An African American Novel about White People (The Marrow of Tradition, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on The Marrow of Tradition, editor Autumn Womack discusses her background with the novel, teaching the novel, her favorite line, and her hot take on 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 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/part2/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 Canon producing, and today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Charles W. Chestnut's novel from 1901, The Marrow of Tradition. To explore this text, we welcome back its editor, Autumn Womack. In our first episode we discussed Chestnut's life and work, the historical context of his career, the Wilmington race riot, and some of the novel's characters. In this second episode we ask Autumn Womack her favorite line from the novel, her techniques to teaching The Marrow of Tradition, this novel's contemporary relevance, and so much more. 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 back to the Norton Library podcast. 

[Autumn:] Thanks for having me back; it's so good to see you again. 

[Mark:] Good to see you again. So, why don't we start with your beautiful edition of Charles W. Chestnut’s The Marrow of Tradition? And I'm looking at the front cover. Can you explain the design and the colors of this edition? Yeah so, the editors at Norton did a really wonderful job indexing the original first edition cover, which uses this exact same color scheme, which is like a mustard and orange. I think one of the things that we really wanted to do is really reference the particular historical moment when this book was published, which was really important to Chestnut and really important in African American literature, but also kind of flag a really modern interpretation of that and draw this line of connection between the past and the present, which is one of the things that the introduction is doing and one of the things that Chestnut is asking us to do. 

[Mark:] Excellent, so we're recalling the 1901 first edition of The Marrow of Tradition. Autumn, do you remember when you first read this novel? 

[Autumn:] I do remember when I first read the novel. I was in graduate school getting my master's at University of Maryland. So, I did my master’s at Maryland, my PhD at Columbia. And it was the fall 2006, and I read it in Carla Peterson's late nineteenth-century African American literature class. It came towards the end of the semester, but that was my first encounter with the novel. 

[Mark:] Did you know much about Chestnut or had you had much experience with Chestnut? 

[Autumn:] Previously I had read The House Behind the Cedars in undergrad, which is curious looking back, because I don't even think they teach it very much anymore, at least I don't. So, I had read Chestnut; I was a little bit familiar with him. I may have encountered The Conjure Tales at some point too in undergrad, but certainly The House Behind the Cedars. But I had never read The Marrow of Tradition before, so it was my first time reading the text. I had the really good fortune of reading it in the company of so many other late nineteenth-century African American novels. It was all of Pauline Hopkins, it was all of Frances Harper, it was the Dunbar. So, I was really able to think about how it was in conversation with this really exciting moment of Black novel writing. 

[Mark:] And does Chestnut figure prominently in your work? 

[Autumn:] Chestnut does figure prominently in my work now, after doing this edition. So, he doesn't really make an appearance in my first book, but the more I've been thinking with Chestnut, which happened by way of this introduction, I've really begun thinking about him as an intellectual who deserves to be thought of in relationship to – at least alongside of – folks like Du Bois and Washington and Ida B. Wells, which is really kind of the way we think about Black political and social thinkers and writers and reformers in the late nineteenth century. But Chestnut was really prolific; he wrote so many novels, so many speeches, so many essays. So, I began to think about him in the company of those kind of figures that we think of, or that we tend to recall more, at least more readily. 

[Mark:] Autumn, we touched on this somewhat in the first episode, but I'm wondering if there are common challenges to reading this book, if there are difficulties that you see students have when they first encounter The Marrow of Tradition. 

[Autumn:] Yeah so, my experience is that students really love The Marrow of Tradition when they read it, both undergraduates and graduates. I mean it's just a good story. It's captivating; it has a great plot. But for those same reasons it's really difficult because there is so much happening in this novel. In the introduction to the novel, which he published in the Cleveland World, Chestnut describes the way that it braids together all these threads of interest, and there are five thousand threads, like he then goes on to list them, and there's a murder, and an attempted rape, and almost lynching, and a race riot, and maybe marriage, and there's deception, and there's all of these, a lost will, sisters that are reunited. And so, it's hard for students, I think, to know what to prioritize. There are those plot questions but then there are these bigger kind of conceptual questions. He's staging the tension between old and new, past and present, different kinds of economic structures, so I don't know that students always know where exactly they should focus their attention. The other thing that's difficult is that this is such a particularly late nineteenth-century novel, and early twentieth, I should say. And by that I mean he is making reference to all of these precise and specific cultural moments and objects that those readers would have recognized and been familiar with. And they would have been right there with him, whether it's a newspaper editorial, a kind of cultural moment, a political belief, an election, they would have known exactly what he was talking about. It's really current in that way. But for twenty-first-century readers, who are getting further and further away from the nineteenth century, I think both physically but also kind of culturally and technologically, it's hard to know what he's referencing. So, I think it just feels, as an object, I think it feels foreign to students. They don't know what he's referencing without a deep, deep knowledge of the nineteenth century, so that makes for an exciting teaching challenge. But I think it makes it a tricky read. 

