The Passing of Grandison

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1899

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Myth of the Happy Slave

One of the most important motifs in the story is that of the happy slave. This was a pervasive myth among white Americans both before and after the Civil War, in the North and South. And Grandison repeatedly reflects the myth back to the Owens family in his professions of contentment and loyalty. In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, formerly enslaved person Frederick Douglass recounts his shock upon hearing such myths: “I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake” (Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, Barnes and Nobles Classic, 2003, pp. 26). The motif illustrates the story’s theme of The Relationship Between Freedom and Autonomy. While the happy slave might not have existed as a historical fact, it did exist as an element of the ideology that supported slavery. Grandison’s motivic performance of what the Owens family expected to see allows him to control and outsmart them. Colonel Owens sees the figure of the happy slave as “an outward and visible sign of his wealth and station, and therefore sacred to him” (62). He is so pleased by the image of the loyal and happy slave that Grandison seems to represent upon his return that the colonel “always ha[d] [Grandison] conveniently at hand to relate his adventures to admiring visitors” (70). Grandison knows that this symbol and what it represents is dear to the colonel, which is why he performs this role while he plans to liberate his family.

Canada

Canada is a real destination for the characters in the story, but it also serves as a symbol of freedom. Dick’s initial query to Charity is, “Will you love me if I run a negro off to Canada?” (60). What he means to ask is if will she love him if he frees an enslaved person—a moment before, Charity declared her admiration for the imprisoned abolitionist because “[h]e dared something for humanity” (60). Dick uses “Canada” to mean “freedom.” Colonel Owens uses the idea of freedom and Canada in an attempt to strike fear into Grandison. He says Canada is “a dreary country, where the woods are full of wildcats and wolves and bears, where the snow lies up to the eaves of the houses for six months of the year, and the cold is so severe that it freezes your breath and curdles your blood” (63). In Colonel Owens’ formulation, the freedom one gets in Canada puts one at risk. Because he wants to retain the people he enslaves, he attempts to make the implications of the freedom one might achieve in Canada negative.

Later, after Dick’s plans to get Grandison to run away in both New York and Boston fail, he turns to Canada as a final resort. On the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, Dick suggestively says, “You are now in Canada, Grandison, where your people go when they run away from their masters. If you wished, Grandison, you might walk away from me this very minute, and I could not lay my hand upon you to take you back” (67). Dick equates a physical presence in Canada with the symbolic achievement of freedom. Some regions of Canada abolished slavery as early as the 1700s, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire (including Canada) by 1834, roughly 20 years before the story takes place. While the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 meant that any enslaved person who fled to another part of the United States would be returned to their enslaver, Canada, as a separate country, was not subject to such laws. Previously enslaved people could escape to Canada, where they were not at risk of being returned to slave owners. At the end of the story, Colonel Owens watches Grandison and his family on a boat “with her nose pointing toward Canada” (70), and toward freedom.

Trickster in African Diasporic Traditions

The trickster is a key motif in the text that demonstrates the influence of Pan-African folk tale tradition in Chesnutt’s writing. The trickster, represented by Grandison, is “a folk character who invokes a multiplicity of meanings, including transcendence of boundaries between good and bad, morality and immorality, truth and lie” (M’Baye, Babacar. “Tricksters in African, African American, and Caribbean Folktales and Cultures.” Oxford Bibliographies, 2021). Grandison embodies multiple meanings, playing the loyal slave for the Owens family while planning with abolitionists and the Underground Railroad to free his family. The trickster is more than a character who plays amusing tricks. Rather, they are a character whose “situation and movements symbolize the harsh conditions of millions of people of African descent due to brutal historical forces such as slavery, colonialism, and other oppressions” (M’Baye). The trickster, both as a way of being in the world and a literary archetype, helped diverse African peoples who were stolen from their homelands and enslaved in the Americas retain their cultures and “resist oppression and affirm their humanity” (M’Baye). Grandison carries on a legacy of resistance to oppression.

Chesnutt’s story itself is also an example of the trickster motif. While Grandison tricks the Owens family into believing he is a happy and loyal slave to ultimately manipulate them and win freedom for himself and his family, Chesnutt constructs his story so that the reader becomes the target of an analogous trick. By narrating events in the third person largely from Dick’s perspective, Chesnutt makes the reader complicit in Dick’s racist assumptions. The reader doesn’t expect the ending because Dick doesn’t expect it. And the reason Dick doesn’t expect it is because it doesn’t occur to him that a Black person could create such a bold, clever, thorough plan for escape. Just as Grandison deceives Dick, Chesnutt deceives the reader. Grandison’s trick freed his family from the antebellum South. Perhaps Chesnutt designed his trick to show the intelligence, discipline, and courage of Black Americans like Grandison to his Jim Crow-era readers.