Charles W. Chesnutt and the Generous Edition

Introduction

This essay makes two claims. First, although we have teaching editions of Black writers, there is an urgent need for scholarly editions. Second, these editions must be “generous,” undergirded by an ethos that has emerged from the groundswell of work in Black bibliography, an ethos that foregrounds relationality, contexts, communities, and forebears, and rich in robust collations, annotations, and genetic histories.1 We are in a new era of Black studies, one not unlike the 1960s, when scholarship took major strides in bringing forward fresh histories and theories. Generous scholarly editions, print and digital, should not shy away from making a contribution to this new era. All editions are marked by their moment. To claim otherwise is disingenuous, to shirk the responsibility the moment demands, and to seek refuge in a false claim to neutrality and disinterest.

Seven years ago, having surveyed the field of scholarly editions of U.S. writers, Oxford University Press concluded there was a need, and presumably a market, for a multivolume scholarly print edition of the writings of African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932). Chesnutt’s short stories and novels have been at the center of groundbreaking scholarship on race for decades, and yet there are no scholarly editions of his fiction, not even of single works, much less his entire oeuvre. Oxford was prepared to take on the costs of publication and distribution, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded a Scholarly Editions Grant to the first two volumes: The Complete Short Stories (ed. Stephanie Browner, Sarah Wagner-McCoy, and Richard Yarborough). Those two volumes and a third—The Journals and Memoranda (ed. Tess Chakkalakal and Mark Sussman)—are nearing completion. A prospectus for a fourth, Chesnutt’s first published and now widely taught novel The House Behind the Cedars, is in development, and others will follow.

At the same time, The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, launched as an undergraduate-course project twenty-five years ago, is growing and securing funding. Thanks to an NEH grant, it is now a well-structured TEI-conformant (Text Encoding Initiative) site, with faceted search capabilities. It offers all of Chesnutt’s published works, and a manuscript wing has been developed that already includes the hand-corrected galley proofs of four of his book-length works. Encoding of the galley proofs required innovation, since the current TEI (P5) standard offers no guidelines for how to tag proofreading marks. This work has been documented, presented at the Association for Documentary Editing, and made publicly available.2 Current work is focused on Chesnutt’s correspondence. Expected to take six to seven years, the project will digitize, transcribe, and annotate all of Chesnutt’s correspondence, incoming as well as outgoing. When this work is completed, scholars and readers will have access to more than eighteen hundred letters, a remarkably expansive epistolary world. Importantly, the stability and future of the site are accounted for since it is housed at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska and is fully integrated into the center’s backup and preservation plans.3

Scholars involved in both projects have examined the case for editing Chesnutt simultaneously for print volumes and the digital medium.4 The latter may seem to be the medium of the future, but concurrent projects are common, and print’s advantages remain significant. A university press’s interest and ability to provide financial support for production, distribution, and marketing is valuable, and the ongoing vitality of print editions is evident in the many multivolume print editions currently in process. Just to name U.S. writers, these include editions for Henry James, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Charles Brockden Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, with Cambridge University Press, University of California Press, University of Nebraska Press, Bucknell University Press, Yale University Press, and Oxford University Press, respectively. In this context, then, the question that initially seemed important to wrestle with fades, which is whether it’s foolhardy to edit for both print and digital formats, and a more important question emerges: what are the specific demands that come with editing a Black writer?

Chesnutt did not become a major literary figure for study at majority-white institutions until the 1970s, and his introduction into the majority-white scholarly world was often burdened with misguided assumptions about discovery: the works had been forgotten and were just now gaining the attention they deserved. There was also early on an emphasis on his achievement in publishing in white and Northeastern venues such as Atlantic Monthly, and his standing was often attested to by reference to him as the first Black writer to appear in those pages.

But Chesnutt was never out of view for the Black community, including scholars, leaders, and writers, who honored him while he was alive and nurtured his legacy after his death. Late in his life, Chesnutt was asked to contribute to The Crisis’s influential symposium on “The Negro in Art.” In 1928, Harlem Renaissance writer, activist, and lawyer James Weldon Johnson nominated Chesnutt for the NAACP’s highest award: the Spingarn Medal. After his death, Chesnutt earned attention from a wide range of Black scholars. His books were advertised steadily in The Crisis, Carter G. Woodson’s Journal of Black History promoted his fiction as essential to Black education, and in 1941 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Phylon published a scholarly article on Chesnutt. In the 1950s, Arna Bontemps brought many of Chesnutt’s papers to Fisk University for care and preservation, and his daughter Helen Chesnutt published a biography of her father with the University of North Carolina Press. In the 1950s, his second novel, a thinly veiled account of the 1898 Wilmington coup and massacre, was important to the young playwright Lorraine Hansberry. She dedicated seven years, before her early death, to dramatizing the novel, and the margins of her copy include references to the Black historians she was reading at the time. In the late 1960s, as the Civil Rights Movement and the founding of Black studies programs increased demand for books by Black writers, Chesnutt’s published works were reprinted in facsimile editions. But it was Black scholar Sylvia Lyons Render who undertook the archival and editorial labor to publish, with Howard University Press, the fifty-five stories that had appeared only in magazines or newspapers or had never been published.

