This media item will not play in the Internet software you are currently using.
One of the first black American novelists, Charles Waddell Chesnutt often wrote about the plight of black Americans in the South. The son of free émigrés, Chesnutt was very light-skinned, and his writing focused especially upon the experiences of blacks of mixed racial ancestry. In this reading from The Marrow of Tradition (1901), customary social positions as portrayed in the novel are reversed when a proud white woman must seek the help of a black woman whom she had earlier scorned. Recited by an actor.