A brother and sister cross the color line — and pay two different prices for it.

The House Behind the Cedars

Charles W. Chesnutt · 1900

Charles W. Chesnutt was light-skinned enough to have passed as white himself and chose not to — a fact that gives The House Behind the Cedars its particular authority. Published in 1900, the novel follows a brother and sister who take opposite paths through the same impossible choice: John reinvents himself wholesale as a white lawyer named Warwick, while Rena, persuaded to follow him, finds passing to be a much more anguished and unstable proposition, especially once she falls in love with a white suitor who doesn't know what she is. Chesnutt uses their story to dramatize, with unusual precision for his time, exactly how the Reconstruction-era South's racial caste system worked — what it demanded, what it destroyed, and what it cost even those who beat it at its own game.

33 chapters · 68,906 words · ~5.2 hr read