Mandy Oxendine.

Charles W. Chesnutt. Mandy Oxendine. Ed. with an intro, by Charles Hackenberry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. 1l2 pp. $10.95 paper.

As we approach the turn of the century, the fiction of Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932), published at the dawn of this century, is perhaps more widely read and taught than ever before. In recent decades, the five books of his fiction that appeared between 1899 and 1905 have been reprinted and have been analyzed in several books and scores of journal articles. His journal and his correspondence are also now in print, so that Chesnutt scholars may learn more about the motivations, experiences, and relationships that often shaped Chesnutt's fiction without visiting the collections of his journals, manuscripts, correspondence, and reviews at Fisk University. Until recently, however, his novel Mandy Oxendine has languished in obscurity because Chesnutt was unable to find a publisher for it.

Luckily, Charles Hackenberry has recovered Chesnutt's nearly-forgotten novel about two racially mixed lovers separated by the color line in post-Reconstruction North Carolina. In this respect, Mandy Oxendine resembles his first published novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), which focuses on Rena Walden, a young, light-skinned African American who tries to pass with the help of her brother John, who has already crossed the color line. When Rena's attempt at passing (and her anticipated marriage to a white aristocrat) fails, she fulfills her "imperative duty" and rejoins the African American community as a teacher in a colored school. Mandy Oxendine differs from The House Behind the Cedars in several important respects, however. The former novel switches the genders of the "passer" and "non-passer," in that Mandy Oxendine chooses to pass while Tom Lowrey refuses to pass. In her ability to "pass," Mandy's gender is significant, since most light-skinned women in "passing" fiction of Chesnutt's day either r efused to pass out of a sense of "imperative duty," failed to pass, or suffered alienation and paranoia as white women. Furthermore, most of these light-skinned heroines conformed to the "tragic mulatta" stereotype who suffered from an "unnatural" mixture of white and black blood, or who could not enjoy white privileges while maintaining peace of mind or sustaining their relationships with their relatives. In Mandy, however, Chesnutt offers a clever, unsentimental female protagonist who bears little resemblance to Rena Walden or any other conventional "tragic mulatto" of "passing" fiction. During one conversation with Tom, Mandy uses apparent Divine Will to refute the "one-drop" rule by declaring that " 'God made me white ... an' I 'termined ter be what God made me, an' I am white.' " As Hackenberry points out in his introduction, Chesnutt's unconventional heroine may have been one reason for the novel's rejection by Houghton Mifflin, which published Chesnutt's first four books of fiction.

In showing how Mandy and Tom were separated by the color line, the first part of the novel provides a fascinating analysis of the experiences of persons of mixed ancestry--like Chesnutt himself--whose racial identity was defined so arbitrarily. His depiction of Tom in several ways mirrors his own experience as an intelligent, light-skinned schoolteacher in rural North Carolina. Like Tom, the young Chesnutt did not permanently pass, though his journal entry of 1875 reveals that he considered the option: "Twice to-day, or oftener I have been taken for 'white.' ... I believe I'll leave here and pass anyhow, for I am as white as any of them." Like his creator, Tom Lowrey was all too familiar with the experiences of life on the color line. The narrator discloses Tom's thoughts about his peculiar situation:

He knew he was as white as they, he believed he was the superior of many of them, in intellect, in culture, in energy; and he tried to look down, with a fine philosophic scorn, upon the unworthy prejudice that condemned him to hopeless social inferiority. But ... he never went where white people were without feeling as though he were being robbed of his birthright. He often wondered whether darker people experience the same feeling in the same degree; or whether the fact that he was so near the line gave it special poignancy in his case. It was inconvenient too, sometimes, to be so white. White people who did not know him were apt to treat him as one of themselves, and if he acquiesced, and they subsequently learned the contrary, they were likely to blame him for presumption rather than themselves for lack of discernment. He was liable to hear people express freely, in the supposed presence of an equal, their opinions of colored people, which were often the reverse of complimentary.

Unfortunately, as Hackenberry observes, the issues Chesnutt raises in the first half of the novel are mostly forgotten during the latter half, when Mandy's white lover is murdered. From this point onward, Chesnutt pays little attention to the ethics of passing and racial caste and becomes almost exclusively concerned with plot and mystery. The disjunction between these two halves of the novel parallels Chesnutt's dual purpose--to dispel the racial prejudices of white readers while entertaining them. The most interesting passage of this part of the novel is the concluding paragraph, in which Chesnutt does not reveal on which side of the color line his two protagonists will live in the future. Chesnutt's reticence about the characters' future racial identity emphasizes the instability of racial distinctions in a society in which the color line is vigilantly policed yet constantly crossed.

Hackenberry's introduction provides some interesting details about Chesnutt's early life that shaped Mandy Oxendine--including his journal writing, his literary aspirations, and the similarities between Chesnutt and Tom Lowrey as "voluntary Negroes." Hackenberry also tries to determine when Chesnutt composed the novel (probably during the mid-1890s) and speculates on the reasons for its rejection by Houghton Mifflin. Finally, Hackenberry places the novel within the context of nineteenth-century "race fiction" by African American and white authors.

Despite its lack of thematic development, Mandy Oxendine is certainly worth reading--not just for readers interested in Chesnutt or "race fiction," but also for anyone interested in how "race" is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.