What would he do, or rather what ought he to do, in such a crisis of a lifetime?
Part II on "The Wife of His Youth" by Charles Chestnutt and "Talma Gordon" by Pauline E. Hopkins
If you haven’t read the first half of this discussion of these two stories, please do:
Last week, I mentioned that Pauline Hopkins was the editor of the most widely distributed African American literary magazine when her story “Talma Gordon” came out. As many scholars have noted, this magazine was in direct competition with the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, which later eclipsed the readership of The Colored American. According to her biographers, Booker T. Washington arranged to purchase the Colored American, and had Hopkins fired over a difference in vision. Her formula for success did not include convincing white people of her worth; she advocated for the civil rights and equality that she deserved. She was an “agitator,” whereas Washington was an “assimilationist.” She had been using its pages as her megaphone, and Washington used his more extensive funds to put a stop to it.1
The story by Charles Chestnutt (1858-1932), “The Wife of his Youth” takes Washington’s ideology for a spin. The protagonist, Mr. Ryder, is mixed race and well-educated. He has opted to be a leader of the “Blue Vein” club:
Its purpose was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited room for improvement. By accident, combined perhaps with some natural affinity, the society consisted of individuals who were, generally speaking, more white than black.
The Blue Veins did not allow that any such requirement existed for admission to their circle, but, on the contrary, declared that character and culture were the only things considered; and that if most of their members were light-colored, it was because such persons, as a rule, had had better opportunities to qualify themselves for membership.
Chestnutt goes on to record the objections of colorism levied against this club, but the story takes it seriously, as a necessary gathering — a formalization of Black class difference in a society where the upperclass has been maintained as exclusively European-American. Mr. Ryder demonstrates his qualifications for membership throughout the story— in the first half he shows his “culture” through recitation of English poetry and the spending of other cultural capital, and in the second half of the story, he shows his character.
We learn that Mr. Ryder intends to propose that evening at the Blue Vein Society Ball, to a beautiful widow Mrs. Dixon, whose complexion is lighter than his, her education more complete. In the logic of assimilation, he reports that he is making a calculated move:
He had observed of late a growing liberality, almost a laxity, in social matters, even among members of his own set, and had several times been forced to meet in a social way persons whose complexions and callings in life were hardly up to the standard which he considered proper for the society to maintain. He had a theory of his own.
“I have no race prejudice,” he would say, “but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step. ‘With malice towards none, with charity for all,’ we must do the best we can for ourselves and those who are to follow us. Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
His ball would serve by its exclusiveness to counteract leveling tendencies, and his marriage with Mrs. Dixon would help to further the upward process of absorption he had been wishing and waiting for.
So, we see in this passage the logic of self-denialism and internalized caste ideology that has motivated this character — now let’s see what Chestnutt does with it.
Charles Chestnutt, by the time this story appeared, was a well known essayist and short story writer. His collection, The Conjure Woman, published in 1899, used realist and regionalist narrative techniques to introduce Black folk traditions and vernacular speech to a wide audience. His first story, which came out in August 1887, “The Goophered Grapevine” was the first story in that collection, and the first story published by an African American in The Atlantic Monthly.2 His short stories tend to focus on the color line, the places where white characters and Black characters meet, interact, impose upon and misunderstand one another. His narrators are liminal characters, sometimes unnamed, and their motivations are mixed, and often — it turns out— central to the story. For example, “The Goophered Grapevine” — another frame narrative, it is unclear who is tricking whom, and to what end — but it seems everyone gets their piece of the pie at the end.
Later that year, Chestnutt released a second short story collection, The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. Several stories in that collection are concerned with ideas of racial and class “passing” — a practice that highlighted the fraught racial and social dynamics of the turn of the century. Chestnutt was majority (7/8ths) European-American, but according to the caste logic of hypodescent, he was legally African American. Though he could pass, he chose not to, and advocated for Black civil rights his entire career, through his work with the NAACP, his work as a civil rights lawyer, and as an educator in his parent’s home state of North Carolina. His stories do not pass judgment on people who chose another path, who chose to pass, but instead, he demonstrates for his majority white audience the reasons why they might choose to do so. In his journals, written at the start of his literary career in 1880, he quite clearly stated his mission: to challenge white ideas about race.
“The object of my writings would be not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites — for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism — I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people; and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it.”
Chestnutt’s work gives us a chance to consider the other 4 pillars in Isabel Wilkerson’s seminal book on the Caste system (we looked at 1-4 last week):
Pillar #5: Occupational Hierarchy. Caste systems rest upon a bottom tier which performs menial tasks whose labor supports the other castes.
Pillar #6: Dehumanization and Stigma. Dehumanization distances the lower caste and allows their treatment to be “outside of the norms of humanity”.
Pillar #7: Terror and Cruelty. Terror and cruelty are used to enforce caste and control the subservient caste, and being complicit or joining in is rewarded.
Pillar #8: Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority In each caste system, messages about the inherent superiority of the dominant caste and the inferiority of the lower castes are continually reinforced.
We can see in Mr. Ryder’s logic around his marriage prospects how thoroughly he has internalized #8, ideas about inferiority. He has been rewarded for his assimilation, though the threat of violence (#7) is kept at an arm’s length in this story. Chestnutt would later write a historical novel set in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 that centers on that violence. In 1899, he was publishing prolifically as an urgent political and antiracist act.
