One cannot blame him for that; what would one be one's self?
If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was
the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the
bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago,
what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity
the argument of his fiction?
Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel,
and shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a
legal government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not
paint the blacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them
as slavery made them on both sides, and if in the very end he
gives the moral victory to the blacks--if he suffers the daughter
of the black wife to have pity on her father's daughter by his
white wife, and while her own child lies dead from a shot fired
in the revolt, gives her husband's skill to save the life of her
sister's child--it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or
ethics are false. Those who would question either must allow, at
least, that the negroes have had the greater practice in
forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor his
interpretation of the fact.
Pages:
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44