A Literary Genealogy of “Slavery’s Capitalism” in Chesnutt and Faulkner

Abstract

In this essay, Stephanie Rountree investigates Charles Chesnutt’s “Lonesome Ben” and William Faulkner’s Light in August as they reveal enslavement’s foundational influence on US capitalism and public health. Chesnutt narrates Ben’s antebellum tale as he self-emancipates, eats clay that whitens his Black skin, dies, and transforms into a brick. A metaphor for Booker T. Washington’s brick-making and body-care curriculum at Tuskegee, Ben’s tale condemns it as racial capitalism that “whitens” Black personhood yet denies Black citizenship. Chesnutt also connects Ben’s geophagia to Reconstruction-era poor white characters, correlating cross-racial suffering under capitalism. Historically, epidemics ravaged poor southern communities across racial boundaries, and many diseases compelled geophagia, like hookworm. Reading Faulkner through Chesnutt, the “hookwormridden heirs” of Doane’s Mill, together with Joe Christmas’s volatile racial and digestive narrative, reveal how pre-capitalist enslaving logic endured beyond Emancipation in public health policy to produce bodily-abjected laborers consigned to the bottom of US liberal democracy’s “anteliberal” hierarchy of citizenship.