"The First Negro Novelist": Charles Chesnutt's Point of View and the Emergence of African American Literature

In 1895, Charles Chesnutt, an aspiring author with a few stories in the Atlantic Monthly to his credit, was asked by a clubwoman named Alice Haldeman to help her with the literary side of a paper she was preparing called "What Has the Negro Done in Science and Literature?" "There are very few American colored men who have written anything which could really be dignified with the name of literature," Chesnutt informed her. He mentioned Phillis Wheatley, Alexander Crummell, and various African American journalists, but concluded, "None of these productions however can be classed as literature in the higher and finer sense of the term. They are efforts in the right direction and constitute the promise I hope of better things to come in a brighter future." He then acknowledged the recent "efforts in the line of pure literature" shown by Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Edwin Campbell, and implied that his own effort would do more than these to bring the brighter future closer to hand: "My works . . . are principally yet unwritten, or at least unpublished. Such fugitive pieces as I have given to the world however, have perhaps gained recognition in higher authors' quarters than the productions of any other acknowledged colored writer in the United States . . . ."¹

Charles Chesnutt, I will argue, became the foundational author he became, and thus helped inaugurate African American literature to the extent that he did, in good part because of this dismissive view of writing by African Americans before him, evident elsewhere in his correspondence and journals. It seems hardly accidental that Chesnutt's hopes for a brighter literary future were voiced as such in the year of Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition address and on the eve of the Supreme Court's 1896 decision on Plessy v. Ferguson, and that they received some confirmation shortly after the case when William Dean Howells recognized Dunbar as "the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature."² Such coincidences strengthen Kenneth W. Warren's argument, which I aim here to extend and complicate, that Jim Crow gave new impetus to the project of creating an African American literature, and a new urgency to getting such a literature recognized as "literary."³ We can think roughly of the 1890s—at least from 1892, the year Plessy v. Ferguson began and the year of Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South—as the moment in which an ultimately productive awareness of what Pascale Casanova calls "literary destitution" took root for the most ambitious black literary aspirants, and Chesnutt would capitalize on it, to the detriment even of Dunbar in the long run, in ways that determined his foundational stature and the ambiguous values that would attach themselves to it.⁴

There is an obvious reason why Jim Crow's legal regime maintaining restrictions on African American economic, educational, and political prospects, in tandem with its cultural regime of maintaining African American "inferiority" under the rubric "separate but equal," should have motivated African American literary production. Insofar as literature's power to advance social justice and broaden human sympathies was a longstanding cultural assumption of the Victorian era, African Americans could use it to combat systematic segregation as they once used it to combat slavery. This view of literature, then, reveals more constancy than discontinuity in writing by African Americans; that Chesnutt committed himself to the "high, holy purpose" of using literature to convince white readers of the immorality, illegitimacy, and irrationality of their ways surely puts him in line with William Wells Brown, whose work he found embarrassing.⁵ But literary production would also become more valued for reasons that sit uneasily with such purposefulness. For the young Chesnutt teaching at a segregated school in Fayetteville, North Carolina, "literature" meant among other things a shot at professional, middle-class status in a northern "Metropolis," as we see in the remarkable journal entry from 1881 detailing his dream of being "an author":

In my present vocation, I would never accumulate a competency, with all...