Chesnutt: "The Wife of My Youth"

I am a hopeless romantic so I really enjoyed reading Chesnutt’s “The Wife of My Youth”. But besides the storyline, I found it interesting the way Chesnutt portrayed African Americans in this short stories versus the way they were portrayed in his other short stories that we have read. In the other three stories, African Americans were portrayed as uneducated members of the lowest class of society. Their dialect was that of the stereotypical illiterate slave and served to illustrate their inferiority to white people. However, in “The Wife of My Youth” the African American characters are members of a sophisticated society called the “Blue Vein Society”. The society as Chesnutt describes it, was “more white than black” meaning that its members, the “Blue Veins”, were educated and sophisticated members of society. Most of its members held upstanding jobs. “There were a number of school teachers, several young doctors, three or four lawyers, some professional singers, an editor, a lieutenant in the United States army” to name a few. In the other three short stories we read by Chesnutt the African American characters were all slaves. But, despite their literacy and sophistication and dignified occupations, the “Blue Veins” “would not have attracted even a casual glance because of any marked difference from white people.” I found this interesting because it seemed like Chesnutt was finally giving credit to African Americans and acknowledging that they were no different than white people, but with this statement and Eliza Jane’s character who speaks in the stereotypical slave dialect seen in his other short stories, Chesnutt seems to still insinuate that African Americans are not equal to white men. It seemed sort of like a two steps forward one step back situation. However, Chesnutt continues to build up the credit of the African Americans with the character of Eliza Jane. Eliza is an uneducated ex-slave. She is wearing gray, tattered clothes, clearly not in the same class as Mr. Ryder, but Eliza is portrayed as a better person than Mr. Ryder. She remained devoted to her husband for 25 years after they were separated by slavery, but Mr. Ryder, who ironically turns out to be Sam Taylor her long lost husband, had long forgotten about Eliza. In this sense, Eliza is superior to Mr. Ryder even though she is illiterate and unsophisticated because she remained loyal and kept her promise to her husband even though he quickly gave up on her and moved on to better his own life.