Charles Chessnutt

The sheriff resist popular notions of racial identity because he thinks the court should find the colored guilty before hanging him, instead of just hanging him because they think he did it. He wanted the event to be fair even though it was a colored person. Readers in this time period were probably angered that the sheriff stood up for the colored person instead of going with the white people. I think that people were also probably enraged to hear about miscegenation even though they probably knew it was going on. People don't like it to be known of the dirty laundry around their community. In the Goophered I think Julius was putting on a show for the white people. Julius didn't want the white people to buy the farm because he was making money from it so he told them a story. It is obvious that in the story black Americans were thought of as commodities because in Julius's story Henry was a commodity and then in the story itself he made Julius somewhat of a commodity because he didn't care that he worked for someone else as long as he was making more that on his on. He never thought that maybe Julius wanted to work for himself instead of being looked at as an object. It's interesting that Chesnutt shows black Americans to be one with nature, just as if they were apart of the land, they weren't even human so they couldn't be part of the culture.