The Marrow of Tradition
1901
In 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, a Black newspaper editor and his family face the violent culmination of white supremacist fury. Charles W. Chesnutt's devastating novel reimagines the real coup d'état that toppled a duly elected biracial government,屠杀 Black citizens, and drove thousands from their homes. At the center stands Major Carteret, a white businessman whose seemingly secure world cracks as he confronts the forces of racial terrorism he has helped unleash. His wife Olivia, terrified for her unborn child, relies on Mammy Jane, a nurse whose own family carries generations of unrecognized sacrifice. The novel moves between the drawing rooms of the powerful and the homes of the marginalized, revealing how easily decency becomes complicity. Chesnutt wrote this book while the smoke still hung over the city, his anger barely contained beneath his precise, devastating prose. It stands as one of the most unflinching portraits of American racial violence ever committed to fiction, a novel that refuses to look away from what this country did, and what it cost.
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“When the pride of intellect and caste is broken; when we grovel in the dust of humiliation; when sickness and sorrow come, and the shadow of death falls upon us, and there is no hope elsewhere,”
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“We are all puppets in the hands of Fate, and seldom see the strings that move us.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“Those who set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“Selfishness is the most constant of human motives. Patriotism, humanity, or the love of God may lead to sporadic outbursts which sweep away the heaped-up wrongs of centuries; but they languish at times, while the love of self works on ceaselessly, unwearyingly, burrowing always at the very roots of life, and heaping up fresh wrongs for other centuries to sweep away.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“Race prejudice is the devil unchained.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“It was a prerogative of aristocracy, Ellis reflected, to live upon others, and the last privilege which aristocracy in decay would willingly relinquish.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
“Ellis had a strain of thrift, derived from a Scotch ancestry, and a tenacious memory for financial details.””
— Charles W. Chesnutt
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Chesnutt, Charles W.. The Marrow of Tradition. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-marrow-of-tradition-51d8a112-5eeb-49e1-8625-3ead98d82aca.Chesnutt, C. W. (1901). The Marrow of Tradition. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-marrow-of-tradition-51d8a112-5eeb-49e1-8625-3ead98d82acaChesnutt, Charles W.. The Marrow of Tradition. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-marrow-of-tradition-51d8a112-5eeb-49e1-8625-3ead98d82aca.
