquote, “Fusionist” party, which was an interracial party that was bringing together disenfranchised Black and white workers and the working class. So, this really was an exercise in interracial political coalition, and they gained leadership in Wilmington, and they had a bunch of individuals in a political office in different kinds of state supreme court and things like that. So, the southern Democrats wanted their power back, and they staged a really strategic and drawn out plan to get power back. So, this included running a bunch of newspaper ads kind of calling for white supremacy, white power, taking back the vote, we have to overturn the Fusionist party, disenfranchising Black voters at the polls, running kind of incendiary editorials in the press, holding rallies, things that are not all that unfamiliar to us in the twenty-first century. So, when the November election came around, white Democrats did take back many of the seats from the Fusionist party, however they, the Fusionists, still held control in Wilmington after the November election. And so, this is when we have our first and only successful political coup in the US. So, the white Democrats went into Wilmington and said we're going to take back control, and this group of, I think it was like twenty-five white men, go and they take back the political office. They kick out the mayor of Wilmington, and they take over. At the very same time, they really take aim at the middle-class Black community, and the Black community at large, really, in Wilmington, and they organized a successful racial massacre. And at the heart of their plan, or at the center of it, is this editorial by this Black writer and journalist Alexander Manly. To galvanize supporters around this white supremacist movement, they use this editorial written by Alexander Manly as kind of the rallying cry to get people inspired to join their white supremacist call. And Manly's editorial was so activating for individuals because what he said in the editorial was, ‘listen, the main charge for justifying lynching is always rape of a white woman by a Black man, but this is a false charge, because so many white women enter into these interracial sexual, intimate relationships willingly.’ So, they reprinted this editorial and said, ‘see this is what's wrong with the world.’ And they galvanized hundreds of individuals to attack the Black community and take back political control of Wilmington. 

[Mark:] Autumn, what strikes me about your explanation, you're using the word strategic and brainchild, I think when we hear the word riot, we think of chaos and it's just something that just exploded. But this was all political strategy, in the most violent way 

[Autumn:] All political strategy. It was all mapped out. In fact, interestingly, the word riot was actually used by one of the organizers of the massacre when he was kind of defending their decisions and defending the moves that they made afterwards. He published this editorial, and he described it as a riot, one of these white men who organized it. And part of what's happening there is that he's trying to recast this entire massacre, this entire political coup, as this kind of eruptive, impromptu violent outburst that would then cast blame on the Black individuals, cast them as the main incendiary. So, he did this, again, strategic rhetorical maneuver where he reframed the entire narrative around this racial massacre and cast it as a riot, which totally removed the blame from them, in a particular kind of way. I think we've inherited that in the twenty-first century. So, one of the things that's interesting is that this book invites us to think about the racial dynamics of a race riot in quite a different way. 

[Mark:] I'm wondering if we could talk about some of the characters that Chestnut presents to us and maybe if you could just give us a thumbnail for how we could think about them: if they represent something or if there's a moment or description that you want us to bear in mind as we approach the novel. And can we start with Major Carteret? 

[Autumn:] Major Carteret is one of the centerpieces of the novel. We're introduced to him in the earliest pages, and he is the brainchild, or one of the brain children, of this race massacre. So, he grew up in North Carolina. He represents, kind of, this fallen aristocratic plantation class. He married another former plantation woman, from the plantation elite. And so, they really symbolize in this text this generation of white Southerners who so desperately don't want to give up the past but are being forced into a different kind of present, a political present, an economic present, and a racial present. So, he has a wife who was a plantation heiress, and the book begins as they are having their first child, and there's a question about whether this child is going to survive. What that does from the outset is it frames this the Carteret family as a family that's really always wrestling with, or really struggling with, what their place is going to be in the future, and if their child makes it. The child is constantly confronting death. What will be the place of the Old South in the future? He's a newspaper editor, and his newspaper becomes the place that really galvanizes Wellington in the novels, galvanizes them around this white supremacist plan. 

