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From Text to Context: Teaching Kate Chopin's "Désirée s Baby" Side by Side with Charles Chesnutt's "The Sheriff s Children"

Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" has long been an anthology favorite: it is short, intriguing, skillfully written, and challenging in its questioning of the racial caste system based on skin color. It is always a reliable choice whether in an English 101 or in a more advanced American literature course, drawing spirited responses from students. Yet to make a good thing even better, I teach "Désirée's Baby" together with "The Sheriff's Children" by Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). Besides being a great occasion to introduce an African-America author who has joined the canon relatively recently, Chesnutt's story creates good synergy with "Désirée's Baby", one expediting the understanding of the other, more than doubling the impact of reading, and animating class discussions. Rather unusually for a Chopin story, "Désirée's Baby" has a fairytale atmosphere. Set in unspecified, faraway days of ante-bellum South, it is a story of a foundling adopted by an aristocratic planter family to grow up like a beautiful princess and be married to a even more illustrious house with "the oldest and proudest name in Louisiana." Of course, these are to offset the reversal of fortune at the end of the story all the more forcibly. Still, this uncharacteristic fairytale atmosphere along with Chopin's characteristic subtlety and suggestive, rather than descriptive, style that leaves a lot to the reader's imagination makes "Désirée's Baby" fall a little short of driving home all the horrors of slavery, especially to Korean student not well-versed in American history. In contrast, the realistic "Sheriff's Children" both shows and tells in no uncertain terms the rampant discrimination and violence against men of color: in "The Sheriff's Children," Chesnutt switched to a more direct protest and consciousness-raising from the roundabout way of parody and gentle poking fun in his earlier, popular story collection, The Conjure Woman (1899). As a result, "The Sheriff's Children" describes in greater details the evils of slavery and its aftermath, fleshing out where they are only delicately hinted at in "Désirée's Baby." Also, teaching "Désirée's Baby" in conjunction with "The Sheriff's Children" can lead to an overview, however brief, of the slavery in America. "The Sheriff's Children" is set in the Reconstruction-era ten years after the Civil War, to be more precise when the original dynamic of the Reconstruction already started to be undermined, while lynching and bullying of the "freedmen" grew rampant in the South. Publishing after the 1896 Plessy v. Fergurson ruling, Chesnutt superimposes on the 1870s setting of "The Sheriff's Children" the predicaments of the people of color up to the 1890s. Given the ante-bellum background of "Désirée's Baby," reading it together with "The Sheriff's Children" thus offers an opportunity to survey the history of slavery and racial discrimination from the early decades of nineteenth century to its very end or even beyond. Granted, today's Korean students are not as knowledgeable as they should be in the history of American slavery or slavery in general, for that matter but they at least know of the Civil War, President Lincoln and the Proclamation of Emancipation; and after that, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Right Movements of the mid-twentieth century. To round off the "Désirée's Baby" and "The Sheriff's Children" session, I ask students to fill the lacunae in their knowledge. Whether the result of the assignment is a sweeping bird's eye view or a thumbnail sketch, it gives them a chance to learn the tortured history of how the African Americans suffered under the yoke of slavery, regained their freedom, civil rights, and equality before the law only to be robbed them again, and how they struggled and is still struggling to re-regain what is only due to them as human beings.