The Marrow of Tradition. Charles W. Chesnutt
introduction
One evening, while teaching a creative writing workshop at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, I had a student ask me which writer was the most intelligent in the history of American literature. Of course each person’s answer to this question is completely subjective, but I gave it a shot anyway.
“Charles W. Chesnutt,” I said. “He was a genius.”
Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio, to free blacks from North Carolina. In 1866, his parents returned to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with their family, where Chesnutt’s father, the son of a wealthy white landowner, opened a general store with his father’s financial backing. In Fayetteville, young Charles attended a school for African Americans that had been opened as a result of Reconstruction. Chesnutt, who had grown up reading widely while also listening to the folktales told on the porch at his father’s store, proved himself an exceptional student, curious and driven. In 1875, at the age of seventeen, he left home and moved over one hundred miles east to teach at a rural school for African Americans in Charlotte. Two years later, he would return to Fayetteville to begin teaching at the State Colored Normal School, where