Divided Duties: Due Process, Equal Protection, and Badges of Degradation in Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Sheriff’s Children”

Abstract: Through a law-and-literature interpretive frame and “surface reading,” this essay examines the principles of due process and equal protection in Charles Chesnutt’s “The Sheriff’s Children”—the first belletristic work of African American literature, I contend, to offer a sustained exploration of anti-Black lynch logic. Focusing on the story’s moments of representation (circa 1875) and production (1889), it historicizes and contextualizes Chesnutt’s early critique of a white lynch-mob mentality, while demonstrating a two-prolonged legal argument at stake: on the one hand, an ironic representation of the discrepancies between de jure and de facto legal practices, when race is a factor, that plays out on the text’s surface; and on the other, a tacit unveiling of “incidents” and “badges” of slavery, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, that come to light through the prism of such a surface reading, thus revealing new insight into the story’s symbolic and allegorical dimensions that reside beneath.