← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
685 Charles Chesnutt (with Tess Chakkalakal) | My Last Book with John Goodby
01:01:41
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark, how a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics, why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever, and how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe you'll discover stories of history, science, art and culture you won't find in a display case you can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts or find us online at si edu Sidedoor. Your data is like gold to hackers and they'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails and fraudulent websites. McAfee Secure VPN lets you browse safely and its AI powered tech scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit mcafee.com cancel anytime. Terms apply. Hello, we begin today with a quotation on race relations and identity that should inspire us all. Quote Looking down the vista of time, I see an epoch in our nation's history, not in my time or yours, but in the not distant future when there shall be in the United States but one people molded by the same culture, swayed by the same patriotic ideals, holding their citizenship in such high esteem that for another to share it is of itself to entitle him to fraternal regard when men will be esteemed and honored for their character and talents, when hand in hand and heart with heart, all the people of this nation will join to preserve to all and to each of them for all future time that ideal of human liberty which the fathers of the Republic set out in the Declaration of Independence which declared that all men are created equal. The ideal for which Garrison and Phillips and Sumner lived and worked, the ideal for which Lincoln died. The ideal embodied in the words of the book which the slave mother learned by stealth to read with slow moving finger and faltering speech, and which I fear that some of us have forgotten to read at all. The book which declares that God is no respecter of persons and that of one blood hath he made all the nations of the earth. You could be forgiven for thinking that this Was Martin Luther King Jr. Talking during the 1960s? It has that majesty and dignity and sonorousness that won King the Nobel Prize and. And made him an American hero. But this was written before, 58 years before King's I have a Dream speech. It came in an essay called Race Its Causes and its cure from 1905. And its author, Charles Chestnut, a humble writer of fiction and the occasional essay will be our subject today. Charles Chestnut with his biographer, Tess Chacolakol, today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. You might think it's hypocritical to say, well, Jack, how can you talk about America and its ideals when America is showing you its truest self at the moment? A self that does not care about one. People swayed by the same patriotic ideals, treating citizens with regard, no matter their race or ethnic background or other human differences. Hasn't the current state of affairs turned all of that heady wine into vinegar? Haven't the forces of prejudice taken over, helped along by their allies, ignorance and indifference? And I will say it's not hypocritical. It's not inconsistent, it's not living in la la land. America has always had this hypocrisy, this inconsistency baked into it from the beginning. Remember my argument that the most American American of all times is Thomas Jefferson. He's the guy to study because he had the twin sides to him, roiling within him, soaringly idealistic on the one hand and deeply prejudiced on the other. All that at once. And America has always lived with these figures on its shoulders. The angel on the one shoulder that says, look at what you can be. And the demon that says, look at what you are. Only there's a trick to that. The angel that says, look at what you can be is also the angel that says, look at your past and your present clearly. Because it will help to show you what you can be if you let it. If you grapple with that truth. And the demon that says, look at what you are, he's not so clear eyed. He says, never acknowledge the truth about your past or your present because it's better to fool yourself about it. Nobody wants to admit they're following the devil, not to the outside world and not to themselves. But somewhere deep down, they know it. Or they will if they are honest. And you can tell by their reaction when other people point it out. Okay, Enter Charles Chestnut. This is someone. The angel. I won't say the angel sent him, but if angels were Real. And they could have sent somebody. They might have sent someone like this, like this guy. He was born light skinned and could have passed as white, but he chose not to. His people were black. They identified as black. And why not live among his people and count himself one of them? That's plausible and convincing. It's commonsensical. But you could also see the other side of this. He was born in 1858, after all, when millions of black Americans were enslaved and millions of white Americans were supportive of it. Even those who weren't were often conflicted about just where people of black skin stood in the world. We're going to hear a whole episode on this with Ralph Waldo Emerson wrestling with this question. Chestnut came of age in a world that had ended slavery after the Civil War, but had not ended the attitudes that had made that war necessary. And he wanted to be a writer, a professional writer in a world where the people who could make that happen had a predisposition for believing that white people would have the best education, the best background, the best intelligence necessary to put words on paper that were worth paying for. Nevertheless, Charles W. Chestnut persisted. And what does that leave us with? The inheritors of a fascinating body of work, a black man writing about race in the years immediately after the Civil War, before the Harlem Renaissance, which would give us authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes Hurston, born in 1891. Jean Toomer, 1894, Langston Hughes, 1901. Chestnut was a generation before, a generation plus, more really. He was 33 when Hurston was born, 43 when Hughes was born. And so we turn to him to see what fiction could do in those days and what America could do with a black writer of fiction. Who was Charles Chestnut? What did he write about, and how was it received? We will talk to our guest. And a word about pronunciation here, I believe. I began the conversation with our guest and asked her if chocolacal was the right way to pronounce her name. I think she said, yeah, that's fine. Which is always the answer if people don't mind a little mispronunciation if they've gotten used to it. I've since read that it's pronounced chocolate, so please forgive if I pronounce it in a couple of different ways here. But anyway, we will have her out here to talk about Charles Chestnut. We'll do that right now. Okay. Joining me now is Tess Chakalakal, who teaches African American and American literature at Bowdoin College and who also hosts the Podcast Dead Writers, a show about great American writers and where they lived. Her previous works include Novel Slavery, Marriage and freedom in 19th century America. She's here today to discuss her new book, A Matter of the Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chestnut. Tess Chakalakal, welcome to the history of literature.
