Charles W. Chesnutt to Bettie Wilson, 12 November 1921
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November 12, 1921.
Mrs. Betty Wilson,
100 Church Street,
Greenville, Tenn.
My dear Mrs. Wilson:
It was quite interesting to get a letter from you and to learn that you have a daughter old enough to be interested in reading fiction.1 My own children are all earning their own living. Mrs. Williams lives in Washington,2 Edwin is a dentist in Chicago,3 Helen4 is a teacher at Central High School and Dorothy5 at a Junior High School. It was quite a stunt to educate them and put them all through college, and I hope you will be successful in giving yours a good education.
My books are published by Houghton-Mifflin Company, 4 Park Street, Botton, Mass.6 The book seller in your town will order them for you, or if you want to send the price to me here I will send them to you. The books are "The House Behind the Cedars," $1.75;7 "The Wife of His Youth", $1.75;8 "The Conjure Woman," $1.50.9 I don't know what the postage is, but I will pay that. You can order either one or all of them, as you like.
The family join me in best wishes.
Yours very truly,Correspondent: Elizabeth (Bettie) Wilson, née Cladwell or Caldwell, was a Black woman born in Tennessee between 1884 and 1888; she died in 1939. According to the 1910 and 1920 census, she lived with her husband P. R. Wilson (1875–1928) at the listed address, 100 N. Church St., in Greeneville, Tennessee. He owned the Clover Leaf Restaurant. After his death, Bettie Wilson was listed as its owner in the 1930 census. The four children she references were Albert (1911–1959), Emily (married name Durham, 1917–2001), Harrison (1921–1965), and the daughter she mentions, Roosevelt Jaunita Wilson Greenlee (1905–1961).
1. Bettie Wilson's daughter was Roosevelt Jaunita Wilson Greenlee (1905–1961); she was 16 at this time. [back]
2. 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). [back]
3. Edwin Jackson Chesnutt (1883—1939) was the third child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. Born in North Carolina, he spent his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, graduated from Harvard University in 1905, and decided not to remain abroad after an extended stay in France in 1906. Instead, he trained and worked as a stenographer, including at the Tuskegee Institute from 1910–1912. After obtaining a degree in dentistry at Northwestern University in 1917, he became a dentist in Chicago. [back]
4. 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]
5. 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]
6. Houghton Mifflin Company had its roots in Ticknor and Fields, a notable publishing house founded in 1832 in Boston, Massachusetts. By 1880, Houghton, Mifflin & Company (later incorporated as Houghton Mifflin Company) had become a major force in U.S. publishing, a position strengthened when it began to publish textbooks in the 1890s. The firm published both of Chesnutt's short story collections and two of his three novels, and as publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, several of his short stories. Chesnutt corresponded with the company from 1891 to 1931. [back]
7. 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]
8. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in December 1899. It was reprinted once in 1901; in 1924, the printing plates were melted down because of low demand. [back]
9. Chesnutt's collection of short stories, The Conjure Woman, was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in March 1899. [back]