[Mark:] Did the various aspects of the novel and the various concerns and emphases, do they ultimately cohere or are there a lot of anarchic elements to this novel? 

[Autumn:] Some of them cohere, some of them don't. So, I think one thing that happens is that the novel leaves open-ended a lot of kind of philosophical questions, but also plot lines. There's not a lot of resolution here. The end of the novel is – we're at an impasse. And I think that can be frustrating for readers. That probably was frustrating for nineteenth-century readers. But I think part of what Chestnut is doing there is he's inviting readers actually to participate in this moment, as readers. He's trying to activate a different kind of responsibility on the reader, to do something, without solving everything for the reader. 

[Mark:] Now I'm going to ask you a question that's utterly impossible to answer. But in this entire novel, do you have a favorite line? 

[Autumn:] I do have a favorite line. I'll give a shorter one, because he has some beautifully long sentences in here. So, this line comes, I guess, three quarters of the way through the novel. So this line is given to us by the elder Tom Delamere – there's a younger one and an older one. And he is talking to his long-term servant, Sandy, who is being wrongly charged with murder and he's about to be lynched. And Sandy is giving him this long, long, long history of how he got to where he is, and when Tom is asking him, did you do it, what happened, he's giving this long answer, and Tom interrupts him and says, why are you talking so much about the past? “Let’s get back to the present.” And that line to me is so beautifully complex. It's so short, it's so perfectly executed, from a writer's standpoint. But I think what it also is doing is announcing this really kind of proto-modernist relationship to time. What does it mean to return to the moment that we are standing in right now? It's a totally different relationship to time. It kind of upends this fluid, start-to-finish teleology or temporality that we think of as being the backbone of the historical novel. And so, I love it as a way and invitation to think about how this novel is also theorizing history and time, and those kinds of lines happen throughout the text, but that one “let’s get back to the present,” and I think I might be butchering it just a bit, but that's one of my favorite lines. 

[Mark:] “Let us get back to the present.”  

[Autumn:] “Let us –,” which is even more interesting because then it becomes like a collective action. Like let us get back to – so the idea that the present is actually something that you can leave and return to is just a different way of – and I think a really modernist way – of thinking about literary form but also temporality in literary form. 

[Mark:] And in the context of the novel, it has the notion of the old South and the new South and then the racial implications of that, so it's really totally fascinating, and so I love what you write about that in your introduction. 

[Autumn:] Yeah and they're all just in many ways trying to return to this present that has already passed right, and so that also causes a lot of anxiety for all of these characters. 

[Mark:] Well Autumn, this might be a related question, and I'm certainly not trying to foist another favorite sentence onto you, but I think the title itself, The Marrow of Tradition, is kind of interesting and mysterious. How do you read that and how does that set us up for the narrative? 

[Autumn:] Yeah, I mean in so many ways this novel is about different kinds of traditions and competing definitions of tradition. Is it familial tradition? Is it cultural tradition? What's kind of the basis for tradition? And what the white characters, in particular, are wrestling with is how do we make sense of the pre-Civil War, pre-emancipation conception of tradition, which was all about inheritance and bloodlines – you inherit from fathers, in the case of white people, in the case of black individuals, you inherit from the mother. All of that gets thrown into crisis, at least ostensibly, after the Civil War and after Reconstruction and the fail of Reconstruction. So, I think one of the things that Chestnut is charging the readers with thinking through, in relationship to the novel, is where does tradition lie? Is it in the blood? How does it get passed down? How does it get inherited? When does it fall away? When does it kind of evaporate? And not for nothing, this is fiction. I mean, he could have written a historical text. Before he published this, he had just finished writing the biography of Frederick Douglass. So, he could have written a history, or historical, nonfictional account of the Wilmington race riots, or racial massacre, I should say. But I think he's also pointing out that this fiction of tradition is a fiction, or this idea of this kind of tradition. But I think the question he's really asking is, what is the root of it? Where does it lie? How does it grow? Does it fester? Is it visible? Is it invisible? And so, that's it. That opens up a lot of different pathways for reading through the novel, as well.  

