Charles W. Chesnutt to W. E. B. Du Bois, 3 August 1925
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1646 Union Trust Bldg.2
August 3, 1925.
Dr. W. E. B. DuBois,
Editor of The Crisis,3
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Dr.DuBois:
I have read the four stories which you have been good enough to send me, and am prepared to tell you what I think about them.4 In my opinion the quality of a story depends upon several elements: 1, the theme; 2, the plot and its working out; 3, the language, including the style; 4, the effect on the reader. The theme is important. A motive which in real life is improbable (except of course in fairy tales and others of the sort) does not make a good story. A plot which suffers from the same defect or is not well worked out does not make a good story. Good English or whatever the language may be, which is easily understood by the reader, is essential. But the most important of all is the effect upon the reader. However irreproachable your theme, however well developed your plot, however fine your style or however choice your language, if the story does not ring true and does not convince the reader, it is not a good story.
Applying these principles to the stories you sent me, and which I return herewith, I should say that the story "There Dogs and a Rabbit" is well conceived, well written, but not convincing. The race motive is dragged into it unnecessarily. There was no dramatic necessity for this fine old woman to betray the secret of her origin, with the extremely probable effect of embarrassing her children and their future. The story would have been, from any standpoint but that of a colored reader, equally dramatic and effective without that disclosure. So the story is not convincing.
"Easy Pickin's" is merely a character sketch in dialect. I suspect this bum's condition was due to more than his wife's misconduct. He could not have been any good or he would have managed his wife better, nor would he have permitted his life to be ruined by a worthless woman. Speaking of dialect, in my view there is no such thing as Negro dialect. Dialect is a form of speech which has become to a
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certain extent fixed or at least conventionalized, like the Scotch dialect or perhaps the Pennsylvania Dutch speech. Negro dialect is largely if not entirely merely mispronunciation of English.5 Mr. Octavius Roy Cohen6 has either dug up or created some forms of speech which savor of dialect, as for instance the phrase of which this would be an example, "Time is somethin' I ain't got nuthin' else but." But, generally speaking, Negro dialect is merely the local corruption of good English, except as it may here and there include some of the Elizabethan allocutions of which Mr. Mencken has collected so many in his "The American Language."7 A dialect which is so difficult that the reader has to stop to figure out what it means detracts from the interest of the story, in which respect this writer sins.
"High Yaller", the most ambitious of the four stories, is very well written. Of course an editor reading it with a view to publication could make certain suggestions as to the language and figures of speech here and there. The plot is well worked out, with a heroine and a hero and a villain, and its atmosphere may be a correct reflection of Negro life in Harlem, with which I am not very familiar, But to me at least the theme is not convincing. I have never yet met knowingly a fair colored girl who wanted to be darker. The almost universal desire is, as the advertising pages of the colored newspapers and periodicals bear witness, to get as much whiter as possible. So the story is not convincing.
"There Never Fell a Night so Dark" is in my opinion the best of the lot. The theme is human. It is a simple sketch, with some elements of improbability in the plot. For instance as I read her story, her son was killed in the war, and according to his story his son is in prison, innocent of course, though they turn out to be the man and the woman. But the little story touches the emotions and to that extent meets the essential requirement of a good story.
If I were grading the stories I should make "There Never Fell a Night so Dark" No. 1, "High Yaller" No. 2, "There Dogs and a Rabbit" No. 3, and "Easy Pickin's" No. 4.
I suspect you only wanted my opinion on the relative merit of the stories and that I have inflicted on you my
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reasons unnecessarily. If so you will pardon the superfluity.
Your letter found me and my family well, and we all join in sincere regards.
Cordially yours,Correspondent: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was a sociologist, historian, and world-renowned civil rights activist. After completing coursework at the University of Berlin and Harvard University, Du Bois became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard in 1895. He was a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University (1897–1910 and again in the 1930s). He was a prominent leader of the Niagara Movement and helped found the NAACP in 1909. As the editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1931, Du Bois published four of Chesnutt's short stories as well as two of his essays. See "The Doll" (April 1912), "Mr. Taylor's Funeral" (April/May 1915), "The Marked Tree" (Dec 1924/Jan 1925), and "Concerning Father" (May 1930); and "Women's Rights" (1915) and "The Negro in Art" (November 1926).
1. As evident from the signed and sent copy of a letter from July 28, 1924, this dotted line on the carbon copy strikes out 1106 Williamson Building, the outdated address on the Chesnutt & Moore letterhead. The firm had relocated in the spring of 1924 to 1646 Union Trust Building. [back]
2. The Union Trust Building is a 21-story office building in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Chesnutt and his partner Helen Moore (1881–1963) moved their offices shortly after its completion to #1646, and operated out of this office until Chesnutt's death. [back]
3. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began in February 1909, with a Committee on the Negro and "The Call," a statement protesting lawlessness against Black people. In 1910, the organization adopted its current name and in 1912 began publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1912 to 1944. Chesnutt's involvement with the NAACP extended over many years, and included serving on its General Committee, attending conferences, presiding at NAACP events in Cleveland, publishing four stories and two essays in The Crisis (1912, 1915, 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1931), and being awarded in 1928 the organization's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. [back]
4. The four short stories sent to Chesnutt to evaluate for the first Amy Spingarn Contest were, in the order in which he ranked them: "There Never Fell A Night So Dark," by Mary Louise French, a young composer and writer from Colorado Springs; "High Yaller: A Story" by Rudolph Fisher (1897–1925), a physician and writer who became an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance; "Three Dogs and a Rabbit," by Anita Scott Coleman (1890–1960), a Black short story writer based in New Mexico; and "Easy Pickin's," by an author whose name has been lost. Awards in all categories were announced at a banquet held in New York City on August 14, 1925, and the winners were named in the "Krigwa" column (The Crisis 30, no. 6 [October 1925]: 275–276. Three stories won awards and were published. Fisher's story won first (The Crisis 30, no. 6 [October 1925]: 281–286 and The Crisis 31, no. 1 [November 1925]: 33–38). French's won second (The Crisis 31, no. 2 [December 1925]: 73–76); and Coleman's won third (The Crisis 31, no. 3 [January 1926]: 118–122). [back]
5. Chesnutt's opinions on "Negro dialect" varied over time and context. He was aware of its marketability as a literary device popularized by regionalist realism, and he often had his Black characters from rural North Carolina speak a rural Southern dialect with terms and pronunciation patterns specific to the Fayetteville region. He was also aware that renderings of dialect might lead to distortion, caricature, and stereotype, and in some instances he linked the use of Standard English with education and status. [back]
6. Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959), a White journalist and fiction writer from South Carolina, was known for humorous stories about Black characters speaking dialect. His early work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, a popular national weekly, and by 1925 he had written several novels, including detective fiction featuring a bumbling Black detective. He later also worked in film and television. Chesnutt was critical of his caricatures of Black life. See his 1926 essay "The Negro in Art" and his speech delivered at Oberlin College, "The Negro in Present-Day Fiction," in Essays and Speeches, eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 522–523. [back]
7. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919) by Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken (1880–1956) was one of the first detailed studies of specifically American language patterns, including regional variation, that dismissed prescriptive standards and did not see American English as a vulgar or inferior form of British English. Mencken's study makes many references to phrases that can be traced to Elizabethan English, with the most extensive discussion appearing in a chapter entitled "Archaic English Words." [back]
