The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt Book

(spoiler alert) I have to admit I never heard of Chesnutt until I recently took a class in African-American literature. His work falls in the period after the civil war but before the Harlem Renaissance. The writer he most resembles is Mark Twain. Twain at his best is better than Chesnutt at his best, but Chesnutt's short stories are on a par with Twain's good but not great work.

This is a collection of Chesnutt's short stories, a novel (The Marrow of Tradition) and a few essays. The essays are forgettable, the novel uneven. But many of the short stories are simply masterful. "The Passing of Grandison" is the best and should be taught in short story classes as an exemplar of suspense and humor. The plot is this: a son of a slave holder tries to impress his sentimental girlfriend, so he goes north with a slave for the sole purpose of setting him free. But the slave will have none of it. The story escalates as the exasperated son tries to come up with ways to get rid of the slave. In the end it turns out that the slave was simply plotting how to get his fiancé and his entire family up north, but the reader doesn't find out until the end (or until he or she reads reviews of books they're never going to read anyway).

The other short story I really liked was "The Wives of Grandison" wherein Grandison, a lazy but very likable freed slave gets it into his head that he wants to go north and marry a white woman. Never mind that he's already married. The problem is, his hard-working wife won't give him the money she earns and saves in a locked chest. He goes to a lawyer who informs him that as husband, he's entitled to her money, but only if he can manage to get his hands on it. But it turns out they aren't legally married because they never registered their pre-war marriage with the authorities after they were freed. Grandison wants to take the money and leave his wife, but is faced with a quandary. If he's married, then he's entitled to the money, but then he's not free to leave his wife. But if he's not married, then he's not free to take his money. He ends up rationalizing, in a very post-modern Heidegger's Cat kind of way that he's both married and not married at the same time. He goes up north to a Groveland (Cleveland) and soon lands a cushy job and a white Irish widow. Unfortunately for Grandison, things head south as soon as they're married. The widow takes to drink, and he loses his job because he decides to imbibe a bit as well. Racism makes it difficult for them to find a good place to live, and soon he finds that he's worse off than he was before he left his first wife. When his Irish wife leaves him once her husband mysteriously turns up, he decides to go back south and win his old wife back.
The novel The Marrow of Tradition, tells of the Wilmington, NC race riot, which according to Wikipedia, was the only coup d'etat on American soil. Like the short stories - the novel has some interesting what-if scenarios - what if you're a racist and a black doctor is the only person capable of saving your white baby? Perhaps Chesnutt is borrowing a shopworn story line. I'm pretty sure I saw this once in an episode of Little House on the Prairie. The problem with the novel is that it starts painfully slow, and it never elevates beyond being an ok long short story.