A Business Career

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The publication of Charles W. Chesnutt's novel, A Business Career, along with its companion volume, Evelyn's Husband, sees the completion, with one exception, of the publication of the novels that Chesnutt left in manuscript1 In these fictions, Chesnutt is writing in the genre of the white-life novel, in which African Americans write exclusivelyabout white experience . When Chesnutt completed these novels, this was a relativelynew genre. In the late 18908, Chesnutt and PaulLaurence Dunbar began, concurrently, to write white-life novels, and while Dunbar's were published, Chesnutt's have remained in manuscript for over a hundred years. A review of Dunbar's first white-life novel, The Uncalled (i898),2 is revealing, for it helps contextualize the position of an African American who attempted to write white-life fictions in this period. "The Bookman for December 1898 objected to the characters in The Uncalled. Claiming that Dunbar should 'write about Negroes,' the reviewer lamented that 'the charming tender sympathy of Folks from Dixie is missing' and asserted that Dunbar was 'an outsider'whoviewedhisaction 'as astagemanager' "(Williams 174). At the turn of the century, neither critics nor publishers nor white audiences were willing to listen to the voice of an v VI African American who had stepped outsidewhat they assumed to be his "proper" role—as a writer who represented his own folk's experience, narrowly construed as rural and Southern , and as a race spokesman. The expectations that African American writers wereto be representative remained much the same for the better part of a hundred years, and while there is no general consensus among the fewcritics who have written about the genre of the white-life novel, almost all assume that African American writers must serve as race spokesmen, a position diametrically opposed to what Chesnutt himself believed. He wrote, as he said in 1928, accepting the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, "not as a Negro writing about Negroes, but as a human being writing about other human beings" (Essays and Speeches 514). From that subject position, his conviction was that he could write not only about African American experience, but also (and exclusively) about white experience. Chesnutt's universalist subject position and his hope that his work could be received outside the matrix of race has been contradicted bythe reception of and lack of attention to whitelife novels. David Roediger has recently written that the "serious Vhite life novel' has left very little impact on American literary criticism. Even its most spectacular successes, such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room or Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee,are little read. Less artistically successful works,such asRichardWright's pulpy and revealingaccount of loss and violence in the white middle class in Savage Holiday, vanish with hardly a trace" (8). VII The neglect of the genre of white-life fiction is due to the persistence of the color line in literature. In 1928,JamesWeldon Johnson claimed that "white America has a strong feeling that Negro artists should refrain from making use of white subject matter. I mean by that, subject matter which it feels belongs to the white world. In plain words, white America does not welcome seeingthe Negro competing with the white man on what it considers the white man's own ground" (479).The neglect of the genre has to do not only with the competition Johnson identified, but with a sense of imaginative trespass, as if,in the view of white readers, African American writers have had no right to represent white-life exclusively because to grant that right would be to acknowledge the permeability of the color line. Chesnutt himself commented on the presence of that heavily demarcated line when he wrote that Howells "has remarked several times that there is no color line in literature. On that point I take issue with him. I am pretty fairly convinced that the color line runs everywhereso far as the United States is concerned, and I am even now wondering whether the reputation I havemade would help or hinder a novel that I might publish along an entirely different line" (Chesnutt, Letters 171). Of course, the novels "along an entirely different line" are his white-life novels, and until this day,the answer is that such works, at the verybest, do not help the reputation of an African American writer. That isnot to say, however,that Chesnutt's ambitions in...