In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

39 Passing as Narrative and Textual Strategy in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison” Martha J. Cutter Charles Chesnutt’s “The Passing of Grandison” (published in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, 1899) is not properly about “passing” as it was first used in the nineteenth century in the United States, that is, African Americans passing for white or crossing the “color line.” As Werner Sollors has argued , the first usage of the term “passing” appears in notices concerning runaway slaves (255). Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), for example, reproduces an actual advertisement for two runaway slaves which concludes , “I suspect they have taken the road to Baltimore, as Cassy formerly lived in that city. No doubt they will attempt to pass off for white people” (72). In Chesnutt’s short story, Grandison passes in a number of ways that this essay will examine, but he never does pass for white. Nor does the story partake of earlier nineteenth-century ideologies that often damned passing as a kind of racial treachery, a base counterfeiting of the self. In Frank Webb’s novel The Garies and Their Friends (1857), the negative overtones of racial passing are emphasized, as one character comments to another: “It is a great risk you run to be passing for white in that way” (43).1 But in Chesnutt’s story a complicated series of passing acts allows the protagonist to free not only himself, but also his extended family of eight other enslaved individuals. These are just some of the many ways that Chesnutt’s story fools its readers and undermines hegemonic notions of passing, racial identity, and the ability of one individual to “read” another. Texts about passing, such as “The Passing of Grandison,” often function on both a narrative and textual level to disrupt constructions of race.2 On a narrative level, African American characters who assume an identity as white undercut binary divisions between black and white and upset essentialistic notions of racial identity. More importantly, for a writer such as Charles Chesnutt on a textual (or generic/formal) level, stories about passing often pass for something they are not, thereby subverting a reader’s way of Martha J. Cutter 40 reading race and of reading texts about race; the form of the story itself, in short, constitutes Chesnutt’s most intricate act of passing. Furthermore, in Chesnutt’s story passing functions on both a narrative level (between characters) and on a textual level (between text and reader) to enact a profound destabilization of constructs of race, identity, and finally of textuality itself. In the end “The Passing of Grandison” illustrates that every reading of a text and every reading of race, like every reading of an individual, must be contextually sensitive, specific to a particular situation, carefully constructed, and continually revised. Performing Sambo: Narrative Strategies of Passing We might begin by asking what the term “passing” in the title actually signifies. The central character of the story, a slave named Grandison, does not pass for white, as is common in novels about passing, even those written by Chesnutt himself, such as The House behind the Cedars (1900). But Grandison does pass in other ways. Mainly, he pretends to be a contented, happy slave who would never dream of leaving his dear old master. Grandison is taken to the North by his master ’s son, Dick Owens, who attempts to impress his girlfriend, Charity Lomax, by setting a slave free. But Grandison resists the temptations placed before him by Dick and the abolitionists. In an inversion of a trope common to the slave narrative , when he is kidnapped and taken to Canada, Grandison makes his way back to Kentucky and his master, Colonel Owens, “keeping his back steadily to the North Star” (280–281), much to Colonel Owens’s great delight. However, three weeks after his triumphant return, Grandison and eight other individuals (his wife, aunt, uncle, two brothers, mother, father, and sister) escape. Oddly enough, as the narrative voice comments cryptically, “the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train. Once, twice, the colonel thought he had them, but they slipped through his fingers” (281). Grandison has used his trip to the North and his contacts with abolitionists to engineer the liberation of not just himself, but eight other relatives. What becomes apparent, then, by the story’s end is that...

Share