- [09:31]
Tess Chakalakal
Thank you. Nice to be here, Jack.
- [09:33]
Jack Wilson
So Charles Chestnut was born in 1858 and he called himself a pre Harlem post bellum writer. Why is that important for understanding the context in which he was writing?
- [09:49]
Tess Chakalakal
Well, he was born in 1858, which of course is before the Civil War. And he used that phrase really toward the end of his life in an acceptance speech in around 1930 when he was accepting the Spingarn Medal from James Weldon Johnson, honoring his life and work. He was about 70, maybe 69 when he, he, he got this award. And he was really kind of looking back on his life and work and kind of explaining why he wasn't more popular, more widely read, more widely known in his lifetime. And he explained this in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was just about waning at that point, but obviously everyone's heard of.
- [10:42]
Jack Wilson
There had been that boom.
- [10:43]
Tess Chakalakal
Yeah, but he wasn't one of those. And he sort of was kind of bemoaning, I guess, his timing. He had not come a little later perhaps, or maybe even a little earlier during, say, the days of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. He was in between in a number of ways, both historically, you might even say racially, might even say geographically, because he was in the Midwest for most of his life. He was born in Cleveland, died in Cleveland, though spent a large part of his youth and early manhood in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So for those reasons, he was just kind of situating himself historically where he was. And later literary critics kind of picked up on this phrase. And it's come to be associated not just with him, but actually a kind of whole group of writers, particularly African American writers that let's say, didn't get their due at the time of their. Of their writing because. Well, really. Because of segregation.
- [11:50]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. It is interesting because from our perspective, it makes him even more interesting because it's like, well, here's someone who fills in a gap or who is in a period that's lesser known. And what was he up to? And we maybe don't have as many examples, but from his perspective, I'm sure with the publishing world, with readership, with all of those kinds of things, it must have felt like here he was putting in the time and doing the work and the artistry and everything. And yet not getting the kind of acclaim or the kind of financial reward that he saw people before him or after him getting.
- [12:29]
Tess Chakalakal
Yeah, that was. I mean, what he wanted to do was be a full time writer. And because he was also working as a stenographer, court reporter, lawyer in Cleveland, he could make more money at that than he could off of his works. He would have to sell 40,000 copies of a book or have his work serialized in important magazines, literary magazines of the period, which is the way a lot of writers at the time, like Henry James and Mark Twain, you know, Huckleberry Finn was serialized in the Century magazine. That's how they made their money. But he wasn't getting those offers in quite the same way. And so he couldn't really rely on that as a source of income, particularly because he had four children and he was the sole breadwinner in his house. So he couldn't really do that full time. And that was another kind of issue for him, that he had to work a day job in order to feed his family, put them through his school. And so he couldn't devote as much time to his writing as he would.
- [13:35]
Jack Wilson
Have liked, we might say. Today he's also pre MFA program.
- [13:39]
Tess Chakalakal
Yeah, exactly, Totally.
- [13:42]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so you said he was born in Cleveland. Who were his parents? What did they do?
- [13:48]
Tess Chakalakal
Well, his parents, they were known at the time there was a term referring to free blacks, and that means that they were never slaves, but they lived in the south. And they were both. His mom, Anne Marie, and his dad, Andrew Jackson, were both the progeny of relationships, illicit relationships between white men and black women. And these were consensual, as far as we know, these were consensual relationships. And though they were not married, they lived together. And Andrew Jackson's father bequeathed an inheritance to him, a property to him in Fayetteville. And that was one of the reasons after he had left Fayetteville, before the Civil War, he returned to be with his father. And now he had Charles and his two brothers with him after the Civil War. So he was educated. His mom could read and write and was known to have illicitly again taught slaves to read when she lived in Fayetteville. So her last name was Samson, his was Chestnut, and they had a long lineage in North Carolina, left to Cleveland, they actually did not. They met en route, migrating to Cleveland because a whole group of free blacks, as their rights were being curtailed in the late 1850s, this was pre Civil War, they decided to leave to search for a Better life up north. And that's how they met. That's how the story goes anyway. That's the story that Charles Chestnut's daughter Helen tells in her biography of her grandparents. So that's what we know about his parents. And then Chestnut's mom, Anne Marie dies when he is just 13 years old. So he doesn't talk a lot about her in his diaries. We do have a lot of good information about Andrew Jackson, who helped to found one of the first Howard schools in Fayetteville when he returns. And he owned a grocery store. And after his mom died, he remarried one of his second cousins. And after she died, after Chestnut's mother died, that's when Chestnut had to drop out of school and work full time.
