33 pages • 1 hour read
The Sheriff's Children
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Background
Literary Context: Romanticism Versus Realism
The Romantic Period (c. 1830-1870), was characterized by a focus on the emotions of the subjective individual. The movement drew on aesthetics and concepts of the sublime; nostalgic portrayals of the past, an antipathy to manmade progress; and assertion of the power of the imagination to transcend worldliness. In the United States, Romanticism was largely expressed by the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, which championed the inherent goodness of individuals and saw divine experience in the everyday rather than a heavenly realm. Its leading proponent, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a staunch abolitionist, and this expression of Romanticism was strongly associated with the abolition movement.
Literary realism, in contrast, is a style that seeks to represent life without artificiality, rejecting artistic conventions, including supernatural, implausible, or sensational elements. It was a reaction to Romanticism, seeking an “objective reality” and countering many of the aims and styles of Romanticism. In the United States, the realist aesthetic was forged in the mid-1800s, especially by early proponents such as Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. The popularity of Realism in the US was partly driven by a reaction to the stark hardships of the Civil War and a wish for progression into a new era.
“The Sheriff’s Children” pits Romanticism against Realism in the rendering of its setting and characters by presenting a conflict between naive sentimentalism and harsh reality. This conflict heightens and mirrors the racial divide at the story’s heart. From the beginning, Charles W. Chesnutt contrasts the deteriorating town with the symbols of progress and purpose outside it, an implicit criticism of Romantic nostalgia. The stagnant nature of Branson County is thrown into relief against the progress of outside environs, progress that Romanticism would deplore. Similarly, Chesnutt contrasts his white characters, defined by their ability to safely contemplate and espouse ideas on the goodness of all people (a major tenet of Transcendentalism), with the very real danger the story’s Black characters face daily. For example, Chesnutt juxtaposes the Romantic imagery of the “yodel of some tuneful negro on his way through the pine trees” (131) with the visceral fear of Sam when he alerts the sheriff. In his subconscious subjectivity, the sheriff doesn’t recognize the lived experience of African Americans, encouraging Sam to sit down and eat dinner before leaving although he must urgently escape notice.
Sociohistorical Context: Racial Prejudice in the Late 19th Century
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the government reinstituted the Confederate states into the Union and created a program called Reconstruction, stretching from 1865 to 1877. This led to new legislation focusing on repairing and improving infrastructure that the war had ravaged and initiating social programs and organizations that sought to disseminate the social and political mores of the North across the whole Union. These measures included giving Black people and people of color the right to vote across America. African Americans were also able to hold governmental roles. Chesnutt himself benefitted from Reconstruction, attending schools in which he was encouraged and supported, and obtaining a teaching position.
Reconstruction was of limited effect culturally and socially, especially with regard to racial equality. Individual states were allowed autonomy in creating their laws, and some passed Black Codes to maintain systems similar to enslavement, often enforced by unregulated militias or mobs. Lynching, as referenced in “The Sheriff’s Children,” is an extrajudicial killing enacted by a group. It was most often used against Black people or people of color in the United States in the mid-to-late 1800s. From 1866, North Carolina passed a series of laws that denied basic rights to Black people, including the right to vote and to equal justice under the law. These laws also restricted the right of Black people to move freely, to own or carry firearms, and prohibited interracial marriages. (Harris, William C. “Black Codes.” NCpedia, 2006).
The oppressive practice of sharecropping, in which a sharecropper oversees a portion of land to receive a share of the crop’s profits, relegated many Black (as well as white) sharecroppers to poverty, limiting social and economic uplift. The Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1865 in violent opposition to Reconstruction, intimidated African Americans, imposing poll taxes and literacy tests to prevent them from voting. Even after presidential reconstruction was replaced by congressional or military reconstruction, undoing the Black Codes, systems of social and economic inequalities remained. Once Reconstruction ended, white governance again instituted policies that subjugated African Americans. The promise of a “new South” became increasingly distant. In 1877, Federal troops were removed from the Southern states as part of the compromise to settle the disputed 1976 presidential election. This marked the end of Reconstruction and, in practice, enabled the increasing racial disenfranchisement and discrimination of the “Jim Crow” laws.
Chesnutt’s work is part of an African American movement that spoke out against injustice and racial oppression and encouraged formation of Black societies. These activists advocated for collaboration, an end to discrimination, and—if all else failed—the right to relocate in the North. “The Sheriff’s Children,” set toward the end of Reconstruction, critiques the social dynamics of this time. This includes misplaced nostalgia, the violent practices to keep African American people “in their place,” and the failure of Reconstruction to effect real change against longstanding systems of oppression. Chesnutt envisioned a rise in social consciousness and responsibility in which all races would come together under a shared culture and law.
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By Charles W. Chesnutt
