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When it is said that it was done to please a woman, there ought perhaps to be enough said to explain anything; for what a man will not do to please a woman is yet to be discovered. Nevertheless, it might be well to state a few preliminary facts to make it clear why young Dick Owens tried to run one of his father’s negro men off to Canada.
In the early fifties, when the growth of anti-slavery sentiment and the constant drain of fugitive slaves into the North had so alarmed the slaveholders of the border States as to lead to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, a young white man from Ohio, moved by compassion for the sufferings of a certain bondman who happened to have a “hard master,” essayed to help the slave to freedom.
The third-person omniscient narrator’s opening lines serve several useful functions. For example, they introduce Dick Owens as the story’s protagonist and indicate his motivation: “to please a woman.” The lines also announce the story’s subject: Dick’s attempt to help one enslaved person escape to freedom in Canada.
Since the story was published in 1899, about fifty years after its setting, the narrator reminds readers who can recall the 1850s, and instructs readers who can’t, about the historical situation at the time. Since then, a Civil War and the abolition of slavery have changed the United States. But the color-line, about which Chesnutt often writes, continues to affect citizens’ lives. To read the story of Dick, his father, and Grandison is to recall the nation before the war. The narrator’s deft handling of the subject, along with their wry understanding of what people do for love, reassures readers of their reliability at the story’s outset.
When Grandison saw Dick approaching, he edged away from the preacher and hastened toward his master, with a very evident expression of relief upon his countenance.
“Mars Dick,” he said, “dese yer abolitioners is jes’ pesterin’ de life out er me tryin’ ter git me ter run away. I don’ pay no ’tention ter ’em, but dey riles me so sometimes dat I ’m feared I ’ll hit some of ’em some er dese days, an’ dat mought git me inter trouble. I ain’ said nuffin’ ter you ’bout it, Mars Dick, fer I did n’ wanter ’sturb yo’ min’; but I don’ like it, suh; no, suh, I don’! Is we gwine back home ’fo’ long, Mars Dick?”
Here, Grandison assures Dick that he is glad to have gotten away from the conversation with the preacher in Boston. The lines are a good example of the use of dialect in Chesnutt’s writing, a feature of much local color fiction written during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Readers may note that Grandison’s pronunciation is distinct, especially compared to Dick’s or the colonel’s. Readers in 1899 would have taken this dialect to indicate a lack of formal education. However, it’s important to observe that the syntax—that is, the sentence structure—of his speech is as sophisticated as the speech Chesnutt writes for the white characters.
In addition, on a second reading of the story, readers can appreciate the deception that Grandison craftily maintains in these lines to ensure that Dick is unaware of the work he is doing to prepare for his and his family’s escape. Grandison is so convincing that Dick becomes exceedingly agitated and even thinks about “assassinating” Grandison if he can’t lose him in Boston.
Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from Kentucky, registered at the fashionable New York hostelry for Southerners in those days, a hotel where an atmosphere congenial to Southern institutions was sedulously maintained. But there were negro waiters in the dining-room, and mulatto bell-boys, and Dick had no doubt that Grandison, with the native gregariousness and garrulousness of his race, would foregather and palaver with them sooner or later, and Dick hoped that they would speedily inoculate him with the virus of freedom.
These lines occur when Dick and Grandison arrive to stay for a few weeks in New York City, and they demonstrate the influence of setting on plot. Dick chooses a hotel that won’t arouse his father’s suspicions, should Grandison abandon his post. Despite being in a northern Free state, the hotel is a haven for belief in “Southern institutions,” where no one questions plantations or the enterprise of slavery.
This setting provides Dick with the cover he needs for his plan. Just as important, though, it provides an opportunity for the free Black men and boys who work at the hotel to talk to Grandison about their lives. Dick hopes they will persuade him to go on north to Canada, where he will be free, safe from the Fugitive Slave Act. In other words, Dick hopes this setting will help him reach his goal. Of course, his plan seems to fail. Grandison reports that he doesn’t much care for these free men. But as we readers realize later, it's likely that these men do in fact provide him with information he needs to plan his eventual escape—information he couldn’t have accessed on the plantation in Kentucky.
“It’s just as I thought from the beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of running away; he knew when he was well off, and where his friends were. . . . They actually kidnaped him—just think of it!—and gagged him and bound him and threw him rudely into a wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut, and fed him on bread and water for three weeks. One of the scoundrels wanted to kill him[,] . . . and before they had their minds made up Grandison escaped, and, keeping his back steadily to the North Star, made his way, after suffering incredible hardships, back to the old plantation, back to his master, his friends, and his home.”
These lines occur as Colonel Owens arrives at the plantation with an exhausted Grandison. The colonel recounts Grandison’s explanation about where he has been—which is to say, detained in Canada by abolitionists. The colonel feels “joy” that Grandison proved him right and “indignation” about how his “property” has been treated. He praises Grandison for knowing who his true “friends” are. He imagines Grandison’s homesickness for “the old plantation,” and he describes Grandison as turning his back “steadily to the North Star”—an ironic reference to the guide star that fugitive slaves in fact followed while escaping to freedom.
Readers who, like Dick, suspect Grandison’s tale of woe to be a convenient “yarn” can sense the ironic distance between the colonel’s glee and reality. The irony is confirmed when Grandison and his family follow the North Star to Canada on a path prepared in advance by Grandison and the “infernal abolitionists” the colonel so despises.
