Tom Driscoll to Charles Chesnutt

From "Tom Driscoll", actually Chambers, the evening after he discovers from his mother Roxy that he is actually a "Negro", to Charles Chesnutt - focusing on confusing ideas of race and legitimacy, intermarriage, etc. Meant to be a theoretical frozen-in-time idea of what he might have been thinking.

Dear Charles Chesnutt,

You ask in your essay, "What is a white man?" I am asking myself very similar questions this evening. If I appear white, and if I have always thought of myself as white, and if everyone treats me as if I am white, why am I not white? My father was white, but I am not his heir - but I am the heir of another white man. Can't this make me white?

If I am to be forever trapped between the race of slaves and the white race, with whom am I to associate, and marry, and create children with? My fear now is that Roxy - my mother - whoever she is, that she will expose me as her child. Will this make my children not-white as well? I am determined to continue living my life out as a white man. How, then, will I treat my children? They will not be white. I will not be able to treat them as if they are white, because they will not be.

To become not white would be absolutely absurd. Even if I am to believe this woman's story, she cannot change the fact that I speak, dress, read, write, and live like a white man. But if I do all of those things - what is the difference between a white and a Negro? How can I speak and live like I do if I am not white? Charles Chesnutt, you discuss the mulatto, this mix of races that I apparently am. I ask you, how do the laws look on this and disregard the white part of the man? The white man, as the government itself states, is superior to the black man and woman - so how is the part of a child that is a black woman superior to the part of a child that is a white man?

Your assessment of the laws and of this mixing of races has not quite made it clear why this classification exists and thus I ask you for a more detailed and explicative account.

Best,
Tom Driscoll


What do you think made Twain want to name the story "Pudd'nhead Wilson"? What significance could this name, and the title, have (if any, beyond just what Twain may have found the most interesting part of his story to be)?

Charles Chesnutt spends a lot of time figuring out what makes a man "white" versus "colored" but never explicitly states his opinion on the whole mess. Thinking of Chesnutt himself in his time, what do you think his solution would have been, keeping in mind that perhaps the entire dismissal of the idea of color and the color line would have been, while obviously the most desirable solution, an almost unthinkable possibility?