Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

11. Paul Marchand, F.M.C.: "F.M.C." and "C.W.C."

II PaulMarchand, F.M.C. cc EM.C."and"C.W.C." It isin the nameof the father that we must recognizethe support of the Symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law. —JACQUES LAGAN, TheLanguage of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis Paul Marchand, F.M.C., the novel with which Chesnutt sought to breaka sixteen-year literary silence, is ageographic, historical, and generic anomaly in Chesnutt5 s canon.* Chesnutt5 s previous novels and manyof his stories are set in North Carolina during the i88os through the first years of the twentieth century.With Paul Marchand., F.M.C.., however, Chesnutt moved his attention to Louisiana in the 18205. His two previous novels, TheMarrow of Tradition and TheColonels Dream, were executed in the styleof muckraking realism popular at the time of their composition, but with Paul Marchand, F.M.C. Chesnutt seems to offer a local-color romance, a literary form more than twentyyears out of fashion. And yet, despite these gestures toward an earlier movement and an earlier style, Paul Marchand, F.M.C. is, in many ways, Chesnutt's most modern work. It is so in virtue of the strikingly modern, evenpostmodern, meditation that it offers on personal and authorial identity. The theme of identitywill bethe guiding focus of this chapter,but, before pursuing it, more must be said about the novel's setting. J. Noel Heermance , one of the fewcritics to comment on the novel, viewsthe shift away i84 «EM.C»and "C.W.C" from the present asan effort to accommodatereadersunwilling "to face realistic , contemporary racialmaterial."2 However, the novel's foreword contradicts this escapist thesis, for it promises "interesting parallels between social conditions in that earlier generation and those in our own."3 Indeed, while 1920s Cleveland—the time and place of the novel's composition—might seem very different from Louisiana in the years following its accession to the United States, the sad truth was that, for black Americans, conditions in manyways remained the same.Byrolling back the clock exactlyone hundred years, Chesnutt's narrative mocks white assumptions of a century of social progress. Antebellum Louisiana offered special circumstances with which to reinforce this point. The former French colony already had, before the Civil War, a significantnumber of blacks who were not slaves. Members of this special caste had cultural and economic opportunities that many of Chesnutt's black contemporaries might well have envied. Many Louisiana quadroons were educated in France, and they often controlled significant economic interests, including large plantations. Quadroon males, however, were required by law to signal their difference by signing "f.m.c." after their names. These initials undid the sense of autonomy implied in the name that they followed. The free men of color, despite their freedom from slavery and their cultural and economic attainments, had few legal rights that whites were bound to respect. As Chesnutt's novel shows, free men of color could be publicly humiliated, imprisoned, even enslaved by white Americans on the flimsiest pretexts. Chesnutt, who sawsystematic discrimination , brutal lynching, and peonage—slavery by another name—in earlytwentieth -century America, could appreciate, fully as much as his protagonist , the bitter irony embedded in the initials that follow the protagonist's name. F.M.C., Free Man of Color: the final word in the designation canceled the first. In 19205 America, as in the 18205, a man's rights as a free citizen were significantly conditioned by the color ascribed to his skin. Early-nineteenth-century New Orleans provided fertile ground on which Chesnutt could continue his reflections on the language and the constructs we use to describe ourselves. The city was, following its accession to the United States, perhaps more than at any time in its history, the capital of carnival, a city of dynamically shifting identities. In a little over forty years, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century , Louisiana was successivelyFrench, Spanish, French again, and then "EM.C»and «C.W.C» 185 American. Following admission to the Union, the population exploded, swollen by immigrants from all parts of the republic and from elsewhere. The quadroon class was an important component of this polyglot, hybrid population. Slave mistresses and their half-white children were, of course, common elsewherein the Americanslavestates, but they were kept "behind the cedars," shrouded bywhite hypocrisy and denial...