Time touches all things with destroying hand; and if he seem now and then to bestow the bloom of youth, the sap of spring, it is but a brief mockery, to be surely and swiftly followed by the wrinkles of old age, the dry leaves and bare branches of winter.
The opening line of the novel is an indication of what the reader can expect as the narrative progresses. Not in terms of diction, word choice and linguistic style; while occasional expository paragraphs reach or the lavishing of poetic style onto descriptive prose as demonstrated here, for the most part the actual writing is far more direct and subdued. What is intimated by this opening lines, subsequent paragraph and entire initial chapter, however, is that the author’s interest in the story is maintained at a higher level than characterization and plot. Criticism that the novel’s characters are not fully fleshed out and that the plot depends on too many contrivances are legitimate, but beside the point. Chesnutt is not attempting merely to write a good story that will keep readers turning pages; he wants readers to muse philosophically about those characters and his plot. Much as this opening line turns out to be not the narrator’s thoughts, but one of the main character’s thoughts as related through the narration.
“The negro is an inferior creature; God has marked him with the badge of servitude, and has ad- justed his intellect to a servile condition.”
This is a novel about “passing” as white when you are a light-skinned black. Within that overarching theme, however, multiple smaller themes which cohere to form the larger whole. One of the most important of these thematic sections or “mini-themes” is the socio-political aspect of how white society determines the possibility of the need for “passing” to even exist. Removed from the milieu in which conceptions of white supremacy can survive and flourish, the entire construct collapses. “Passing” as an option can only exist if society places a value of worth upon pigmentation of skin utterly removed from any inherent qualities. This statement by the inexcusably ignorant and irredeemably racist Dr. Green is essential not just to understanding the intricate relationship between white supremacy ideology, but also for understanding how the seemingly non-racist George Tryon could be so quick to turn on the woman he loves for the most ridiculous of reasons.
“Somewhere, sometime, you had a black ancestor. One drop of black blood makes the whole man black."
"Why shouldn't it be the other way, if the white blood is so much superior?"
“Because it is more convenient as it is—and more profitable."
The conversation taking place here is a flashback to before John Walden changed the course of his life by moving to a strange city and passing himself as a white man named Warwick. Judge Straight is unlike Dr. Green in that he is by no means an ignorant racist. The judge is, however, a man of his time as he shows here with his quick ability to deflect young John’s incontestable logic with indefensible rhetoric. This quote also goes to straight to the core of one the novel’s mini-themes: how can every other attribute of a human being be negated by a (symbolically) a single drop of blood?
At first he could see nothing but the fraud of which he had been made the victim. A negro girl had been foisted upon him for a white woman, and he had almost committed the unpardonable sin against his race of marrying her. Such a step, he felt, would have been criminal at any time; it would have been the most odious treachery at this epoch, when his people had been subjugated and humiliated by the Northern invaders, who had preached negro equality and abolished the wholesome laws decreeing the separation of the races.
Once again, the narrator has entered into the thoughts of a character. It should not escape the reader’s attention that the poetic flights of fancy which open the novel are revealed to the thoughts of a black man who has successfully committed the “fraud” of passing himself among white society as a white man. The self-pitying thoughts underlined with a simmering anger expressed here are the thoughts of one of those members of white society who upon which the “fraud” has been committed. And within the differences between the two men’s thoughts can be located another of the thematic sections which connect to overall concept of passing. To “pass” as white for the light-skinned black person is viewed as merely taking an opportunity to enjoy a better life while for the whites already enjoying that opportunity as a birthright view it as a deceitful act of cheating. The irony, of course, is that opportunity for “passing” can only exist as a result of the hypocrisy that goes unrecognized by men like Tryon. The real “cheating” going on within this system being done by whites taking advantage of their birthright despite being inferior to blacks at the level of every other attribute but one: nobody can tell just by looking at them whether or not they have been tainted by “one drop of black blood.”
