Chesnutt resolves Marchand's dilemma with a surprising plot reversal. Marchand, although white, chooses to pass as a black so that he can keep his wife and children. Thus, by altering the traditional narrative that Cable, Twain, and Howells had developed for their fiction on mixed-race themes, he exposes the issue of race as a social and legal fabrication. Moreover, Chesnutt shows Marchand's awareness that traits of inferiority and superiority are not based on "blood" but on other factors. In him Chesnutt has created an admirable male character responsive to human needs and civility rather than to artificial institutions.

Books by Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) include Baxter's Procrustes, Hot-Foot Hannibal, The Conjure Woman, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel's Dream.