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  • Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in The Marrow of Tradition
  • Nicholas T Rinehart (bio)

Introduction

At the outset of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Major Carteret's wife has just given birth to the couple's first and only child, a baby boy named Dodie. The next day, Carteret is greeted with congratulations by his employees at the The Morning Chronicle, where he is editor. Among them is Jerry Letlow, the black porter and grandson of Mammy Jane, the Carterets' maid and Dodie's caretaker: "The major shook hands with them all except Jerry, though he acknowledged the porter's congratulations with a kind nod and put a good cigar into his outstretched palm, for which Jerry thanked him without manifesting any consciousness of the omission." Proper decorum disallowing his speech, Jerry communicates only by means of "his outstretched palm," a small but meaningful gesture signifying the vast social expanse between him and Carteret. As circumstance renders Jerry dumb, the narrator intervenes on his behalf:

He was quite aware that under ordinary circumstances the major would not have shaken hands with white workingmen, to say nothing of negroes; and he had merely hoped that in the pleasurable distraction of the moment the major might also overlook the distinction of color. Jerry's hope had been shattered, though not rudely; for the major had spoken pleasantly and the cigar was a good one.

(487)

This awkward encounter between the leading man and the porter—who, "without manifesting any consciousness" in Carteret's presence, must be spoken for by the narrator—is not an insignificant detail. It speaks, rather, to one of the central problems of the novel: the narrative expression of black consciousness.

Based loosely on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898—Chesnutt himself visited the North Carolina town to collect oral histories as material for the novel—The Marrow of Tradition has been understood nearly exclusively as a historical novel.1 Since Chesnutt's revival from critical obscurity some three decades ago, critics [End Page 1] have been preoccupied with the historiographical value of the work, using it to glean Chesnutt's political persuasions. The overwhelming tendency is to read The Marrow of Tradition as the narrative struggle between racial reconciliation and assimilation on the one hand—as embodied by the upwardly mobile Dr. William Miller, representative of the new black middle class—and violent, vengeful protest on the other—as embodied by Miller's antithesis, the brutish Josh Green. This myopic focus on the opposition of Miller and Green has led astray many readers of the novel; Miller has been seen as representative of both Du Boisian elitism and Washingtonian accommodationism and almost always an autobiographical projection of Chesnutt himself. Meanwhile, the political struggle supposedly enacted in the novel has left equally as many critics needlessly baffled by the novel's ambiguous conclusion, wondering whether Chesnutt ultimately sides with Miller or Green and finding no satisfactory answer.2

Moreover, this generalized preoccupation with the explicitly political or historical contours of the novel frequently precludes closer scrutiny of Chesnutt's formal literary strategies. By overemphasizing plot development and the ambiguous position of Chesnutt's authorial persona, scholars have overlooked some of the novel's central formal tropes.3 Refocusing attention on these elements, I suggest, might in fact better illuminate the political stakes and historical weight of Chesnutt's narrative construction. Jerry's "outstretched palm" (487) and reserved silence in the face of Major Carteret lend critical insight into The Marrow of Tradition not just as a historical novel but also as a novel of consciousness. Viewing the novel from the perspective of its representation of consciousness both reframes its historiographical bearing and opens up new ways to understand Chesnutt's fiction and nineteenth-century African American literature more broadly.

Jerry's first encounter in the novel is but one of many such instances in which the expression of black consciousness is halted or impeded by a looming white presence. When Carteret assembles the white supremacist triumvirate responsible for the violent coup d' etat and expulsion of black citizens from Wellington (Chesnutt's fictionalized Wilmington) that forms the historical backdrop of the novel, Jerry finally...

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