The Passing of Grandison | Overview

Charles Waddell Chesnutt published “The Passing of Grandison” in 1899 in his second collection of short stories, The Wife of His Youth and Other Tales of the Color Line. Told from the third-person-limited point of view, the story uses the narrative device of the trickster, the setting of the pre–Civil War plantation, and a two-part plot for the larger purpose of criticizing and satirizing the institution of slavery. The first half of the plot involves Dick Owens, the spoiled son of a plantation owner, attempting to persuade a young woman, Charity Lomax, to marry him. The second and more dominant part of the plot concerns Dick trying to accomplish this by taking a slave north and giving him the opportunity to escape. Charity found a similar account of a man—a man who was imprisoned and executed as a result—to be rather romantic. Not aware of his son’s intentions, plantation owner Colonel Owens selects a slave named Grandison to go north with Dick, for Grandison convinces the colonel that being a slave is a blessing, confirming the colonel’s fondest opinions of slavery. Both ironic and satirical, the story manages to hide its conclusion until the final paragraphs, even though the reader suspects that the slave will indeed trick the master. Both characters are such extreme caricatures of plantation figures that we, along with the narrator, can only laugh at them from beginning to end.