- [16:20]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so he famously was light skinned, but never, never in his life, as far as I know, tried to pass as a white man. And once he said he was 7, 8, white. Do we know why he chose to identify as black?
- [16:38]
Tess Chakalakal
Well, in his personal diaries he's living in the black community. His brother, his sisters, his mother, his father, they're all members of the black community. And though when he does mention a couple of instances in his diary, his early journals, while he's working as a teacher, that he's once in a while mistaken as white. And he kind of laughs about this, how stupid people are, because he doesn't really see that as a solution to the problem. And the other thing is when he's 19, 20 years old, he marries his wife, who he remains married to for the next 50 years or so, Susan. And she's dark skinned. And so now they're together and they're a couple and that's how he goes through the world. So there wasn't really a question for him that he was going to leave his wife or marry somebody for the purpose of passing. Of course he wrote stories about people who did that and he sees their lives, at least in his literature and the fiction that he writes is actually quite tragic. So that's not the kind of life he wanted to lead. He always was very close to his family, his father, his sisters, his brothers, and of course his wife and four children. So that was very important to him and certainly more important than passing.
- [17:57]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, it seems a very clear eyed view of what life would be like for him if he, if he viewed it as well, that would be going down a path of living a life of deceit, that it would be right, especially in an era where some states have the one drop rule and, and so on. It's like it wouldn't be very difficult for him to be exposed as someone who was passing.
- [18:23]
Tess Chakalakal
Right. I mean, because he's part of this pretty large extended family, and he knows so many people, both in Cleveland and North Carolina, and he's very close to all these people. The other thing about passing is, for Chestnut, he really believes that this is just what exacerbates, reaffirms the race problem. What you really need to do is dissolve the color line altogether instead of reinscribing the very rules that mandate racial segregation.
- [18:54]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right. If anyone was someone who could say, well, there is a middle here, it doesn't have to be all or none, it seems like it would be him with his family background and so on.
- [19:08]
Tess Chakalakal
Yeah, exactly. And that's really what a lot of his stories and novels are about, being in that middle ground that you. That you mentioned.
- [19:17]
Jack Wilson
Right. So let's talk about his stories. We've touched on it a little bit, what he was writing about, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that and maybe how he fit into the context of his era, in what ways he was a pioneer.
- [19:31]
Tess Chakalakal
Yeah. The word pioneer comes from his daughter Helen's biography that she published a couple decades after his death. She called him the pioneer, a pioneer of the color line. And he was a pioneer in the sense. I'll take that last part first, because he wanted to write stories that were literature instead of kind of didactic, preachy stories about the race problem. So. And, you know, his favorite writers were Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer. And we know all this from the journals that he kept because he was a voracious reader, and a lot of people were writing these kinds of stories in the vernacular, famously, you know, Joel Chandler Harris, you know, the Uncle Remus tails were really popular at the time. And then there was Albion Turget, who had moved to North Carolina from Ohio, had fought for the Union, and he was writing sort of stories about blacks and whites and the relationships between them, you know, in a fool's errand and bricks without straw and set very close, like in Greensboro, which was, you know, about 100 miles from where Trussett was in Fayetteville. So he was reading those stories, too, and he basically thought, look, I'm here. I am a black man living in a black community. I can do this a lot better than Phil Chandler Harris and Albion Turjay, because I'm living amongst them. And most importantly, the period in which he's writing, which, as you know, and many of your listeners know, is the beginning of American literary realism and realism. Is interested in is presenting characters as they really talk, as they sound. And Chestnut, the other thing he was doing alongside reading Shakespeare and Homer was he was studying shorthand and stenography, which was a new technology at the time. And in developing this Alphabet, which was totally oral, it was really trying. He was trying to transcribe the way people spoke. And growing up in a mostly illiterate and semi literate society, this, you know, post Civil War, mainly black former slaves teaching people how to read. Because, of course, once he dropped out of school, he became a schoolteacher because that was the only job available for young black men who could read and write. So he was surrounded by mostly illiterate men and women, and he transcribed their voices. And this is a really unique and important feature of Chestnut's stories and novels, that the vernacular voices, both black and white characters, are really true to real life. The way people spoke then very different from what Joel Chandler Harris and even Turget and others at the time were doing. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's characters. He read Uncle a couple of times. He writes about this. I mean, her characters obviously are stereotypes, right? Caricatures. She knew very few black Southerners, so she didn't know the way that they spoke. She just knew the kind of stereotypes of the way black vernacular sounded on the page, really borrowed from slave narratives and things like that. So Chestnut was kind of mining this new form, this new way of talking and writing the black vernacular, so that it was on the page as it sounded, the way it was spoken. And sometimes people have a really hard time reading that because he is kind of relentless with it. He doesn't, like Mark Twain does at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn, give you a kind of preface to explain the vernacular. He doesn't explain it, he just expects you to know it. And the thing about those black characters that speak in this vernacular voice is that they're very smart and intelligent. They know stuff strangely, like his famous Uncle Julius character from the Conjure Woman stories. He's not just a trickster, what you find in George Chandler Harris. He's a deep thinker and very clever. And yes, he speaks in the voice of the black vernacular, but he knows what he's talking about. He knows his history and he knows his present. And he's speaking to, importantly, white, highly educated Northerners, and they understand him perfectly. So that storytelling voice is something that Chestnut really comes up with. It's really original to him. And that's another one of the reasons I think people should know his work, because of this amazing kind of innovation he made in American literature that is.
