The Marrow of Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition

by Charles W. Chesnutt, Werner Sollors (Editor)

The Norton Critical Edition of this hugely influential novel gives readers the fullest possible sense of its historical background and critical assessment. Inspired by the 1898 Wilmington Riot and the eyewitness accounts of Charles W. Chesnutt’s own family, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition captures the astonishing moment in American history when a violent coup d’état resulted in the subversion of a free and democratic election.

The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the 1901 first edition. It is accompanied by a note on the text, Werner Sollors’s insightful introduction, explanatory annotations, and twenty-four photographs and illustrations.

“Contexts” connects the novel to the historical events in Wilmington and includes a wealth of newspaper articles, editorials, and biographical sketches of the central players.

The account of riot instigator Alfred Moore Waddell, published just weeks after the event, is reprinted, along with three rarely seen letters: W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Booker T. Washington’s comments on the novel and Walter Hines Page’s letter to Chesnutt. Rounding out the historical record is a selection of 1890s sheet music, a poem, and newspaper articles on the Cakewalk, a popular dance of the period with roots in slavery.

“Criticism” begins with twelve contemporary reviews, including those by Hamilton Wright Mabie, Katherine Glover, William Dean Howells, and Sterling A. Brown. Fifteen recent assessments focus on the novel’s characters, history, realism, and violence. As scholarship on The Marrow of Tradition and on Wilmington in 1898 has been especially active since the 1990s, ten assessments are from this period.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction, School, African American, Race, College

523 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.

Reviews

[Sarah Weathersby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things they didn't teach you in American History

I consider myself fortunate to have gone to segregated schools in the Jim Crow South of the 1950's,thanks to teachers who taught us many of the things that were missing from the approved text books. The text books in the Virginia schools would have us believe that "slaves were happy and they sang a lot." And for 200 years of American History, we were missing.

When my late husband and I returned to the South in 1975 and settled in Raleigh, NC, many cities were just catching up to enforcing the Supreme Court decision that outlawed "Separate but Equal" in the public schools. Wilmington, NC had experienced what was being called a riot by 10 activists known as the Wilmington Ten. They were convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971, and remained in jail until the case was overturned in 1980.

My husband grew up in North Carolina and had learned about Wilmington Riot of 1898 when he attended segregated schools in his home town of Fayetteville, NC. We didn't know whether it was irony or intention that placed Wilmington in the center of racial tension again.

While living in Raleigh, I gradually learned how the Raleigh News & Observer through its publisher Josephus Daniels played a role in the Riot of 1898. His white supremacist editorials fanned the flames of racist sentiment in Wilmington, leading to the overthrow of the elected city government in a city that was in 1898, two-thirds black.

On May 17, 1995, The News & Observer Publishing Company was sold , ending 101 years of Daniels family ownership. Orage Quarles, III a black man is now the President and Publisher of the Raleigh News & Observer. Finally, in 2010, under Quarles leadership, the full story of the riot led by white supremacists to end "Negro domination" in Wilmington was published.

http://media2.newsobserver.com/conten...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmingt...

That's a rather long lead in to a book review. The Marrow of Tradition is Charles W. Chesnutt's account of a the events that led to the massacre of the black population, the burning of the only black newspaper, and black hospital in the fictional town of Wellington, NC.

Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland Ohio to mixed-race parents who returned to their hometown of Fayetteville, NC after the Civil War. Chesnutt returned to the North in 1878 to escape the poverty and prejudice of the south.

The Marrow of Tradition captures the spirit of those times, the dialect of the uneducated, the day-to-day struggles of black people trying to make a life of their own, the hatred of the white "aristocracy," and the plotting and planning of would-be politicians to gain a toehold in the political arena.

A sad tale that is well told.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fictional story set with the backdrop of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot -- white supremacists attempted to wrest power from the popular and legally elected black community in place. Politics and historical events are drawn on a personal level. We see the consequences of choices made. People only understand the effects of the choices they have made when they are affected on a personal level. Only then does regret and remorse tumble in on them. Only then does enlightenment occur.

Why no more than three stars? The tone of the novel is academic—a message is to be conveyed, a lesson to be learned. Characters are referred to with a variety of names—their rank and title (the general, the captain, the major), their surname, given name or nickname and their familial position (aunt, cousin, niece, uncle or half-sister). I couldn’t always keep straight who was who! Rather than paying attention to the story, I all too often was trying to figure out how one character was related to another. Belief in God and religious concepts are an underlying premise of the book. All the above gave me trouble. Bottom line, for one reason or another, I didn’t get close to the characters.

I cringed with disgust at the racial discrimination so clearly evident. Only here did I feel an emotional involvement. The author was a Black. He wrote of his time and what lay close to his heart. I don’t regret reading the book, since I had not known about the Wilmington uprising.

The audiobook is narrated by Sean Crisden. His intonations / character personifications annoy me. I reduced the speed to 90% to properly hear the words spoken. Two stars for the narration.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

A heartrending book about the race riots that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Charles Chesnutt tackles the issue of white supremacy by focusing on two families - one white and one black - and how their lives intersect. Upon The Marrow of Tradition's initial publication, Chesnutt intended for it to clarify the misconceptions of those in the North, though the book addresses several themes still pertinent to race relations today.

