always grated upon his [Carteret’s] susceptibilities. The captain was an upstart, a product of the democratic idea operating upon the poor white man, the descendant of the indentured bondservant and the socially unfit. He had wealth and energy, however, and it was necessary to make use of him; but the example of such men was a strong incentive to Carteret in his campaign against the negro. It was distasteful enough to run elbows with an illiterate and vulgar white man of no ancestry,—the risk of similar contact with negroes was to be avoided at any cost.
Reading this passage brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s Southern Strategy, especially a speech he made about states’ rights—which is Southern code for legalizing race prejudice—in 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place where poor white farmers would undoubtedly support him in a state that would yield only seven electoral college votes. Reagan knew the power of these poor whites, and he knew the language they needed to hear not just in Mississippi, but also around the country. One has to wonder if Reagan would have made a similar speech had he been able to predict the Tea Party, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and scores of other political organizations and social leaders that would lead conservatives toward the dark precipice of nationalism and white supremacy.
At the murderous height of the massacre in Marrow, Philip Carteret is too late in discovering the edge of this dark precipice. The white mob, which originally had been organized and spurred to action by Carteret’s editorials in The Morning Chronicle but is now led by Captain McBane, sets fire to Dr. Miller’s hospital, where Josh Green and other black, armed resistors have sought refuge inside. As the men flee the fire, they are gunned down. Carteret attempts to quell the violence, shouting, “Gentlemen, this is murder, it is madness; it is a disgrace to our city, to our state, to our civilization.” The narrator, as if watching from the cool vantage point of history, says, “Their present course was but the logical outcome of the crusade which the Morning Chronicle had preached, in season and out of season, for many months.”
It easy to imagine any number of conservative political leaders standing alongside any racial conflagration over the past fifty years while shouting the same latent warnings as Carteret, but it is just as easy to imagine the McBanes of 1898 or 2018 never pausing in their unrepentant anger to listen.
In truth, Captain George McBane, with his history of poverty, would have been ideal partner for free blacks in the Fusion party who had their impoverished history, but McBane was not looking for an equal. Instead, he was searching for the dominance that he saw the wealthy enjoying, the dominance that he believed was his racial birthright. In order for him to climb the ladder of economic success, political power, and social acceptance, McBane understands that someone must be beneath him, and he sees African Americans as vulnerable victims on whose backs he can tread and on whose necks he can stand. He finds an ally in the patrician Carteret, a man whose conception of himself and his family is tied to the relics of his family’s history of slave ownership. The only thing these men need is a reason to put their plan into action, so they create one with the help of people like Rebecca Latimer Felton.
Chesnutt understood the impulses of a man like Captain George McBane. If you read this novel you will understand those impulses, too. Afterward, perhaps you will understand why I call Chesnutt a genius, this man who was able to look at a past that preceded him and connect it to the moment in which he lived only to create a work of art that speaks so clearly to our contemporary moment.
What happened in 1898 was an answer in search of a problem. It was an old white woman demanding the lynching of black men for sexual assaults that had not occurred. The same base impulse was on display when a presidential candidate took the escalator down from a gold-covered apartment to deliver a speech about Mexico sending rapists and criminals it did not send. The same blind fear and anger led a group of young white men with torches to chant “Jews will not replace us” around a statue of a losing general erected for a war that general lost. A cynic may claim that history is simply repeating itself, but a realist would acknowledge that to repeat implies a cessation or at least a change in course. Chesnutt was nothing if he was not a realist, and he would be the first to acknowledge that America is not repeating 1898—because 1898 has never stopped happening.
Wiley Cash
January 2019
The Marrow of Tradition
I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition’s shown.
—Charles Lamb, To the Editor of the Every-Day Book
I.
At Break of Day
“Stay here beside her, major. I shall not be needed for an hour yet. Meanwhile I’ll go downstairs and snatch a bit of sleep, or talk to old Jane.”
The night was hot and sultry. Though the windows of the chamber were wide open, and the muslin curtains looped back, not a breath of air was stirring. Only the shrill chirp of the cicada and the muffled croaking of the frogs in some distant marsh broke the night silence. The heavy scent of magnolias, overpowering even the strong smell of drugs in the sickroom, suggested death and funeral wreaths, sorrow and tears, the long home, the last sleep. The major shivered with apprehension as the slender hand which he held in his own contracted nervously and in a spasm of pain clutched his fingers with a viselike grip.
Major Carteret, though dressed in brown linen, had thrown off his coat for greater comfort. The stifling heat, in spite of the palm-leaf fan which he plied mechanically, was scarcely less oppressive than his own thoughts. Long ago, while yet a mere boy in years, he had come back from Appomattox to find his family, one of the oldest and proudest in the state, hopelessly impoverished by the war,—even their ancestral home swallowed up in the common ruin. His elder brother had sacrificed his life on the bloody altar of the lost cause, and his father, broken and chagrined, died not many years later, leaving the major the last of his line. He had tried in various pursuits to gain a foothold in the new life, but with indifferent success until he won the hand of Olivia Merkell, whom he had seen grow from a small girl to glorious womanhood. With her money he had founded the Morning Chronicle, which he had made the leading organ of his party and the most influential paper in the State. The fine old house in which they lived was hers. In this very room she had first drawn the breath of life; it had been their nuptial chamber; and here, too, within a few hours, she might die, for it seemed impossible that one could long endure such frightful agony and live.
One cloud alone had marred the otherwise perfect serenity of their happiness. Olivia was childless. To have children to perpetuate the name of which he was so proud, to write it still higher on the roll of honor, had been his dearest hope. His disappointment had been proportionately keen. A few months ago this dead hope had revived, and altered the whole aspect of their lives. But as time went on, his wife’s age had begun to tell upon her, until even Dr. Price, the most cheerful and optimistic of physicians, had warned him, while hoping for the best, to be prepared for the worst. To add to the danger, Mrs. Carteret had only this day suffered from a nervous shock, which, it was feared, had hastened by several weeks the expected event.
Dr. Price went downstairs to the library, where a dim light was burning. An old black woman, dressed in a gingham frock, with a red bandana handkerchief coiled around her head by way of turban, was seated by an open window. She rose and curtsied as the doctor entered and dropped into a willow rocking-chair near her own.
“How did this happen, Jane?” he asked in a subdued voice, adding, with assumed severity, “You ought to have taken better care of your mistress.”
“Now look a-hyuh,