The publication history and context of Chesnutt’s first story similarly bespeaks an ethics of community and care. A short story for children, “Frisk’s First Rat” (1875) appeared in the Fayetteville Educator, a weekly newspaper central to the Black Fayetteville community. Founded by two men, one who came up through the Howard School, which Chesnutt also attended, and one who later served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, the newspaper was unabashed in its attention to issues important to the community, both local and national. It published railroad timetables and accident reports, news of church events, and updates on civil rights activism, including extensive coverage of the battle for the 1875 Civil Rights Act. When it passed, the editors proclaimed, “We are at last a free people.” To the bill’s detractors, the editors retorted, “We assure our friends who have been so badly frightened by the bill that their parlors, their daughters, &c are just as safe now as ever.” The newspaper’s “Religious Department” was written by Chesnutt’s teacher and mentor, Robert Harris, and when the newspaper published three “Compositions by pupils in the Howard School” about Eli Whitney, two were by Chesnutt’s brothers, fourteen and thirteen years old at the time. Providing a glimpse into the curriculum at the Howard School, which had been built by the Freedmen’s Bureau on land Chesnutt’s father and six other Black men purchased, all three essays underscore the relationship between the efficiency gained with the cotton gin and an increase in the slave trade.

The range of voices in the Fayetteville Educator reflects the “diversification of voices, function, and conceptions of authority” that Eric Gardner found in his study of early San Francisco Black newspapers. The Fayetteville weekly was, like the Black Ohio newspapers Jewon Woo studies, both an “outlet for specific editorial voices” and “a document for active communal life.”5 It was embedded in a community and contributed to that community’s well-being. A generous edition, then, would not only determine the best text for “Frisk’s First Rat”; it would also give some sense of this publishing context. We have, in the past, used words like “authoritative” or “definitive” for scholarly editions, and these aptly captured the ethos of the times. Generous editions should be no less disciplined, careful, complete, and committed to the highest standards. But they might also be defined as open, generative, and importantly, embedded in and shaped by a larger community of scholars and readers. The success of such endeavors as The Colored Conventions Project and the Black Bibliography Project, in building and sustaining collaboration and in putting community at the center, have much to teach us. The rest of this essay will tease out what an ethos of generous editing might mean for three standard features of scholarly editions: collations, annotations, and genetic histories.6

Collations

In his 1997 essay “Editing ‘Minority’ Texts,” William Andrews suggested that the usual “lists of textual variants, emendations, line-end hyphenations, and the rest of the panoply of textual description” were unnecessary.7 Editions with robust textual apparatuses take time, and we needed African American texts to teach right then. But now, twenty-five years later, we have teaching editions of many Black writers, but few with collations.

Computer-assisted collation began in the 1960s, and by 1990 there were more than a dozen somewhat useful software programs. And yet, in 1994, as he contemplated collating eighty-three manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer scholar Peter W. Robinson discovered that few scholarly editions in the last few years had used computer collation. Nor did he find any existing programs to serve his needs as a medieval textual scholar. Thus, he wrote his own program and imagined a not-too-distant future when “the traditional editor could disappear altogether” and digital editions would include collation software that allowed readers to navigate for themselves the selection of texts for collation, the type of analysis, and the format of the results.8 In the early 2000s, Jerome McGann similarly imagined such a future, and he and his colleagues at NINES (Nineteenth-century Scholarship Online) created Juxta, an online collation tool. Although Juxta is no longer available, there are other online nonproprietary collation tools (e.g., LERA and Variance Viewer). There are also collation tools embedded in programs such as TUSTEP, Classical Text Editor, Versioning Machine, Oxygen XML Editor, and CollateX. A 2020 review of machine collation programs finds much to like, but also concludes with concerns, most importantly that programs tend to embed assumptions about what can be ignored (spelling, white space, punctuation, handwriting, font, layout, etc.) and what is of interest.9

Automized collation must have clarity, from the start, about the goals of the edition, the interests of readers, and importantly, what is the smallest unit of comparison. For Chesnutt, whose works include nuanced visual rendering of dialect, collation must attend to such details as the placement of apostrophes and the presence or absence of a space before or after the apostrophe. Recognizing that much is learned in the process of doing hand collations, and reluctant to spend the time testing existing applications or designing our own, the editors of the print editions of the short stories elected to do manual collation. We did, however, enter every variant, tagged for type and location, into a bespoke program (in the language C) that facilitates analysis. The program’s results, displayed in a spreadsheet, were particularly useful when there were hundreds of variants across as many as ten witnesses and when fine-grained analysis was important.10

