Chesnutt's Children

The strength of the United States can be understood as predicated on growth: spreading democracy, westward expansion, a booming population, increased agricultural production, larger and more expansive corporations.  This... [ view full abstract ]

The strength of the United States can be understood as predicated on growth: spreading democracy, westward expansion, a booming population, increased agricultural production, larger and more expansive corporations.  This paper explores nineteenth century origins of, and interventions in, this understanding of growth as a precondition of national stability.  I argue that growth comes to be understood this way through a corporate framework that obscures the risks—and costs—of growth that extends beyond its usual cyclical parameters.  These risks—and costs—are, not surprisingly, borne by those whose status renders them more vulnerable to marginalization.       

I turn to Charles Chesnutt’s novels, particular his depiction of the death of a child that occurs in both The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905) as challenges to this account of growth.  These deaths, then, are not just an intervention in the sentimental formulation that presents the death of an innocent child as a sacrifice that enables moral progress, but an example of how African-American authors intervene in narratives of growth that presume new cycles of development can progress without costs or exploitation.  Chesnutt’s children are reminders that economic growth in the South—both that which emerges from the reconstitution of white political power as well as that which is promised by more socially and economically progressive versions of a Southern economy—does not occur without risk of individual loss. Thus, his novels provide not just a rejoinder to romanticized accounts of North-South reconciliation, but a rejection of moral, but also economic growth that seems to proceed with no cost to individuals’ own stability—which is to say, growth that is imagined as both without risk and without end.