The Sheriff's Children

In “The Sheriff’s Children,” Charles W. Chesnutt expresses significant concerns around racial issues, especially exploring Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility. Establishing a detailed historical and social setting, Chesnutt creates a foundational backdrop upon which to understand social dynamics and hierarchies. In fact, the setting almost becomes a character in itself, as Chesnutt uses images characteristic of Romanticism to portray the town early on:

[A traveler] would have seen weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the shingled roofs in so many instances covered with a rich growth of moss. Here and there he would have met a razor-backed hog lazily rooting his way along the principle thoroughfare, and […] some lazy dog, dozing away the hours in the ardent sunshine (131).

This description is pastoral and picturesque, but the references to lazy animals underscore the moral complacency of the town, which will become the object of Chesnutt’s social critique, as well as the violent animalistic behavior of the mob. In associating the town with Romanticism, Chesnutt indicates that it is held in the past. He uses the tropes of Romanticism when first mentioning the Black inhabitants, describing the “tuneful negro on his way through the pine forest” (131).