‘A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt’
By Tess Chakkalakal
St. Martin’s Press, 384 Pages

‘Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde’
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 Pages

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first breakthrough Black author, reaching a national audience through major magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and championed by important writers and taste makers such as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. Chesnutt’s fiction, in novels such as “The Marrow of Tradition,” and his biography of Frederick Douglass, the first, explored the fraught history of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992), a Black feminist and poet who wrote “The Cancer Journals,” about dealing with her breast cancer, regarded her lesbian orientation as an important way of describing her position in the world. She wanted her Blackness and sexuality to seem not singular but part of a universal heritage. She turned to the history of the earth to make her point.

The consanguinity of these two writers might best be established in side-by-side quotations. In “Literature and Its Relation to Life” (1899), Chesnutt suggested: “When we turn back, as we can through the medium of books, to the dawn of history, and follow its course down to our own time, the troubles of any one individual or any one race dwindle into comparative insignificance and when we look around us and see the forces of progress in operation on every hand, imagination pictures for us a future for which the troubles of to-day are but a brief apprenticeship.”

Lorde believed that the formation of the earth had to be understood first of all to put the place of Black people, and everyone else for that matter, in perspective. In her signature poem, “Coal,” the sedimentary rock formed near the surface of the earth and the diamonds formed deep in the earth are fused as a portrayal of herself: “As a diamond comes into a knot of flame / I am black because I come from the earth’s inside / Take my word for jewel in your open light.”

Tess Chakkalakal has a fascinating passage describing Chesnutt’s report on a Frederick Douglass speech endorsing James Garfield for president. Douglass, a great orator, quoted another great orator, Daniel Webster, in the “manly defense of free principles.” Chesnutt also reported a rare instance of Douglass employing Black dialect, citing a “colored brother of mine” and using “de” and “dem” and “dat,” the staples of “darky” talk in the work of white authors of the time. 

The question is, why? Ms. Chakkalakal explains: “Here was a man who can quote from Webster and an unnamed colored preacher in the same breath, giving both men equal status on the podium.” Such was Douglass’s “literary range and sense of humor,” she concludes. Douglass, Chesnutt, and Lorde take us both inside and outside of human experience in all of its colors and formulations.

Ms. Chakkalakal has written a conventional, if eloquent, biography. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, just as eloquent, has composed a phenomenal work, aimed at extending the work of poems like “Coal”: “This is not a normative biography linearly dragging you from a cradle to a grave,” she announces. “This is a book shaped by what Audre Lorde did as a reader and a writer and a mentor to change what a book can be, what a book can do. This is a quantum biography where life in full merges in the field of relations in each particle. This is a cosmic biography where the dynamic of the planet and the universe are never separate from the life of any being.”

Such claims sound boastful, but they are apposite and, for all their differences, unite Lorde, who taught in universities, and Chesnutt, who thought of Aristotle as he lectured. He wrote in “The Future of the Negro”: “Education will open our eyes. Like the magic stone of the Arabian Nights, which revealed to its possessor all the treasures of the earth, it will broaden our views, it will take us out of Fayetteville, out of North Carolina, out of America. It will take us beyond this narrow earth, which to the simple appears so great; and will carry us far away to the glittering worlds above us.” 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”