Charles W. Chesnutt to Ethel Chesnutt Williams, 16 May 1932
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[1]
May 16, 1932
Mrs. E. C. Williams,
912 Westminster Street, N. W.,
Washington, D. C.
My dear Ethel:
Your mother1 and I thank you very much for your interesting and cheerful letter of April 25th, and for your invitation to visit you in Washington.2 I regret very much to say that our health, physical and financial, will not permit us to accept what would be under ordinary circumstances a most welcome invitation. I have rheumatic pains which interfere with my locomotion, and your mother is in much the same shape.
I note what you say about the movie "Veiled Aristocrats."3 I have seen the book advertised in Carter Woolson's4 publication a number of times, and thought once of getting it.5 I sold the movie rights to "The House Behind the Cedars,"6 to the Morceau Moving Picture Company of Chicago,7 and I saw it on the stage once, under the real name, "The House Behind the Cedars," and the ending as the editor had revised it was like the story that you saw8 -- the young white lover reaches the house in time to see her coming down the steps of the house behind the cedars on the arm of Frank Fuller, evidently at the end of a wedding. I don't know whether what you saw was the same or not, or whether the Morceau people got it out. If they did n't, it was rank plagiarism, and they would be liable in a civil action, if I had the money to bring one, and they had anything which I could collect. I contracted with them for $500.00, for the movie rights. They paid me four of their five notes of $100.00, and the other is still unpaid.9 When I saw it, I thought with you that it was very well done, but it was not my story, and it was a soundless picture when I saw it.
I note what you say about Myron McAdoo. Susie has learned since from Washington that there is nothing to the rumor. I hope she has learned correctly.10
I can quite imagine that your work at the Associated Charities is very heavy.11 We have had all the financial troubles here that you complain of there. A special session of the legislature was called and some relief bills were passed, which will probably ward off starvation at least for the rest of the year. I imagine with you that it will work out all right.
I note what you say about the Communists.12 They are more or less active around this city. There is a meeting or demonstration
[2]
2
every now and then, and somebody is arrested or not, according to how the police feel or what takes place.
The A. M. E. General Conference has been in session here for about a week.13 They had a halcyon and vociferous time. They tried three bishops for dishonesty, suspended them for four years each, I think, and elected three new bishops who were consecrated yesterday.14 One of the afternoon papers ran a special edition which was sold around in the colored district and near the church, the front page of which every day was filled with photographs of persons in attendance. They were a weird looking lot, comparable as a whole, with a Garvey convention. You may not have heard the joke about the United National Improvement Association. Some wag around Idlewild15 say that the initials U. N. I. A. mean "ugliest Negroes in America." I have been at one or two of their meetings, and I think their description is inapt. However, they can't help it, and they are doing what they think is best for themselves.16.
Charlie has my sympathy in his hard times.17 I have found times just as hard, but I am old, with no future, and he is young with his life before him.
School teachers' salaries have been cut here to such an extent, that Helen18 will get $440.00 less a year and Dorothy19 probably $250.00 less. As I am relying on them to help me pay my bank interest and keep out of the sheriff's hands, this hits me as well as them. However, time will tell, and in the meanwhile I try somewhat unsuccessfully to keep up a cheerful spirit. School will be out in two weeks from today -- I think it's two weeks -- and shortly after that we will endeavor to get started towards Idlewild. Helen wants to go up with us, and Dorothy wants to stay in Cleveland with her husband. I don't know how they will arrange it. I am entirely in their hands.
Family all join me in love, and your mother is very sorry that she cannot accept your invitation to come to Washington.
Correspondent: Ethel Perry Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958), Chesnutt's eldest daughter, graduated from Smith College in June of 1901 and worked as an instructor at Tuskegee for the academic year 1901–1902. In the fall of 1902, she married her fiancé, Edward C. Williams (1871–1929), then head librarian at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Their only child was Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940). After several years spent in Cleveland in 1909, the Williamses moved to Washington, D.C., where Ethel continued to live and work after her husband's death in 1929; in the early 1930s, she was working as a social worker (home visitor) for Associated Charities of Washington, a poverty-relief umbrella organization. By 1939, she had remarried; her spouse was Rev. Joseph N. Beaman (1868–1943).
