Charles W. Chesnutt

“ To the rest
of the town you will be my servant, and still a
negro. If you choose to read my books when no
one is about and be white in your own private
opinion, I have no objection. When you have
made up your mind to go away, perhaps what you
have read may help you. But mum 's the word!
If I hear a whisper of this from any other source,
out you go, neck and crop! I am willing to help
you make a man of yourself, but it can only be
done under the rose."
For two years John Walden openly swept the
office and surreptitiously read the law books of old
Judge Straight. ”

“ Molly always meant to be kind, and treated Peter
and Nancy with a certain good-natured condescension.
They resented this, never openly or offensively,
but always in a subconscious sort of
way, even when they did not speak of it among
themselves--much as they had resented her
mistress-ship in the old days. For after all, they
argued, in spite of her airs and graces, her white
face and her fine clothes, was she not a negro,
even as themselves? and since the slaves had been
freed, was not one negro as good as another?
Peter's son Frank had grown up with little
Rena. ”

“ I can't imagine who you are. It's
plain that you are a lad of good blood, and yet I
don't know whose son you can be. What is your
father's name?"
The lad hesitated, and flushed crimson.
The old gentleman noted his hesitation. "It
is a wise son," he thought, "that knows his own
father. He is a bright lad, and will have this
question put to him more than once. I'll see
how he will answer it."
The boy maintained an awkward silence, while
the old judge eyed him keenly.
"My father's dead," he said at length, in a low
voice. "I'm Mis' Molly Walden's son." ”

“ They were not citizens,
yet they were not slaves. No negro, save in books,
ever refused freedom; many of them ran frightful
risks to achieve it. Molly's parents were of the
class, more numerous in North Carolina than elsewhere,
known as "old issue free negroes," which
took its rise in the misty colonial period, when race
lines were not so closely drawn, and the population
of North Carolina comprised many Indians, runaway
negroes, and indentured white servants from
the seaboard plantations, who mingled their blood
with great freedom and small formality. ”

“ It says `the negro.' A negro
is black; I am white, and not black."
"Black as ink, my lad," returned the lawyer,
shaking his head. "`One touch of nature makes
the whole world kin,' says the poet. Somewhere,
sometime, you had a black ancestor. One drop of
black blood makes the whole man black."
"Why shouldn't it be the other way, if the
white blood is so much superior?" inquired the lad.
"Because it is more convenient as it is--and
more profitable."
"It is not right," maintained the lad. ”

“ Mis' Molly's father had been at
one time a man of some means. In an evil hour,
with an overweening confidence in his fellow men,
he indorsed a note for a white man who, in a
moment of financial hardship, clapped his colored
neighbor on the back and called him brother. Not
poverty, but wealth, is the most potent leveler. ”

“ You have the somewhat
unusual privilege, it seems, of choosing
between two races, and if you are a lad of spirit,
as I think you are, it will not take you long to make
your choice. As you have all the features of a
white man, you would, at least in South Carolina,
have simply to assume the place and exercise the
privileges of a white man. ”

“ When the boy had learned to read, he discovered
the library, which for several years had been
without a reader, and found in it the portal of a new
world, peopled with strange and marvelous beings. ”

“ Ah,
this is the place:--
"`The term mulatto,'" he read, "`is not invariably
applicable to every admixture of African blood
with the European, nor is one having all the features
of a white to be ranked with the degraded class
designated by the laws of this State as persons of
color, because of some remote taint of the negro
race. Juries would probably be justified in holding
a person to be white in whom the admixture
of African blood did not exceed one eighth. ”

“ There are white people darker
than I am."
"Ah, well, that is another matter; but"--
The judge stopped for a moment, struck by the
absurdity of his arguing such a question with a
mulatto boy. He really must be falling into
premature dotage. The proper thing would be to
rebuke the lad for his presumption and advise him
to learn to take care of horses, or make boots, or
lay bricks. But again he saw his old friend in the
lad's face, and again he looked in vain for any sign
of negro blood. ”

“ Several years before the war, when Mis' Molly's
daughter Rena was a few years old, death had
suddenly removed the source of their prosperity.
The household was not left entirely destitute.
Mis' Molly owned her home, and had a store of
gold pieces in the chest beneath her bed. A small
piece of real estate stood in the name of each of
the children, the income from which contributed to
their maintenance. Larger expectations were
dependent upon the discovery of a promised will,
which never came to light. ”