Through its detailed exploration of characters’ emotional distress, Jessie Redmon Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree (1931) reveals the complicated realities of African American women's psychological struggles resulting from external forces. Laurentine Strange and her cousin Melissa Paul grapple with different manifestations of depression (one chronic, the other sudden), with both recoveries ultimately possible because of a combination of their own efforts bolstered by caring community members. This significant plot point—struggling with and managing depression—implicates duress for Black women as both symptom and result of social disadvantage, community alienation, undermined ambition and failed hopes. Underscoring African Americans’ historic reliance on their own resources, Fauset breaks firmly with the abundance of fictional models of white women's psychic distress and its earlier isolationist treatment, including institutionalization, by locating health within her characters’ reach if they receive community support. Fauset introduces and humanizes Black women's complex psychology by sympathetically exposing its range of expression, including reactions to historic slights, to misunderstandings, to jealousy and disappointment, to frustration and to very real psychological pain. Accordingly, a health humanities reading of The Chinaberry Tree seems especially timely during a period of increased anxiety fueled by enforced social isolation due to COVID-19 self-isolation protocols. Furthermore, because many published illness narratives discussed by scholars are not written by African Americans, a large gap exists in the critical examination of stories about struggling with illness. While journalists report increasingly on persisting and dramatic health disparities between Black and white communities, brought into sharp relief because of COVID-19, we need to devote more time to underscoring connections between historic and current accounts of what illness means specifically for African Americans from our own perspectives. Examining novels and short stories written by and about Black people offers a necessary articulation of these deeply intimate struggles: living with illness, managing treatment, maintaining recovery and seeking support. A health humanities examination of African American fiction, as illness narrative, adds an important dimension to a discipline intent on learning what it is to manage the disruptions illness creates.

Set in Red Brook, New Jersey, Chinaberry Tree tells the complicated stories of two young women and the men who love them. Laurentine is the daughter of Sarah (Sal) Strange, once “a slip of a brown girl,” and Colonel Francis Halloway, deceased scion of the town's wealthiest white family.