One fundamental value of collation, of course, comes before collating even begins. It lies in the exhaustive search for all extant witnesses. For Chesnutt, this yielded a wealth of new information. Chesnutt began his career by publishing stories through syndication. We knew his stories had appeared in a few major city newspapers—the Boston Evening Transcript, the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, and the Boston Daily Globe. But intensive searches across diverse digital databases revealed that his stories appeared in many more city newspapers than previously thought (Atlanta, Louisville, Denver, San Francisco, and Portland [Oregon], to name only a few) and in small-town newspapers from coast to coast. Some stories have been found in thirty to forty venues, a number that will almost surely grow as more newspapers are digitized. We have also learned that stories Chesnutt sold to weekly magazines were later reprinted by daily newspapers, that one story presumed unpublished was in fact published, and that another was abridged and republished several years later, both in a story magazine and in newspapers. A conservative estimate suggests a total readership of between fifty and one hundred thousand for some of these works.11

We also found that collating syndicated stories not only returned us to the work of the prolific and influential editor Fredson Bowers in productive ways, but also challenged us to consider that attention to and reporting of every detail is integral to a truly generous edition. In wrestling with Stephen Crane’s syndicated stories, for which there are no extant master copies or manuscripts (as is also the case with Chesnutt), Bowers suggested that editors consider “treating the accidentals of the revised text on the same critical basis as its substantives.” But, as G. Thomas Tanselle pointed out in “Editing without a Copy-Text,” Bowers did not follow his own advice. Although Bowers included accidentals and substantives in his emendation lists for the Crane stories, only substantive variants appear in the historical collation.12 This leaves accidental variants in equally authoritative witnesses unrecorded. For Chesnutt, this would be a serious misstep. Although the indeterminacy of the source for each of the hundreds of variants across the multiple witnesses of Chesnutt’s syndicated stories cannot be resolved, a collation of all accidental and substantive variants allows readers to ask, if not definitively answer, a host of questions that would be foreclosed by a less generous approach, such as collations that do not record accidental variants. With Chesnutt, as it turns out, much information lies in these seemingly small and insignificant changes and a truly complete collation allows us to consider how compositors and editors engaged Chesnutt’s style, word choice, syntax, spelling, and punctuation.

While collation often yields small kernels of information that only sometimes provoke larger insights, at times the results are quite dramatic. Such is the case with the 1889 short story “The Conjurer’s Revenge.” Chesnutt was at the tail end of two years of intensive short story publishing, and it is the only story he published in the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco literary magazine. Founded in 1868 with Bret Harte as its first editor and stories by Mark Twain in its first issues, The Overland Monthly had a commitment to Pacific-region writers and culture. Chesnutt’s story stands out as one of only a few each year that were not about the West. Ten years later the story appeared in his collection The Conjure Woman. This is the text that is reprinted and used by teachers and scholars, with the differences unremarked.

“The Conjurer’s Revenge,” like all the stories in the 1899 collection, is a frame tale, featuring a white northern couple, John and Annie, who have moved south for her health and bought land, which they are developing. In each story, they listen to a conjure tale from slave times as told by Julius, who had been squatting on the land but now works for the couple. In preparing three other previously published stories for the 1899 collection, Chesnutt focused on revising the frame tale, eliminating explanatory passages no longer needed in every story. And at first glance this may seem to be the case with “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” since changes to the frame tale include a cut of 461 words that reduces Annie’s contribution to the dialogue.

But far more of Chesnutt’s revisions are focused on Julius. In fact, over 80 percent of changes between the 1889 and 1899 texts are to the tale Julius tells, or to the words he speaks in the frame tale. Some of the changes foreground Julius’s attention to his listeners, and several have Julius giving more cues to facilitate understanding of the story. But the preponderance of variants reveals Chesnutt’s meticulous attention to Julius’s words and syntax, and to rendering his speech visually. Sometimes Chesnutt changes a word from standard English to dialect speech (was to wuz, or him to ’im); sometimes from dialect back to standard English (as in yer to you); and sometimes from one dialect version to another. Many changes add or delete apostrophes and add or delete single letters or space on either side of the apostrophe.

For more than a century, writers and scholars have meditated on the intertwined oral and print traditions of African American literature. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois prefaced every chapter with bars of gospel songs; and his last chapter, “Of Songs of Sorrow,” begins by invoking the sound of the renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers. The role of music, sound, speech, and oral culture are integral to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, to name only two of many major works that have probed the relationship between orality and print. Dialect fiction, however, remains a knotty issue, and some of Chesnutt’s most complex stories—popular in his day and widely taught now—put visual dialect at the center.

There is little consensus on Chesnutt’s use of dialect. Eric Sundquist argues that, in Chesnutt’s dialect, there is a “subtle, self-conscious examination of his relation to both the White plantation tradition and to those Black writers who may have pandered to the public taste.” Paul Petrie has suggested that Chesnutt exploited “plantation-dialect regionalism’s capacity for cultural mediation while ridding it of its white racist values.” Seeing dialect as a trickster’s mask, Houston Baker argues that Julius speaks with “conjuring efficaciousness” because he is fully aware that the sounds of his speech are “dear to the hearts of his White boss.” Critic and novelist John Edgar Wideman suggests Chesnutt’s use of dialect reveals that the speech of the northern white man and the southern Black man are equally marked, and that the “obvious kind of power” of the former is “balanced by an unexpected force wielded by the supposed powerless.” Several scholars, noting Chesnutt’s remarkable stenography skills (he could record more than two hundred words per minute), have argued that Chesnutt’s exacting depictions of orthographical features bespeak a desire to preserve a regional dialect that was disappearing. In The Sonic Color Line, Jennifer Lynn Stoever reads Chesnutt’s dialect as writerly performances akin to the Fisk Jubilee singers performing spirituals for white audiences. In both instances the performances are not mere minstrelsy, but also transformational for the performer.13