Chesnutt excels at examining how tradition undermines progress and how white fragility may lead to unhealthful amounts of aggression and violence. He addresses some of the more complex causes of racism, such as how whites in tenuous positions may project their insecurities onto blacks. Chesnutt's writing also shows how families can play into the issue of prejudice, such as by separating people of different groups and serving as a vehicle for elders to transmit their bigotry into future generations. All in all he includes a bunch of different ideas and characters while still making the story flow well.

Chesnutt's thoughtfulness contrasts with the more direct approach of social protest fiction writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. Overall, a book I would recommend to those searching for a more nuanced portrayal of race relations in the United States.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many critics consider Charles Chesnut to be the most influential African American fiction writer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His realist fiction work The Marrow of Tradition based on a historical account of race riots that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 has been on my kindle for a while. I had been hesitant to take it on, because I thought such a subject matter would be depressing, but the classics challenge gave me the proper motivation to stop procrastinating and get reading. Chestnut did not write the novel for mere entertainment. He had two important purposes. The first was to refute misinformation about the riot perpetuated by inaccurate news reports and a series of white supremacist novels. The second was to stir a sense of outrage over lynchings and violence upon blacks.

I appreciate what Chestnut did in writing this book. The intertwined characters and plots made for an interesting story. Given the backdrop of good storytelling, Chestnut tackled a variety of difficult subjects and offered his audience alternative perspectives. He successfully documented the riots and gave the reader a context to understand them. I think that The Marrow of Tradition still has a lot to offer the modern reader as for as understanding the origins of nature of race relations, especially in the south. I’m glad I read it, but for my own taste the book was sometimes arduous.

Given the gravity of the subject matter, the nobility of purpose, and the many excellent technical aspects of the book, it is difficult for me to give this book a review that is less than glorious. However, if truth be told, I did not enjoy the book as much as expected. It had a slow start, but that wasn’t the primary problem for me. So much of the book was written from the racist perspective, that I was bored much of the time. Personally, I found the racist voice wearing, and the expectation of it dampened my interest in the book.

Though I can only give this book 3 1/2 stars based on my own enjoyment, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. I read Marrow of Tradition for the PrettyBooks’s Classics Challenge. The requirements of the challenge are to read one classic a month, review the book and answer specific questions. My challenge blog is: http://linda2015classicschallenge.blo...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Marrow of Tradition, originally published in 1901, is a historical novel by African-American author Charles Chesnutt portraying a fictional account of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. Before reading this I wouldn't have thought there would be so much hate by the time this "race riot" took place, but I was wrong. It was years since slavery had ended - so why is there still so much hate? I don't know, people don't seem to be able to get along now, why would I expect them to get along over one hundred years ago? When I went off to look up Charles Chesnutt and read a little about him I was amazed to see a picture of what I thought looked like a middle aged white man. Since then I've looked at different pictures and he still looks like a middle aged white guy to me, unless he looks like an old or young white guy. So I looked further and found this:

"Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (née Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder, and Chesnutt likely had other white ancestors. He identified as African American but noted that he was seven-eighths white. Given his majority-European ancestry, Chesnutt could "pass" as a white man, but he never chose to do so. In many southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt would have been considered legally white if he had chosen to identify so. By contrast, under the one drop rule later adopted into law by the 1920s in most of the South, he would have been classified as legally black because of some known African ancestry."

I see no reason why the one drop rule - which was actually somehow made into a law - at least according to the above paragragh, wouldn't work both ways. Now I have myself trying to figure out how things would be if a person seven-eighths white but one eight black would be a black person, but a person seven-eights black would be a white person. Then again, I see absolutely no reason for such a law in the first place. Anyway, back to the author and the book. Chesnutt was a very busy man, at the age of 14, Chesnutt was a pupil-teacher at the Howard School and he eventually was promoted to assistant principal of the normal school in Fayetteville, one of a number of black colleges established for the training of black teachers. Now I'm going to have to look up what a normal school is if I remember to do it when I'm finished. In 1887 in Cleveland, Chesnutt read the law and passed the bar exam. Chesnutt had learned stenography as a young man in North Carolina and now established what became a lucrative court reporting business, which made him "financially prosperous". I'm soon going to start counting up the careers I would hate that this guy had. About this time he began writing short stories and one of his stories was published in The Atlantic Monthly, it was the first work by an African American in that magazine.

His first novel, The House behind the Cedars was published in 1900, followed by the book I'm supposed to be talking about The Marrow Of Tradition. Somewhere before I wrote that the novel was based on the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. This "insurrection" was also known as "The Wilmington coup d'état of 1898", the "Wilmington massacre of 1898" or the "Wilmington race riot of 1898". That coup d'état I had to look up the meaning of. Anyway, this is a tiny bit of what happened in the "Wilmington Insurrection":

"The Wilmington coup d'état of 1898, also known as the Wilmington massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington race riot of 1898, began in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898 and continued for several days. It is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. The event marks an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African-Americans throughout the South, a shift already underway since passage by Mississippi of a new constitution in 1890 raising barriers to voter registration. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000), "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole."

