The House Behind the Cedars

by Charles W. Chesnutt

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  I - A Stranger from South Carolina

  II - An Evening Visit

  III - The Old Judge

  IV - Down the River

  V - The Tournament

  VI - The Queen of Love and Beauty

  VII - ‘Mid New Surroundings

  VIII - The Courtship

  IX - Doubts and Fears

  X - The Dream

  XI - A Letter and a Journey

  XII - Tryon Goes to Patesville

  XIII - An Injudicious Payment

  XIV - A Loyal Friend

  XV - Mine Own People

  XVI - The Bottom Falls Out

  XVII - Two Letters

  XVIII - Under the Old Regime

  XIX - God Made Us All

  XX - Digging Up Roots

  XXI - A Gilded Opportunity

  XXII - Imperative Business

  XXIII - The Guest of Honor

  XXIV - Swing Your Partners

  XXV - Balance All

  XXVI - The Schoolhouse in the Woods

  XXVII - An Interesting Acquaintance

  XXVIII - The Lost Knife

  XXIX - Plato Earns Half a Dollar

  XXX - An Unusual Honor

  XXXI - In Deep Waters

  XXXII - The Power of Love

  XXXIII - A Mule and a Cart

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  THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS

  CHARLES WADDELL CHESNUTT (1858-1932) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where his family had moved from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to seek better economic opportunities. Shortly after the Civil War they returned to Fayetteville, where Chesnutt spent most of his childhood and young adulthood. He taught in local public schools, eventually returning to Cleveland and being admitted to the bar. He established a legal stenography business, yet found himself strongly attracted to writing fiction. He published two collections of short stories, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, in 1899 and three novels (none of which was more than moderately successful), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). Unable to support his family through writing, he returned to the profession of legal stenography.

  DONALD B. GIBSON, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of The Fiction of Stephen Crane, The Politics of Literary Expression: Essays on Major Black Writers, The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero, and numerous articles on American literature, especially black American literature. He is the editor of Five Black Writers: Essays on Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Le Roi Jones, Modern Black Poets, and W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks.

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  First published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin & Co. 1900

  This edition with an introduction and notes by Donald B. Gibson published in Penguin Books 1993

  Introduction and notes copyright ©Donald B. Gibson, 1993

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 1858-1932.

  The house behind the cedars/by Charles W. Chesnutt;

  introduction and notes by Donald B. Gibson p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-17442-5

  PS1292.C6H68 1988

  813’.4—dc 19

  88-9999

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  INTRODUCTION

  On more than one occasion Charles Waddell Chesnutt distinguished between a group of black people who were to him “true” Negroes and another he called “people of mixed blood,” those with whom he personally identified. Chesnutt himself could indeed have passed for white, had he chosen to (as the two main characters in TheHouseBehind the Cedars do). In his diary entry for July 31, 1875, at the age of seventeen, Chesnutt (sounding for all the world like the character John Walden Warwick in the novel) indeed declares that he has on occasion passed and will again:Twice today, or oftener, I have been taken for “white.” At the pond this morning one fellow said he’d “be damned if there was any nigger blood in me.” At Coleman’s I passed. On the road an old chap, seeing the trunks, took me for a student coming from school. I believe I’ll leave here and pass anyhow, for I am as white as any of them.

  In the novel the young John, in his conversational exchange with the wise and liberal antebellum slaveholder Judge “Straight” about his own [John’s] racial identity, makes clear his sense of who he is racially:“You want to be a lawyer.... You are aware, of course, that you are a Negro?”

  “I am white,” replied the lad, turning back his sleeve and holding out his arm, “and I am free, as all my people were before me....”

  “You are black, my lad, and you are not free....”

  “A Negro is black; I am white, and not black.”

  “Black as ink, my lad.... One drop of black blood makes the whole man black.”

  Chesnutt’s point is that at work in the dialogue there are conflicting definitions of what constitutes race. John bases his judgment on “ocular proof”: What is true about racial definition is based on what is observable, what can be seen, evaluated, known, through the eyes. The judge draws initially upon the doctrine of “the custom of the country,” the notion that the truth of racial identity (as well as other legal matters) depends upon the practices, the customs, the conventions, of the time and place. That is, the judge actually misinforms him in the dialogue following, when he says that the laws of the neighboring state, South Carolina, define John’s racial category differently:“Then I need not be black,” the boy cried, with sparkling eyes.

