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84 Performing Race Mixed-Race Characters in the Novels of Charles Chesnutt Keith Byerman Under the old code noir of Louisiana, the descendant of a white and a quadroon was white. Under these laws many persons currently known as “colored” or, more recently as “Negro,” would be legally white if they chose to claim and exercise the privilege. . . . In South Carolina, the line of cleavage was left somewhat indefinite; the color line was drawn tentatively at one-fourth of Negro blood, but this was not held conclusive. “The term ‘mulatto,’” said the Supreme Court of that state in a reported case, “is not invariably applicable to every admixture of African blood with the European, nor is one having all the features of a white to be ranked with the degraded class designated by the laws of the State as persons of color, because of some remote taint of the Negro race. . . . The question whether persons are colored or white, where color or feature is doubtful, is for the jury to determine by reputation, by reception into society, and by their exercises of the privileges of a white man, as well as by admixture of blood. —Chesnutt, “The Future American” The passage above, from Chesnutt’s 1900 article “The Future American,” offers a legal (and legalistic) description of race that dovetails nicely with current discussions of that concept as a social construction. In this sense, it is also clearly relevant to a discussion of House behind the Cedars, published the same year as the essay, as well as Paul Marchand, written twenty years later. What I believe interested Chesnutt in these stipulations of racial identity is what might be called their reasoned arbitrariness. One’s status, with regard to legal restrictions and privileges, varied by state, time period, and, in the case of South Carolina, by reputation. These rules were in place at the very time that the assertion was being made both socially and “scientifically” that “race” was an absolute and fixed biological category. What I wish to suggest in my discussion is that the two novels Mixed-Race Characters in the Novels of Chesnutt 85 above might be considered as thought experiments by Chesnutt that track the meaning of such arbitrariness. In this sense, I am interested in the performance of race in these works rather than in the nature of its reality. My analysis is in large measure a dialogue with SallyAnn Ferguson and Dean McWilliams, whose engagement with the issue of mixed-race representation in Chesnutt is longstanding and substantial.1 In “The Future American,” Chesnutt argues for amalgamation as the solution to America’s racial problems. He sees it, from a logical and scientific viewpoint, as an easy means of ending racism and creating a vibrant future. Ferguson and McWilliams have pointed out the substantial flaws in his thinking, both as rhetorical gesture and as racial commitment.2 What I would suggest is that such “flaws” are calculated acts of provocation designed to discomfort the audience rather than persuade it. Since Chesnutt contends, early in the article, that race is a fiction and that the states have long recognized it as such in the laws they have constructed, he chooses to foreground this reality and, perhaps somewhat facetiously , turn it into a national virtue. It is unclear whether Chesnutt intended the article to be taken seriously as a proposition. For example, he notes the popular expectations for a new “American race”: This perfection of type—for no good American could for a moment doubt that it will be as perfect as everything else American—is to be brought about by a combination of all the best characteristics of the different European races, and the elimination, by some strange alchemy, of all their undesirable traits—for even a good American will admit that European races, now and then, have some undesirable traits when they first come over. It is a beautiful, a hopeful, and to the eye of faith, a thrilling prospect. The defect of the argument, however, lies in the incompleteness of its premises, and its obliviousness of certain facts of human nature and human history. (96) The humor of the passage, in its parody of American progressivist language, suggests the difficulty of achieving the goal of homogeneity within the “white” race alone. Clearly, he understands the much greater difficulty of mixing groups separated by generations of social, legal, and ideological oppression and physical violence used to maintain that oppressive order. At the same time, he...

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