- [24:32]
Jack Wilson
Fascinating because I think a lot of times people today, we'll look at a kind of writing that has a vernacular and an intense vernacular where the GS are dropped and all of that, and they'll sort of say, this is not to our taste. It's not good writing. Or they'll criticize it and other people will defend it and say, but what if that's how they really sounded? And what you're suggesting is that the problem with doing the vernacular is that so many times it would infantilize the characters, or it would say, they must be primitive thinkers, they must be primitive people if they're speaking like this. And what Chestnut is saying is, no, it's true that this is how they sound, and I can replicate that, but I'm not going to go down the path of then assuming that they're basically their intelligence level stopped at being a child, because it might be, to a. An untrained ear, it might sound like, well, this is how children talk, or that kind of thing. But he's basically saying that you can find the depth of thought there if you're willing to listen for it.
- [25:43]
Tess Chakalakal
Right. And what's really interesting is the way he puts his black characters in conversation with white characters. That, too, is really not in a subservient way, on par in conversation with white characters, listening and learning from the black characters and not around matters of religion. You know, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Uncle Tom is this paragon of Christian virtue, and the white characters are supposed to learn from Uncle Tom's sacrifice. That's not the case here at all. It's quite the opposite, in fact. And Chessett is playing with those stereotypes from the sentimental fiction of people like Stowe and turning it on its head. And so his stuff is coming out in the 1880s and 90s, and. And that that sense of humor and knowledge, with the knowledge of readers expectations is really acute. And that's something that you can really see in his fiction.
- [26:47]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Tess Chakalakal. Don't you love it when you find a new podcast you really like? Well, let me recommend one. It's called Something you should know. I'm Micah Ruthers, the host, and in every episode you'll hear fascinating information that will make your life better from top experts. Recently we've done episodes on why you have the personality you do, the science of luck and the psychology of a restaurant menu. You're Gonna like something you should know. We have literally thousands of five star reviews. Look for something you should know. Wherever you get your podcasts, this episode is brought to you by Pluto tv. Pluto TV has all the shows and movies you love streaming for free. That means laughter is free with gut busting comedies like the Neighborhood Key and Peele and Ferris Buell day off. Mystery is free with countless cases to crack from Criminal Minds Tracker and Matlock. And thrills are free with heart pumping hits like the Walking Dead and Defiance. Feel the free Pluto TV stream now pay never. Today AT T Mobile, I'm joined by a special co anchor. What up everybody? It's your boy. Big Snoop deal. Double G Snoop. Where can people go to find great deals? Head to T mobile.com and get four iPhone 16s with Apple Intelligence on us plus four lines for 25 bucks. That's quite a deal, Snoop. And when you switch to T Mobile, you can save versus the other big guys. Comparable plans plus streaming respect. When we up out of here, see how you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys. @t mobile.com/apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. Okay, we're back. So, Tess, he did have some success. We talked about him being in the. The middle of some, some sort of eras and, and having some qualms about that or, you know, looking back on his life, he kind of saw himself as in between. But he did have success. He was the first black writer whose stories appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, which was a hugely influential publication at the time. So what qualities were they recognizing and what was valued about what he was doing?