Increasingly, scholarship and public debate have challenged us to think critically about speech, performance, language, race, and power, and new forms of social justice praxis recommend attention to who speaks, in what language or dialect, and in what settings. Not surprisingly, scholars have sought in Chesnutt’s journals, letters, and essays, as well as the stories themselves, evidence of his own thinking about dialect, and certainly some readers find it troubling, particularly that Julius’s speech is rendered with what seems to be “comic orthography” meant to capture “lazy, slovenly pronunciation.”14 Thus, in this context, meticulous attention to Chesnutt’s revisions to Julius’s speech at every level, from word choice and syntax to how it looks on the page, is critical. Even a cursory study of Chesnutt’s manuscripts reveals that he wrote dialect easily. Handwritten revisions of dialect passages are squeezed in between typed lines and pour down the margins in a hand that seems not to pause as Chesnutt uses spaces, apostrophes, dropped letters, and colloquialisms, sometimes revising as he goes.

To date, we have had no “great deal of organized and digested information,” in Paul Eggert’s description of scholarly editions, of Chesnutt at work drafting and revising dialect, a language central to some of his fiction.15 And while his use of dialect may seem to dabble in stereotypes, the speed of composition suggests intimacy and familiarity, and the hundreds of tiny revisions bespeak a kind of care, even loving attention, to the words, phrasings, sound, rhythms of a Black North Carolina storyteller, and to the visual play on the page of Julius’s voice, wit, and intelligence. We often assume Chesnutt wrote primarily for a white audience. But that is not the full story. He worked hard to get his books into the hands of Black readers, and he read his stories aloud to Black audiences, at schools, churches, and public events in the North and South. In 1899, a few months after he would have made these revisions to “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” Chesnutt read two dialect stories at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Elite and storied, led by abolitionists, orators, and activists, the church was pastored, in 1899, by the nationally esteemed Reverend Francis J. Grimké. Almost surely the pews were full, and without a doubt Chesnutt would have known the church’s history. In 1865 the church was led by Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, the first African American to speak in the U.S. House Chamber; in 1870 it established the nation’s first public Black high school; before the Civil War, the congregation included White House seamstress Elizabeth Keckley, who led church’s Contraband Relief Association; and after the war Sojourner Truth helped the church raise money for the Colored Soldiers Aid Society. Presumably Chesnutt and Reverend Grimké spoke before and after the reading. The Colored American covered the event, observing that, while Chesnutt’s talent for handling “the dialect of the North Carolina darky with rare skill is well known to the many readers of his books,” the reading “demonstrated in a manner most entertaining, that he can speak as well as write dialect.” The review concludes: “There was not a dull moment in the two hours, . . . and at the conclusion of the programme he received the hearty applause and individual congratulations of his auditors”16 How did Chesnutt render Julius’s words, his accent, the rhythms of his speech? How did the congregants hear him? Was there delight and pleasure and love in Chesnutt’s voice when he read Julius’s lines? Collation that attends to every detail of Chesnutt’s rendering of dialect—as he wrote it by hand, typed it, and revised it—is surely editorial work that honors and matches the care Chesnutt himself gave to dialect writing. Put differently, if an edition is to serve the myriad questions raised by Chesnutt’s use of dialect, it must make all relevant evidence available.

The question of how to present collations is not simple, and it is here that we might want to apply the notion of generous editing not only to a single edition, but to the decision to undertake concurrent editing in print and digital formats, something we initially worried was a luxury. The print edition of Chesnutt’s short stories will use the familiar variants lists, while the digital archive offers high quality scans, and thus each offers distinct advantages. The variants list in a print edition is sometimes dismissed as ungainly, but it is a form that, as Richard Bucci has argued, “focuses attention efficiently on the changes.”17 For “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” the variants list is almost five hundred lines, four hundred of which draw our attention to the details of every instance of Chesnutt’s careful rendering and revising of Julius’s speech. The list also reveals patterns: which words get tweaked most often, for example, or when he makes a change in one version and then undoes it in the next. The variant list offers, to use Eggert’s observation about scholarly editions in general, “a great deal of organized and digested information,” and thus it completes the collation task many scholars may not be prepared to undertake. By contrast, although the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive does not yet offer a collation tool or any completed collations, it does offer scans and transcriptions of all three versions of “The Conjurer’s Revenge.” The images of the galleys, something the print cannot offer (due to costs), are particularly interesting: they allow the reader to see Chesnutt’s hand as he makes the corrections in blue pencil.

