Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing
Noelle A. Baker and Kathryn Tomasek, Co-editors in Chief
ISSN: 2167-1257 | DOI: 10.55520/6ZH06EW2

Volume 40, 2023-04-27, DOI: 10.55520/70H776MR
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License. © 2023 Scholarly Editing.

“Time Enough but None to Spare”
Chesnutt Alive in Today’s Archive
Bianca Swift, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

DOI: 10.55520/ATEJXWZ1The work of Charles Chesnutt—lawyer, pioneer of African American literature, and author of six booklength works, eighty-five short stories, and more than seventy essays and speeches—reminds me that poking at
the past has always pained the present. Upon reading in Chesnutt’s wrenching novel The Marrow of Tradition
that impossibilities are “merely things which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen,”
students working at the archive that bears Chesnutt’s name hear different messages.1 Some appreciate a cleverline from a historical figure and smile or show newfound appreciation for the mind being studied. Others,
especially the Black students on whom history weighs more heavily, know the impossibilities Chesnutt speaksof at a personal level and receive yet another disheartening message in a bottle from the past.

At the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive (CWCA) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, it is our practice
not to shy away from the pain of digitizing historical documents. Instead, we embrace them and reflect on how
working with charged history presents distinct challenges. Chesnutt was a mixed-race writer from nineteenthcentury Ohio, and as a student of color, I experience his works in drastically different ways than the white
students with whom I share the archive. Chesnutt has been gone for eighty years, yet the world in which helived—captured in magnetic prose—feels achingly present to me in 2022.
We intentionally create opportunities for student workers to process Chesnutt’s writing, the world thatshaped it, and the echoes of both in today’s world. This short essay is one of those reflections. For me, Bianca,
the experience of uncovering more of Chesnutt’s record—not just the stories he published in his famous
collections, but his correspondence, galley proofs, and ephemeral periodical pieces—has produced a different
conundrum: how well can I, a twenty-first-century Black woman, truly know the nineteenth-century Blackman whose works I digitize each day?

We hang photos in our office, we travel to historical societies to conduct research, and we giveconference papers to share our labors of love, and yet still there is so much we don’t know about Chesnutt.

Did he read that first book review of The Marrow of Tradition?2 Did he go out of his way to find in it the bad
as well as the good and cut himself on it? How did it feel when they called him a man from a despised race?
When they painted him as childlike? Did he read the review in which they called him nearly white? Did hesmile and nod his head when they said he was “scarcely distinguishable in any feature from [his] whiteneighbors” and was only “ostracized because of a stray thread of African blood in [his] genealogy?”3 How did
he feel when they declared him above the “servile” race? Was it what he wanted—and if it was, did it feel likeenough when he received it? How does it feel both to crave something and to condemn it?

I ask these questions of Chesnutt because often I have asked them of myself. As digital archive creators,
we try to be systematic in understanding Chesnutt and the words he left behind. We try to make his world aformula we can understand. It’s tempting to try to measure his life: fifty-four months and twelve days before
slavery ended, Charles Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to two free Blacks, Andrew Chesnutt and AnnMaria. His grandfather was a white slaveholder, and Charles was seven-eighths white. Chesnutt’s family moved
back to Fayetteville when Chesnutt was nine—Fayetteville, which then had been free for only 131 weeks and1 day.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was alive when Reconstruction began and, like so many others, less alive when
it ended. He published his novel about white supremacist violence, The Marrow of Tradition, only 9,000 days
after the official end of federal Reconstruction and the withdrawal of troops from the Southern states. He
fictionalized the events of the Wilmington race riot of 1898, the only coup ever on American soil, in which aman named Alfred M. Waddell led a massacre and the burning of a Black-run publishing office called TheDaily Record. The mob of over 2,000 white men killed an estimated fifteen to sixty Blacks and forced 2,000to flee.
I try to think about the numbers because in some ways it is the only thing stopping me from obsessing
over the flesh. But still I think about how Chesnutt inherited this viscerality before the Black people of today—a pain so incalculable that the only commonality among those who have felt it is the knowledge thatsometimes hurt is so unfathomable that your body refuses to recognize it. I wonder if his hurt was lesser orgreater than the pain of today. I wonder how we would measure it. I wonder if it even matters. I think of all hemust have experienced, and though scholar Saidiya Hartman warns me away from making false memories ofthe dead, I wonder if he cried. I wonder who was there for him when he did. I hope his casket was soft. I findmyself glad that he died of old age. That is the kindest fate I could wish on any dark face.
I think of him at the end, his peaceful death, and I wonder if I am wrong about that—if I have yet again
created closure where there was none. Hartman writes, “It is much too late for the accounts of death toprevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes.”4 And I wish theuse of my words could make up for the loss of his. But that is not how time works, and by that, I mean that is
not how Blackness works. I am not sure it is the pain that is transcendental. I’m not sure it is the pain thatconnects us, but maybe instead it is the time. It’s time not to turn away from our attachments to the dead, butinstead to interrogate what they mean.

