Summary
Narrated by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator and set in the southern state of Kentucky in the 1850s, “The Passing of Grandison” opens with an explanation of why the story’s protagonist, Dick Owens, tries to bring one of his father’s slaves to freedom in Canada: he wants to impress a woman.
At a time when anti-slavery sentiment is gaining popularity and more and more slaves are escaping into the North, the Fugitive Slave Law is passed. Dick attends the trial of a young white man from Ohio who is sentenced to three years in prison for trying to help free a slave who has a violent master.
Dick is in his early twenties. He is handsome, rich, and personable. However, he is also lazy. He has no motivation to do anything on his own because he knows he will inherit his father’s vast estate. Charity Lomax, a woman Dick has been courting for a year, has shamed him into studying law, but he doesn’t make much progress aside from spending a few hours a week working for a judge. The judge believes Dick needs motivating in the way slaves and animals need to be whipped to be compelled to labor.
After going to the trial, Dick tells Charity that he feels more sympathy for the young man than he does for his father and other slave-owners who wanted the young man sentenced. Charity says she has hated Briggs, the slave-owner, ever since he broke a slave’s leg with a block of firewood. She thinks of the young man as a hero because he dared to do something for humanity. Charity says she could love a man like that.
When Dick asks if she’ll ever love him, Charity tells Dick she won’t love him until he has done something to prove he is a man. She hates to see a clever man be so lazy and good for nothing. Dick suggests bringing “a negro off to Canada.” Charity calls his claim absurd and says she’s going to visit her aunt in Tennessee for three weeks. She says he can come tell her about what he’s done to “prove [his] quality” when she returns.
The next morning, Dick asks his personal attendant slave, Tom, if he would like to accompany him on a trip to the North. Tom would very much like to go north, but he’s never been courageous enough to attempt it. He tells Dick he will join as long as Dick brings him home as well, but Tom’s eyes betray his true desire. Dick is confident he can give Tom an opportunity to escape once they’re in a free state, feeling pleased that he will get what he wants with the least effort expended.
Over breakfast, Dick tells his father, Colonel Owens, that he isn’t feeling well and thinks a change of scene would improve his health. His father suggests he take a trip north, saying there is business Dick can take care of in New York. He also advises his son to pay attention to “what the rascally abolitionists are saying and doing.” Colonel Owens uses the n-word and the term “darkey” to refer to the slaves who have been escaping, adding that he would personally harm anyone who tried to help one of his slaves run away.
While Colonel Owens is happy for his son to go north, he doesn’t think it is safe to bring Tom. Despite his loyalty, Tom has been caught reading the newspaper, and the fact that Tom has learned to read makes Colonel Owens suspicious. He thinks Tom is at risk of being swayed by the abolitionists, so he suggests Dick take Grandison instead. Grandison is less likely to run because he is older, and has been promised he can marry Betty, Dick’s mother’s maid. Colonel Owens tells a mixed-race “yellow” boy catching flies in the next room to get Grandison from the barn.
Analysis
Published in 1899, “The Passing of Grandison” is African-American author Charles W. Chesnutt’s look back on the not-so-distant past. In the 1850s, slavery had yet to be abolished and tens of thousands of Black Americans were escaping with the help of abolitionists to northern states and Canada. But while many writers might have approached the grave subject with solemnity, Chesnutt takes a comedic approach, satirizing the short-sighted white slaveholders and celebrating the slaves who outsmart them.
The opening paragraphs introduce the major theme of abolitionism while establishing the comedic, irony-laden tone that characterizes the story. The narrator outlines how Dick rises to Charity’s challenge of doing something meaningful because he is envious of the admiration she has for the young abolitionist Ohioan who sacrifices himself to free a mistreated slave. Although Dick hopes to do something heroic and dangerous in trying to release one of his father’s slaves, Dick’s motivation to impress his girlfriend is selfish and trivial compared to the stakes and risks of the endeavor.
Dick's laziness leads him to look for a shortcut to glory, and his first idea is to take his personal attendant, Tom, on a trip North. Sensing Tom’s hunger for freedom, Dick thinks it will be easy to give the young man an opportunity to escape. However, Chesnutt uses dramatic irony to inject tension and comedy into the story by having Dick’s father unwittingly complicate the plans by accurately predicting Tom may be tempted to escape. However, it is significant to note that the colonel doesn’t attribute the desire to escape as originating in Tom. To admit this, the colonel would be admitting that some of his slaves would prefer freedom to bondage, an idea that grates against the colonel’s belief that he is a generous man who provides a decent life for his slaves.
Instead of conceding that people don’t want to be enslaved, the colonel worries the innocent young slave is at risk because he is liable to be swayed by abolitionists. As a Southern slaveholder, the colonel’s mortal enemies are the “rascally” abolitionists who threaten his livelihood by advocating for the extension of human rights to people he sees as his property. Chesnutt draws out the dramatic irony of the moment with the colonel’s claim that he would harm anyone who tried to run off one of his slaves—the exact thing Dick hopes to do.
The colonel’s racist condescension is on full display as he frets over Tom potentially having learned to read. While on the one hand, it seems absurd that an act as simple as reading would have been threatening to slaveholders, it is important to note that enforced illiteracy was a weapon slaveholders used to keep their “property” uneducated. Because reading expands the reader's sphere of knowledge and can facilitate critical thinking, literacy was a direct threat to the myth of racial inferiority. For slaves to have the same access to information as their masters would tip the balance of power.
