“Awakening a Dormant Appetite”: Captain McBane, Convict Labor, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Moments before a bloody battle erupts near the end of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the novel’s narrator notes a slight but critical change in the group of armed white men poised to attack a black-owned and -operated hospital. The Marrow of Tradition—Chesnutt’s fictional response to the 1898 Wilmington (NC) Race Riot¹—is considered the writer’s “political masterpiece” (Sundquist 406), focusing on miscegenation, racial caste, violence, and, at its crisis moment, election fraud and intimidation in a southern port city. Concerned about their waning power, three white supremacists orchestrate a campaign of “no Negro domination” to reassert their control in the fictional city of Wellington. Their efforts culminate in widespread flight from the city and bloodshed in its streets. In the scene above, a group of black men led by Josh Green have garrisoned themselves in Dr. William Miller’s hospital, one of the most important institutions in the black community. Green and his followers have already seen a dozen other black men and women “dead in the streets of Wellington . . . slain in cold blood.” Now, the armed black men find themselves in a standoff with a group of armed whites. Just as the first shots are about to fly, the narrator points out that Captain George McBane is the only one of the three white co-conspirators who has not “withdrawn from active participation in the rioting” (Marrow 196).

McBane’s decision to remain in this violent scene long after the other white leaders have withdrawn sets him apart from the same white elites whose acceptance he so dearly desires. This and other moves in the novel by McBane, a former convict lessee who “had sprung from the poor white class” as a result of his lease (22), invite us to reflect on how race and class were interconnected in the U.S. South in the late nineteenth century. Because of the way Chesnutt narrates McBane’s various roles in the novel, a closer investigation of this seemingly minor character will supplement recent readings of this historically significant novel (e.g. Beleu and Cameron, Danielson, Friedman, Harrell, and Wagner). First, we see Chesnutt’s interpretation of the significance of convict labor in solidifying the region’s racial caste system after Reconstruction. Next, we begin to unravel just how Chesnutt interpreted the use and threat of chain gangs, and the criminal justice system more generally, to undermine attempts by poor whites and all blacks to pursue their common political and economic interests. At first glance, to be sure, McBane seems little more than an ancillary southern caricature—a man whose shirtfront is ablaze with “a showy diamond” while it is “plentifully stained with tobacco juice” (20). By stereotyping McBane, Chesnutt shows how more privileged white southerners farther removed from policing African Americans maintain their class and racial identity by inviting men of McBane’s lower, but rising class to do their bidding.² And yet, in McBane, we also encounter a much more complex character, one tainted by his involvement with the convict-lease system in ways that actually undermine his white identity.

Because The Marrow of Tradition is an intricate novel, most contemporary scholars tend to focus upon the two main narratives that structure the text, in which two intertwined southern families—the white Carterets and the black Millers—are bound by an act of miscegenation in their families’ shared past. This secret haunts the more sensational events of the book: the violent uprising and battle through the streets of Wellington, multiple life-and-death encounters involving children, a robbery and murder and subsequent failed attempt to lynch a trusted black servant, and all the intrigue that swirls around legal questions. In many ways, this approach to the novel is in spirit with recent historical and cultural work in southern studies that tends to focus on the elimination of racial visibility, relying heavily on the notion of spectacle. By racial visibility, I mean those instances in which racist attitudes and practices become overt...