Chesnutt's city isn't Wilmington it's Wellington but the above paragraph should give you an idea of what is going on in Wellington. There's all kinds of people in the novel, white newspaper editors, black newspaper editors, white doctors, black doctors (one anyway), white people who are actually related to black people which they hate, all the people doing the servant type jobs are black people (I think) - waiting on tables, answering doors type of things, most of the business owners are white, and most, but not all white people are awful. In this book anyway. I'm not going to say much more about the novel, I'll let you decide whether you want to read it by letting the book "talk for itself", here are some of the quotes that stick in my mind:

"Old Mammy Jane, however, was not entirely at ease concerning the child. She had discovered, under its left ear, a small mole, which led her to fear that the child was born for bad luck. Had the baby been black, or yellow, or poor-white, Jane would unhesitatingly have named, as his ultimate fate, a not uncommon form of taking off, usually resultant upon the infraction of certain laws, or, in these swift modern days, upon too violent a departure from established social customs. It was manifestly impossible that a child of such high quality as the grandson of her old mistress should die by judicial strangulation; but nevertheless the warning was a serious thing, and not to be lightly disregarded."


"Is it quite prudent, Mrs. Ochiltree," suggested the major at a moment when Sandy, having set down the tray, had left the room for a little while, "to mention, in the presence of the servants, that you keep money in the house?"

"I beg your pardon, major," observed old Mr. Delamere, with a touch of stiffness. "The only servant in hearing of the conversation has been my own; and Sandy is as honest as any man in Wellington."

"You mean, sir," replied Carteret, with a smile, "as honest as any negro in Wellington."

"I make no exceptions, major," returned the old gentleman, with emphasis. "I would trust Sandy with my life,—he saved it once at the risk of his own."

"No doubt," mused the major, "the negro is capable of a certain doglike fidelity,—I make the comparison in a kindly sense,—a certain personal devotion which is admirable in itself, and fits him eminently for a servile career. I should imagine, however, that one could more safely trust his life with a negro than his portable property."


"Upon the major's first appearance at the office, which took place the second day after the child's birth, he opened a box of cigars in honor of the event. The word had been passed around by Ellis, and the whole office force, including reporters, compositors, and pressmen, came in to congratulate the major and smoke at his expense. Even Jerry, the colored porter,—Mammy Jane's grandson and therefore a protégé of the family,—presented himself among the rest, or rather, after the rest. The major shook hands with them all except Jerry, though he acknowledged the porter's congratulations with a kind nod and put a good cigar into his outstretched palm, for which Jerry thanked him without manifesting any consciousness of the omission. He was quite aware that under ordinary circumstances the major would not have shaken hands with white workingmen, to say nothing of negroes; and he had merely hoped that in the pleasurable distraction of the moment the major might also overlook the distinction of color. Jerry's hope had been shattered, though not rudely; for the major had spoken pleasantly and the cigar was a good one. Mr. Ellis had once shaken hands with Jerry,—but Mr. Ellis was a young man, whose Quaker father had never owned any slaves, and he could not be expected to have as much pride as one of the best "quality," whose families had possessed land and negroes for time out of mind. On the whole, Jerry preferred the careless nod of the editor-in-chief to the more familiar greeting of the subaltern."



"And now that you have a son, major," remarked the gentleman first described, as he lit one of the major's cigars, "you'll be all the more interested in doing something to make this town fit to live in, which is what we came up to talk about. Things are in an awful condition! A negro justice of the peace has opened an office on Market Street, and only yesterday summoned a white man to appear before him. Negro lawyers get most of the business in the criminal court. Last evening a group of young white ladies, going quietly along the street arm-in-arm, were forced off the sidewalk by a crowd of negro girls. Coming down the street just now, I saw a spectacle of social equality and negro domination that made my blood boil with indignation,—a white and a black convict, chained together, crossing the city in charge of a negro officer! We cannot stand that sort of thing, Carteret,—it is the last straw! Something must be done, and that quickly!"


"What he says is absolutely true, doctor," interposed Miller at this point. "It is the law, and we are powerless to resist it. If we made any trouble, it would merely delay your journey and imperil a life at the other end. I'll go into the other car."

"You shall not go alone," said Dr. Burns stoutly, rising in his turn. "A place that is too good for you is not good enough for me. I will sit wherever you do."

"I'm sorry again," said the conductor, who had quite recovered his equanimity, and calmly conscious of his power, could scarcely restrain an amused smile; "I dislike to interfere, but white passengers are not permitted to ride in the colored car."

"This is an outrage," declared Dr. Burns, "a d——d outrage! You are curtailing the rights, not only of colored people, but of white men as well. I shall sit where I please!"

"I warn you, sir," rejoined the conductor, hardening again, "that the law will be enforced. The beauty of the system lies in its strict impartiality—it applies to both races alike."


"The criminal was a negro, the victim a white woman;—it was only reasonable to expect the worst.

"He'll swing for it," observed the general.

Ellis went into another room, where his duty called him.

