For this Undergraduate Research presentation, I plan on discussing Charles Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars. Charles Chesnutt is a late 19th early 20th century Southern author who pushes the boundaries of race in literature. Because his literary career was short lived in that he only published during the years 1887-1905, much is still left to be discovered about both his writings, and the author himself. Visiting Fisk University and conducting research in their Special Collections allowed me to study Chesnutt’s original manuscripts, as well as unpublished scrapbooks and other personal materials, adding historical context to the literature that Chesnutt produced in the Jim Crow South. Examining materials in the archive made his novel, The House Behind the Cedars even more meaningful to me, because I was able to read publisher correspondences and letters that directly discussed the text, placing emphasis on the effort Chesnutt took in getting the story of his character Rena Walden, published. Having this kind of historical grounding has helped me see how Chesnutt is able to relay serious issues of slavery and race through characters like Rena and the fecund southern landscape. Combining both the racial tensions in the South and the landscape itself, Chesnutt uses The House Behind the Cedars as a didactic tool, aiming unflinching criticism at his primarily white readership. I plan on focusing on how Chesnutt uses the combination of the southern landscape with the issues of race during this time to communicate to readers the dangers of living in an environment that harbors racism and racist ideals. Read in this way, the character Rena is meant to die as an example of how a racist environment can destroy those of mixed-blood metaphorically through the destructive forces of Nature.