Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents were both free African Americans who moved to Cleveland from Fayetteville, North Carolina in 1856. Chesnutt was of mixed race: both his grandmothers were African American while both of his grandfathers were white. Though he self-identified as African American, he often referred to an extensive white ancestry and claimed that the issues of his mixed race had a profound impact on him as a young man. Themes of complex heritage and racial identity would be characteristic of Chesnutt's writing.
In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, Chesnutt's family moved back to Fayetteville, where his father opened a grocery store....
