Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

8. The House behind the Cedars: "Creatures of Our Creation"

8 The House behind the Cedars "Creatures of Our Creation35 Language—that fundamentalact of organizing the mind's encounter with an experienced world—is propelled by a rhythm of naming: it is the means by which the mind takes possession of the named, at once fixing the named as irrevocably Other and representing in crystallized isolation from all conditions of externality. —KIMBERLY M. BENSTON , "I Yam What I Yam: The Topos of (Un)naming in AfricanAmerican Literature" The House behind the Cedars, like Mandy Oxendine, begins with a young man's arrivalin a rural North Carolina town. The visitor is, despite appearances , an African American, and he has come to retrieve a light-colored mulatto female. Despite these echoes of the earlier narrative, The House behind the Cedars is, thematically and technically, a significantly different novel. We are made aware of this fact as early as the novel's first paragraph. The paragraph presents these musings on time in the quiet community: Time touches all things with destroying hand. . . .And yet there are places where Time seems to linger lovingly long after youth has departed, and to which he seems loath to bring the evil day. Who has not known some eventempered old man or woman who seemed to have drunk of the fountain of youth:1 Who has not seen somewhere an old town that, having long since ceased to grow, yet held its own without perceptibledecline?1 134 "Creatures of Our Creation" These reflections seem to come from the narrator, and they prepare us to enter a timeless world outside of history and social necessity.The next sentence , however, brings us up short: "Some such trite reflection—as apposite to the subjectasmost random reflections are—passed through the mind ofa young man" (i). Thethoughts belong not to the narrator but to the recently arrived young man, from whom the narrator carefully distances himself. The narrator and the complex relationship he establishes with his characters will be discussed later on, but for the moment the focus will remain on the newly arrivedvisitor. His nameisJohn Warwick, and he is, it seems,asingularly unreliable observer. Charred buildings, Jewish names on storefronts, and even a black policeman prove that the town has not escaped the historical transformations occasioned by war, immigration, and Reconstruction . Although Warwick notes these details, he ignores their significance. He prefers to linger nostalgically in an earlier time. The discrepancy between things as they are and things as they are perceived —dramatized in Warwick's encounter with the town—takes us to this novel's thematic heart. The woman Warwickseeksis Rena Waiden. Rena is, in literary terms, Mandy Oxendine's sister—or at least her near cousin. Both are fictional protagonists conceived by Chesnutt during the 18908, and both are light-colored black women who cross the color line and live as whites. In The House behind the Cedars, Chesnutt explores once again the consequences ofhis heroine's decision to change her racial identity.But theseconsequences areimagined differently in the two novels. The consequences that flow from Mandy's choice are felt most powerfully in the lives around her, in the convulsive sexual passions her presence arouses in two white males and in the vindictive jealousy it elicits from a black girl. Tragedy m Mandy Oxendine occurs around the central couple, in the deaths of Bob Utley and Rose Amelia, but Mandy Oxendine and Tom Lowrey themselves escape and begin a new life elsewhere. We do not know where or how Mandy and Tom will live their lives, but we are told that they will freely elect their social affiliation in terms of their own interests. The narrative thus defends the mulatto couple's right to choose their own racial identity. Rena Waiden's story casts doubt on this assertion of the mulatto's sovereign independence. In TheHouse behind the Cedars, emotional confusion occurs not only around Rena, but within her. She cannot escape this confusion becausenot only does she live in a racist society, but that society also "Creatures of Our Creation" 135 lives within her. She is not exempt from the contradictory pressures of her culture: they blind her, they frustrate her hopes, and finally they destroy her life. John Warwick's entry into Patesville at the beginning of the novel initiates the chain of events that leads to Rena's death at its end. Warwick comes, he believes, to rescue his sister from life...