[Mark:] Is Chestnut inviting us to sympathize with him if he's having difficulties with his child? 

[Autumn:] No, we are not invited to sympathize with Carteret at all. Instead, I would argue that we are made to see him as a desperate character who is clinging on to this hollow idea of a past that is just no longer relevant, and to really the hollow idea of white supremacy. So, through Carteret we really see the fiction of white supremacy, in just how hard one has to work to convince themselves of this fiction and convince everyone else of this fiction. So over and over and over again we see Carteret kind of manipulating the press. We see him kind of rationalizing to himself and others why white supremacy everywhere, which is his call to action, is just kind of an empty plan that has no teeth. So, we actually see him as quite a pathetic character, I would argue. His wife, I think we are invited to sympathize with her in a different way. Her strand of the story is actually what links Carteret to the other main family centerpiece, which are the Millers. So, the Millers are a Black family. Dr. Miller has a Black Hospital in town, so he represents kind of this Black middle class, educated, post-Civil War generation, kind of the new, I would argue. And his wife is the half-sister of Olivia Carteret, Major Carteret's wife. She's a Black woman; they have the same father. Her mother was a former slave to her father, and Olivia Carteret, her mother died, so they are half-sisters. So, there is also this kind of sisterly tension and this desire for or, question about, interracial reconciliation and a reconciliation with the past and the present that gets funneled through this sisterly relationship. 

[Mark:] How about Tom Delamere? 

[Autumn:] You're going to begin to see how much of a tangled web this cast of characters is, which is another reason, I think, that readers struggle with the book. There is so much going on, and every kind of character is in this book. It's really almost like the greatest hits of nineteenth-century tropes. So, Tom Delamere. We are introduced to him as kind of a playboy heir who also is really morally corrupt. He is wooing one of the young heiresses in the town, who happens to be a niece of the Carterets, but he has a really interesting relationship in the novel to questions of fraud and questions of Blackness. So, he is kind of this perpetual gambler, always kind of wanting to make more money, kind of framed as dishonest, and he also seems to enjoy/exploit dressing up in blackface and performing in cakewalks, which were these popular – and apparently, my students tell me, still are popular forms of entertainment throughout the American South. In particular, what my students told me, that they had cakewalks in high school in Texas. So there are a number of scenes where he impersonates one of the Black characters, Sandy, and gets away with it, performs in blackface, and he's so convincing that people take him to be a, quote unquote, “real” Black individual. And he actually ends up using this kind of racial masquerade as a way to steal and murder, without giving away too much, as a cover for criminal activity. 

[Mark:] Autumn, maybe the last person that I'd love to hear you say a few words about is William Miller. 

[Autumn:] William Miller, yeah so William Miller is the head of the other leading family in the novel. So, if we have the Carterets and we have the Millers, they're kind of mirroring each other in every sense in the novel, and then the other characters kind of refract different parts of that mirror, I would argue. So, Miller: he comes back to Wilmington, his father was a successful stevedore. He comes back after having been educated as a doctor and lived in Europe, and he opens this Black hospital. And so, what Miller is really signaling in this text, I would argue, is this particular kind of articulation of, quote unquote, the “new negro”, which is a figure, which is an ideology, which is a trope, some would say, that really circulated in this late nineteenth century, early twentieth century moment. And so, he is representing a different kind of future: educated, all about uplifting the community, all about service, and his idea of political action is through work and service and institution building. So, there are particular moments in the novel where he is asked to participate in different kinds of political action, whether that be direct violence, whether that be protests, and he really holds a line and suggests that doing work – working in hospital, hiring people, caring for the sick – is a political strategy, and that really gets tested throughout the novel. So, in many ways he's also our kind of moral center of gravity who is the foil to Carteret, who has a constantly shifting moral compass, and those two moral compasses come to a head at the end of the novel. 

[Mark:] Autumn Womack, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast. 

[Autumn:] Thank you for having me. It was really fun to talk about this book. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chestnut, with an introduction by Autumn Womack, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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