Annotations

The ethos in Black bibliography that calls attention to relationality, contexts, community, and forebears has contributed to an important reframing of how we understand post-Reconstruction America. Four decades ago, Eric Foner’s description of post-Reconstruction society as the “racial nadir” of the nation’s history accomplished important work. It demolished any lingering purchase of the Dunning School’s assertion that the “Redemption” and the end of Reconstruction were necessary to the South’s economic recovery. But, for all that Foner’s oft-quoted phrase does to bring into view disenfranchisement and legally sanctioned violence, work also done by such terms as “slavery by another name” or “neoslavery,” it misses that this was also a period, as Foner himself documented, of bold interventions in racial politics and discourse. During these years, Black institutions were forged and strengthened, including schools, newspapers, political organizations, families, and churches.

Chesnutt was active across all these areas.18 During the early years of fiction writing, he worked briefly as a reporter for Dow, Jones, and Company, a Wall Street news agency in New York City, and then in the legal department at the Nickel Plate Railroad Company in Cleveland, Ohio, where he read law for two years with the company’s senior counsel, Judge Samuel E. Williamson. He was one of the top court stenographers in Cleveland for over forty years, and his office often served as a gathering place for out-of-town lawyers. The national NAACP consulted him about political nominees they were considering endorsing, and Chesnutt attended NAACP events on the East Coast, chaired panels at NAACP conferences, and hosted events in Cleveland. He corresponded about law and politics for decades with white and Black leaders, and led a lively social and cultural life with his wife. Two of his brothers built a successful photography business in Cleveland, and one daughter, after earning a B.A. at Smith College, taught Latin at Cleveland’s Central High School, where Langston Hughes was among her students. Another daughter taught briefly at Tuskegee Institute, which deepened Chesnutt’s personal ties to Booker T. Washington, even as he disagreed passionately with him on voting rights. His son-in-law was a librarian at Case Western Reserve, and later head librarian at Howard University.

In a generous edition, whether print or digital, of his fiction or his letters, how do annotations help these relationships and communities, contexts and networks come into view? One common case for annotations is access. In his introduction to a 2017 edition of Martin Delaney’s Blake; or, The Huts of America, McGann observes that the annotations in the 1970 Beacon Press edition “fall far short of what a reader of the book, whether a general reader or a scholar, needs.”19 The goal of this new edition, he explains, is to “improve readers’ access” to Delaney’s work. Improving access is laudable, and often adduced as a reason for annotations, but the argument can have a whiff of paternalism: the reader needs help or the text needs to be explained. This paternalism can be particularly troubling when the texts are by non-white writers. Some editors, by contrast, pride themselves on minimal annotations. Fredson Bowers’ 1970 University of Virginia Press edition of Stephen Crane’s Tales of War offers a particularly austere version of this approach. It is as minimalist with annotations as it is maximalist with collation. It has no annotations at all. The message is clear: the text’s worthiness of our attention goes without saying, and the reader is assumed to be as capable of scholarly research as the editors.

The minimalist approach is appealing. Justifying an interest in Chesnutt would be patronizing, and it is best to assume readers are fully capable of research, much facilitated now by the internet. Moreover, paratext can be problematic. Annotations and introductions, unattached to an explicit argument or interpretation, and embedded in a scholarly edition, can seem to have a neutrality and thus authority to frame or define the text. But there are also problems with the minimalist approach. In its efforts to avoid interpretive intrusion, it enshrines the single text, as though texts exist outside contexts, networks, and contingencies of all kinds. The unencumbered text may be an example of the modularity in both computing and the humanities that Tara McPherson warned in 2012 can lead to an avoidance of relationality and complexity.20

So, if we want to embrace an ethos of generous editing, we might consider Anne Fernald’s 2015 Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway as a model. Running almost as long as the novel (130 pages for the 175-page novel), the explanatory notes (and these do not include textual notes) offer a kaleidoscopic map of the work’s contexts, of Mrs. Dalloway’s London, and of Woolf’s life and writings.21 Might robust annotations for Chesnutt’s short stories and correspondence do the same thing for Chesnutt’s writings and life and for Chesnutt’s America? And what dangers might attend a practice of generous annotating?

In a 1906 letter to Chesnutt, Washington mentions that, during his upcoming visit to Cleveland he will stay at the Hotel Hollenden. A minimal note would identify the Hollenden Hotel as a luxury hotel in downtown Cleveland. A more generous note might add that, although Washington stayed there several times, in general Black guests were not welcome. An even more generous note might include information about the barbershop at the hotel. As both Chesnutt and Washington would have known, the hotel had a large and renowned barbershop, owned by a Black man. One year younger than Chesnutt, George A. Myers was influential in Republican politics at the city, state, and national levels. His shop had more than twenty employees—barbers, manicurists, porters, podiatrists—and it was a gathering spot for social and political elites. He served as a delegate to several Republican National Conventions, and his involvement led to offers of political appointments. He accepted none, but was instrumental in getting appointments for other Black men. In 1923 the hotel management decided that, when Myers retired and sold his business, all the Black barbers would be replaced by White ones.

