The Passing of Grandison

Throughout the story, Grandison speaks in a dialect known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE originated on plantations in the American South, where Africans and African Americans were enslaved until the mid-1860s and then forced to work as sharecroppers. The origins of AAVE are unknown, but the dialect merged linguistic forms and grammatical structures of speech among enslaved people and those they had contact with. Enslaved people originated from many linguistic groups in Africa and so had no common language to speak except for those they developed from linguistic materials in their original languages and the English that surrounded them. White Americans both before and after the 19th century sometimes looked to AAVE as proof that Black people lacked the intelligence or civilization of white people. For Colonel Owens, Grandison’s use of AAVE—for instance, “Anybody ax me who I b’longs ter, I ain’ got no ’casion ter be shame’ ter tell ’em, no, suh, ’deed I ain’, suh!” (63)—would certainly have had the effect. However, Colonel Owens’ misinterpretations of Grandison suggest that someone’s dialect of English does not correlate with their ability or intelligence.

Irony contributes to many aspects of the story, such as its satire and its key themes. The simplest definition of irony is “a situation in which something which was intended to have a particular result has the opposite or a very different result” (Cambridge Dictionary). This occurs in many places in the text: for instance, it is ironic that the enslaved person who Colonel Owens declares “abolitionist-proof” organizes the escape of not just himself but his entire family.

When the colonel warns Grandison about all that he will see and hear in the North, he tells him,

Stick close to your young master, and remember always that he is your best friend, and understands your real needs, and has your true interests at heart, and if you will be careful to avoid strangers who try to talk to you, you’ll stand a fair chance of getting back to your home and your friends (63-64).

This passage is ironic considering that Dick has only his interests at heart: in this case, freeing Grandison to win Charity’s love. One of the means Dick uses to accomplish this end is soliciting the very strangers that the colonel warns Grandison about. He writes letters to the “addresses of several well-known abolitionists” (65) to get them to try and persuade Grandison to escape. This is also ironic, for while Dick thinks that Grandison is too stupid to desire his freedom, Grandison might well have been making the connections he needed to free his family.

Satire is a genre that uses humor, irony, and other similar devices to elevate human vices or follies to criticize them; as a genre, it is usually deployed to make a social commentary. Chesnutt satirizes many pieces of pro-slavery propaganda which portray enslaved Black people as content and happy and enslavers as kindly fathers. Novels such as Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) and Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, A Southern Life as It Is (1852) depict slave owners as benevolent lords. This is what Colonel Owens thinks of himself, as the reader can see when Grandison supplicates to the colonel, and the colonel’s “feudal heart thrilled at such appreciative homage” (62). Novels such as these also portray enslaved people as happy and grateful serfs that are unable to govern or think for themselves. Chesnutt draws from these depictions for the persona that Grandison adopts to trick Colonel Owens, while the twist ending makes it clear that this is satire and not an endorsement of the myth of the happy slave.

Chesnutt even satirizes other abolitionists and activists to emphasize the message of those activists. For instance, when he is told by the colonel that he will go North with Dick, Grandison says, “Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de bes’ marster” (64), placating the colonel before bowing and scraping out of the room. This passage satirically references Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, when he writes that Mr. Freeland was “the best master I ever had” (71). However, the most important part of Douglass’s sentiment is the second half of it: “till I became my own master” (71). The reader familiar with Douglass’s narrative might recognize this ironic allusion, which successfully satirizes the colonel, who simply believes that Grandison’s words are true.