I think about how the only thing tethering me to a man long gone is not even race, or at least, it is not allrace. It is the words he left behind. The letters I found, the essays that were published, and his words, mypoems, his papers, my transcriptions, this essay. Now I think about his absence, how he was disappeared long
before he died. Chesnutt wasn’t silenced all at once, but the quiet end is deafening. Chesnutt stopped writing
because the world stopped listening, because in the end his words didn’t fit into the place whiteness had set outfor him. I think that is what rebellion is like. I am not sure what I would be if I could not write, what would
happen to my voice if others couldn’t hear it. Chesnutt chose to stop writing at the end, but for us choices area lot like time. We convince ourselves we have them.
Time is a catapult, and Blackness is the object to be flung; and in this there are only ever three positions:the potential energy of the past; the kinetic energy of the present; and the target of the future. And how fittingthat this does not have a scientific term because Blackness is knowing you will never land there. It is all just thein-between, just the space inside of breaths. I don’t know how the world felt after the Wilmington coup, but I
know that after the Charlottesville rally, I felt like fleeing, too.
I am not saying that history repeats itself—time is not so unimaginative that it deals in doubles—I’m justsaying the beginning of a fall feels a lot like the end of one. Time is not a line; it is a spiral, and we are in one ofits loops. And I can only hope that the rings are getting wider, and the pain we experience is getting lighter as it
spins outward. We are the children of the unmovable point—of the fires lit again and again as we become
nothing more than ash. We will, I think, make progress, in whatever way that means, but it will be slow andcircuitous and tiring, and someone will always end up burned.
We have promised to deal with the space in between. This space between heroes, villains, and time. The
space after the fire was lit and before it has died down. At the end of the day Chesnutt was just a man—one
worn down, influenced by his time, and trying to do his best about what is thought to be an impossibility. He

closes The Marrow of Tradition with a resonant line: “There is time enough but none to spare.”5 The nowfamous phrase reflects on the long, perhaps interminable wait for justice, and dramatizes Black sacrifice for thegood of a white family after enduring the agonies caused by white supremacist violence. It is proof that we will
always exist in this limbic gray space, this time out of time. “Time enough but none to spare” has beenhaunting us for decades. It has chained us to a tree and bid us to outrun it. To reach a destination I am not sureexists. So, what do we do when we know a goal is unreachable? What steps do we take on a journey that
doesn’t end? Chesnutt chose an option in this impossible trolley problem. Ultimately, Chesnutt chose to stoprunning, stop writing, because a largely white reading audience had deemed him bitter. He had seized the timeenough to indict white violence, and there was none to spare for himself.
“The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide
closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to adeath not much noticed,” Hartman writes. She is someone who knows about the cyclical nature of burning.
About the desire to rewrite a flame if you don’t like its smoke. We want to keep Chesnutt’s words
reverberating into our time, spiraling outward into something that is hopefully better, a future that is
hopefully brighter.
Many people have worked to preserve Chesnutt’s legacy. The literary historian and critic William
Andrews looked at Chesnutt’s writing from behind a wall of superiority, protected and confident in theknowledge that he could pass judgment.6 And it is this that I am not sure I can accomplish. I cannot speak
unbiasedly of the man I know so intimately and not at all.
I could call The Conjure Woman a masterpiece, say that it goes far in creating a South that is both real andethereal.7 I could call Uncle Julius a creative and mischievous character who fabricates stories to gain
advantage for himself, thereby succeeding in showing agency in a world not for him. I could say Chesnutt
made great strides in creating a narrative that was intriguing but not diminutive—empowering, but also subtle.
Or I could say I found The Conjure Woman paternalistic, that it turns Uncle Julius into his own walking
minstrel stereotype. I could say it paints him in the lazy trickster slave narrative everyone asked for. I could saythat John is in many ways a self-portrait of Chesnutt, who in writing about the Black experience shows hedoesn’t believe himself truly a part of it.
I am not sure I could dissect the literary nuances of Chesnutt’s work more eloquently than already has
been done. I’m not sure I could weave you a tale of narrative tropes or stale storytelling, but I think I could say
he had a wife, three daughters, and a son. He made fun of the presidents and the politics of it all and got inpages-long debates with Booker T. Washington. He was a master of passive aggression, and W. E. B. Du Bois
spelled his name wrong when he was upset with him.
I know I am not the right person to paint Chesnutt as a studied and learned and important member of theBlack intelligentsia. This is not to say he is not one. Just that I don’t have nearly enough initials behind myname to prove it. But I am in precisely the right place to do something arguably better. I can make Chesnutt
like me. I can tell Chesnutt human.
1. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 19. ↩
2. “A New Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” St. Paul Dispatch, December 14, 1901, 5, in The Charles W. Chesnutt
Archive, gen. ed. Stephanie P. Browner, Matt Cohen, and Kenneth M. Price, accessed May 24, 2022,
https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.rev00290. ↩
3. “[Review of The Marrow of Tradition],” The Watchman, December 12, 1901, 15, in The Charles W.
Chesnutt Archive, accessed May 24, 2022, https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.rev00309. ↩
4. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 14. ↩
5. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, 329. ↩
6. William Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1980). ↩
7. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899). ↩