- [29:33]
Tess Chakalakal
That's a good question. And it's complicated because readers of the Atlantic were like now, you know, the same kind of readers you'd have of the Atlantic today actually, like white progressive, liberals, whatever, northerners, Bostonians, highly literate, highly educated people. And he's from the South. You know, he's grown up in the south, he's living in Cleveland. He's. He's far from the centers of literary culture and power, which is really, at the time, like today, New York and Boston and perhaps more Boston than New York back then. So the thing about Chestnut is that he's also extremely well read and attuned to readers interests, especially of a magazine like the Atlantic. But he's also not pandering to them. But his white characters are very much written in the model of readers of the Atlantic magazine. So readers, and including their editorial staff would be able to see themselves in those characters. They're actually Northern whites. John and Annie is this couple who is in every one of the stories of the Conjure woman. And they've moved from Ohio to the South. And they look and act very much like your typical kind of Northerners who know nothing about the south and are discovering things. And so they're the frame for the story that Uncle Julius tells about what's going on in the south and telling stories about his own days in slavery in the past. So he creates this whole kind of framework and structure for the story so that you have the voice of the black Uncle Julius framed by this white Northern couple. They're in conversation. And so this was absolutely fascinating to Northern audiences, especially editors of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. And so while you have, at the time, nonfiction by, say, Booker T. Washington about education and politics and things that are. That's published in the Atlantic, you don't have this fiction, this innovative, creative fiction, and that really comes from the pen of Charles Chestnut. So Thomas Bailey Ulbrich is the first editor of the Atlantic who receives his stories and publishes them. And then after that, this guy named Walter Hines Page takes over and the weird. And Walter Hines Page is the first Southern born and educated editor of the Atlantic magazine. Before that, they're all Boston men. You know, this is a magazine that was founded by Emerson, Longfellow, Harry Peter Stowe, like the New England literati. And then Walter Hine Page enters the scene. I talk a lot about him in my. In the biography. And then Paige recognizes in Chestnut something. And he's also from North Carolina, of all places, and notices he kind of grabs on to Chestnut and really encourages him. And so for his years at the Atlantic and at the Houghton Mifflin as well, Page is his editor and his literary advisor and their friends. And so this relationship really leads to a long relationship between Chestnut and these Boston important publishers.
- [33:06]
Jack Wilson
Right. I wonder if there was something to this being the years after the Civil War as well, because one of the things I've been learning a lot more about just recently is the extent to which the abolitionist editors and publishers, the white abolitionists in the north, and the way that they would kind of steer narratives written by black people toward a kind of sentimentality and a kind of these people are long suffering, and what we're doing to them is a moral atrocity, but it didn't have the kind of room for complexity that maybe you would find in a Charles Chestnut. And so maybe after the Civil War being over, there was more of a spirit of, well, we no longer have to do that. We no Longer have to kind of try to pull at the heartstrings of white readers and kind of have an agenda of getting them conditioned and getting them ready to be anti slavery. Now we can take a look at people, as we would with other kinds of demographic groups, and see what kind of, you know, who they are as human beings and treat them with the kind of respect that we would treat white people, whether they're coal miners or whether they're presidents of the United States.
- [34:32]
Tess Chakalakal
Ideally. Ideally, that. That would have been the case, I think, but I think it was a little bit more complicated than even that.
- [34:39]
Jack Wilson
Like.
- [34:39]
Tess Chakalakal
Like the pre and post Civil War stories, I think there was a kind of, like, fatigue around stories having to do with race and slavery. After the war, they really just wanted to get on with it. And so Chestnut came up against this a few times when his stories were set in the south about black people. He would sometimes get the response like, these are all tragic stories. These are sad stories. We don't really need any more of those kinds of stories. So Chestnut was kind of walking a tightrope around the kinds of stories he wanted to tell. When he first started publishing, before he got his first story called the Gooford Grapevine, published in the Atlantic in 1887, he was writing for Puck magazine. This, like, comic satire, these short sketches. And these stories had nothing very little to do with race, some of them, anyway. A lot of them just had to do with, like, marriage stories, little quippy funny stories. Some of them had to do with race. Like funny black characters kind of playing into certain stereotypes that were still popular at the time. The thing about Chestnut is that he didn't make, at least in his early stories, politics at the forefront of his stories. He wanted to kind of hone his craft. And I think that did appeal to readers at the time. And there are a lot of kind of funny jokes embedded in his fiction and moral tales, too, that he was writing about marriage and whether you married for money or for love and little things like that. But then when he wrote the Goopford Grapevine, it was published in the Atlantic. The editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, had no idea who Charles Chestnut was. Just liked the story because of its. Of its form that I described before and published it. And that was his biggest check that he'd received for anything that he'd written before $50. He kept the receipt for it, you know. And after that, he had another story, probably his most famous story that was published in the Atlantic called the Wife of His Youth. And this was a. I don't know if you know this one, but this is the story that kind of blew my mind and made me, got me hooked on Chestnut was the complexity of this story, just so many layers to it. And it was published I think in 1899 in the Atlantic. And that story was so different from anything people had read had read. It was about a light skinned man who had kind of been in slavery before, not as a slave, but had been married to a slave and then escaped, but not with his slave wife, made it to the north and made a life for himself. And we enter the story at the moment when he's about to marry very light skinned upper class widow. And just at that moment before he's going to propose, he's about to throw a ball to propose to this woman, his former slave wife shows up who's been searching for him ever since the end of slavery. And that's how the story proceeds is what is this man, his name is Mr. Ryder, going to do about his past and his present and grappling with the situation he finds himself in. So many different issues that have nothing to do with slavery as such. It has to do really with the present of Mr. Ryder living a good life. He owns his own home, he makes money, but he still, because he's a light skinned man, he's sort of committed to the race politics of the moment and finds himself kind of thrust back in the past and having to reunite with this slave wife who's very dark skinned, who he's left behind and who he's, he's so different from now that he's a free person living in the north and she hasn't moved on, she for ever since slavery ended has been searching for him. So it's we're and we're inside Mr. Ryder's head as he's grappling with all these issues. So this is also the first time you get the interior life of a character like Mr. Ryder who is grappling with these questions around race and freedom and economics, I guess too, and love and marriage. So different from the kinds of stories that were written during the pre and Civil War periods.