  “No,” replied the lawyer, “you need not be black, away from Patesville....”

  “From this time on,” said the boy, “I am white.”

  This dialogue is troubling in America to us all. It is troubling to me because it says that being black is a liability; that blacks want to be white. Though I am sure there are some blacks who do, most blacks do not want to be white. And while most whites probably do not want to be black, there are some whites who would not mind being black, especially if they could choose the socio-economic class they might belong to. The question is a question of c
lass and not simply race. Nobody, black or white, wants to be poor, hungry, and without shelter or status; few would sacrifice whatever security his or her socio-political status provides in favor of some amorphous racial status that exists independent of class, gender, and age. Chesnutt’s apparent desire to be white means something far different from what the words say. He would certainly not have opted to be white only; he wanted opportunities and a level of life generally unavailable to blacks.

  Judge Straight confounds us when he talks about John’s racial status and how that relates to law and social practice. As it turns out in regard to the question of John’s racial status, the question is not of legality, but of John’s standing in a hypothetical community after it may be revealed that he has within him a metaphorical “drop” of black blood. If the “drop of black blood” defines him, then what does it matter that the laws of a neighboring state define blackness differently? As it turns out, the issue is not in the least legal (the question of John’s legal racial status never arises) but practical, having to do with what people around him think—how they personally understand and define race. John is no safer in South Carolina than he would have been in his own home territory, except for the fact that in South Carolina—far from Patesville, North Carolina—he is simply known and accepted as white.

  Chesnutt’s fixation on racial intermixture and his insistence on claiming a separate status for people of “mixed blood” (perhaps more properly “mixed genes”) are personally and historically based. When he received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1928, he spoke of his preoccupation with the issue:Substantially all of my writings, with the exception of The Conjure Woman, have dealt with the problems of people of mixed blood, which, while in the main the same as those of the true Negro, are in some instances and in some respects more complex and difficult of treatment, in fiction as in life.

  Chesnutt’s paternal grandfather, Waddell Cade, was a white slaveholder of moderate means and his grandmother, Ann Chesnutt, Cade’s mistress, a free person of color, probably herself genetically mixed. The notion that such people as he formed a third group—not black or white but something else—did not originate with him. Such distinctions point to the social origins of color discriminations as made clear by the differentiations of color prevailing at different times and at different places in the United States.

  It was not at all uncommon in the French and Spanish slave-holding islands in the Caribbean to distinguish a third group standing between black and white: the children, ordinarily, of whites (often but not always slaveholders) and black female slaves. The group expanded as further genetic intermixture occurred, not only between black and white, but between white and mulatto, black and mulatto, and mulatto and mulatto as well. Racial distinctions are noted in colonial statutes that refer to “negroes, indians, mulattoes and mestizoes,” the latter categories meaning the offspring of Europeans and Africans and of Europeans and Native Americans. They are not on the whole distinguished as a third group; their categorical distinctions mean only that they are other than white. In the United States a third group was distinguished in certain states where there was a strong Spanish or French Caribbean influence. Two such places were Louisiana and South Carolina, where mulattoes or people of color were recognized as a separate group. Hundreds of planters fled from Haiti during the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, bringing their slaves to Louisiana, especially to New Orleans and its environs. They would have been attracted to Louisiana because of the French cultural influences prevailing in the former French territory. They brought with them recognition and acceptance of a third race, mulattoes, neither white nor black, who had stood as a buffer between the slaveholders and the slaves who vastly outnumbered them everywhere in the Caribbean. Acceptance of mulattoes as a group different from and above African slaves did not mean that the slaves were treated better. On the contrary, the harsher and more virulent the conditions of slave life, the more acceptable and necessary a buffer group was seen to be.

  South Carolina, where John in The House Behind the Cedars travels in order to become white, was also a place where the existence of a large number of free mulattoes was not only tolerated but encouraged. They too were seen by whites as a buffer between themselves and blacks, who around the time of the Revolution outnumbered whites three to one. Rice cultivation required large numbers of laborers, and labor requirements accounted for the vast numbers of slaves especially from Barbados, preferred because they brought with them from west Africa a knowledge of rice cultivation that the British colonists did not have. The majority of the earliest settlers in South Carolina were from Barbados, and they and subsequent settlers brought with them the habits of racial interaction that had existed for years on that Caribbean island.

