House Behind the Cedars

Charles Chesnutt’s classic novel, hailed by Werner Sollors as “a pioneering work of racial passing.”

Edited and featuring an introduction and notes from Judith Jackson Fossett.

A riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life, The House Behind the Cedars follows John and Rena Walden, mixed-race siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The siblings travel carefully between Black and white worlds, but their precarious routine is threaten...