The Sheriff's Children

 “The Sheriff’s Children” is a short story written by Charles W. Chesnutt in 1889 against the backdrop of the post-bellum South. “The Sheriff’s Children” was originally published in the New York Independent and then later in Chesnutt’s collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Writing in the Literary Realist style, he eschewed the Romanticism of the previous age, using close description of his characters’ internal and external conflicts to illuminate the real plight of African American people. Set in the 1970s, toward the end of the Reconstruction Period, the short story exposes and confronts the racist social systems that continued to imprison the Black population after the American Civil War. In “The Sheriff’s Children,” Chesnutt explores themes of Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility, Social Versus Moral Duty, and Free Will Versus Fatalism as well as the related ideas on the nature of justice, change versus tradition, rural versus city life, and knowledge versus ignorance.

Chesnutt (1859-1932) was born to freed people of color. His paternal grandfather had been a white enslaver. While Chesnutt noted that he was of seven-eighths white European descent and could “pass” for a white man, he refused to do so, identifying as African American.