Witnessing Charles Chesnutt: The Contexts of “The Dumb Witness”

When Henry B. Wonham writes that Charles W. Chesnutt’s dialect tales possess a “complicated engagement with contemporary issues” (“Plenty” 131), he addresses turn-of-the-century contentions such as racism and disfranchisement—that is, issues of 1900. As is often pointed out, Chesnutt’s work does bear witness to its time. However, others have added to this commentary by observing that Chesnutt also addresses our turn of the century.¹ In both instances, the focus falls upon vested interests of author and reader, upon context and broadly political concerns. More intriguing is the fact that Chesnutt’s very telling of these tales is telling, that their narrative technique is their content. Critics point out that the framing of the stories communicates ideas about black voice and exploitation—whether, for example, Uncle Julius uses or is used by white characters such as John. Yet after more than a century of history and critical theory, our readings of Chesnutt cannot be altogether naïve—which is another way of saying that we prefer our own naïveté. The past is always a trope of the present. Our present, our experience, allows us to consider Chesnutt’s narrative technique not only as an instance of African American expression but also as a parable about the nature of African American studies.

One of Chesnutt’s dialect stories in particular opens out endlessly and suggestively from past to present, white to black and black to white, from its art to how we study its art. The frame of “The Dumb Witness” (c. 1897) extends far beyond the borders of its pages and implicates us all. Although the tale employs dialect, it was not one of the original conjure tales: the conjure woman does not appear, and the story was not included in the 1899 volume The Conjure Woman. However, Richard H. Brodhead considers the work a later though related tale and includes it in his edition of Chesnutt’s conjure stories, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1993). It is “thematically of a whole with all of the conjure tales” (Carmean 101).

The lurid, Southern gothic plot touches upon mystery and deception, violence and revenge, and miscegenation and retribution. The young, first-person narrator, John (white and enterprising, a Northern entrepreneur), arrives at the old, run-down Murchison place to bargain about the purchase of timber. Before opening negotiations, John is bewildered by the spectacle of an old man with a woman whom the old man resembles, despite his whiteness and her obviously mixed heritage—a “strange couple” (171). The man’s words confuse John, and the woman’s answers are unintelligible, a cacophonous stream of noises. After his brief exchange with the woman and seemingly unconscious of John’s presence, the man grabs a shovel and proceeds to dig holes in the yard. John concludes his business with young Murchison and immediately asks Uncle Julius to account for the odd behavior of the couple. Julius explains that both have been deranged for years. The curious outsider, John, hears a “story of jealousy, revenge and disappointment” that Julius delivers “in his own quaint dialect—a story of things possible only in an era which, happily, has passed from our history” (162). As Julius’s framed tale commences, John adds that he has assembled the story mostly from Julius’s account but partly from other sources as well.

As the story tells us, Malcolm Murchison had been driven mad by his besetting weakness, avarice. The plantation had fallen to his care years earlier, along with his housekeeper, Viney, “a tall, comely young quadroon” (163). We are told that Viney was cheaper to keep than a wife would have been and that no white woman had set foot in the house in fifteen years. From his home, Murchison negotiated business dealings, including the purchase and sale of slaves, but otherwise used the plantation house to host his smoking, drinking, card-playing male friends. Mrs. Martha Todd’s visit to the region interrupts this longstanding state of affairs; she is an available widow who attracts Murchison—and she is independently...