"He should burn for it," averred McBane. "I say, burn the nigger."

"This," said Carteret, "is something more than an ordinary crime, to be dealt with by the ordinary processes of law. It is a murderous and fatal assault upon a woman of our race,—upon our race in the person of its womanhood, its crown and flower. If such crimes are not punished with swift and terrible directness, the whole white womanhood of the South is in danger."

"Burn the nigger," repeated McBane automatically.

"Neither is this a mere sporadic crime," Carteret went on. "It is symptomatic; it is the logical and inevitable result of the conditions which have prevailed in this town for the past year. It is the last straw."

"Burn the nigger," reiterated McBane. "We seem to have the right nigger, but whether we have or not, burn a nigger. It is an assault upon the white race, in the person of old Mrs. Ochiltree, committed by the black race, in the person of some nigger. It would justify the white people in burning any nigger. The example would be all the more powerful if we got the wrong one. It would serve notice on the niggers that we shall hold the whole race responsible for the misdeeds of each individual."

"In ancient Rome," said the general, "when a master was killed by a slave, all his slaves were put to the sword."

"We couldn't afford that before the war," said McBane, "but the niggers don't belong to anybody now, and there's nothing to prevent our doing as we please with them. A dead nigger is no loss to any white man. I say, burn the nigger."


"In the olden time the white South labored under the constant fear of negro insurrections. Knowing that they themselves, if in the negroes' place, would have risen in the effort to throw off the yoke, all their reiterated theories of negro subordination and inferiority could not remove that lurking fear, founded upon the obscure consciousness that the slaves ought to have risen. Conscience, it has been said, makes cowards of us all. There was never, on the continent of America, a successful slave revolt, nor one which lasted more than a few hours, or resulted in the loss of more than a few white lives; yet never was the planter quite free from the fear that there might be one."

There are a few story lines in this book that can be followed without hanging or burning people. There is Clara, the niece of the awful Major Carteret, who is in love with Tom Delamere. Tom is handsome, Tom is attentive to Clara, and Tom is an aristocrat who spends most evenings getting drunk and gambling. Mrs. Carteret has given birth to only one child "Dodie" and he finds himself in danger a few times - after all there was a mole behind his left ear or some such thing. Then there is Lee Ellis who works at the paper (the white one) and is in love with Clara. And there really is a murder committed that is leading to the whole burning incident, so we have to figure out who committed the murder and we better figure it out fast before they burn the first black person they see. So that's it, if you want to read the book I say - go ahead and read it. I wonder if I ever told someone not to go and read a book. I find I can't quite give it four stars, not yet anyway, I only give four stars to books I know I want to read again - five stars to books I know I'll read again and again, and I'm not sure I'll read this one again. So it gets three stars, but someday who knows, it just might move up the list. For now it's on to the next book, happy reading.

[Dusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Marrow of Tradition is, as William Dean Howells famously declared, a bitter, bitter novel. But like any black moral American alive at the time when white supremacy (which we could euphemistically refer to as "Jim Crow") withheld from former slaves and their descendants the liberties supposedly assured them in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Charles W. Chesnutt had good reason to voice bitterness. Sure, at times the novel is a bit heavy-handed in its depiction of cross-racial relations in the post-Reconstruction south, but Chesnutt never claimed to have written anything but a piece of reform literature, and honestly I didn't find the narrator's interventions a distraction. What is unfortunate, though, is that this book's (admittedly important) treatment of race leads too many to turn a blind eye to its technical merits. And Marrow has plenty of those, from the intertwining romantic subplots to the generous, deep characterizations of such seemingly stock characters as Mrs. Carteret. Anyway, I'll admit it, I teared up at the end, and that's what convinced me to give five (rather than four) stars.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We are all puppets in the hands of Fate, and seldom see the strings that move us."

The Marrow of Tradition is incredible. I loved it so much that I stayed home from school for the first half of the day just to finish it. I think I enjoyed this book so much because it reminded me of A Tale of Two Cities in the way the plot unfolded. It involved a complicated web of characters and subplots, but as the story evolved, all the characters intertwined and came together. Any author who writes a story with a huge lot of unconnected characters and, through a story, can slowly connect all of them can win over my heart in a snap.

This novel is a fictional depiction of the social and political struggles that led up to the Race Riot of 1898. Even though Chesnutt's narrator has a very straightforward way of relaying the events that take place in the story, I still felt the superficiality of the white people's worries regarding the African Americans of Wilmington. Chesnutt did a very nice job of making the whites' disgust seem unwarranted, especially toward the end.

Like I said before, I find it impressive how the author intermingled so many separate storylines while simultaneously building complex, interesting characters. Racism, love triangles, murder, gambling addictions, family drama, and possessed babies can all be found within these pages, but not once did the plot seem too bogged down. Chesnutt did a fantastic job of letting each separate storyline run smoothly into the next, and I forever applaud him for it.

This book may not be for everyone, but I still recommend you give it a try. I loved every page of it.

[L.C. Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Such a crucial work of art during that time period and it really opened the eyes of many. I was amazed by the complexities of his characters and his plotline, showing the different levels of racism and the different generations of black people that continued butting heads throughout the story. There were so many mixtures of opinions, moral conflict, and problems that also arose with the difference in class. What really struck me the most was the ending of the novel.

