Summary
Mr. Ryder is going to give a ball. He is the “dean” of the Blue Vein Society, a group that started as a society of black persons in the Northern city of Groveland, Ohio after the Civil War.
The Blue Vein Society meant to promote standards and uplift for black people, but its makeup is more white in skin tone than black, hence the name—one’s skin was white enough to show the blue veins beneath. There were no specific qualifications for entry besides character and culture, but it seemed that whiter-skinned black people had better opportunities to gain those things. Another unspoken requirement seemed to be free birth, but this was also not official. Outsiders often critiqued the Society, but those very same outsiders praised it lavishly once they gained entry.
Overall, the Blue Veins were rather conservative and Mr. Ryder was the most conservative of the bunch. He was its “recognized adviser and head, the custodian of its standards, and the preserver of its traditions.”
Mr. Ryder was popular for numerous reasons. He had light skin and refined features and irreproachable manners. He also had very literary tastes, was frugal, had a handsomely furnished home, and worked his way up to the head of a company. He was not married, however, and never felt compelled to do so until Mrs. Molly Dixon visited Groveland.
Mrs. Dixon was an attractive young widow with even whiter skin than Mr. Ryder. She was very educated, had a refined wit, and moved in the best black society. She was welcomed immediately into the Blue Veins and Mr. Ryder became quite taken with her. He decided to ask for her hand and would do so at a ball he would throw in her honor. This ball would “mark an epoch in the social history of Groveland” and would be worthy of the woman in whose honor it was thrown.
Mr. Ryder felt that lately his own people had become a little too lax in their associations and did not like having to gather with people whose “complexions and callings in life” were so inferior to his own. He firmly believed that “we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone.” They were neither white nor black and must set a standard for behavior. Thus, the exclusive ball would “counteract leveling tendencies.”
Analysis
Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” is concerned above all with race, and with the ways black people in the late 19th century negotiated within their own community who was one of society’s elites and who was not. The story is not about the relationship between white people and black people (it is, of course implicitly about that in regards to the legacies of slavery and racism) but between light-skinned black people and darker-skinned black people.
The ostensible protagonist of the story is Mr. Ryder, portrayed as a paragon of the highest echelons of black society. He is renowned not just for his manners and morality but also for how ardently he upholds the values, stated and unstated, of the Blue Veins. He is “one of the most conservative,” is “the preserver of its traditions,” and is responsible for “[fanning] the embers until they burst again into a cheerful flame” if the work of the Society lags. He is very strict about whom he wants to associate with, almost to the point of prejudice: “He had observed of late a growing liberality, almost a laxity, in social matters, even among the members of his own set, and several times been forced to meet in a social way persons whose complexities and callings in life were hardly up to the standard which he considered proper for society to maintain.” He doesn’t believe he has “race prejudice” but that mixed-race people such as himself (whom W.E.B. Du Bois would deem the Talented Tenth) have a special place in society and must work for “self-perseveration.”
Mr. Ryder doesn’t act on his own when deciding what to do; instead, he poses the conundrum to his community. The community plays an important role in deciding his fate, as they are given a voice with its concomitant power.
The decision isn’t really between two women, of course—it is between “acknowledgement and denial,” Earle V. Bryant writes, “between fidelity and assimilation. Ryder must decide whether to acknowledge and embrace his racial identity or to deny and thus spurn that identity by inhabiting a racial limbo that disallows any memory or reminders of [the past].”
The fate the community chooses for him is that past, blackness, and his more authentic racial identity. It is also important to note that Mr. Ryder was not exactly standing alone as an individual, his fate to be decided by an outside community; rather, he says that he knew what they would say. The moment is, Joe Sarnowski explains, one that “solidifies Ryder’s identity by affirming his place in the community by declaring their shared ideals and reaffirming those ideals in the eyes of the other members.”
