The House Behind the Cedars

by Charles W. Chesnutt

there are conflicting definitions of what constitutes race.

being black is a liability;

most blacks do not want to be white.

The question is a question of class and not simply race. Nobody, black or white, wants to be poor, hungry, and without shelter or status;

he wanted opportunities and a level of life generally unavailable to blacks.

Hundreds of planters fled from Haiti during the revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, bringing their slaves to Louisiana, especially to New Orleans and its environs.

third race,

buffer between the slaveholders and the slaves who vastly outnumbered them

a buffer

The majority of the earliest settlers in South Carolina were from Barbados, and they and subsequent settlers brought with them the habits of racial interaction that had existed for years on that Caribbean island.

The conditions that I have described as existing in Louisiana and South Carolina did not exist throughout the nineteenth century but only into the decade preceding the Civil War, the 1850s. Thereafter, as sectional tensions grew, more and more pressures developed to define race in such a way as to simplify racial identity. It is at this moment in history that “white” finds its modern definition in America: It comes to mean one whose forebears are white and white only; one who does not carry in his or her body a known (or acknowledged) “drop of black blood.”

the upper South, in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware:

Often a freed slave was required by law to leave the state within a specified period of time.

They stayed because of kinship ties,

defined by custom.

moral obligation

He inherits the fruits of slavery:

Only within the United States was slavery ever in history defined by race.

The corruption of the white people’s speech was one element—only one—of the negro’s unconscious revenge for his own debasement.

Phryne

By some good chance he had escaped military service in the Confederate army, and, in default of older and more experienced men, had undertaken, during the rebellion, the management of a large estate, which had been left in the hands of women and slaves.

Jacobite

He knew that she would not pay him, for the simple reason that he would not accept pay for such a service.

free man, who, since the war, was as good as anybody else;

Her departure had some of the characteristics of a secret flight; it was as important that her destination should not be known, as it had been that her brother should conceal his presence in the town.

W‘ite folks has deir troubles jes’ ez well ez black folks, an’ sometimes feels ’em mo’, ’cause dey ain’t ez use’ ter ’em.”

Shylock’s bond

the righteousness of the lost cause,

My young friend John has builded, whether wisely or not, very well; but he has come back into the old life and carried away a part of it, and I fear that this addition will weaken the structure.”

The South before the war was essentially feudal,

She had always loved weak creatures.

His feeling for her was something more than brotherly love,—he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars.

the innocent suffer with the guilty, and feel the punishment the more keenly because unmerited.

“The niggers,” he explained to Tryon, “are getting mighty trifling since they’ve been freed. Before the war, that boy would have been around there and back before you could say Jack Robinson; now, the lazy rascal takes his time just like a white man.”

We are well rid of slavery.”

Such people were, for the most part, merely on the ragged edge of the white world, seldom rising above the level of overseers, or slave-catchers, or sheriff’s officers, who could usually be relied upon to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate blacks that fell into their hands.

Had they possessed the sneaking, cringing, treacherous character traditionally ascribed to people of mixed blood—the character which the blessed institutions of a free slave-holding republic had been well adapted to foster among them; had they been selfish enough to sacrifice to their ambition the mother who gave them birth, society would have been placated or humbugged, and the voyage of their life might have been one of unbroken smoothness.

unsullied current

caste.

Had she been merely of illegitimate birth, he would have overlooked the bar sinister.

Use of the term bar sinister.

unconscious that she was other

There were few to trouble themselves about the secluded life of an obscure woman of a class which had no recognized place in the social economy.

Dred Scott decision, delivered by the great, wise, and learned Judge Taney?”

it says in substance, as quoted by this author, that negroes are beings ‘of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; in fact, so inferior that they have no rights which the white man is bound to respect, and that the negro may justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.’

since the slaves had been freed, was not one negro as good as another?

There would have been no legal barrier to their union; there would have been no frightful menace to white supremacy in the marriage of the negro and the octoroon: the drop of dark blood bridged the chasm.

Niobe

I would rather die of knowledge than live in ignorance.

Tryon.”

The name is apt as Rena tried on whiteness and found it an ill fit.

He had heard sad stories of white children, born out of wedlock, abandoned by sinful parents to the care or adoption of colored women, who had reared them as their own, the children’s future basely sacrificed to hide the parents’ shame.