(Spoilers ahead!)

The line, "There's time enough, but none to spare" was powerful and brilliant. I had no desire to know what happened to the baby at the end because what made this work is that we are left uncertain, just like our future. The baby was a representation of that. We have time to change things but we don't have enough for us to waste. In order to build our future we cannot wait for things to happen. Take control of your situation because as it is, in the context of the book and time period, the white population is heading nowhere. An important book that I recommend to everyone.

[She Reads for Jesus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most profound books that I have ever read! I obtained this book for a dollar at the 2009 Harlem Book Fair, due to it being a classic within African American literature. A young man was selling used books, and I discovered this treasured classic at the bottom of a box of books. I decided to finally read it, and have no regrets upon doing so. This classic novel teaches one about the evils and negative affects of pure hatred through racism. It also emphasizes the notion of 'You reap what you sow'. However, most of all, this prolific story portrays the power of forgiveness. This novel is surely a page turner, and I would suggest that this be a book that everyone should have the privaledge of reading!

[spoko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chesnutt was America's first successful black novelist. This book was written in 1901, and is based on an actual race riot that broke out in North Carolina a few years earlier. It's not nonfiction; it's a dramatization based on events leading up to and during the riot.

Really good book. Chesnutt's style is perfect for his theme—it reminds me a lot of Baldwin, in that sense. Stark, straightforward realism is a sharp tool for opening up and exposing racism in society. What Chesnutt does here, primarily, is to tell the stories of two families—one white, one black—who actually share an unacknowledged bond of blood (the wives/mothers are half-sisters). The parallels are really telling. Chesnutt is at his best when he's simply describing the thoughts or actions of his characters. There's a really great moment, for example, after the white sister discovers that her father did indeed marry the mother of her half-sister, and that as such she's entitled to a large portion of his estate. She mulls all this over in her mind, trying honestly and logically to decide whether a black woman can be entitled to a large sum of money from a white man's estate. Which is absurd (and realistic) enough. But then for one brief moment, the larger picture occurs to her:

If the woman had been white,—but the woman had not been white, and the same rule of moral conduct did not, could not, in the very nature of things, apply, as between white people! For, if this were not so, slavery had been, not merely an economic mistake, but a great crime against humanity. If it had been such a crime, as for a moment she dimly perceived it might have been, then through the long centuries there had been piled up a catalogue of wrong and outrage which, if the law of compensation be a law of nature, must some time, somewhere, in some way, be atoned for.

Eventually, of course, she snaps out of it and decides to keep hidden the secret of her sister's lineage and inheritance.

The characters in the book are compelling, especially the black ones. As I said, the parallels are often really revealing. Black characters have a full range of thought and emotion, as they rarely seem to get even from today's white writers. There's a real honesty to Chesnutt's writing, I think. At around the same time, I was reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with some of the same issues from a white perspective. It's also very well written and honest, but the black characters just don't get the same breadth that they get here.

I have to add this other quote, by the way, which really goes to the heart of the perceptions governing American race relations: "The qualities which in a white man would win the applause of the world would in a negro be taken as the marks of savagery."

I don't mean to make it sound like an essay-form treatise on race or anything, though. It's written as a thriller, complete with cliff-hangers and intrigue and the lot. And it reads pretty well, even just on that level. From the very beginning of the book, I really enjoyed his writing style. I love the language and rhetoric of that period, and he was obviously a master of it. That he's not more widely known is, I think, a testament to the fact that we haven't fully recovered from racism. It was interesting to finish this book just after James Cameron passed away, and the anniversary of the Soweto Uprising.

[Katie Quinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closer to 4.5 stars.
This is a really fast paced read, and unfortunately the racism and white supremacy are still very relevant to today's world. In that way, it's hard to read.
Chesnutt is a wonderful writer - very accessible and engaging. I would recommend reading his short stories if you love this novel.

[Beth Mowbray · Rating 5 out of 5]

For most of my life I have lived in a city on the eastern coast of the U.S. by the name of Wilmington, North Carolina. This area is known for some really great things: There are a number of lovely beaches. Michael Jordan was born and raised here. Because of the film studios you may also know my hometown as Dawson’s Creek or One Tree Hill, as the place where Brandon Lee died while filming The Crow, or as the home of Empire Records where you can celebrate Rex Manning Day. But Wilmington is also recognized for some things that I wish it wasn’t. For example, the area has been one of the fastest growing for opioid addiction. And then there are the events of this book, which I wasn’t even taught about growing up in school, even though I lived in the town where it happened ...

In 1898 a group of white men overthrew the local government in an effort to assert white supremacy. They targeted black citizens, destroyed their property and businesses, and killed an unknown number. While this event still does not seem to be widely discussed today, it had a profound impact on race relations in the area, and the south at large, for decades to come.

