Journal Entry for The Bitter Root
So this is a kind of cut-and-paste job from the book of Chesnutt’s letters: to Booker T. Washington (p 15) to Carrie Clifford (see p 51), to W.E.B. Dubois (p 81-84). I wanted to write in response to the idea of “bitterness” that I thought Pitwurst touched upon in her entry – Lucretia over-steeping! How is this “bitterness” an act of rebellion, of undermining while remaining respectable, and what happens when what you are “serving” is no longer palatable. How do you walk that line? I was thinking of (and quoting from) the Andrews piece on Howells and Chestnutt, too– about Howell’s assumptions about what Chesnutt is accomplishing and his judgments on how he has chosen to do so.
The Conjure Tales is so much about cross-racial assumptions about the ability to reason, which version of things are “correct” – see how Howell, who had previously praised Chesnutt’s “conservative temperament, positive outlook, his patience in face of injustice,” later reviews The Marrow of Tradition as “too clearly of a judgment that is made up” (Andrews 335). What strategies does Chesnutt use to make himself, his writing, credible enough for a white audience? How does he and how does he not, like Julius, “play” into ideas of what a black character, or a black writer, needs to look like/sound like/behave like?