- [39:34]
Jack Wilson
It is such a brilliant short story. Longtime listeners of the podcast might remember we covered it in episode 520 where we took a look at this story and it, I mean, it's where identity sometimes can feel somewhat abstract. We think about it in the abstract. Do you want to consider yourself to be X or Y? And this story really, you know, as you described it, it's a dilemma on a very basic Human level of how do you treat someone that you know you were married to and love or no longer love? Like, it raises all of these very practical, real life questions that identity might bring about.
- [40:25]
Tess Chakalakal
Exactly. And, you know, people think about them in the abstract. Right. And it's so easy to make all these proclamations and declarations about what it means to be a black person in the abstract. But as you say, like, when those issues are practical and on the ground and you're making them, well, it's a. It's totally different. And things come up that you wouldn't expect. And that's exactly kind of the surprise and the suspense of the story that keeps you reading.
- [40:56]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. Okay. So how would you characterize his outlook on life? And his personality was. I mean, you could. From what we've talked about so far, you could imagine a person being angry and bitter or cynical, but also kind of wry, observant, optimistic. How do you see him? Or did that change throughout his life?
- [41:19]
Tess Chakalakal
Oh, I think it's all of those things and more. He was angry, he was optimistic, he was wry, he was funny, he was joyful, he was curious. I think that the word that I was just this constant curiosity of learning new things and this love of reading, really devotion to literature as the most kind of liberating force in American culture and that commitment to learning and new ideas is, I think, what kept him, kept him going amidst a lot of hardship and failure. He really just loved learning and meeting people and talking to people. I mean, one thing that was so great about writing a biography is that really you're kind of in this ongoing, for me, decade long conversation with your subject with whom you might otherwise not be able to talk because they're dead. Right?
- [42:17]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [42:18]
Tess Chakalakal
So at least my subjects usually are. So this was a way of really getting to know him and the way that he thought about the world. And he did have quite a bit of hope, I think. I don't know if people, Chestnut readers would agree with me, but I think he had quite a lot of hope for the future. But I think when he looked around at his own time and the response to some of his publications, I think he did find himself quite dispirited with the times after the Plessy vs Ferguson decision and its aftermath. But he took a lot of joy and hope in his children, in educating his children and talking with his children and his grandchildren. So he. And, you know, he was also a fisherman. He had a summer house in Michigan and he had a nice house in Ohio. He did well with his family. He was very much devoted to his wife. And so he. I think. I think he really did appreciate what he had, having come from so little.
- [43:28]
Jack Wilson
It's interesting when you talk about the time, because I have this quote from him from 1905. You're probably familiar with this. And he is talking about the issue of racism and prejudice. And he says, looking down the vista of time, I see an epoch in our nation's history, not in my time or yours, but in the not distant future. And then he talks about in the United States, there will be one people molded by the same culture and so on. But that the way he. I mean, if you think about that, not in my time or yours, he's telling an audience, this isn't going to happen overnight. And not only that, it's not going to happen during your lifetime, but then he says, but in the not distant future. So he's also not saying it's going to be a thousand years or 500 years, but I can't decide if that's. It sounds optimistic, but when he says, not in my time or yours, it sounds very cynical. And the cynic in me says, could you make that speech in 2024, 2025, and it would still be true? Is that always going to be where we are?
- [44:49]
Tess Chakalakal
Huh? I mean, I kind of see him saying that, as, you know, it takes people a while to come around to change their minds. And that's. That's what we. That's what we're working toward. And so that's what his fiction is all about, too. Like, if you read the Marrow Tradition, the main character is a white supremacist and is, you know, he's. Who starts this terrible massacre in his town in order to overthrow the black white fusionist government at the time, based on the Wilmington massacre in 1898. And we're inside this guy's head, and what this guy experiences is a conversion of kind, but only after much destruction, violence and death has occurred. But I guess, you know, what you learn from that is like, that's life. And there's. It doesn't happen overnight. And you can't force people to change their minds. They have to come around on their own. And for me, the final line of that novel, the Marrow Tradition, which is really in my mind and his. Because he said this himself, well, this was his masterpiece. There's time enough, but none to spare. And that's the final line of that novel in many ways. That's. That's kind of a. His. His mantra. There is an urgency to it. We have the time to do it, but it's. It's something we each have to do for ourselves. And yeah, I mean, we can. We can say this in 2024, 2025. It's really a method, isn't it? Like, it's a method of how to bring about change. You don't force people to submit. You talk to them, you have conversations with them. And that's something that's kind of hard for us to imagine in this day and age, I think, still to talk to the other side. But that's what Chestnut was constantly doing and constantly modeling in his fiction.
