The Sheriff's Children

In “The Sheriff’s Children,” Charles W. Chesnutt expresses significant concerns around racial issues, especially exploring Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility. Establishing a detailed historical and social setting, Chesnutt creates a foundational backdrop upon which to understand social dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, the setting almost becomes a character in itself, as Chesnutt uses images characteristic of Romanticism to portray the town early on:

[A traveler] would have seen weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the shingled roofs in so many instances covered with a rich growth of moss. Here and there he would have met a razor-backed hog lazily rooting his way along the principle thoroughfare, and […] some lazy dog, dozing away the hours in the ardent sunshine (131).

This description is pastoral and picturesque, but the references to lazy animals underscore the moral complacency of the town, which will become the object of Chesnutt’s social critique, as well as the violent animalistic behavior of the mob. In associating the town with Romanticism, Chesnutt indicates that it is held in the past. He uses the tropes of Romanticism when first mentioning the Black inhabitants, describing the “tuneful negro on his way through the pine forest” (131). These early sentimentalized descriptions are part of Chesnutt’s play on narrative and genre expectations, beginning his story in the mode of Romantic nostalgia, which will increasingly shift to the dark and challenging themes of Realism. This subversion of expectations supports Chesnutt’s creation of shock and moral interrogation.

The events that follow explore these cultural and moral conflicts, juxtaposing old systems attempting to maintain a regressive social order and new systems attempting to incite transformation. The story’s characters represent this discord as they wrestle with the resulting dichotomies of Social Versus Moral Duty and Free Will Versus Fatalism. In this context, the “rugged” Captain Walker, an “old veteran” who lost an arm at Gettysburg, becomes a symbol of the expiring Old South. The white townspeople “discuss” and “speculate” on the murder but it is only when the suspect is identified as Black that they become active. Not satisfied by due process when the suspect is Black, lynching becomes the vehicle by which the town wishes to restore a “primitive” order, reasserting the conservative and outdated values of their time:

They ha[ve] vague notions of the majesty of law and the rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the moment these sunk into oblivion; a white man had been killed by a Negro (134).

The story thus frames the townspeople’s motivation as racist, underlined by the later wish to “teach the n*****s their places” (139).

The story’s early Romantic mode is seen in the character of the sheriff. When Chesnutt first introduces him, he has a “masterful expression” and is a vision of health, vitality, and power. In learning about the lynch mob, he leaps quickly into action, “unconsciously assum[ing] the attitude of a soldier who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face to face” (135). His title of sheriff casts him in a dutiful role, allowing him to adapt his wartime valor and experience in peacetime. However, the sheriff’s understanding of his position is quickly undermined. Complacent in his own privilege and liberalism, the sheriff offers Sam food, failing to realize Sam’s very real danger, echoed later in his failure to worry about Polly’s safety. In both of these instances, the sheriff chooses to enact the role of the romantic hero instead of recognizing and attending to the true threat Polly and Sam face. His privilege as a wealthy, white man allows him to follow his whimsy while Sam and Polly are left holding the anxiety. In fact, in his bravado he cannot even conceptualize his own danger, dismissing Polly’s worry, and proclaiming, “There ain’t a man in Branson County that would shoot me (136). The reader will come to understand that the sheriff cannot genuinely know his duty without acknowledging the prejudicial actions of men who are more like him than he cares to admit.

In embodying their subconscious roles, the mob and the sheriff act out a moral conflict, in which they cast themselves within the unnuanced perspective of “good” and “evil.” This contrast in increasingly disrupted, as the characters fail to express their roles in the expected way, first when the sheriff stands up to the mob instead of feigning a show of resistance and then when Tom fails to assume a deferential posture in relationship to the sheriff, namely, a white man carrying a gun. When Tom steals the revolver from the sheriff, he challenges the sheriff’s racist stereotypical assumptions of Tom as passive or submissive: The sheriff is shocked out of his “mechanical” actions and placed into a real relationship with Tom, human to human. When Tom identifies himself as the sheriff’s son, the sheriff is forced to confront the actual man before him as well as his despicable actions as an enslaver.

This confrontation is essential to the theme of Societal Versus Moral Duty. Tom confronts the sheriff with the responsibilities of father, man, and human soul. When he admonishes the sheriff for employing his role as father in defense of his life, he makes distinctions between the mere biology of a father and the actual “duty” of a father to provide a name, protection, freedom, and opportunity. The story here also draws out the theme of Free Will Versus Fatalism, as when the sheriff argues that he gave Tom life, offering the feeble and “mechanical” platitude “while there’s life there’s hope” (142), Tom scrutinizes the “life” the sheriff gave him, stating, “You gave me a white man’s spirit, and you made me a slave, and crushed it out” (144). The sheriff is forced to acknowledge the safety and privilege he has experienced because of the “safeguards of parental restraint and public opinion […] thrown around him” (144).

Tom becomes the face of Realism as the narrative shifts into this mode. He upsets the sheriff’s sense of invincibility as well as his clarity around his duty. The sheriff must face a “flood of unaccustomed thoughts” that lead to a “clarifying of the moral faculty” (146) and an increased acknowledgment of the ways he has wronged his son (144).

The sheriff’s “awakened conscience” brings the story to its climax. However, this does not lead to the resolution of the story’s themes. Although the sheriff exhibits compassion in relationship to Tom, he fails to understand or acknowledge the insidious and deadly nature of the racist systems that underpin his office. He continues to attempt to play by the rules of society, part of the theme of Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility. Although he finally believes Tom to be innocent, he leaves him in his cell; he dismisses the “hypothesis” of allowing Tom to escape, and he makes no plan to acknowledge Tom as his son. His ideology and allegiance remain firm as he explores the improbable possibility of freeing Tom through legal action, especially within a legal system that disallowed Black testimony against a white man. The sheriff chooses the identity of sheriff and white man over the duties of father and equal, opting to protect his reputation, his job, and his social standing over paternal and moral responsibilities.

In this context, Tom’s death becomes the fatalistic end of the story, concluding the theme of Free Will Versus Fatalism. When Tom is robbed of his gun, he is also robbed of his power and “bravado”; he falls into “stony apathy” that eventually leads to his death, whether as a result of his injuries or through his deliberately embracing death. The intentional ambiguity surrounding the nature of Tom’s death is part of this theme. Death is Tom’s only escape from the distress he describes. Tom’s death may be a yielding to fate or, alternately, and act of agency beyond the “choice of two ropes” (142). Symbolically, Tom has been killed by the father who gave him the “gift of life” (141), as the sheriff has been unable to offer Tom an acceptable future. Although the sheriff has resolved over night to live up to his responsibility and intends to devise “some plan […] by which the sheriff might atone for his neglect of this son of his—against society—against God” (147), his resolution to be a father to Tom comes too late.