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3 Charles W. Chesnutt’s Historical Imagination Werner Sollors In the past decade or so we have witnessed the republication of pretty much all of Charles W. Chesnutt’s collected and uncollected works and the first printed editions of his unpublished journal, novels, and selected correspondence. (Richard Brodhead, William Andrews, Joseph McElrath et al., Ernestine Pickens, SallyAnn Ferguson, Nancy Bentley, Sandra Gunning, Dean McWilliams, Matthew Wilson, and Judith Jackson have recently edited Chesnutt’s works.) Eric Sundquist’s study To Wake the Nations devotes a third of the book, a total of about two hundred pages , to Chesnutt—more than to W.E.B. Du Bois or to any other author. Numerous new and younger critics have joined the ranks of established Chesnutt scholars, and at a recent American Literature Association meeting Chesnutt may well have been the single most popular American writer, judging by the many papers that were devoted to his work. How can one account for this remarkable revival? What I would like to do is to address Chesnutt’s extraordinary sense of the history that he was living and that lay behind him. It is my feeling that Chesnutt’s historical imagination, paired with his sense of irony, made him an unusually perceptive witness of his own time. I say “unusual,” for the main drift of early African American literature was not historical. The previous sentence seems hard to believe, written at a time when historical fiction has become a dominant genre in African American writing, with slavery one of its central themes. But it appears that from 1853 to 1941, a period during which historical fiction was very popular in the Western world, only one truly historical African American novel was published: Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1935). And this book may have come out of the Popular Front’s interest in the slave rebel motif that the Comintern (Communist International) encouraged writers on the Left to represent. The reasons for the paucity of a specifically African American historical imagination in the form of historical fiction have never been fully accounted for. One thing seems clear: major black writers (perhaps with the exception of Paul Laurence Dunbar in a few of his poems) have not easily been able to make themselves look back at the past with a sense of nostalgia. For most writers, slavery’s memory may have been too painful, Werner Sollors 4 too embarrassing, too formidable an obstacle to permit the full development of a backward glance; also, of course, each writer’s own present contained many urgent social problems—segregation, disfranchisement, discrimination—that needed to be addressed. Furthermore, writing centrally, honestly, and with the wisdom of hindsight about slavery might make African American authors appear “bitter” in the eyes of their readers. Thus it is no coincidence that Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, contains numerous explicit assertions that the author is not bitter; of course, he also offers the most straightforward “from-to” American progress narrative as the shape of his autobiographic history. Chesnutt was keenly aware of the problems of remembering slavery when he wrote his biography of Frederick Douglass (1899), newly edited by Ernestine Pickens in 2001. Chesnutt describes how Douglass “beheld every natural affection crushed when inconsistent with slavery, or warped and distorted to fit the necessities and promote the interests of the institution.” And he mentions “the strokes of the lash,” “the wild songs of the slaves” beneath which Douglass read “the often unconscious note of grief and despair” (15–16). Chesnutt emphasizes that Douglass perceived “the debasing effects of slavery upon master and slave alike” (16). Yet Chesnutt continues in a manner that might surprise contemporary students of American and African American literature who most frequently read Douglass’s 1845 narrative. Here is Chesnutt’s comment: “Doubtless the gentle hand of time will some time spread the veil of silence over this painful past; but while we are still gathering its evil aftermath, it is well enough that we do not forget the origin of so many of our civic problems” (16). Interestingly, Chesnutt gives far more emphasis to Douglass’s life as a free man and devotes only the first two of a total of twelve chapters to Douglass’s experiences as a slave. Adding a touch of irony that showed his acute sense of topics generating nervousness at the time he wrote the biography, Chesnutt also wondered why Douglass’s white father “never claimed the honor, which might have given him...

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