The Marrow of Tradition is a fictional tale based upon this 1898 “Wilmington Riot” and the author himself had family who were involved. This was an incredibly interesting and important read for me. Although fictionalized, and therefore including a lot more backstory than the actual events of the riot, Chesnutt leans heavily on characters who represent the men who actually drove this horrible event in real life. Despite the age of the book (originally published in 1901), I found it easy to read and very engaging. Chesnutt’s writing was informative and moving at the same time. The text that I have also includes a great deal of additional historical documents and criticism that I look forward to delving into.

I definitely recommend this book to those who are interested in both historical fiction and non-fiction.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took on “The Marrow of Tradition” knowing only that is was one of the novels in the Library of America series and was written by a black man in the beginning of the last century. I hadn’t heard of the events this story is based on, or of this book’s own place in history. I read it for the story. I was pleasantly surprised in that the style of the writing didn’t seem as archaic as some books of the period. The writing was not as flowery, but still had some of the excessive elements that I associate with how I was taught creating writing in high school. Post-James, pre-Fitzgerald. The story itself has a number of characters to keep track of, more than I usually like, but the descriptions and the story kept them all active and mostly memorable. The story is based on a race riot that occurred in North Carolina. I found reading the story before understanding the actual event allowed me to enjoy the book. The book mostly covers the time before the riot, with many strings of action and relationship that culminate in the riot. The event itself is heinous mob action, which occurs in about the last fifth of the book. I would certainly be willing to read more by this author.

[Wanda]

23 JAN 2015 -- Many Thanks to Laura. She provided the link to this book at Project Gutenberg. Find it here

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11228

[Steve]

The many nefarious mechanisms, both cunningly subtle and intentionally overt, of counter-Reconstruction are ably catalogued through this engaging story set in Wellington, a small mental step from Wilmington, NC, site of a racially inspired massacre in 1898. So deeply ingrained have been repressive white Southern attitudes that even today, more than 120 years since Mr. Chesnutt penned his admirable work, we can still easily observe their effects on our society and that in every state of the union, not just in the South.

I caught one quote that felt sadly descriptive of current culture:

That there were some white men who had learned little and forgotten nothing goes without saying, for knowledge and wisdom are not impartially distributed among even the most favored race.

I note the repugnant voices I hear about who so earnestly desire to lead us forward into their robust vision of the future, that of the 14th century. Works like The Marrow of Tradition have the possibility of leading someone to a new way of thought, however, it must be opened first; light cannot enter a dark, windowless room with a locked door.

[Staci Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books starts out as a fairly common Southern story set post Civil War/Reconstruction. Many wealthy families have lost everything at the close of slavery and the patriarchs of those families go through any means possible to return their families to the previous glory. There ia also a love triangle between a rich young woman, the man who wants her money, and the noble man who loves her. This was Chesnutt's appeal to white audiences so he could tell the story he wanted to tell.

By the end, this novel is an attempt to open the eyes of white Southerners to the plight they had placed on the black members of their communities. It touches on lynchings, minstrelsy, the denial of legitimate black children of white men, and of course, the Wilmington Race Riot. Chesnutt used the tropes he knew appealed to white readers and flips them on their head a bit to show just how the blacks fulfilling those tropes would be treated in a realistic context.

This book is not easy to read. Chesnutt's African-American dialect in the novel really has to be trudged through, read over and over, and finally deciphered by the reader. His missing ear for dialect makes the reading labored and slow. In my experience reading this with a class of peers, I found you had to want to read it or it wouldn't get read.

The plot is the other problem. It's mediocre in the beginning, becomes quit compelling in the middle (dealing with minstrelsy and lynching), and then fizzles out quite a bit at the end. You would think the massacre deemed race riot would be an exciting and interesting, but unfortunately most of the characters let you down (black and white alike) and the basic "moral" of the novel is "well I guess it's not going to change." Perhaps Chesnutt thought it wouldn't change, but the ending to this novel left me feeling very dissatisfied.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chesnutt depicts various social classes and their views of race. Interesting and salutary.

[Rana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll admit, I wasn't looking forward to this novel when it was assigned in my English class. I thought it would just be another novel about racism and slavery, with nothing new. But I was absolutely wrong!

The novel starts out a little slow, but then the characters and the plot get incredibly interesting and engaging. I also became infuriated at parts, which is always a good sign from a novel.

Chesnutt did a great job making the novel realistic with a good analysis of the consequences of racism on both whites and blacks. Fantastic novel!

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's time enough but none to spare!

This book was written at the beginning of the 20th century and ends with the hope that "there's time enough but none to spare" in our struggle with racism. This impressive book will give you perspective and pause in thinking about race relations in the United States. The story builds to a well-written crescendo that seemed to ask for forgiveness for the unforgivable. Can we overcome atrocities and hatred to come together?

[Carol Singleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book to understand the origins and abuses of racism in U.S. history.

[Larrry G]

Chapter 2 anyhow
Having thus given the child two beautiful names, replete with religious and sentimental significance, they called him--"Dodie.

[Richard R]

Minority groups often find themselves confronted with an unresolvable dilemma, whereby they can be condemned equally for having failed to integrate into wider societal norms or having done so too successfully. As an example, anti-Jewish pogroms were often directed against Orthodox communities forced to live in segregated ghettos while the holocaust was born of resentment at the economic success of a largely assimilated Jewish middle class.

