A new light on an old master: scholars reexamine the provocative racial themes in the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt.

The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt Edited by Charles Duncan Ohio University Press, May 2004 $49.95, ISBN 0-821-41542-5

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt by Matthew Wilson University Press of Mississippi September 2004 $45., ISBN 1-578-06667-0

A revival of, writer Charles W. Chesnutts works in recent years has been led by university presses with the publication of several posthumous novels and essays, as well as volumes of criticism. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first prominent African American novelist and essayist recognized by white critics and readers. With this acclaim, he almost totally eclipsed the noted popular poet Patti Laurence Dunbar at the turn of the 20th century.

Chesnutt's most popular book, The Conjure Woman (1899) showcased slave folktales from the Cape Fear region of the South, while Fayetteville, North Carolina, served as the setting of The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and The Colonel's Dream (1905). He lodged his literary protest against lynching in The Marrow of Tradition (1901), set in the 1898 Wilmington race riot. He used themes of racial mixing and the "passing" of mulattoes in his other works.

The Northern Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Charles Duncan, an English professor who has been studying Chesnutt's work for more than decade, features 18 short stories centering around "Groveland," a fictionalized version of Chesnutt's native Cleveland, Ohio. There is an evolved sense of narrative and metaphor in these stories of comedy and conflict about northern Negroes still fighting the color line. While the stories do not pack the rage and defiance that would later come with the books of the Harlem Renaissance, Chesnutt saw the need for blacks to accommodate and compromise with the prevailing color codes of the white society, presenting an option of mulattoes and mixed races as the cure for white bigotry. These are the themes of the majority of the stories such as "A Matter of Principle," "Uncle Wellington's Wives," "The Doll," "Mr. Taylor's Funeral," "The Kiss," "The Shadow of My Past," and "White Weeds."

He varies the settings, situations and characters with great skill and style such as the comic "A Bad Night," the nourishing "A Grass Widow," the romantic "Uncle Wellington's Wives" and the tragic "Her Virginia Mammy." He that truly believes in the tenets of American democracy and the promise that all of its citizens, black and white, should enjoy its fruits. This is a very satisfying collection of short fiction, capably rendered and told by a veteran storyteller.

Matthew Wilson's Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt places his use of the racial question in a literary context with the work of leading white writers of his day. Chesnutt, proud to be a pioneer of the Negro view, challenged the segregationist, often-patronizing opinions of the white populist scribes, Thomas Dixon (The Clansman), William Dean Howells (An Imperative Duty) Bliss Perry (The Plated City) and Mark Twain (Pudd'nhead Wilson).

In 1904, Chesnutt insisted that the American race problem was a lasting obstacle to this country's progress. He said it is one "which will probably continue to vex us as long as the Negro in this country exists in the public consciousness as something distinct from the ordinary citizen, and whose fights, privileges, and opportunities are to be measured by some different standard from that applied to the rest of the community."

Chesnutt lived in a turbulent time in American history, from the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the 1860 Lincoln presidency and the Civil War through Reconstruction, race riots, and the rise of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP. While white writers preached the inferiority of the black race, he proposed equal rights for blacks, even to the point of racial intermixing, producing mulattos. His work explored these themes: the "passing" of John Warwick in House Behind the Cedars, the sisters of two different races--one black and one white--in The Marrow of Tradition, and the dilemma of white parents of an adopted, mixed-race child in The Quarry (1999). Wilson concludes that Chesnutt's expansive view of the Negro's social and historical role in America evolved. Chesnutt decided the answer must be found by whites who dismissed scientific and religious bigotry in favor of democracy and freedom. In his novels published posthumously in the 1990s, Chesnutt stressed character and social upbringing over the racial themes of his literary heyday.

The Harlem Renaissance literary boom forgot Chesnutt with his pioneering, provocative writing, but he remains an African American author who laid the literary foundation for all of those who prospered from their written work. Wilson's is one of the most incisive, informed texts on the man who is still neglected and forgotten. It is well researched and conceived.

Robert Fleming is a BIBR contributing editor and the author of Havoc After Dare Tales of Terror (Dafina Books, March 2004).