A note with this much detail might raise concerns about editorial intrusion, about directing the reader with a heavy hand or using small details (Washington’s hotel choice) as an excuse for providing a history of interest to the editors, or their political agenda, beyond what is needed for reading this 1906 letter. Indeed, our annotation does not include all these details. But noting Myers’s business in the hotel was warranted, we concluded. Barbering was an important occupation for Black people, and in a 1930 speech “Advice for Businessmen,” Chesnutt lamented the loss of this employment sector for African Americans. In that speech he also honored Myers as the “last outstanding example of success in this line in Cleveland.”22 Chesnutt also put a Black barber working in a Northern luxury barbershop at the center of one of his later stories. “The Doll,” published in 1912 in The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly magazine, centers on a moral quandary: the barber finds himself shaving the white Southern man who murdered his father decades earlier, and must weigh his desire for justice and the consequences for his own family. Although a reference to the Hollenden Hotel in a letter seems to warrant a note that includes Myers, does the short story also need such a note? The fictional barber is the owner of the shop, which is in a hotel, and it is the “handsomest barber shop in the city,” with “many colored barbers, in immaculate white jackets” and “frequented by gentlemen who could afford to pay liberally for superior service.”23 The ethos of a generous edition, as opposed to the minimalist approach, would suggest a note, perhaps at the end of the sentence that introduces the barber and describes his shop. We take seriously the dangers of annotations that make connections better left to readers, but are willing to risk the dangers of annotations that annoy today or later come to seem unnecessary and outdated. Ideally, a generous edition offers, unobtrusively, relevant information anchored to and arising from words, phrases, and references in the text, and in doing so helps bring Chesnutt’s world, networks, and community more fully and richly into view.

Genetic Editing

The distinct affordances of print and digital editions are particularly evident in genetic editing. Indeed, many would argue that the digital environment can do justice to complex genetic histories in a way that print cannot. And while that may be true, the preparation of a print edition of a genetically complex work has much to teach us.

Extensive archives for Black writers before the Harlem Renaissance are uncommon, and the Chesnutt manuscript archive is one of the most voluminous. It includes several thousands of pages, mostly typescript and hand-corrected. Although scholars have turned to this remarkable archive to publish the works unpublished in Chesnutt’s lifetime (six novels, one play, and sixteen stories), there are no in-depth studies of the genetic histories of any of the works for which we have more than one version, which include twelve published stories and sixteen unpublished stories. Most notably, the more than five hundred pages of hand-revised typescripts for one of his most often taught and studied novels, The House Behind the Cedars, have garnered scant attention.

Since its publication in 1900, this iconic novel about racial passing has spoken to the nation’s race conscience. In the 1920s it was republished in serial form by The Chicago Defender, the largest-circulation Black newspaper at the time. The Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux twice turned it into a movie featuring major Black stars and running in Black theaters across the country: as a silent film in 1927 and as a talkie in 1932. In the late 1960s, as the American literary canon was reformed, reprints began to appear, and now, in addition to trade editions, the novel has appeared both in a Modern Library anthology dedicated to Chesnutt and alone in the Modern Library Classics series. There is no scholarly edition of the novel, however, and few know that the work began not as a novel about passing, but as a short story about a Black community and a light-skinned, mixed-race woman who makes a bad marriage at her mother’s prodding.

Chesnutt was at the height of his story-writing career when he wrote “Rena Walden,” the title he used for this story, and he wanted it to appear in a leading magazine. He had published more than thirty stories in the previous two years in Family Fiction, Puck, the Atlantic Monthly, and newspapers around the country. He shared three drafts with George Washington Cable, with whom he had recently established a friendship, and he had the more established Cable forward the story to Richard Watson Gilder at The Century.

When Gilder’s response came, Chesnutt chafed. Gilder called the characters “amorphous,” to which Chesnutt retorted, in a draft letter to Cable, “I suspect that my way of looking at things is ‘amorphous’ not in the sense of being unnatural but unusual.” To many whites, he noted, mixed-race people are an “insult to nature, a kind of monster.” Chesnutt omitted these observations from the letter he sent to Cable, but he was undeterred by a reading he found so misguided. Four weeks later he submitted it to the Atlantic Monthly, telling Cable, “I mean to have it published.” When the Atlantic Monthly declined, he proposed to its parent company, the book publisher Houghton Mifflin, a collection of stories to be called “Rena Walden and Other Stories,” noting that he was willing to leave out or include other stories, “always excepting the longer one, ‘Rena Walden.’” But Houghton Mifflin declined the collection proposal as well. Chesnutt’s publishing pace slowed after this, although in 1895, he reported to Gilder: “After five years’ study of life and literature, I have recast the story of ‘Rena Walden.’ . . . It is now a novelette of about 25,000–28,000 words.”24 Four years later, Chesnutt had further expanded “Rena Walden,” and in 1900 Houghton Mifflin published The House Behind the Cedars, a novel about passing. The story was now, ten years later, fundamentally transformed and four times its original length.