Something of this is very apparent in Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, which is based on the Wilmington insurrection, a coup d'état and a massacre carried out by white supremacists in 1898. It's one of the comprehensive criticisms I think I've read: "The nation was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion, before the exigencies of which mere abstract ethical theories must not be permitted to stand. The same argument that justified the conquest of an inferior nation could not be denied to those who sought the suppression of an inferior race. In the South, an obscure jealousy of the negro's progress, an obscure fear of the very equality so contemptuously denied, furnished a rich soil for successful agitation. Statistics of crime, ingeniously manipulated, were made to present a fearful showing against the negro. Vital statistics were made to prove that he had degenerated from an imaginary standard of physical excellence which had existed under the benign influence of slavery. Constant lynchings emphasized his impotence, and bred everywhere a growing contempt for his rights."

The plot partly draws on that historical background and partly describes how mixed race American children were often left unacknowledged and divested of their inheritance in favour of their white siblings. Chesnutt's main thesis overall is that emancipation from slavery had made African Americans targets of an arguably worse form of racism: "You are mistaken, sir, in imagining me hostile to the negro... I merely object to being governed by an inferior and servile race.... White people... do not object to the negro as a servant. As the traditional negro,—the servant,—he is welcomed; as an equal, he is repudiated."

Partly, this arises from the fact that slave owners had some responsibility towards people they regarded as property, whereas emancipation had divested them of any such stance: ""We couldn't afford that before the war," said McBane, "but the niggers don't belong to anybody now, and there's nothing to prevent our doing as we please with them. A dead nigger is no loss to any white man. I say, burn the nigger .... you should undeceive yourself. This man is no longer your property. The negroes are no longer under our control, and with their emancipation ceased our responsibility. Their insolence and disregard for law have reached a point where they must be sternly rebuked."

Chesnutt is equally critical of some African Americans, whose desire to integrate into American society leads to a repudiation of their blackness: "These pitiful attempts to change their physical characteristics were an acknowledgment, on their own part, that the negro was doomed, and that the white man was to inherit the earth and hold all other races under his heel... More pathetic even than Jerry's efforts to escape from the universal doom of his race was his ignorance that even if he could, by some strange alchemy, bleach his skin and straighten his hair, there would still remain, underneath it all, only the unbleached darky,—the ass in the lion's skin... If you wish to get along well with the white people, the blacker you are the better,—white people do not like negroes who want to be white. A man should be content to remain as God made him and where God placed him."

Much of the novel revolves around white prejudices that African Americans are inherently animalistic, so that when a white woman is murdered the general assumption is that a black servant must have been the perpetrator. As the massacre begins, Chesnutt takes this trope and inverts it: "The flames soon completed their work, and this handsome structure, the fruit of old Adam Miller's industry, the monument of his son's philanthropy, a promise of good things for the future of the city, lay smouldering in ruins, a melancholy witness to the fact that our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at the first impact of primal passions."

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The clearly stated and unashamed 1898-style of racism espoused by the white characters made this book unpleasant to read. I don't think the author was as concerned with character development and the craft of novel-writing as he was with explaining and condemning the actions and ideas of the white perpetrators. He's insightful about some of his characters' motivations and thought processes, particularly the white supremacists.

Chestnutt also appears to subscribe to the "talented tenth" idea being floated at the time, that one in ten Black men had cultivated the ability to become leaders of the Black community by acquiring a college education, writing books, and becoming directly involved in social change. There is a stark difference between his portrayal of the Black professionals in the story and other Black characters. Only the speech of the Black servants and laborers is rendered in a racialized dialect -- trying to represent the words phonetically. This was not an uncommon practice at the time and for decades afterward, but it's clearly a problem. The story is set in the South. Most characters would rightly have heavy accents. The dialect for the less affluent Black characters is clearly meant to highlight their ignorance and lack of education. Besides being hard to read, it also contributed to my distrust of the author's portrayals of these characters -- I think they were shown to be dumber and less perceptive than is realistic.

[Ila · Rating 4 out of 5]

If he is innocent, his people can console themselves with the reflection that Mrs. Ochiltree was also innocent, and balance one crime against the other, the white against the black.

If there was one single moment where my blood ran cold reading this novel, it was when a so-called progressive white doctor blurts this out on learning that a possibly innocent black man would be lynched to sate the crowds for the murder of a white woman.

Chesnutt sure doesn’t mince words in the slightest. He is entirely unapologetic at describing how exactly these progressive men flee at the first sign of trouble, when their prejudice rears up. Race prejudice is the devil unchained, to quote him.

I was impressed with the nuanced characters, the historically accurate and plausible events, expectations, and behaviour of society. The chapter on Olivia discovering her father’s past is a fine example of selfishness and “honour” trampling decency and humanity. The most prejudiced people have moments of clear insight into their wrongdoings. How indeed can one justify anything by twisting ideals!

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

that was so fucked up. my heart hurts

[Jacob Lietz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this. Steeped in irony that never holds back its bias. Good at that razor edge walking.