1. Susan Perry Chesnutt (1861–1940) was from a well-established Black family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and worked as a teacher at Fayetteville's Howard School before marrying Chesnutt. They were married from 1878 until his death in 1932 and had four children: Ethel, Helen, Edwin, and Dorothy. Susan led an active life in Cleveland. [back]
2. The 23rd annual convention of the NAACP was held May 17–22, 1932. In attendance were many of Chesnutt's correspondents, including Walter White (1898–1955), then head of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and Mary White Ovington (1865–1951). Chesnutt and his wife did not attend. [back]
3. Veiled Aristocrats (1932) was the second film adaptation of Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars by Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), a sound remake of his 1927 silent movie that had used Chesnutt's title. The movie's title comes from a 1923 novel by Gertrude Sanborn (1881–1928), but the plot of the movie is taken from Chesnutt's novel, updated to the 1920s. For this second version, the Micheaux Film Corporation did not approach Chesnutt about movie rights, even though it had not fully paid for the rights for the first movie. It was filmed in Montclair, New Jersey, in the summer of 1931 with an all-Black cast. [back]
4. Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) was a scholar, historian, author, and founder of The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History) and the Association for the Study of African and American Life and History. Largely self-taught as a youth, he studied at Berea College, earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He built a collection of more than 5,000 items related to Black life and history, helped to launch "Negro History Week," and published majors works on migration, religion, and education, including The Miseducation of the Negro (1933). [back]
5. The 1923 novel Veiled Aristocrats by the White American journalist and fiction writer Gertrude Sanborn (1881–1928) dealt with "passing" and interracial romance. It was published by Associated Publishers, the publishing company founded by Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950) in 1921, and advertised in his Journal of Negro History, to which Chesnutt subscribed. Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) used the book's title and theme for his remake of The House Behind the Cedars, but adhered to Chesnutt's character names, setting, and plot (albeit loosley). [back]
6. The House Behind the Cedars (Houghton Mifflin, 1900) was Chesnutt's first published novel. House evolved over more than a decade from a short story, "Rena Walden," first drafted in the late 1880s. It was the only novel by Chesnutt to be serialized, once in 1900-1901 in the monthly Self Culture and again in 1921-1922 in the Black weekly Chicago Defender. House was also his only novel to be adapted to film (1924 and 1932). [back]
7. The Micheaux Film Corporation began in 1919 as the Micheaux Book and Film Company. Founded by Black novelist, film director, and film producer Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), it was based in Chicago, with offices in New York City and Roanoke, Virginia, and became the most successful Black-owned film company of the 20th century. In the 1920s and '30s, Micheaux produced at least three dozen films featuring Black actors and themes he believed to be of particular interest to Black audiences, three of them based loosely on Chesnutt's work. In 1928, the company voluntarily filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, and survived until 1940. Most of the films are lost. [back]
8. The lost 1924 silent film version of The House Behind the Cedars, produced by the Micheaux Film Corporation with a script by Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), was very loosely based on Chesnutt's novel. It was filmed in 1923 in Roanoke, Virginia, and New York City, starring the Black actors Shingzie Howard (1902–1992) as Rena, Lawrence Chenault (1877–1943) as her White suitor, and Douglass Griffin as Frank Fowler. It premiered at Philadelphia’s Royal Theater in December 1924 and was shown in the spring of 1925 in Black movie theaters nationwide. Chesnutt saw it, but it is not known when. Micheaux later remade the film with sound under the title Veiled Aristocrats (1932) without notifying Chesnutt. [back]
9. Between January and September 1921, Oscar Micheaux negotiated with Chesnutt to pay $500 in five installments for the film rights to Chesnutt's novel The House Behind the Cedars. This was a low sum for movie rights to a novel, but Chesnutt likely took into account that Black-produced films had low budgets. Ultimately, 25% (rather than the originally suggested 33%) of the money received went to Chesnutt's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Company. Several of the payments were delayed, and Chesnutt never received the final installment. Micheaux's film adaptation was released in December 1924. [back]
