This Thanksgiving, Remember the Curse of Ham
This article originally appeared in Imani Perry’s newsletter, Unsettled Territory, free through November 30 and available with an Atlantic subscription after that. Sign up here.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt would hardly qualify as a representative of late-19th-century Black experience. Born in 1858 in Ohio to parents who had been free people of color in Fayetteville, North Carolina, his skin was so light that he could easily “pass” for white. But he didn’t. After the Civil War, his family returned South.
Chesnutt, educated and erudite, worked as a court stenographer at a period when most Black men still did agricultural labor. He would become one of the most successful African American writers of the late 19th century. A series of short stories that he published in The Atlantic in the 1880s and ’90s was gathered into a book, The Conjure Woman, in 1899. The stories continue to be taught in universities.
They are consistent with two types of writing popular during Chesnutt’s time: “local color” literature, depicting
