RJ Boutelle

The Gift of Guilt: How a Novel Helped Survivors of America's Only Coup Expose the Wilmington Massacre

This trade book is about a unique copy of Charles Chesnutt's protest novel, "The Marrow of Tradition" (1901), which thinly fictionalizes the white supremacist coup known as the Wilmington Massacre (1898). A discovered a copy of the novel that one of the coup's architects (Alfred Moore Waddell) received as a gift from a Black survivor of the massacre (John Taylor) is centerpiece of this work, asking "why?" as it explores the Wilmington Massacre through the personal relationships among Waddell, Taylor, and Chesnutt. It is through this intimate portrait of Wilmington's social milieu, these personal relationships and the novel within the promises and abandonment of Reconstruction, the history of white reactionary violence, and the power of literature as a force for social justice are situated.