  Patesville, the town in which Rena, John, and their mother live, is in North Carolina. Differences in the histories of that state and its sister state to the south produced significantly different cultures. Relations between whites and blacks were such as to produce and sustain in South Carolina a sizable population of people of color, and sexual interrelation among white, black, and mulatto was such that racial identity was not always clear. Unlike North Carolina and Virginia, South Carolina never defined color in fractional terms. The color of any individual was determined by reputation and social standing, not in terms of the racial identity of a parent or grandparent. A person was legally white if the people around him thought that he was. This is spelled out in The House Behind the Cedars, as the reason that John, whose racial identity is defined by percentage of “blood” in North Carolina, would not be so identified in South Carolina, where he is by the state’s legal definition white. Of course he would be stigmatized if it were known that he had black forebears or that he had previously been known as black. As Judge Straight says, “One drop of black blood makes the whole man black.”

  The conditions that I have described as existing in Louisiana and South Carolina did not exist throughout the nineteenth century but only into the decade preceding the Civil War, the 1850s. Thereafter, as sectional tensions grew, more and more pressures developed to define race in such a way as to simplify racial identity. It is at this moment in history that “white” finds its modern definition in America: It comes to mean one whose forebears are white and white only; one who does not carry in his or her body a known (or acknowledged) “drop of black blood.”

  Just as John Walden’s decision to move to South Carolina in order to pass for white is grounded in the history of the South, so are the implications of his decision to do so by leaving his family, his home, his town, and his state. This becomes readily apparent if we look at his actions in historical perspective. The census of 1860 tells us that, on the eve of the Civil War, there were 260,000 free blacks in the South. Most of them lived in the upper South, in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware: nearly 84,000 in Maryland; 58,000 in Virginia; and 20,000 in Delaware. However, significant numbers—more than might be expected—lived in Louisiana (18,600), North Carolina (30,500), South Carolina (10,000), Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. These “free” people were required in every state to be able to prove at any moment that they were indeed free. Any white person could require any black person claiming to be free to produce proof of freedom; inability to provide such proof implied that the person queried was not free. The burden of proof rested upon the accused.

  Free black people faced many risks. They stood, for example, the risk of being stolen into slavery, a situation described in Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853. The papers proffered to prove free status could be destroyed or appropriated by unscrupulous slave dealers or others of ill will. The papers could be lost or inadvertently destroyed. Free blacks were often harassed if they came into competition with whites in any way whatsoever; they were usually (though not always) unable to vote, to serve on juries, or to testify in courts for or against whites.

  Many free blacks themse
lves owned slaves, but most blacks who owned slaves owned relatives or spouses in order to circumvent state laws designed to thwart the freeing of slaves. If a slaveowner wished to free a slave, he could do so in effect by passing ownership of a slave over to a black person already free. Since free blacks were often seen as threatening, as harborers of runaways, and as potential underminers of the slave system itself, most states made it increasingly difficult between 1830 and 1860 to enlarge the population of freed slaves by manumitting more. Often a freed slave was required by law to leave the state within a specified period of time. Failure to do so could result in reenslavement. Why, then, given these atrociously difficult circumstances, did so many free blacks remain in the South? Why did they not migrate north or west in order to avoid such problems as most encountered?

  In its handling of the theme of domesticity (especially as revealed through the actions and attitudes of its two chief characters, Rena and John), The House Behind the Cedars offers one possible and highly likely answer to this question. They stayed because of kinship ties, especially binding because they spread over the breadth of extended families. Family ties among black people, both slave and free, were widespread, complex, and, because of the need for mutual protection of both slave and free, especially binding. Chesnutt knew this very well. That is, he was acutely aware of the implications regarding the likely conflict between passing and domesticity; the former is likely to make impossible the carrying out of the duties and responsibilities attendant upon the latter.

  Rena, the central character of the novel, is at first identified far more by reference to class and gender than to race. Indeed, the aspects of her character that might stem from race are denied and underplayed. For example, she has no black women friends. Aside from her mother, her tie to the black community is only through her black neighbor and childhood friend Frank, who loves her deeply, but who in her eyes—as well as in her brother‘s, her mother’s, his own, and Chesnutt’s—could not possibly be a suitable marriage partner because of their color and class differences.