Print is often valued for offering clean reading texts, which John Bryant has described as a “smooth” reading experience.25 Thus, at the moment, we plan to provide a clear text of both the earliest extant manuscript—the 1890 short story—and the 1900 published text. The edition will also include a complete collation across the five manuscript witnesses (two of which are almost complete and three quite fragmentary). In part, a smooth reading experience of a text that is radically different from and, at the same time, fascinatingly similar to a well-known novel will help this early version come to life aesthetically. A clear reading text will allow and even encourage reading the 1890 story in relation not only to the novel Chesnutt published ten years later but also to the stories he was publishing during these years. Reproducing only the first version also accords with its distinct status. While the other drafts deepen our understanding of Chesnutt and his writing process, there is no evidence that he understood any of these four as ready to be shared or submitted for publication. They are appropriately understood as drafts. The 1890 story, by contrast, was a work he wanted to publish and sent out for review.

Producing a clean reading text of the first version will require resolving several difficulties, including how to treat the handwritten revisions on nearly three-quarters of the fifty-five typescript pages and how to handle eight missing pages. Regarding the first, we have opted not to incorporate the revisions, an unconventional decision, since changes in the author’s hand are evidence of a later, perhaps more considered, intention. But it is the story Chesnutt submitted in 1890 that is of interest, and revisions made in 1890 cannot be distinguished from revisions made in 1895 when he returned to the manuscript. The missing eight pages pose a greater challenge to presenting a smooth and satisfying aesthetic reading experience. There are passages in later drafts that correspond to the missing pages, but they are much longer and the result would be a textual hodge-podge. Thus, a blank space of some ten or fifteen lines will indicate the missing pages, and the introduction will describe what later versions of the text suggest might have been on the missing pages in the 1890 version. The print edition may also include, space and cost permitting, a diplomatic transcription of the 1890 draft in addition to the reading text. This would capture Chesnutt’s revisions, most probably made years later as he began to reconceive the story as a novella. This would allow readers to begin to wrestle with the contours of the text’s development over time and might go far in capturing the tempestuous sites of revision that are common across Chesnutt’s typescripts and in revealing the dialogic nature of his writing process.

In The Work of Revision, Hannah Sullivan suggests that genetic complexity, for modernists, is the result of an interest in fractured temporality and unsettled origins.26 Following her lead, what might be gleaned from the genetic complexity of one of the most iconic works on race? What to make of the fact that it started as a short story with no white characters? Of Chesnutt’s incessant revising? Is this a text that will not settle into one single form? Is Chesnutt grappling with a protean idea that might take many forms, searching for how to formulate his anti-essentialist understanding of race? Does this documentary record reveal a restlessness that arises when a Black writer, a light-skinned man who had two white grandfathers and could pass but did not, poked and prodded at the nation’s insistence that race was fixed, indelible, eternal, even as evidence to the contrary was in plain view to all? Gilder found the characters amorphous, perhaps because they made visible what he could not see, or did not want to see, or certainly did not want to print. Do Chesnutt’s typescripts allow a glimpse into the work of making visible, at the height of Jim Crow, the fundamentally amorphous nature of race? How might a generous print scholarly edition spur and support a new era of scholarship on a novel that has been speaking to and troubling the discourse on race for more than a hundred years?

We expect to ask similar questions of the digital edition we hope to build in the not-too-distant future. A digital approach to a genetic edition of The House Behind the Cedars will have to consider some of the most basic challenges that all digital editions confront, including financial support for technical expertise and the specifics of TEI encoding, presentation, and interface. But there is little doubt that this productive editing approach, one that has been primarily used for white authors, should be brought to bear on the works of Black writers. Chesnutt is among only a handful of Black fiction writers working before the Harlem Renaissance for whom we have such an extensive manuscript archive, but there are similarly rich archives for many twentieth-century Black writers, and there is no doubt that the future of digital scholarly editing must include attention to these materials. Indeed, given the absence of scholarly editing of Chesnutt to date and the different methods, affordances, institutional support, and final product between print and digital editions, there is little reason to worry about too much editorial attention to a novel that has been at the center of groundbreaking scholarship on race for the last three decades, but whose textual history is barely known.

The essays in this book come out of a symposium at the University of Nebraska that used the Walt Whitman Archive as the centerpiece for wide-ranging discussions of the future of digital scholarly editing. Inevitably, there were meditations on Whitman the poet, and also reflections on the decades of work necessary to create a digital archive that honors the expansiveness of the poet and his world. Might we also, in this spirit, and in the spirit that has motivated two decades of critically important work in Black bibliography, imagine generous editions, and in particular a multivolume print edition of Chesnutt and a digital archive, attentive to Chesnutt’s expansive world? Chesnutt, too, cannot be contained between his hat and his boots.

Notes

1. 1. No list can do justice to the last twenty years, nor to the steady hundred and fifty years, of important work in Black bibliography, print culture, book history, and editing, but these examples provide a sense of the range and the ethos: Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill, “What is ‘Black’ about Black Bibliography?,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116, no. 2 (2022): 161–89; Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne, eds., Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019); P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and, Sarah Lynn Patterson, eds. The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); The Colored Conventions (coloredconventions.org); and The Black Bibliography Project (blackbibliog.org).

