The House Behind the Cedars
Glossary
"
- "Mulatto" (period racial vocabulary)
- A period term, used throughout the novel by both Black and white characters, for a person of mixed Black and white ancestry — part of the finely graded racial vocabulary (also including terms like 'yellow' for light-skinned Black characters) that the novel deploys to show how precisely Southern caste society tried to classify and rank appearance.
- Related: The One-Drop Rule, Passing
B
- Blanche Leary
- A young white woman who has long expected to marry George Tryon and who remains a quiet romantic rival to Rena throughout the novel, embodying the socially 'safe,' unquestioned match Tryon is expected to make.
- Related: George Tryon, Rena (Rowena) Walden
C
- Clarence Social Club / tournament
- The genteel South Carolina social world — its annual tournament and fairground pageantry — in which George Tryon courts Rena, dramatizing the antebellum-flavored chivalric rituals of the white planter class Rena has passed into.
- Related: George Tryon, Blanche Leary
F
- Frank Fowler
- A Black Patesville craftsman devoted to Rena since childhood, who loves her without ever expecting his feelings to be returned given the town's and Rena's own racial calculations. His steady loyalty stands in deliberate contrast to the more self-interested figures who circle Rena later, including Jeff Wain.
- Related: Rena (Rowena) Walden, Patesville
- Free people of color
- The pre- and post-war social category the Walden family occupied in Patesville — legally free but racially subordinate, occupying a precarious middle position in the South's caste hierarchy that the novel shows was neither full citizenship nor full exclusion.
- Related: Molly Walden, Patesville, The One-Drop Rule
- Front Street
- A principal street of Patesville, the town's commercial and social spine, whose comings and goings register the town's close-knit surveillance of its residents' business — including, eventually, the Waldens'.
- Related: Patesville
G
- George Tryon
- A young white South Carolina gentleman who falls in love with and becomes engaged to Rena without knowing her ancestry. His discovery of her secret, and his response to it, becomes the novel's sharpest test of whether love can survive the caste line Rena has crossed.
- Related: Rena (Rowena) Walden, Blanche Leary, Clarence
J
- Jeff Wain
- A prosperous, self-important Black landowner from Sampson County who hires Rena to teach at his district's school after her passing collapses, then pursues her romantically with manipulative persistence — the novel's portrait of the dangers Rena faces even within Black society once she can no longer pass.
- Related: Rena (Rowena) Walden
- John Walden / Warwick
- Rena's older brother, who left Patesville years earlier and reinvented himself as the white lawyer 'John Warwick.' He returns to persuade his sister to follow the same path, making him the novel's clearest case of passing pursued as a deliberate, unsentimental calculation rather than an anguished necessity.
- Related: Rena (Rowena) Walden, Passing, Judge Straight
- Judge Straight
- An aging, war-worn Patesville lawyer who mentored John Walden as a young man, helping set him on the path to reinventing himself as 'Warwick.' His office scenes give the novel its clearest picture of the Reconstruction-era South's legal and professional class.
- Related: John Walden / Warwick, Patesville
M
- Molly (Mis') Walden
- Rena and John's mother, who remains in Patesville living openly as a free woman of color in the house behind the cedars. Her presence is the fact John and Rena must conceal to sustain their passing, and her loyalty to her children never wavers even as their choices separate her from them.
- Related: House Behind the Cedars, Rena (Rowena) Walden, John Walden / Warwick
P
- Passing
- The novel's central act: living as white when one has any Black ancestry, made possible by light skin and made necessary by a legal and social order that treated even a small fraction of Black blood as disqualifying. John and Rena Walden pass in different ways and for different reasons, and the novel tracks what each gains and loses by it.
- Related: The One-Drop Rule, John Walden / Warwick, Rena (Rowena) Walden
- Plato
- A Black schoolboy Tryon encounters on the road, proud to be learning to read and write 'lack de w'ite folks' — a brief scene Chesnutt uses to register both the hope and the constrained horizon of Reconstruction-era Black schooling.
- Related: Patesville
R
- Reconstruction-Era Patesville
- The novel's setting, modeled closely on Chesnutt's own hometown of Fayetteville, North Carolina — a Southern caste society in the years after the Civil War, where old antebellum racial hierarchies persist under new legal conditions.
- Related: The House Behind the Cedars, Front Street
- Rena (Rowena) Walden
- The novel's heroine, persuaded by her older brother John to leave Patesville, change her name, and pass as white in South Carolina. She falls in love with George Tryon before her hidden Black ancestry threatens to unravel her new life, and her story forms the novel's central tragedy.
- Related: John Walden / Warwick, George Tryon, Passing, Jeff Wain
S
- Sampson County
- The rural North Carolina county where Jeff Wain lives and where Rena goes to teach at a school for Black children after her passing in South Carolina collapses — a poorer, more isolated setting than either Patesville or Tryon's plantation society.
- Related: Jeff Wain, Rena (Rowena) Walden
- School for colored children
- The segregated schools for Black children established across the Reconstruction-era South, one of which Rena teaches at in Sampson County — part of the postwar expansion of Black education that also exposed teachers like Rena to precarious working and living conditions.
- Related: Jeff Wain, Sampson County, Plato
T
- The Color Line
- Chesnutt's own term (also used as the title of a later collection) for the socially and legally enforced boundary between white and Black identity in the post-Reconstruction South — the boundary John and Rena Walden 'cross,' at very different costs, over the course of the novel.
- Related: Passing, The One-Drop Rule
- The House Behind the Cedars
- The Walden family home in Patesville, screened from the street by a row of cedar trees — a literal hiding place that gives the novel its title and stands for the family's need to keep its Black ancestry out of public view.
- Related: Molly Walden, Patesville
- The One-Drop Rule
- The informal but socially and often legally enforced doctrine that any traceable African ancestry, however small, made a person 'colored' regardless of appearance — the invisible line the Waldens are constantly calculating their distance from.
- Related: Passing, Rena (Rowena) Walden
- The tournament (chivalric pageant)
- A mock-medieval jousting tournament held at the county fairground as part of Southern planter-class social ritual, where young men compete on horseback and crown a 'Queen of Love and Beauty' — the occasion at which George Tryon's courtship of Rena publicly advances.
- Related: George Tryon, Clarence Social Club / tournament, Rena (Rowena) Walden