“My Record Was Growing Blacker and Blacker”: Race in Charles Chesnutt’s “Nonracial” Short Stories

Abstract In many of the early short stories of the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), the race of the characters is unmarked, so they are typically interpreted by readers as white. This article makes the case that these underdiscussed stories, written between 1885 and 1893, are not his “nonracial” apprentice work, meant to appeal to white readers by deliberately eschewing questions of race. Instead, Chesnutt subtly invites readers to see certain characters as white-presenting mixed-race people, and to question the assumptions made about these characters’ ethnicity within the story-world. However, he does so without making passing the central theme or the threat of discovery the narrative impetus. Instead, he uses the very fact that such characters are never discovered to be Black to show that categories of race are arbitrary. Chesnutt’s rarely discussed 1893 story “The Shadow of My Past” serves as the limit case that most clearly undermines the racist contention that “Black” and “white” are stable, inherently meaningful categories. While he questions this contention more explicitly in his later, better-known work, in which race relations and racism are central themes, Chesnutt’s ostensibly “nonracial” early short fiction already points to the absurdity of racist essentialism.