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2. Chesnutt in His Journals: "Nigger" under Erasure
- University of Georgia Press
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Chesnutt in His Journals "Nigger55 under Erasure Collective identities, in short, provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their life plans and in telling their life stories. —K. ANTHONY APPIAH, "Race, Culture, and Identity : Misunderstood Connections" In 1875 Charles Chesnutt, then a seventeen-year-old schoolteacher, took a summerjob among rural South Carolina blacks.On August 20, heconfided to his journal about his pupils and their families: This is the doggondest country I ever saw to teach in. They say they'll pay your board, and then don't do it. They accuse you indirectly of lying, almost of stealing, eavesdropyou, retailevery word you say. Eavesdropyou when you're talking to yourself, twist up your words into all sorts of ambiguous meanings , refuse to lend you their mules &c. They are the most suspicious people in the world, good-sized liars, hypocrites,inquisitive little nigger wenches &c. I wouldn't teach here another year for fifty dollars a month.1 Chesnutt, during the winter an assistant teacher at Charlotte's Peabody School, had passed the examination for a first-grade teaching certificate in North Carolina; thus he was entitled to a salary of up to forty dollars a month. He was, however, obliged to take part of his salary in board and to negotiate terms directly with the families of his pupils. These tenant farmers, scarcely a decade out of slavery, were caught between the promises 2 24 ChesnuU in His Journals of emancipation and new forms of exploitation. They were lucky—when not cheatedbywhite landowners—to make half the salarythe youngteacher was asking of them. They had little knowledge of the world beyond their cotton fields, and naturally enough, they were suspicious of this lightskinned outsider and dubious of his services. Chesnutt was the son of free blacks who left North Carolina before the Civil War and who returned afterward to participate in Reconstruction. Charles, born in Ohio, had imbibedhisparents3 reformingspirit and that of the Northern teachers who had come South to educate the former slaves. The teenaged teacher arrived at his summer post full of noble intentions, but his journal records his frustration with his pupils and their parents. We do not know the specific offenses of the "wenches55 to whom Chesnutt refers, but we can imagine that some of his scholarswere near his own age and that they had been influenced by their suspicious parents. They very well may have been nosey and insubordinate to the novice instructor. In exasperation at their behavior,Chesnutt writes the word "nigger55 and then censors himself.However, he does not censor himself entirely, for the word is crossed out, not totally effaced. This word with the line running through it foregrounds the central theme of this chapter: Chesnutt5 s difficulties with, and within, the Americanlanguage in his earliest writings. The imperfectlyerased epithet enacts, incapsule form, the problem with which Chesnutt struggled throughout hisearly journals, and indeed, throughout his literary career. Chesnutt attempts in this entry to articulate his feeling toward the most troublesome of his charges. But at the sametime, he is also trying to work out his relationship to the community he serves and to which, by social custom, he belongs. This struggle is a keytheme of these journals, and its pressures can be felt in Chesnutt's searchfor social,literary,and linguistic resourcesand in his first attempts at creative expression. Although Chesnutt had black ancestors on both his father's side and his mother's side, he did not differ in appearance from most white citizens. On June 7,1875, he records awell-intentioned white man's warningagainst teaching in a Negro school and his offer of a post in a white school. The offer was, in effect, an invitation to pass as white. Chesnutt declined the proposition and accepted a post among blacks. However, a month later, on July 31, after being taken for white twice in one day, he comments, "I [54.173.43.215] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:28 GMT) Chesnutt in His Journals 25 believe I'll leave here and pass anyhow, for I am as white as any of them55 (78). This is the only place in his journalswhere Chesnutt openly considers giving up his African American identity. Three years later, in June 1878, he married a woman darker than he. Chesnutt surely knew that in marrying Susan Perry and beginning a family with her he was committing himself to life as a black person, and he willingly accepted...