In this story, the titular “wife of his youth” appears in the middle third, and her presence threatens Mr. Ryder’s carefully constructed class position. The story handles this masterfully. An old woman appears at his door, just as Mr. Ryder gets ready for the marriage proposal (by choosing which Tennyson poem to recite).
She was a little woman, not five feet tall, and proportioned to her height. Although she stood erect, and looked around her with very bright and restless eyes, she seemed quite old; for her face was crossed and recrossed with a hundred wrinkles, and around the edges of her bonnet could be seen protruding here and there a tuft of short gray wool. She wore a blue calico gown of ancient cut, a little red shawl fastened around her shoulders with an old-fashioned brass brooch, and a large bonnet profusely ornamented with faded red and yellow artificial flowers. And she was very black,so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician’s wand, as the poet’s fancy had called into being the gracious shapes of which Mr. Ryder had just been reading.
Liza Jane asks him if he knows a man named Sam Taylor, whom she has been looking for since the end of the Civil War. She uses dialect to tell her story: back in Missouri before emancipation, she and Sam had been married. Though she was older than him and he was free, they loved each other. He had to run away but promised to come back for her. After the war, she lost track of him. She has been looking for him for 25 years, in every part of the country. Mr Ryder tries to poke holes in her hope: he could be dead, remarried, or moved on. Her fidelity holds fast. Not my Sam, she says. Then Ryder tries the obvious point:
“Perhaps he’s outgrown you, and climbed up in the world where he wouldn’t care to have you find him.”
“No, indeed, suh,” she replied, “Sam ain’ dat kin’ er man.
She shows him a picture (a daguerreotype! Yay! My favorite!) Mr Ryder takes a long look at it, says goodbye, and then goes inside to look at his own face in the mirror.
There’s a section break. What is happening? Leaving us with that reflection, the narration jumps to the party. In a toast, to “the fidelity of women,” Mr. Ryder tells the Blue Veins about the story he has heard that day, in dialect. Suppose this Sam had become a different sort of man, he says.
Suppose, too, that, as the years went by, this man’s memory of the past grew more and more indistinct, until at last it was rarely, except in his dreams, that any image of this bygone period rose before his mind. And then suppose that accident should bring to his knowledge the fact that the wife of his youth, the wife he had left behind him, not one who had walked by his side and kept pace with him in his upward struggle, but one upon whom advancing years and a laborious life had set their mark, was alive and seeking him, but that he was absolutely safe from recognition or discovery, unless he chose to reveal himself.3 My friends, what would the man do? I will presume that he was one who loved honor, and tried to deal justly with all men. I will even carry the case further, and suppose that perhaps he had set his heart upon another, whom he had hoped to call his own. What would he do, or rather what ought he to do, in such a crisis of a lifetime?
The crowd encourages this hypothetical man to embrace Liza Jane and so Mr Ryder feels safe to give the famous last line
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “this is the woman, and I am the man, whose story I have told you. Permit me to introduce to you the wife of my youth.”
Okay, I didn't warn you — but there it is, the ending again. His motivations are unclear, their outcomes and future uncertain, and we are left again looking out upon Chestnutt’s customary ambiguity. While there are no easy answers here, some things are clear: fidelity rises above all other values, and the past is never truly behind us. But what happens the next morning? Does he love or hate her? He doesn’t say, allow me to introduce my wife; instead, he distances himself. Will he stay married to the wife “of his youth”? According to the law of the time, it would not have been required, as he pointed out earlier in the story:
“He may have married another woman. Your slave marriage would not have prevented him, for you never lived with him after the war, and without that your marriage doesn’t count.”
Chestnutt preps the audience for a smooth reaction before he introduces Liza Jane. Hopkins didn’t do that for Talma — when the Doctor reveals Talma to the “Canterbury Club,” she doesn’t step upon the moral high ground that Ryder/ Sam has prepared for himself and Liza Jane. One hopes that now that Ryder/Sam’s “character,” his integrity and fidelity, is revealed, his place in society will remain secure, but the narrator doesn’t let us know that for sure, either. Ryder/Sam has said that his operating theory is “Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” Was this orchestrated introduction all in the service of self-preservation? Not love, not faithfulness, not fidelity or integrity — but survival?
When reading Chestnutt, we can see the power of realism — its use of a central consciousness, its psychological sophistication, and its use of dialect — in the service of navigating prejudice. But clear-eyed, Chestnutt also doesn’t let us readers off the hook. While the second-order problem of “Where is Liza Jane’s Sam?” gets solved, the prejudice at the heart of the story still remains problematic, whether or not Liza Jane and Sam will face it together.
For more on this fascinating and infuriating story, see Alisha R. Knight, “Furnace Blasts for the Tuskegee Wizard: Revisiting Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Booker T. Washington and the ‘Colored American Magazine.’” American Periodicals, vol. 17, no. 1, 2007, pp. 41–64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20770968. Accessed 26 Feb. 2024.
That story is awesome, funny, and a thinker, too. You might want to listen to it rather than read it though, because the dialect is difficult to parse. Here’s a link you can use.
As an aside, myself and the students were unanimous in our reading that Liza Jane knew that Mr. Ryder was Sam the whole time, but she was choosing not to reveal it, giving him time to show himself to her. She picks up on this cue when he doesn’t recognize her and run to her as she first comes up the steps, and so she plays it cool. We think Liza Jane is too self-assured to accept a man who won’t accept her.