Plenty of Room for Us All?: Participation and Prejudice in Charles Chesnutt's Dialect Tales

PLENTY OF ROOM FOR US ALL? PARTICIPATION AND PREJUDICE IN CHARLES CHESNUTT'S DIALECT TALES Henry B. Wonham University of Oregon It is often difficult to convince students who are reading Charles Chesnutt's dialect tales for the first time that his brief writing career, from about 1887 to 1905, coincided with the "nadir" of American race relations.1 Chesnutt insisted in 1903 that "the rights of the Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during the thirty-five years of their freedom, and the race prejudice more intense and uncompromising," a comment borne out by the period' s record number of lynchings and systematic denial of civil and political rights to blacks.2 Yet Uncle Julius appears to be doing pretty well, students are likely to point out, and his narrative forays into the antebellum past function very effectively to secure the former slave' s post-war dotage. Although Chesnutt elsewhere plays the role of social critic with brutal directness, the conjure tales betray little anxiety over the rapid deterioration of AfricanAmerican rights after Reconstruction, and they include virtually no evidence of a "more intense and uncompromising" racial prejudice in Julius's fictional Patesville, North Carolina. It is tempting to respond to this characterization of the dialect tales by alluding to Chesnutt's well-documented frustration with the conventions of local color Southern fiction, conventions he successfully abandoned in more strident and polemically charged non-dialect stories and novels, including "The Sheriffs Children," "The Web of Circumstance ," and The Marrow of Tradition. Yet such an apologetic characterization of the politically coy dialect tales overlooks their complicated engagement with contemporary issues, specifically issues related to the abridgment of the Fifteenth Amendment and the restriction of African-American participation in post-Reconstruction Southern cultural life generally. The form of this engagement is so elusive because social critique in the dialect tales operates in three quite different historical registers at once. Julius is significantly insulated from the demise of race relations at the end of the nineteenth century, because he occupies what is for Chesnutt a crucial moment of historical transition , immediately after Reconstruction and just before the retrenchment of white racist sentiment in the South. Chesnutt dwells on this 132Henry B. Wonham uncertain moment not as a nostalgic retreat from the social realities of the present, but because in Julius' s world the nature and extent ofblack participation in Southern cultural and political life remain open questions —questions Chesnutt was very much interested in reopening with readers in the degenerating racial climate of the 1880s and 1890s. Julius's tales of antebellum suffering under slavery thus resonate with significance for his own era, in which the stories function like a form of post-war currency, and they also look forward to an America Julius can hardly imagine. A similar pattern of social critique occurs in Paul Laurence Dunbar's "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," in which a slave preacher elaborates on the story ofMoses as a thinly veiled incitement to rebellion among the members of his congregation. The analogy between Egyptian and American slavery made in the poem's final and most interesting stanza suddenly points to a third term, citizenship: An' we'll shout ouah halleluyahs, On dat mighty reck'nin' day, When we' se reco'nized ez citiz'— Huh uh! Chillun, let us pray!3 Dunbar's incomplete reference to black "citizens," the word so aptly foreshortened to suggest the precariousness of African-American citizenship in his own time, thrusts the biblical legend and its antebellum subtext into the charged racial discourse of the 1890s, where not freedom but franchise is at stake. Chesnutt is rarely so obvious about the direction of his satire, but the dialect tales launch a similar brand of social critique that splinters in several directions at once. Julius's tales of antebellum slavery comment obliquely, but persistently, on both the scene of their performance and the scene of their composition. Playing these three points in time against one another, the tales revolve around a single question: does John's arrival from the North after Reconstruction signify a return to white domination and black disfranchisement, a new form of slavery for the post...