In 1887, Chesnutt had his first short story published in The Atlantic. “The Goophered Grapevine” fell into the literary genre of “local color”: In it, he faithfully depicted the folkways of Black North Carolinians, including the particularities of language and spiritual traditions. Chesnutt’s work found popularity thanks to a general market interest in stories of southern culture, but unlike many of his counterparts who romanticized slave plantations (these were the early days of the Lost Cause Confederate mythology), Chesnutt depicted African American culture with care and political wit. His characters, like those in African American folktales, sought to subvert the power of white supremacy with cleverness and conjure.
In general and perhaps because of his erudition and his appearance, Chesnutt was the rare Black man who was treated as a serious writer of American literature; he had an unusual degree of professional interaction with white contemporaries such as Mark Twain and George Washington Cable. In 1899, several of Chesnutt’s local-color stories were published as a book titled The Conjure Woman, which was well received.
But Chesnutt was not interested only in the unserious. “The Wife of His Youth,” which was first published in The Atlantic in 1898, is a critique of colorism and classism in Black America. The elite “Blue Veins,” so called because they are light enough for their veins to be visible beneath their skin, are led by Mr. Ryder, who surprises the group by revealing the “wife of his youth”: an illiterate and dark-skinned formerly enslaved woman. Chesnutt rejects the attitudes of those elite African Americans who would see themselves as wholly different and superior to their darker counterparts. And yet, as evident in his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars, which was published in 1900, he also rejected essentialist ideas of race. Cedars belongs to the genre of the “passing novel,” depicting the challenges of light-complexioned African Americans who chose to pass for white. Unlike most, however, Chesnutt rejected the idea that all African Americans who would pass for white must be tragic and doomed. They might just as easily be white as Black. With Cedars, Chesnutt revealed himself to be an astute critic of race and a distinctive one. The book was modestly successful and received mixed reviews.