2. 2. Brett Barney and Ashlyn Stewart, “Encoding Chesnutt’s Galley Proofs,” Association for Documenting Editing Conference, July 20, 2021.

3. 3. The University of Nebraska–Lincoln team, with support from UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, includes researchers Antje Anderson, Samantha Gilmore, Ashlyn Stewart, Chaun Ballard, and Bianca Swift.

4. 4. Stephanie P. Browner and Kenneth M. Price, “The Case for Hybrid Editing,” International Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 2 (2019): 165–78.

5. 5. Eric Gardner, “Early African American Print Culture and the American West,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 75–92; Jewon Woo, “The Colored Citizen: Collaborative Editorship in Progress,” American Periodicals 30, no. 2 (2020): 110.

6. 6. Although this chapter will not take it up, digital scholars have begun to address the fact that the most common interface for accessing archives—the search function—is remarkably ungenerous, offering only the narrowest of openings into what are often vast collections (digital and physical). See Mitchell Whitelaw, “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections,”Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2015), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000205/000205.html.

7. 7. William L. Andrews, “Editing ‘Minority’ Texts,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 47.

8. 8. Peter M. W. Robinson, “Collation, Textual Criticism, Publication, and the Computer,” Text 7 (1994): 82, jstor.org/stable/30227694.

9. 9. Torsten Roeder, “Juxta Web Services, LERA, and Variance Viewer: Web based collation tools for TEI,” RIDE 11 (January 2020), ride.i-d-e.de/issues/issue-11/web-based-collation-tools/.

10. 10. The Chesnutt collations have been expertly done by Antje Anderson, editorial assistant at the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and professor emerita in English literature at Hastings College. The program was written by Mark Bauer, professor of practice in chemical and computer engineering at University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

11. 11. Estimates can be made by using such sources as N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual, which provides circulation numbers by year for newspapers across the Unites States. Circulation for the Chicago Inter Ocean, which published eight of Chesnutt’s eleven syndicated stories, was over one hundred thousand during these years. The Cleveland News and Herald, which published five syndicated stories, had a circulation of thirty-five thousand. For other efforts to estimate the extent of Chesnutt’s readership, see John M. Freiermuth, “An Updated Bibliography of Charles Chesnutt’s Syndicated Newspaper Publications,” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (2010): 278–80; Charles Johanningsmeier, “Introduction,” American Literary Realism 42, no. 3 (2010): 189–91; Charles Johanningsmeier, “Realism, Naturalism, and American Public Libraries, 1880–1914,” American Literary Realism 48, no. 1 (2015): 1–24.

12. 12. Frederic Bowers, “Multiple Authority: New Problems and Concepts of Copy-Text” (1972), repr. in Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing (Charlottesville, Va.: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1975), 462; G. Thomas Tanselle, “Editing without a Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 1–22.

13. 13. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 35; Paul R. Petrie, “Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, and the Racial Limits of Literary Mediation,” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 2 (1999): 187; Houston Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 44; John Edgar Wideman, “Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and Literate Roots of Afro-American Literature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60; Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 166–77.

14. 14. John Edgar Wideman, “Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives: The Oral and the Literature Roots of Afro-American Literature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 60.

15. 15. Paul Eggert, “Why Critical Editing Matters: Responsible Texts and Australian Reviewers,” English Studies in Canada 27, no. 1–2 (2001): 197.

16. 16. “Readings by Mr. Chesnutt Author of ‘Conjure Woman’ Entertains a Large Audience,” Colored American, December 2, 1899, 5; republished in Cleveland Gazette, December 2, 1899, 2.

17. 17. Richard Bucci, “Tanselle’s ‘Editing without a Copy-Text’: Genesis, Issues, Prospects,” Studies in Bibliography 56 (2003–2004): 36.

18. 18. Notably, Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard, among others, have turned to Chesnutt’s 1931 essay “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem” to rename the period that has long been called “Jim Crow” (Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919 [New York: New York University Press, 2006]).

19. 19. Jerome McGann, “Editor’s Note,” in Blake; or, The Huts of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), xxxvi.

20. 20. Tara McPherson, “Why are the Digital Humanities So White?: or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 139–60.

21. 21. Anne E. Fernald, “Explanatory Notes,” in Mrs. Dalloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 175–311.

22. 22. Charles Chesnutt, Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 532.

23. 23. Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Doll,” The Crisis, 1912, 248, at The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, accessed October 05, 2022, chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.works00036.

24. 24. See Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Robert C. Leitz III, eds., To Be An Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889–1905 (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997), 67n2, for the letter from Richard Watson Gilder to George Washington Cable, May 28, 1890; see 68n5 for the draft Chesnutt letter to George Washington Cable; see 69 for the letter from Chesnutt to Cable, July 25, 1890; see 76 for the letter from Chesnutt to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., September 8, 1891; see 83 for the letter from Chesnutt to Cable, April 11, 1895.

25. 25. John Bryant, “Editing Melville in Manuscript,” Leviathan 21, no. 2 (2019): 116.

26. 26. Hannah Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).