"The House Behind the Cedars" is the first published novel by American author Charles W. Chesnutt. The author sets the story in the southern American states of North and South Carolina a few years following the American Civil War. Rena Walden, a young woman of mixed white and black ancestry, leaves home to join her brother, who has migrated to a new city, where he lives as a white man. What will happen when the truth of her heredity is discovered?