- [47:06]
Jack Wilson
Well, that's. I mean, it's an argument for fiction and literature because you're right, we don't always get it in the real world. We don't seem to be getting it online and through our social interactions there. In fact, that almost seems to make things worse. But where we see it is in the mind and the pen, so to speak, of. Of an author like Charles Chestnut. And it doesn't surprise me, knowing what I know about him, that his models were Shakespeare and Dickens and Homer and these people who portrayed life and humanity in all its complexity. And if we could say anything today, it would probably be. We'd be better off if more people were as curious as Chestnut and were as great a readers as he was.
- [47:55]
Tess Chakalakal
Right. I mean, what you say is what the distinction of literature is. Presenting multiple points of view at once, that's really hard to do. Not everyone can do it. I can't do it. I can only look at Chestnut, and through Chestnut, I can kind of see the world through his eyes. But to be able to present all these different characters, where he puts a white supremacist next to a black doctor who's looking to uplift his people, next to a former slave woman who's defending devoted to her former owners. You know, he puts all these characters right next to each other, talking to each other. That's hard to do. That's hard to kind of shift and be convincing that you can actually get into the mind characters, shoes of these people and present their points of view sympathetically and realistically. Not. Not as a hack job, you know, not. Not just sort of presented as a straw man type of thing to knock it down, but to really get in there and see how are thinking and be sympathetic with them. That's what literature does. And you can't do that on. On Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Right. There's only one point of view, and that's yours. And the person who agrees with you. So that's, that's why I think literature, that, that's the distinction of literature. And that's why I hope people keep reading books, novels, fiction.
- [49:19]
Jack Wilson
The book is called A Matter of Complexion. The Life and fictions of Charles W. Chestnut. Tess Chakalakal, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [49:29]
Tess Chakalakal
Thank you.
- [49:39]
Jack Wilson
I'm ready for my life to change. ABC tonight, American Idol returns. Give it your all.
- [49:45]
Tess Chakalakal
Good luck.
- [49:46]
Jack Wilson
Come out with a golden ticket. Let's hear it. This is a man's world. I've never seen anything like it. And a new chapter begins. We're going to Hollywood. Carrie Underwood joins Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan and Ryan Seacrest on American Idol season premiere tonight, 8, 7 Central on ABC and stream on Hulu. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision maker. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority, skills. Wait, did I say job title yet? Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions.
- [50:38]
Tess Chakalakal
Appreciate.
- [50:46]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Test chocolate. My again, my apologies for the mispronunciation. So finally today we close with author John Goodby, who was here for a discussion of the life and works of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. After he and I finished our conversation, I asked him a special question. Okay. We're joined now by John Goodby, expert in the life and works of poet Dylan Thomas. John, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [51:30]
John Goodby
This is a great question, one that focuses the mind. Yeah, and I'm tempted to almost be flippant in answering it. Let's say my last book, I'd like to be priest seller, a Tom Do.
- [51:43]
Jack Wilson
Stretch things out, or a Thomas Bench.
- [51:45]
John Goodby
Novel because I'm a fan of his that I never read Mason and Dixon. That's a good. Yep. I might go for something shorter if, you know, the illness was painful. You know, something like, like Jean Reese, for example.
- [52:00]
Jack Wilson
Oh, yeah.
- [52:01]
John Goodby
Or Malcolm Lar is Under the Volcano. That's a bit longer, but it's a favorite. But in the end, I think I'd probably have to go for poetry, in which case I might go for something quite Long again, like a poem I read during lockdown. Linha Jinian's My Life, which I like particularly, and Mina Loy, Anglo Mongols and the English Rose, that's another really good long poem or poems by more recent poets. You know, you might want to go out with a taste of the contemporary. So I'm thinking of people like Elizabeth Bletser, really good English poet, a couple of American poets, Stephen Rodifer, Kent Johnson. Don't know if anyone's heard of those, but they're favorites of mine. But after all the considerations, Jack, I think I might just settle for something quite distant and remote to sort of take me out of myself before that actually physically happened, as it were, and time and in place and in culture. And I think I'd probably go for Chinese poetry of the Tang Dynasty, maybe a very short or a few of those individual poets. I love, for example, the works of Wang Wei or Dufu or Du Mu or Li Shanglin. I mean, these are great poets, and they have a kind of awesome ambiguity and distance and beauty, and they put you in your place. You know, they set the human in this vast environment, time, space, and they're very human at the same time. So I think for all sorts of reasons, you know, to do with your place, your life, where you are in the cosmos and environment, those would be. That would be my final reading choice.
