The Passing of Grandison

"The Passing of Grandison" starts with a conversation between Dick Owens and Charity Lomax. Charity tells Dick that if he did something she considered heroic, she could be convinced to fall in love with him and marry him. For this reason, Dick decides to help one of the slaves of his father's plantation to escape to the North. He chooses this particular way to impress Charity because she admires the courage of a man from Ohio, who tried to help another man's slave gain freedom but was unsuccessful and, as a consequence, was jailed. The man died of a disease shortly after being imprisoned. To achieve freeing one of his father's slaves, Dick decides to go on a trip north and take his slave Tom along; he is convinced Tom will use any opportunity to escape and Dick will achieve his goal very easily. However, Colonel Owens, Dick's father, is opposed to his son's being accompanied by Tom as he is convinced that the slave will escape and constitute a property loss. Instead he suggests that Dick take Tom's brother, Grandison. He suggests that his son ask Grandison about his status as a slave to ensure that he is trustworthy and will not try to escape. Dick takes Grandison with him to New York City and Boston, and then to Niagara Falls, New York, where he even crosses to the Canadian side. (Great Britain had by then abolished slavery in Canada and other colonies in the Western Hemisphere.) Despite having numerous opportunities to escape, Grandison does not run away and refuses abolitionists' attempts to persuade him to flee into freedom. Dick decides to have Grandison kidnapped to get him out of view in order to appear to have helped the slave gain freedom when he reports back to Charity. Four weeks after Dick Owens' return to his father's plantation in Kentucky and one week after his marriage to Charity Lomax, Grandison returned to the property. He was welcomed and celebrated as a loyal slave, as he confirmed Colonel Owens' positive understanding of slavery. The colonel gave Grandison a place as a house servant. After about three weeks, Grandison and his family (his new wife, his parents and his three siblings) go missing. Colonel Owens' view on slavery is shaken when he discovers the slaves have escaped. He searches for the fugitives and last sees them on a small steamboat crossing Lake Erie toward Canada, where they will be free. ==Characters==

• Grandison is the central character, a slave owned by Colonel Owens; he accompanies Dick Owens on a journey to the North. • Dick Owens is the son of the Colonel; he takes Grandison on his travels with the intention of aiding him in escape in the North, to gain the love of Charity Lomax. • Colonel Owens is a rich planter in Kentucky and the father of Dick Owens. He owns Grandison and Tom, among numerous other slaves. • Charity Lomax is Dick Owens' lover, who encourages him to free a slave in order to gain her love. • Tom is Grandison's enslaved brother on the same plantation • Betty is an enslaved maid held by Col. Owens, who marries Grandison after his return from the North. ==Analyses and interpretations==