10. Myron McAdoo (1893–1960), son of North Carolina freedman Orpheus Myron McAdoo (1858–1900), became famous as a singer and impresario. He joined the Jubilee Singers led by Frederick Jeremiah Loudin (1836–1904) and then formed his own Virginia Concert Company and Jubilee Singers. The Chesnutts knew the family personally, through Mattie Allen McAdoo (1868–1936), Orpheus' wife and Myron's mother, who was from Ohio. During World War I, Myron McAdoo protested the racist treatment of Black soldiers like himself at Camp Lee, Petersburg, Virginia. He became a Second Lieutenant in 1918, later moved to Boston and got married there in 1923; he still lived in Boston at the time of his death. In 1932 the Cleveland Gazette reported a rumor that he had been found guilty of dealing drugs in New York; this was apparently untrue (see Cleveland Gazette [March 26, 1932]: 3). [back]
11. Associated Charities (and Community Chests) were umbrella organizations that locally pooled and distributed private charitable donations in many larger cities in the early 20th century and employed the earliest social workers. The president of Associated Charities of Washington, D. C., in the 1930s, Coleman Jennings (1892–1978), was a well-known White philanthropist. Ethel Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958) oversaw the predominantly Black second district of the city's Associated Charities as early as 1931; see "'Hard Times' Rush Community Chest," Evening Star (March 12, 1931): 9. [back]
12. Chesnutt possibly initiated the conversation about Communism with Ethel because he had recently received a questionnaire from Lessie O. Toler (1904–1960), who was working on an M.A. thesis on "The Negro and Communism" (completed 1932); see Toler's request from April 14, 1932, and Chesnutt's response, April 26, 1932. [back]
13. The 29th national Quadrennial A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church Conference was held in Cleveland May 2–16, 1932. [back]
14. Three bishops were temporarily suspended at the A.M.E. Quadrennial Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, in May 1932, all charged with misappropriation of church funds: William Tecumseh Vernon (1871–1944), William Decker Johnson (1869–1936), and Joshua Henry Jones (1856–1932). A fourth, who has not been identified, was involved in a sexual scandal earlier that year. Three new A.M.E. bishops were sworn in during the conference: Noah Wellington Williams (1876–1954), David Henry Sims (1885–1965), and Henry Young Tookes (1882–1948). [back]
15. Starting in 1922, the Chesnutts spent every summer until Chesnutt's death in Idlewild, in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles northwest of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, where he had a summer home built in 1925. [back]
16. The United Negro Improvement Assocation and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) was a Black nationalist and Pan-African organization founded by Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) in 1914. Its international and U.S. membership grew to several million in the early 1920s. When Garvey was convicted of mail fraud charges in the U.S. and deported to his home country, Jamaica, in 1927, the UNIA's popularity declined, but the organization continues to exist. Cleveland's branch of the UNIA, founded in 1920, was very active until the end of the 1930s and had a big impact on local politics. [back]
17. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940) was the older of Chesnutt's two grandchildren and the only child of Chesnutt's daughter Ethel and her husband Edward C. Williams. He graduated from Howard University in 1926 with a B.A. and from Howard Law School in 1929, and married Colleen Brooks Williams (1904–2006) the following year. He had a law practice in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. His only child and Chesnutt's only great grandchild, Patricia, was born in 1931, the year before Chesnutt's death. [back]
18. Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880–1969) was Chesnutt's second child. She earned degrees from Smith College and Columbia University, taught Latin (including to Langston Hughes) at Cleveland's Central High School for more than four decades starting in 1904, co-authored a Latin textbook, The Road to Latin, in 1932, and served on the executive committee of the American Philological Association in 1920. She became her father's literary executor and first biographer. [back]
19. Dorothy Katherine Chesnutt Slade (1890–1954) was the youngest child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. After attending the women's college at Western Reserve University from 1909 to 1913 and working as a probation officer for two years, she began teaching junior high school French and English at Willson Junior High School in Cleveland. She married John G. Slade (1890–1976) on March 29, 1924; they had one child, John C. Slade (1925–2011), known as Johnnie. [back]