- [53:48]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Yeah. I lived in Taiwan for about a year and then traveled through China for most of the following year. And the poem of the Tang Dynasty was something that I fell in love with, the poetry as well. And the Quiet Night Thoughts by Li Bai was one that I had memorized when I was learning Chinese. And I could. You know, I also was teaching, and I could start saying it, and all of the school children would recite it along with me. You know, they knew it better than I did, of course, and. But it was. It was just. What's that?
- [54:29]
John Goodby
I just am so, so envious of you, Jack. Having learned Chinese, I mean, I try in a stuttering way to myself, so I can kind of hobble through one or two lines at the time, but to have a certain fluency must be fantastic. I spent a month teaching in China back in 2017, so I was able to. Yeah. Sample also what you're talking about here, which is that universal recognition factor. People know poems in China, and poetry is central to their identity, their culture. And I think that's. That's a great thing. You know, I wish it was more the case in our own cultures, but, hey, you can't have Everything.
- [55:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And even, I mean, when you include these as your last book, you should also make sure that you have the Chinese characters in the edition with you. Because, like that first line of that poem, I mean, you see the moon, which is basically a drawing of the sun with beams coming down from it. And then you see the word bright, which comes right before that word. But the word for bright, the character for bright, is basically a picture of the sun and the moon together in one ideogram. And so you can kind of, you know, you can explore that. Just the beauty of that ancient endorsed way of writing.
- [55:55]
John Goodby
And it would have to be a parallel text. Jack, you're absolutely right. I mean, not all of those Chinese ideograms are, you know, graphic, but they're all really expressive, aren't they? And when I'm reading it, I kind of hop from one side of the page to the other. I always have a parallel text, partly because I want to learn the language. Language, but also because the thing on the page is so impressive in Chinese. Yeah. You know, as an object is almost a kind of, you know, mantra. Almost. It's there on the page. It's four square. It's doing its thing. It's like a perfect self contained literary artifact.
- [56:35]
Jack Wilson
And that before my bed lies a pool of moonlight and I can almost imagine it's frost on the ground. I look up and see the bright shining moon. I bow my head and think of home. That feels like the kind of state of mind I want to be in when I'm reading my last book. Just the serenity of that and the appreciation for the natural world. It's a beautiful. That's a really good choice. The Tang Dynasty. I still haven't made my choice, but I'm going to need to put those Tang Dynasty poems on the list that maybe I need to have those handy in case I get down to my last book and need to reach for poems like that.
- [57:16]
John Goodby
I'm glad you agree, Jack. Yeah, and that's a really good point as well. The Levi, I do know that poem and I didn't mention him, but he's one of the greats too, isn't he?
- [57:28]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Okay. Well, John Goodby, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [57:34]
John Goodby
Thank you, Jack. It's been fantastic. Thank you so much.
- [57:43]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. Thus concludes another episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to John Goodby for that cameo appearance and of course to Tess Checolakal for the scintillating conversation about Charles W. Chestnut, an author worth reading or listening to. If you'd like to check out his short story the Wife of His Youth, which we read and discussed back in episode 526 and which you can find in our archive. Our archive is a movable feast, isn't it? Moving forward, this episode is now in it. One more coin thrown into the glittering fountain and we'll be throwing more coins soon. Russian Poetry since the Cold War the Great Gatsby turns 100 the making of Sylvia Plath Playwright Thomas Kyd will be talking about him and his influence on Shakespeare race in European fairy tales. It's an interesting topic. And Emerson and the anti slavery movement, Emily Dickinson's Two Butterflies and more. All coming up in the next few weeks and months. So please do stay tuned or jump into the archive and splash around as much as you'd like. It's all free and it's all there for you. I'm Jack Wilson, chief coin thrower. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. How are business leaders working to confront climate change? For that answer, listen to the award winning Climate Rising podcast produced by Harvard Business Business School and hosted by me, Mike Toffel, a professor at hbs. Each episode we share a behind the scenes view into how startups and the biggest businesses like Microsoft, Google and seventh Generation are tackling the central issue of our era. Check out Climate Rising wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rick Rubek. And I'm Royce Yudkoff. Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur, owning your own business, and being your own boss? Our new podcast from Harvard Business School, Think Big Buy Small, explores becoming an entrepreneur through the acquisition of an enduringly profitable small business. In this series, we guide listeners how to buy their own small business, including determining if this path is right for them, evaluating prospects, raising the capital they'll need to purchase a small business, closing the deal, and more. Follow Think Big, Buy Small wherever you get your podcasts.