Book Review: ‘A Matter of Complexion,’ by Tess Chakkalakal

A MATTER OF COMPLEXION: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt, by Tess Chakkalakal

On Nov. 10, 1898, thousands of armed white supremacists stormed the streets of Wilmington, N.C., terrorizing Black businesses and residents and overthrowing the port city’s biracial, “Fusionist” government. The state’s most populous and Blackest city had long been a symbol of Black political power and economic possibility in the post-Reconstruction South, with its Black-owned banks, democratically elected Black aldermen and nationally respected Black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record.

The orgy of violence left businesses burned and as many as hundreds of Black men dead, and led thousands more to flee their homes for good.

After posing for photographs before the Daily Record building’s charred remains, the mob — led by the former North Carolina congressman Alfred Moore Waddell — made their way to city hall, where they forced the Republican government to resign. As white newspapers insisted that the violence had been instigated by Wilmington’s Black people and not the paramilitary mob, Waddell and his supporters successfully recast the Wilmington Massacre into a “Lost Cause” narrative of rabid “Negro rule” and virtuous white redemption. According to Waddell, who served as mayor of Wilmington for the next eight years, the only successful political coup in American history was actually a “perfectly legal” transfer of power by a Fusionist government that had “become satisfied of their inefficiency and utterly helpless imbecility.”

Three years after the Wilmington Massacre, in 1901, the North Carolina-born writer Charles W. Chesnutt challenged Waddell’s narrative with the publication of his second novel, “The Marrow of Tradition”: a gripping tale of family secrets, white resentment and Black ambition in the face of post-bellum racial reaction. Though Chesnutt’s masterpiece would later be called “probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day,” by the contemporary scholar Eric J. Sundquist, the book failed to make the commercial splash that its literary complexity deserved. At the height of literary realism, Chesnutt’s work was often overshadowed by contemporaries like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Albion W. Tourgée, white authors who wrote about the so-called “Negro problem” without accounting for the impact of white racial violence. Amid today’s movement against D.E.I. and Black studies, Tess Chakkalakal’s “A Matter of Complexion” makes an urgent case for the importance of Black artistry during racially reactive and violent times.

In the first biography of Chesnutt in a generation, the professor of African American and American literature at Bowdoin College provides a sophisticated analysis of Chesnutt’s short stories — his dialect-heavy “The Goophered Grapevine” was the first work of fiction by a Black writer to be published in The Atlantic, in 1887 — essays, letters and novels, while contextualizing their creation within Chesnutt’s life as a husband, father and sometimes court stenographer. Chakkalakal asks the reader to see the “First Negro Novelist” as he saw himself: a writer and student of American letters at a time when the literary marketplace struggled to take him seriously.

The book examines Chesnutt’s relationships with his white publishing-industry contemporaries — Howells, who was both a novelist and the editor of The Atlantic, the most esteemed cultural journal of the time; Walter Hines Page at Houghton, Mifflin; and the Louisiana-born essayist and novelist George Washington Cable. These literary giants were often ambivalent toward Chesnutt’s intellectual prowess, even as they took a paternalistic interest in his work. “The only way Chesnutt was able to gain access to Cable, who at the time was almost as well known as Twain,” Chakkalakal writes of their first meeting in 1888, “was by using the fact of his authorship in The Atlantic.”

The light-skinned, fine-haired Chesnutt’s ability to pass as white — he was one-eighth African — shaped much of his work. In the story “The Wife of His Youth” and his first novel, “The House Behind the Cedars” (1900), characters struggle with the personal and political consequences of America’s “one-drop rule.” The “unprecedented collaboration” between Cable and Chesnutt — one a former Confederate soldier and descendant of slaveholders; the other a child of free Black North Carolinians who fled and then returned to the South to build schools for Black children — pushed “American literary realism beyond the bounds of the Northern elite,” Chakkalakal writes.

But this bond was tested by an 1891 political essay, “A Multitude of Counselors,” in which Chesnutt dared to critique Cable and Tourgée and the “conflicting” and condescending advice they gave to Black people like himself, revealing them to be “as much in the dark as to what is best for him to do, or as to what will be the outcome of his presence in the United States, as he himself is.” Chesnutt was by then as prolific a fiction writer as these white contemporaries, and as Chakkalakal writes, now “the shift in their relationship became apparent.”

Toni Morrison wrote that “literature has features that make it possible to experience the public without coercion and without submission.” Chakkalakal’s thoughtfully written biography is a timely reminder of the influence of artists like Charles W. Chesnutt today, when perhaps only literature has the power to sustain us.

A MATTER OF COMPLEXION: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt | By Tess Chakkalakal | St. Martin’s | 369 pp. | $32