[Mark:] You mentioned that you recently reread the novel in order to teach it. What teaching techniques have you found to be particularly successful in imparting this novel to current students? 

[Autumn:] Yeah, so, I've had some different success with this novel. The last time I taught it, or one of the last times I taught it, I taught it in a class that's on histories of resistance and revolution. And it's a literature class, and we think about all different kinds of articulations and expressions of resistance, so aesthetic, formal, geographic. And so, this text I teach alongside Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends; we’re thinking about the fictionalization of real life, of uprisings and riots. And so, I have students actually find some of the cultural objects that Chestnut's referencing in the text. So, it might be a newspaper article, it might be a census report, it might be a statistical study, and I have them read that kind of archival object in relationship to the fictional representation of it. And one of the questions we're asking is, why fiction? Why did Chestnut choose to fictionalize it? What does embedding this historical object in a fictional fabric afford? So, that's really useful because it gets at a question of the utility of fiction in the nineteenth century but also imagination and invention and the relationship between the archive and the novel. And then, for the final project for that class, I had students do a mapping project, where they mapped, I think using like story maps or something, they mapped the real Wilmington race riot, all the locations that they could find from news coverage. And then they mapped and plotted how Chestnut imagined it, and we saw points of intersection and points of divergence, and we really had a beautiful conversation, and I think really generative about what Chestnut's story opened up, what it left behind, what it imagined out, so that was really, really, really fun. And then they had their little archival objects floating around; that was great, so that's been a really useful way. 

[Mark:] Autumn, we invite our Norton Library editors to offer us a hot take about their book. So, do you have something counterintuitive to say about The Marrow of Tradition that you think flies in the face of what most people say about this work? 

[Autumn:] I don't know if it's a totally hot take, and I don't know if it flies in the face, but one of my big readings of the novel is that this is an African American novel that's actually about white people, which is different from a racially ambiguous novel. Like Dunbar wrote all these novels that were cast with characters that were neither designated as Black or white. This is not that, but it is an African American novel that is about whiteness. We might even say, maybe another hot take, some people, a lot of people, read the end of the novel as kind of hopeful. I do not. I think it's quite pessimistic. 

[Mark:] Those are excellent. Has The Marrow of Tradition ever been adapted or repurposed since its publication in a way that we might want to be aware of? Because they made a movie out of The House Behind the Cedars, didn't they? But I don’t think there’s anything –  

[Autumn:] And The Conjure Tales, oddly. 

[Mark:] and The Conjure Tales. Anything with The Marrow of Tradition? 

[Autumn:] Nothing prominent. 

[Mark:] Well, can we at least explore why such an iconic novel wouldn't have an afterlife in different forms the way so many other works have? Could you see this being adapted into a movie, for instance? 

[Autumn:] I could see it being adapted to a movie. I think that it would take a really kind of amazing director to imagine an adaptation that is not a strict adaptation of the book.  Which is to say, this would be a film without a plot, even though there is so much plot. So, I think that would be a challenge. This is just off the top of my head, but I think it poses a similar challenge that was posed by The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which James Weldon Johnson wanted to adapt into a film. I think it's really hard to filmically visualize what essentially in The Marrow of Tradition is kind of the atmosphere of white supremacy. That is the antagonist, and I think that that would be tricky, if we're staying kind of true to the feeling, the ethos, of the film. I do think it's interesting that there has not been, though, a fictional, I mean, a filmic, representation or a narration of the Wilmington race riots, that I know of. That, to me, seems like maybe it's in the pipeline. I can see this being a miniseries that might be interesting.  

[Mark:] Ah, that would allow you to track the various plots and areas of emphases? 

[Autumn:] It's very cinematic, and yet it kind of exceeds, I think, the two-hour movie. I think a miniseries might work. I also don't think that every book needs to be adapted. So I would say no. 

[Mark:] So, what about music? Is there a playlist or are there songs that The Marrow of Tradition invites us to think about? Yeah so, one way that I actually teach this book is I teach it with Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit as kind of an intro. This vector of lynching is kind of all over this text from the environment of the South, this like heavy, sticky scent of magnolia trees that the novel opens with, which are, of course, kind of a symbolic reference to the trees that lynched individuals were hanged from. So, I think that's a really kind of wonderful way to think about the atmosphere of this text, which Chestnut’s trying to capture. There's kind of this sensory overload, especially in the first chapter of the novel, and really throughout, so I think I would put that on there. There's also, I don't know what it would be, but there's also these moments where there's a lot happening. It's really fast-paced, certain people have to get places, and it's kind of chaotic and frenetic, so maybe, I don't know, like Nicholas Briel, the person who often does soundtracks for Barry Jenkins. That might be good. Something like that, like there's a frenzy that needs to be conveyed in us. 

