English practice 39

The following paragraphs may or may not be in the most logical order. Each paragraph is numbered in brackets, and question 45 will ask you to choose where Paragraph 2 should most logically be placed.

Conjuring a Prophetic Literary Career

[1]

Born in Ohio in 1858, Charles W. Chesnutt was an author and essayist whom,³¹ during the Reconstruction era, spent much of his youth in North Carolina. Though his parents were free African-Americans, Chesnutt felt intensely the struggles of African-Americans in the United States in the period directly after the Civil War. Amid all the turmoil of the South of his boyhood, Chesnutt took solace in literature, and he³³ had already decided, in his teens, that he would become a writer.

[2]

Although Chesnutt continues³⁴ to write until his death in 1932, it had become as clear as day³⁵ that the work he completed after The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) had become too inflammatory to a society ever uneasy about the topic of race relations in the United States, particularly when authors had brought these problems as close to the surface as Chesnutt had. In recent years, however, Chesnutt's reputation has been restored and he has been treated as the pioneer that he most certainly was. Today as much as in the late nineteenth century, Chesnutt's works provide us with a number of literary masterpieces and a powerful and prophetic vision of race relations in the United States.

[3]

"The Goophered Grapevine," published in 1887 in The Atlantic, was Chesnutt's first major literary success, and this success encouraged Chesnutt to publish additional tales, which were eventually collected in The Conjure Woman
(1899). The Conjure Woman was written in the tradition of earlier folklorists from a previous era³⁶ Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page. However,³⁷ it presented a much more frank treatment of race relations in the South during slavery and Reconstruction. The Conjure Woman and it's³⁹ narrator, Uncle Julius McAdoo, were clearly written in response to the immensely popular Uncle Remus of Harris's tales, but the similarities between the two authors' works ended there. While Harris's tales used mostly animals and not voodoo, conjure, and the injustices of slavery, which The Conjure Woman did, also incorporating human characters instead of Brer Rabbit and animals.⁴⁰

[4]

Chesnutt's true masterpiece, however, is The House Behind the Cedars. The novel details the lives of an African-American familys⁴¹ children who have chosen to "pass" as white, making The House Behind the Cedars one of the first novels to talk about racial passing.⁴² Chesnutt uses his characters' divided status to travel back and forth between the black and white worlds of the South, and in the process, Chesnutt manages to show both the shocking disparity between the two worlds and the insurmountable difficulties his characters, and those who "pass" in real life, face. From the moment it was published in 1900,⁴³ the novel was a sensation in American letters, garnering the respect and admiration of such prominent white literary critics as William Dean Howells and black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Dubois.

[5]

Author and essayist, Charles W. Chesnutt published two books, The Conjure Woman and The House Behind the Cedars, that were widely appreciated in his own time.⁴⁴