Theme of passing on the narrative level On the narrative level (between the characters of the short story), the theme of passing destabilizes binary oppositions of "appearance" and "reality", "good" and "bad slave", as well "master" and "mastered". Rather, Grandison passes for a contented and devoted slave, who is therefore selected to accompany his master's son, Dick Owens, on a trip north. Grandison seems to have "adopted the racist discourse of the slave system", which Colonel Owens, in the story, describes as a "blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other". Grandison's "performance," or masking, convinces the colonel, that "Grandison typified the best qualities possessed by his bondsmen: humility, loyalty, and servility". In "The Mask as Theme and Structure: Charles W. Chesnutt's 'The Sheriff's Children' and 'The Passing of Grandison, P. Jay Delmar lists four events in the story that highlight Grandison's successful masking: his dialogue with Colonel Owens, who interviews Grandison to see whether he was "abolitionist-proof" and suitable to accompany Dick on his journey. Grandison replied affirmatively to the colonel's question as to whether he believed himself to lead a better life than "free negroes", and confirmed the colonel's positive view of slavery. Second, Grandison resisted Northern abolitionists' attempts to convince him to leave Owens. Grandison's repeated "pass[ing] on freedom" confirms and reinforces Dick's conviction that Grandison was a loyal slave. When Dick returned after a short trip to find that Grandison had not touched the money he had left him, Owens thought this meant that Grandison "... sensibly recognized his true place in the economy of civilization, and kept it with such touching fidelity". Grandison performed his role of being the loyal slave and appeared to have internalized his status as a slave. Grandison remains by his master's side or waits for him on Dick's instruction. Dick decides to have Grandison kidnapped in order to appear to have helped him achieve freedom, and returns alone to his plantation in Kentucky. Grandison again proves his loyalty by returning to his master's plantation. His use of dialect "marks his social and economic status" and "is mistaken for ignorance" by the white men. The Sambo character was not a result of "internally controlled accommodation", but was a vital and reasonable adjustment to the hardships suffered, as well as an adjustment to the "dependency of a closed system". Taxel suggested that the Sambo character was an "externally imposed adjustment" by enslaved persons. In Taxel's opinion, the short story's focus on Grandison's performance of loyalty and childlike behavior reflected two elements characteristic of the Sambo type. Grandison does not escape on the Owens' son's journey and returns to the plantation to be reunited with his family. Wearing the mask of the Sambo character and thereby passing for "a contended, ignorant, childlike, happy slave who appears to believe the distorted visions of the world put forward by his white master" allows him to gain his master's trust and, through repeatedly proving his loyalty, he achieves his own and his family's freedom. these elements help Grandison deceive them. Grandison as a trickster Grandison's deception of the colonel and Dick Owens by masking and performing the stereotypical Sambo can be compared to the trickster figure in African-American literature, African stories, and stories of the African diaspora. The end of the short story shows that Grandison has been masking in order to gain freedom not only for himself but also for his family. He is "a trickster-like, multi-faceted individual emerges from behind the mask of the Sambo doll". Viktor Osinubi further explains that the parallels between the adventures of a trickster figure and Grandison's tortuous scheme for freedom highlight the connection between Grandison's constructed presence in front of his powerful adversaries (his slave masters) and the African metaphysics of presence, in which veiling one's presence is an essential strategy for continued existence or the pursuit of freedom. He creates opportunities for subterfuge, and proves his loyalty by returning to the plantation. These reinforce the colonel's positive view of slavery and sense of Grandison's gratitude. Through "the reversal of polarities, particularly of the master-servant relationship, of truth and falseness, of knowledge and ignorance, and of autonomy and control," Grandison achieves freedom. In "The Passing of Grandison," the hierarchy between autonomy and control in the sense of lack of freedom is destabilized. Grandison chooses the means and time of his escape. As Grandison achieves freedom through his own actions, "his lack of autonomy does not disempower him". As a result, the attributes of the master and the slave classes are reversed: In the new relationship that Chesnutt sets up, the bourgeois class of slave masters loses the attributes of knowledge and sophistication to the slave class, while the slave class liberates itself from the attributes of ignorance and naivety, effectively demonstrating that ignorance and naivety belong equally to the slave masters. Grandison's performance deceives the colonel and enables the slave to escape with his family. As a result, the colonel's view on slavery is shaken, if not completely destroyed. His inability to understand and define his slaves in binary categories is revealed. In the last part of the text, Colonel Owens "reacts to his former slave rather than leading him" Along with the theme of passing on the narrative level, Chesnutt's short story "enact[s] a profound destabilization of constructs of race, identity, and finally of textuality itself". Grandison speaks in a dialect associated with slaves and serves his master loyally on his journey into the north of the United States and to Canada, not responding to Owens' efforts to encourage the slave to escape. In slave narratives, the fugitives follow the North Star in pursuit of freedom and are welcomed by abolitionists when they reach the northern states. However, the last section of the final part reveals Grandison's true goal: the escape from slavery together with his new wife and family. The end reveals "Chesnutt's story for what it is: a story about an intelligent enslaved individual who desires and attains liberty not just for himself, but for the family he loves". Chesnutt indicates this coordination with abolitionists: "The magnitude of the escaping party begot unusual vigilance on the part of those who sympathized with the fugitives, and, strangely enough, the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train." Destabilization of categorical thinking Chesnutt's story addresses racism and the limitation of defining individuals according to fixed categories. Martha J. Cutter suggests that one possible goal of Chesnutt in this story is to raise the reader's awareness "not just of the complexity of race itself, but of the ideologies that create racist ways of thinking". Grandison calls the colonel the "best marster any [n***er] ever had in dis worl; As the biography Frederick Douglass (1899) was published in the same year as The Wife of his Youth, Chesnutt very likely chose Grandison's words deliberately to allude to the full text of Douglass's phrase. Cutter draws a connection between the choice of name for the enslaved hero of this story, as Charles Grandison Finney was a well-known Christian evangelist and abolitionist of the Antebellum period. Finney, an influential minister of the Jacksonian Era, is associated with a call for autonomy, equality and self-determination. ==Notes==