[Mark:] Okay, that's great. So, you mentioned Strange Fruit, and I wanted to ask you about a couple of your notes to the Norton Library edition. So, of all the notes that you write, one of the ones that I really focused on was your description of lynch law, and this would be to chapter twenty-two, which is called “How Not to Prevent a Lynching.” And you go into some depth about the context of lynch law and the practice of lynching, and I wonder what would be helpful for us to know about lynching with respect to this novel? 

[Autumn:] Yeah so, lynching is kind of a part of what I've been describing as kind of the cultural atmosphere that this book captures and conveys and comes into focus against. And so, Chestnut's writing in the period when extra-legal racial violence was at its peak, after the end of presidential or radical Reconstruction, KKK activity spiked and alongside it, lynching. And at the same time there became a number of countless activists, reformers who sought to draw public attention to really the arbitrariness of lynch law. So, the irony that I wanted to point out is lynch law is not a real law, but it was such kind of an arbitrary, unchecked practice that the law did not actually curtail, that really there was no logic to it. People could be, as Ida B. Well’s said, lynched for everything and anything and nothing at all. There could be this false cry of rape, which was often the main trigger for calling for a lynching, but it could be anything. Any kind of social transgression was or could be means for extra-legal violence, which often took the shape of lynching. So, it produced a certain kind of anxiety that was just kind of in the atmosphere. I keep using that word, but I think it's really important for thinking through Chestnut. And so, what I love about the phrase lynch law is nothing at all, but what I think the phrase captures is the arbitrariness of the legal system and its unwillingness to protect black life and its willingness to protect perpetrators of white supremacist violence and, really, anti-Black violence and racialized violence. And so, this comes up again and again and again in the novel, we see the ease with which lynching is called for or dismissed, the ease with which perpetrators get galvanized and really think that they are acting for the law. So, one of the things about lynch law is ‘we, as kind of vigilante renegades, are protecting our citizens in a way that the actual law never can,’ and of course this is all a fiction. 

[Mark:] Can you say a few words about the way Chestnut describes the actual activity? Is he unsparing, as a realist writer? Does he show the ghastly elements of it? Does he spare details? How about the actual activity? 

[Autumn:] So, we don't actually get a lynching here. There's almost lynching. The chapter is called “How Not to Prevent a Lynching,” and the lynching actually ends up being prevented. But what Chestnut does not hold back on is describing the monstrosity of the mob as they are gearing up for the lynching. So, there could be a way that he does stage a lynching, many nineteenth-century novels did, and he, in a way that James Weldon Johnson does, depicts the scene of lynching as this scene of sensory overload. Like Johnson talks about the smells and the scent and the sound and Chestnut’s like ‘actually, what's worth focusing our attention to is the animalistic nature of this mob.’ So, that becomes what we are repulsed by. It's supposed to activate our senses in a different way. So, he pulls back on actually spot lighting the scene of a brutalized Black individual and instead spotlights the brutality of the racial imagination. 

[Mark:] Finally Autumn, I'm also wondering, we're reading this in 2024. And can you say anything about the contemporary relevance of this novel, as opposed to reading it when it was published, or even, let's say, fifty years ago. What is it about reading it today? 

[Autumn:] Yeah so, I think it feels, sadly, more relevant today in 2024 even than when I wrote the introduction in 2021 and 2022. So, one of the things that this book asks us to think about is white supremacy as an all-encompassing force that influences and impacts everybody: white people, Black people, everybody. So, we often think about white supremacy, and we think about the kind of victims, for lack of a better word, of white supremacy as people of color, but Chestnut really says, ‘actually white supremacy is killing white people more than, or as much as, anybody else.’ And that's a very twenty-first-century way – I mean, there's a book by a sociologist called Dying of Whiteness, which is kind of making the same claim. The book also narrates the makings of a political coup, which we have seen happening, or attempted to happen, in the recent past. And so, I think there's a way that Chestnut is inviting us to see the ways that the past continues to restage itself, that we're not really far away from the moment that we think we're so far away from. And so, for those reasons, I think it's now more than ever, the text is worth reading. 

[Mark:] Autumn Womack has joined us to talk about Charles W. Chestnut’s The Marrow of Tradition. Thank you so much, Autumn, great to see you. 

[Autumn:] It's been so fun. 

[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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