The Passing of Grandison

“The Passing of Grandison,” is an interesting story which involves a man named Dick who tries to impress a girl to marry him through taking his slave Grandison up north to set him free. This supposed act of kindness is solely an act of selfishness because Dick is using Grandison’s freedom to better his own personal life. These types of actions and mistreatment of blacks and slaves was pretty common in this time period, and I think that Chesnutt uses this story as an key example to demonstrate how wrong these actions are, and to make people feel guilty for drawing similarities to people like Dick.

Also Chesnutt uses a specific dialect in this story that is very specific and the impression it gives his audience is very strong. The constant use of words like the “n-word” and very rough, off-color speech, adds to the wrongful prejudice and mistreatment occurring in, “The Passing of Grandison,” that Chesnutt is trying to relay to his audience in this story. There is an apparent change towards the end of the story where Dick reveals an act of remorse for Grandison when Grandison shows up at his wedding and identifies that he had been kidnapped by abolitionists and beaten severely. This remorse is new to the audience and I think Chesnutt purposely presented it to us to further main goal of ending these prejudices and mistreatments of minorities.