Energy in Charles Chesnutt's "A Virginia Chicken"

This paper connects Chesnutt’s representation of food rations with the local history of Fayetteville, NC, where competition over resources hardened racial divisions. Published the same month as Chesnutt’s first conjure... [ view full abstract ]

This paper connects Chesnutt’s representation of food rations with the local history of Fayetteville, NC, where competition over resources hardened racial divisions. Published the same month as Chesnutt’s first conjure tale, “A Virginia Chicken” (1887) reduces the competing aims of the Civil War to a fight over a single chicken. “Rev. Samuel,” a minister appointed to an important government position during Reconstruction, recalls his wartime service as a runaway-turned-Union-cook. His anecdote about stealing a chicken during the war recasts a staple of minstrel humor as proof of his fitness for office: “The energy and perseverance which helped him up the rugged path of preferment were the same qualities which at an earlier period of his history and in a different sphere, had enabled him to keep the officer’s mess supplied with palatable food.” Rather than linking enslavement with political incapacity, Chesnutt suggests that Sam’s ability to steal food proves his resourcefulness. This paper argues that the representation of rations across the color line links slave resistance with military heroism, anticipating the political activism Chesnutt witnessed as a young man in Reconstruction-era Fayetteville, where the railroad and other industries undermined the energies of the black community.