Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

“Those that do violence must expect to suffer”

73 “Those that do violence must expect to suffer” “Those that do violence must expect to suffer” Disrupting Segregationist Fictions of Safety in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition BIRGIT BRANDER RASMUSSEN Despite Charles W. Chesnutt’s often noted internalized racism, a passionate rebuke of racial logic and narratives energizes his work.1 In his short stories and novels, Chesnutt challenges the logic of segregation and racial terrorism that organized U.S. society at the close of the nineteenth century. The often veiled and coded nature of Chesnutt’s critique reflects the violence that circumscribed African American protest at this time. This narrative strategy enabled Chesnutt to break into the segregated publishing sphere as white readers could enjoy his fiction without confronting its antiracist critique. Although Chesnutt’s early short stories often focus on the inhumanity of slavery, they were delivered in the disarming narrative style of “local color” fiction, as stories of the South that could amuse Northern readers without raising their hackles.2 The Marrow of Tradition, on the other hand, is overtly political. In this, his third and final novel, Chesnutt uses the space and license of imaginative literature to present a scathing indictment of white supremacy. Chesnutt wrote to and for white audiences, who made up most of the literate readership.3 Inspired by writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion Tourgée, he considered imaginative literature a uniquely powerful vehicle for addressing a white audience about racial injustice.4 Chesnutt hoped to seduce his readers, “while amusing them to lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling” that white supremacy should be dismantled.5 However, in The Marrow of Tradition Chesnutt is anything but subtle and he appeals to self-interest rather than sympathy by constructing a plot where racial violence crosses the lines of segregation to affect all members of society. Chesnutt not only condemns the racial terror that underpins a segregated state, but also warns his readers that such violence will backfire against 73 74 Representing Segregation white Americans for “[s]ins, like chickens, come home to roost” (Marrow 241). Many of the white characters in the novel are killed, injured, or otherwise threatened as a direct consequence of racial violence that affects not only its intended victims but also its perpetrators. The unfortunate fates of Chesnutt’s white characters convey a central message of the novel: “those that do violence must expect to suffer violence” (Marrow 309). “Those that do violence must expect to suffer” Published in 1901, The Marrow of Tradition is a revisionist portrayal of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot, in which Reconstruction efforts to de-segregate the city and its institutions were subverted by a political coup that restored white supremacy in both the political and the written spheres.6 Before this coup, Wilmington, North Carolina, was one of the most economically and geographically integrated cities in the South. A thriving black middle class had emerged to hold important civic positions including justice of the peace.7 However, a corrupt election in 1898 replaced a racially integrated government with a white supremacist regime. A few days later, the city erupted in violence causing many black families to flee the city, and leaving school and newspaper buildings burned to the ground. The coup was organized by white Democrats who had lost political control of the city a few years earlier to an interracial alliance of Fusionists and Republicans.8 Outraged by national press reports characterizing the riot as a justified “revolution” against “Negro domination,” Chesnutt set out to tell a different version of the events that had transpired in Wilmington and to create a critical portrait of national racial politics in the post-Reconstruction United States. Set in fictional Wellington, The Marrow of Tradition centers around the intertwined destinies of two families. The light-skinned Dr. William Miller is married to Janet, who is the unacknowledged half-sister of Olivia, a member of an old and established family in the city. Olivia is married to Major Carteret, a newspaper publisher. Along with two other men, he leads efforts to reinstate white supremacy in the city. When Olivia’s aunt Polly Ochiltree is murdered during a robbery, the blame is placed on Sandy, the African American servant of Mr. Delamere, an elderly white gentleman. The real culprit turns out to be Mr. Delamere’s grandson, Tom. Although Sandy is found to be innocent, he only narrowly escapes lynching as Carteret...