Vernacular Soliloquy, Theatrical Gesture, and Embodied Consciousness in The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract

At the outset of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Major Carteret's wife has just given birth to the couple's first and only child, a baby boy named Dodie. The next day, Carteret is greeted with congratulations by his employees at the The Morning Chronicle, where he is editor. Among them is Jerry Letlow, the black porter and grandson of Mammy Jane, the Carterets' maid and Dodie's caretaker: "The major shook hands with them all except Jerry, though he acknowledged the porter's congratulations with a kind nod and put a good cigar into his outstretched palm, for which Jerry thanked him without manifesting any consciousness of the omission." Proper decorum disallowing his speech, Jerry communicates only by means of "his outstretched palm," a small but meaningful gesture signifying the vast social expanse between him and Carteret. As circumstance renders Jerry dumb, the narrator intervenes on his behalf: He was quite aware that under ordinary circumstances the major would not have shaken hands with white workingmen, to say nothing of negroes; and he had merely hoped that in the pleasurable distraction of the moment the major might also overlook the distinction of color. Jerry's hope had been shattered, though not rudely; for the major had spoken pleasantly and the cigar was a good one. (487) This awkward encounter between the leading man and the porter-who, "without manifesting any consciousness" in Carteret's presence, must be spoken for by the narrator-is not an insignificant detail. It speaks, rather, to one of the central problems of the novel: the narrative expression of black consciousness. Based loosely on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898-Chesnutt himself visited the North Carolina town to collect oral histories as material for the novel-The Marrow of Tradition has been understood nearly exclusively as a historical novel. 1 Since Chesnutt's revival from critical obscurity some three decades ago, critics