[Megan]

"...the old wound still bleeding, the fruit of one tragedy, the seed of another."

So this was a novel! Given the subject matter, it could be dismissed as simply political or social problem fiction, but I found it very good as a novel, with complicated characters, skillful build-ups of plot developments, some pretty immense moments of irony, and a lot of clever prose. Chesnutt portrays a wide variety of human behavior, thought processes, and philosophies among his characters, both black and white. He's attuned to not just racism but also to colorism, to classism, to generational differences. His characters all have complicated relationships to the system of race relations that's slowly suffocating them all.

Chesnutt provides no straightforward answers, but he has a lot of observations and a lot of insights into the ways people deceive themselves and each other, how they rationalize to themselves their own lack of moral fortitude: "Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts which sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly, burrowing always at the very roots of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away." At the novel's conclusion, we have an example of characters overcoming their different degrees of selfishness, but it's at a high cost, and we don't linger long enough to see what happens afterward.

It's not an easy read--this is full-frontal racism, its climax is a fictionalized version of the 1898 Wilmington massacre, and the dialect was sometimes challenging to wade through--but I found it often riveting as a novel and also really engaging as a historical artifact.

(I feel a little uncouth for pointing it out, because the book is obviously about something serious and awful and tragic, but the subtle humor in Chesnutt's prose is still noteworthy. On a white child's christening: "They named the Carteret baby Theodore Felix. Theodore was a family name, and had been borne by the eldest son for several generations, the major himself having been a second son. Having thus given the child two beautiful names, replete with religious and sentimental significance, they called him--"Dodie."" On a performer on public transportation: "A musically inclined individual--his talents did not go far beyond inclination--produced a mouth-organ and struck up a tune...")

[Jessica Burstrem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, it is at times overwrought, but I was nonetheless astounded by this book, so I almost gave it five stars anyway. Chesnutt is incredibly astute, and many of his observations are, sadly, still rather applicable today, well over 100 years later, for example:

"The nation was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion, before the exigencies of which mere abstract ethical theories must not be permitted to stand. . . . An obscure jealousy of the negro's progress, an obscure fear of the very equality so contemptuously denied, furnished a rich soil for successful agitation. Statistics of crime, ingeniously manipulated, were made to present a fearful showing against the negro. . . . Constant lynchings emphasized his impotence, and bred everywhere a growing contempt for his rights. . . . A new generation, who knew little of the fierce passions which had played around the negro in a past epoch, . . . derived their opinions of him from the 'coon song' and the police reports." (155)

I was also impressed by his simultaneous prediction and criticism of some later works on colonialism, as he shows both how the oppressed can grow to imitate the oppressors to whom they are most frequently exposed (Josh like McBane, Sandy like Old Delamere) - but also how they might not always do so, since, after all, the oppressors were not actually gods, as much as they might have tried to act like gods. They did not actually make the men and women whom they oppressed, and those men and women were capable of reaching higher - or lower - ground than the Whites around them - which of course makes perfect sense since we all may achieve higher or lower ground than some of those around us, without regard to others' influence over us or even, oftentimes, our own best attempts.

And while some critics found Chesnutt too angry to be effective, and while indeed some of his characters are too evil - or too good - to be entirely believable, other characters are beautifully well-realized examples of appealing characters with good intentions and yet the evident culpability of complacency and complicity.

Plus I really just enjoyed reading this book. It was a page-turner, and I am finishing it now in the middle of the night because once I got about a quarter of the way into it, I really could not put it down.

[Eric Marcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scathing indictment of Reconstruction racism and lynching in the South, and a particularly harrowing reimagining of the horrific white uprising/riots/lynchings in Wilmington. Reading in the context of flag protests, Black Lives Matter, and police brutality/extra-judicial killings, this is work remains necessary in its depiction of whites utilizing what Giorgio Agamben developed as the "state of exception," where in the law, in the name of itself, suspends itself to work beyond legal models. Here whites all along the spectrum of "degrees" of racism, with whom the power lies, routinely suspend and reinstate the law at their slightest whims. Hold this in contrast to how black protest movements are treated in today's (and previous) contexts (as people of color attempt to assert their own ability to disrupt normal processes as whites have done with impunity in America, revealing that only whites can invoke such states of exception), and the conclusions are sobering.

This work feels like a touchstone of all the complex narrative dynamics that come into play in racial justice issues, particularly in the era of Trump. Necessary reading, even if Chesnutt structurally and formally is a bit constrained.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this novel! The plot is riveting, and even though some of the dialect is hard to get through, it is still readable. Because this novel is set during the time when the Jim Crow South existed, many parts of the story are painful to read, including the notions of racial superiority, hate crimes, and prejudice. However, this novel does a great job of really exposing what it was like to be African-American during this time period. In fact, it presents this so well, that I would rather teach this novel in a classroom than To Kill a Mockingbird. Furthermore, The Marrow of Tradition is a much more interesting read and it has more pathos, thus making it really pull at the heartstrings of the reader. Plus, unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, The Marrow of Tradition was written by an African-American. The only thing that could be improved upon is Mr. Ellis's relationship with Clara....readers never get to find out what becomes of them.