33 pages • 1 hour read
Charles W. ChesnuttThe Sheriff's Children
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1889A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Structural Racism and Personal Responsibility
“The Sheriff’s Children” interrogates the nature of personal responsibility in the context of structural racism, an essential part of Charles W. Chesnutt’s social and political critique. This is mostly expressed through the character of the sheriff. The story initially creates a juxtaposition between the townspeople and the sheriff, which predominantly supports the sheriff’s own view of himself as a man of personal responsibility and honor. Once the sheriff’s character is exposed through the revelation of Tom’s identity, both the reader and the sheriff are obliged to reconsider these assumptions. By confounding narrative expectations, Chesnutt asks questions about the responsibilities of the individual inside an unfair system, challenging the notion that compliance with the law is enough when the law itself is racist.
At first, the story contrasts the ignorant and violent prejudice of the townspeople with the sheriff’s cultivation and honor. While the mob wishes to break the law that—barely—protects the Black suspect’s rights to a hearing and express their prejudice in the strongest terms, the sheriff treats Sam with relative courtesy and is prepared to protect the prisoner against the white mob. Although the narrator reveals early on that the sheriff’s “family” had been enslavers before abolition, the narrative does not at this point hold him personally responsible. The sheriff’s sense of responsibility is based in his role as law enforcer. Expressed in heroic terms, this brings a “determined gleam to his lit eyes” and a straightening of his body as he “unconsciously assume[s] the attitude of a soldier who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face to face” (135). At this point, his courage and duty as a man of law aligns with the story’s interest in racial justice. The reader may believe, if they wish, that the sheriff acts out of personal responsibility to racial equality rather than simply upholding the letter of the law as a duty of office.
When Tom’s identity is revealed and Tom makes his eloquent complaint of the sheriff’s neglectful and abusive treatment of him and his mother, the sheriff’s self-interested moral relativism is exposed. Tom and his relationship to the sheriff force the sheriff to see the human face of enslavement and to acknowledge his own culpability. The sheriff—and the story—has portrayed his compliance with abolition and new law codes as a mark of his honor, but now he is obliged to face the consequences of his exploitation of others when enslavement was legal in the South. The legal changes have compelled the sheriff to embrace the new post-war world, but his ability to do so is revealed as a privilege. While the sheriff has been able move away from his identity as an enslaver, relegating it to the past, the consequences of the sheriff’s action as an enslaver are Tom’s lived experience, which he cannot escape. Tom is the living embodiment of the sheriff’s racist—although legal and commonplace—past actions, and his existence forces the sheriff to confront this part of himself and his history. The story shows that what is legal is not the same as what is right in a structurally racist society and that holding individual responsibility to a higher standard is essential for virtue in this context.
Social Versus Moral Duty
The characters in “The Sheriff’s Children” all exhibit or express a sense of duty, many of which conflict with each other. This duty may be virtuous and sincere or it may be mistaken and disingenuous. The lynchers present their violence and racism as a duty to reinstate a pre-war social and racial structure under the guise of protecting the community. Polly and the sheriff recognize a duty to protect each other. Tom expresses a sense of duty in his attempt to advocate for his fate, avenge his mother’s death, and raise the sheriff’s consciousness.
The sheriff’s character is strongly associated with the prioritization of multiple duties, including as a townsperson, a white man, a lawman, a father, and a child of God. At the beginning of the story, the sheriff possesses a strong and clear sense of his duty as sheriff, facing the mob with a conviction supported by the legal authority of his office. However, he quickly abandons this unequivocal position in failing to identify its members, who represent social “law,” in his efforts to play both sides as sheriff and local white man. In this sense, he undermines the valor with which he sees his position, pitting the antiquated “law” of the town against his allegiance to new, more racially equitable laws. He even jokes with the lynchers about being deprived of the $0.75 a day received for the prisoner, attempting to place himself in casual familiarity with mob.
These conflicts come into relief when Tom reveals himself to be the sheriff’s son. In facing the realities of Tom’s existence as well as his responsibility for Tom’s circumstances, the sheriff must wrestle with internal conflict and decide where his duty lies. The sheriff must either acknowledge the corrupt social laws (i.e., the regressive Black Codes) that have imprisoned a blameless man with little hope of a fair trial or continue in an office that upholds these laws.
In keeping Tom imprisoned during the night, the sheriff tacitly supports the former, putting his duty as a lawman ahead of his duty as Tom’s father—or maintaining his role as Polly’s father over his duty as Tom’s father. When confronted later by his moral duty, he still cannot release his allegiance to his office, vowing only to do whatever he can to obtain Tom’s freedom through lawful channels. When Tom dies, the sheriff must confront his failure to his son as well as his complicity in maintaining oppressive social systems.
Free Will Versus Fatalism
The story examines the nature of free will and fatalism and the extent to which each of these might be available to the different members of an unequal society. In presenting Tom’s and the Sheriff’s opposite perspective on the nature of free will, the story highlights that the opportunity and agency of free will are reliant on levels of privilege and freedom. The story exposes the sheriff’s positive view of free will as a naive idealism. It is also self-serving as it enables him to ignore his own privilege and avoid facing the consequences of his past actions. Tom is fatalistic in recognition of the dangerous and restricted life he is obliged to lead.
At the beginning of the story, the sheriff conceptualizes himself as the individualistic romantic hero, failing to acknowledge the ways in which his life has been shaped by the circumstances he was born into. In this sense, he believes in the freedom the Civil War and Reconstruction have provided, flattering himself in his success in intimidating the mob as well as releasing Tom from his “fetters.” From this vantage point, the sheriff envisions himself as “saving” Tom’s life, believing he has protected Tom from hanging as well as empowered him to fight. Providing Tom the platitude, “While there’s life there’s hope” (142), the sheriff fails to understand that his privilege makes life hopeful rather than an ordeal. In this, he claims a kind of universal free will that is detached from social reality. Proclaiming Tom “free now,” he shows how little he understands the true nature of Tom’s experience and the consequences of his own actions as an enslaver.
By contrast, Tom is fatalistic. Having faced the limits of his liberty since he was born, he no longer doubts the outcome of his life and especially of his imprisonment. Tom acknowledges his only choice is “between two ropes” and his destiny to be “despised and scorned and set aside by the people to whose race I belong to far more than to my mother’s” (144). Although the child of a white man and sharing many of his characteristics, Tom is still considered Black legally and socially, with the added stigma and complexity of having a white father. The sheriff, in his privilege, is able to live from ideology, idealism, and a sense of possibility whereas Tom is only able to acknowledge and surrender to his compromised reality.
While Tom experiences some elements of power and freedom while he holds the gun—allowing him to proclaim his name, reprove the sheriff for his cruelty, and choose his life over the sheriff’s—the “spirit” goes out of him when he is shot. His death is the narrative finale that his fatalism has prefigured.
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By Charles W. Chesnutt
