Charles W. Chestnutt's Marrow of Tradition

Charles W. Chestnutt's The Marrow of Tradition remains to this day a testament to the historical re-telling of the Wilmington Riots of 1898. Called "one of the best sociological studies of the Wilmington riot" by W.E.B DuBois (Dubois qtd in Edmonds 188), Chestnutt uses the formal features of the historical novel as a strategy for re-imagining the tensions between white and black during North Carolina's post-Reconstruction period. With multiple African-American voices, The Marrow of Tradition attempts to give back the voice that had been choked off during this tumultuous time.

Almost twenty years before the riots, however, Chestnutt records in his journal an urgency for representation of black consciousness in literature:

I intend to record my impressions of men and things, and such incidents or conversations which take place within my knowledge, with a view to future use in literary work. I shall not record stale Negro minstrel jokes, or worn out newspaper squibs on the "man and brother." I shall leave the realm of fiction, where most of this stuff is manufactured, and come down to hard facts. There are many things about the Colored people which are peculiar, to some extent, to them, and which are interesting to any thoughtful observer, and would be doubly interesting to people who know little about them. (Chestnutt 126)

Thus, adopting a complete bald representation for black consciousness (and not that of an oversimplified "ironic perception and social identification" as John M. Reilly argues [Reilly 32]), Chestnutt writes the novel in order to understand, to dig into the non-visible realities and socio-pathology of the events leading up to the massacre of November 10, 1898.