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9 Signifying the Other Chesnutt’s “Methods of Teaching” SallyAnn H. Ferguson On Thursday evening, November 23, 1882, at the second annual convention of the segregated black North Carolina Teachers Association in Raleigh, North Carolina, twenty-four-year-old Charles W. Chesnutt delivered a speech entitled “Modern Methods of Instruction,” and when he had finished, around ten o’clock, the session was adjourned. The paper appeared in print the following year as part of the association’s annual minutes with its title changed to “Methods of Teaching.” While Chesnutt’s essay reads like a scholarly treatise celebrating the achievements of certain European intellectuals and their work, its misquotations, inclusions, and omissions signal the impact of nineteenth-century racial politics on the public utterances of this budding short story writer, novelist, and essayist . As he surveyed various teaching theories and methods developed by ancient and modern Eurocentric thinkers, Chesnutt subtly altered their ideas to fit his subtext of African American educational expansion. Such subversive navigation around the racial Other,1 a long-standing practice with Chesnutt in both literature and life, freed him to put on oral and written performances that simultaneously catered to the disparate cultural needs and expectations of the association’s unusual racially mixed audience—integrated that particular night by the racist white North Carolina governor Thomas Jarvis and his cohorts. Indeed, a careful study of Chesnutt’s language in “Methods of Teaching” suggests not only that he maneuvered around presumed threats to already besieged Southern black educational programs, but that, in the process, his signifying double-voice also established an early, nonfictional model for a variety of similar fictional educational masqueraders in the presence of racist Others. Inspired by such teaching mentors as brothers Robert and Cicero Harris and professor/orator Joseph C. Price, Chesnutt himself provides an early prototype for such later fictional educators as J. Saunders Redding’s Perkins Thomas Wimbush in Stranger and Alone (1950) and Ralph SallyAnn H. Ferguson 10 Ellison’s A. Hebert Bledsoe in Invisible Man (1952), whose signifying personalities and behaviors are hallmarks of the African American literary tradition. Before Charles W. Chesnutt took the podium in Raleigh that evening, he had been well schooled by diverse instructors in a wide variety of educational subjects and teaching techniques. Certainly, as biographer Frances Richardson Keller observes , “Whatever the means, whatever the dangers, Chesnutt’s freeborn parents [Ann Maria Sampson Chesnutt and Andrew Jackson Chesnutt] transmitted a thirst for knowledge to their son Charles. It stayed with him all his life” (30). This early parental tutelage—especially from his mother—gave way to Chesnutt’s decades -long association with the Richardson and Harris families, who, like his own family before the Civil War, had emigrated from the economically and socially depressing environment of Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the promise of Ohio, only to return to their Southern homeland when the postbellum era seemed to augur better opportunities and security.2 Constance E. H. Daniel identifies “a bright thread of aggressiveness and high purpose” in the histories of the Richardsons and Harrises and explains: “Wherever they have gone, these families have been in the vanguard of Negro progress. From them has come an impressive line of educators , reformers and leaders in political and civic life” (3). Another historian, Earle H. West, also documents how—with the occasional sponsorship of the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Bureau—William, Robert, Cicero, and other Harris relatives brought their energy to various parts of Virginia and North Carolina. By 1865 Robert, whose teachings were to influence Chesnutt the most, had relocated to Fayetteville, where he organized and taught at day, evening, and Sabbath schools in town, as well as at satellite schools in rural areas. He often staffed the latter with students imbued with his own educational philosophy , one that combined scholarly excellence with religious piety.3 According to Keller, “Harris noticed the abilities of a boy in his classes. The encouragement and direction he gave that boy—Charles Waddell Chesnutt—proved a powerful influence in Chesnutt’s life” (37). In fact, after Robert Harris’s untimely death in 1880, the future author became the second principal of the State Colored Normal School, which was co-founded by Harris as the Howard School in 1877 and is today Fayetteville State University.4 In an essay entitled “Joseph C. Price, Orator and Educator: An Appreciation,” Chesnutt honors another mentor who inspired him to understand and even revere the power of oratory as advocacy, declaring that it...

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