Summary
It is the day of the ball. Everything is in order and Mr. Ryder stands on his porch looking at Tennyson poems in order to find a passage to toast the ladies at the ball. As he is admiring a description of Queen Guinevere, he hears his gate open and turns to see a woman.
She is very short—five feet or so—has bright eyes, is quite old, wears worn clothing, and is very dark-skinned. She looks like “the old plantation life, summoned up from the wave of a magician’s wand.”
He greets her and she asks, in her shrill vernacular, for Mr. Ryder. He introduces himself and has her sit down to tell him her business. She explains she is looking for her husband and knows Mr. Ryder is a well-known personage and might have heard of him. The man’s name is Sam Taylor and she is ‘Liza Jane. He thinks for a moment and says he heard of people looking for each other a lot after the war but not recently.
She begins to explain more. She used to belong to Bob Smith in Missouri and married a man named Jim. Jim died and she then married a freeborn mulatto man named Sam Taylor. He was apprenticed for work and she was a cook. One day someone told her Sam was to be sold down the river even though he was free, so she rushed to tell Sam. He decided to run away and said he would come back and get her and save to buy her freedom. However, after Sam left she was whipped and sold for her part in the affair. The war then broke out and afterward she returned to her old home to look for him, but she learned nothing about his whereabouts. She has been looking for him ever since and is sure that he has been looking for her too. She knows she will find him someday and they will be as happy in freedom as they were before.
Mr. Ryder asks how she’s supported herself and she says she has been a good cook. He then asks her a few questions about Sam, but she is confident he is not dead because of her feelings and dreams, that he never would have married another woman, and that he’s not “outgrown her” because he was a good worker but nothing special and probably did not distinguish himself too much. When Mr. Ryder suggests they’d passed each other in the street, she smiles and says she’d know him among one hundred men and carries his picture around.
Mr. Ryder asks to see the daguerreotype, which she hands to him. He looks at it for a while and even though it is faded, some of the characteristics are distinct. He tells her again he does not know the man but will give the matter attention and contact her if he hears anything.
She thanks him and departs and he watches her walk away. After she leaves he goes upstairs and stares at himself in the mirror for a while.
At eight o’clock the ball begins. It is gathering of illustrious and intelligent people, some of whom would scarcely be distinguishable from white people. The clothing is beautiful, the music delightful.
A few hours pass and it is time for Mr. Ryder’s toast. The toastmaster introduces him and speaks of the value of women and how it might be the time for Mr. Ryder to himself submit to one.
Mr. Ryder stands and adjusts his eyeglasses. He speaks generally of women and then of their best quality –their fidelity. He relates simply the tale the woman told him today, and everyone listens attentively. For some, “the story had awakened a responsive thrill in [their] hearts.” Some had similar memories in their families, and all still felt such a dark past hanging over them at certain points in their lives.
Mr. Ryder concludes with an encomium on the woman’s faith and affection, and then states that he will put a case before them all. He poses this: Say the husband returned and made inquiries of his wife but no one knew anything. She was much older and darker than him and it was a slave marriage so it was not legally binding. He made his way North and worked his way up in society, a society much like the present gathering. The man’s memory of the past became hazier and hazier, but one day this woman came to him. She would not be able to detect him and he was prepared to marry another woman whom he loved. What would he do? Should he acknowledge the wife of his youth?
Mr. Ryder now addresses the crowd and puts the question before them. The crowd murmurs, for it seems a very personal appeal, and his gaze rests on Mrs. Dixon. Tears stream down her face and she speaks, saying he should acknowledge her. The others echo their assent.
Mr. Ryder thanks them and says he expected that answer. He walks to the door of the adjoining room and brings by the hand his visitor from earlier. She is neatly dressed but trembling.
He states plainly that he is the man and she is the woman, and he’d like to introduce them all to the wife of his youth.
Analysis
When Liza Jane enters the story, Mr. Ryder comes face to face with his past. Liza Jane is everything that he and the Blue Veins have been trying to both ironically distance themselves from and assist in uplift—she is poor, elderly, a former slave, shabby, and uneducated. She is no Mrs. Dixon, whom Mr. Ryder obviously felt affection for but, more importantly, with whom a marriage would be advantageous for his social position. Tess Chakkalakal notes, “Mr. Ryder seems not to know how to respond to [Liza Jane’s] story, so far removed is he from the experience she relates. As a result, he questions both the teller’s authority and the facts she relates.” He eventually comes to believe her sincerity and respect her fidelity, which is what he relates as a woman’s most salient characteristic when he is toasting “The Ladies” at the ball.
But who is Liza Jane? Critics have varying perspectives, some touting her humility and devotion, others claiming she is more of a trickster than she might initially seem. Some see her as the morally superior figure, possessive of the sorts of character traits that the Blue Veins themselves would tout as central to their being.
Cynthia Wachtell, however, offers a compelling alternative reading of the text that sees Liza Jane as a trickster figure. Readers have to change their interpretation of the tale, which they do through “[bidding] farewell to their image of Mr. Ryder as a dignified, chivalrous man who magnanimously does the right thing. Instead, they must prepare to see him as a patsy, a pretentious and bigoted man who is thoroughly hoodwinked.” Wachtell explains that it is possible Liza Jane figured out who Sam Taylor now was, saw his position in society, and knew that the best way to get him to acknowledge her was not to play on their former love, which would not be convincing to Mr. Ryder, but to engage his sense of duty and guilt. This works because “Mr. Ryder is not a man to suspect a poor, uncultured black woman of having the artistic ability to fabricate such a remarkable story.” Regardless of his assumptions, Liza Jane is indeed “wily and secretly powerful,” and she gets herself a life free of hard work and toil. Wachtell concludes, “Trickster tales, in sum, address an imbalance of power. More specifically, they offer a subversive rebalancing of power.”
And in a more moderate view, Janet Mohr explains that as a cook Liza Jane already had a slightly elevated position above other slaves, but still, she was nowhere near the bourgeois position Mr. Ryder occupied. She writes that by convincing Mr. Ryder of her fidelity and legitimacy, “’Liza Jane thus gains the status of black bourgeoisie through her persistence and unwillingness to accept a lower social status.” This makes her a good example for other black women, “imploring them not to accept the status quo as an absolute, but encouraging them to act on their own behalf and that of all black people.” Liza Jane isn’t a trickster in Mohr’s reading, but simply an exemplar of the uplift philosophy and a setter of precedent for others.
Charles Duncan concludes, “Chesnutt… remains true to his earlier renunciation of bigotry in any form. Indeed, by the end of the story, Mr. Ryder’s peculiar form of prejudice –the preference for light skin over dark –has been emphatically, if not comfortably, overturned.” The Blue Veins has a narrow view of community that, Sarnowski notes, “robs them of the fellowship of many in the wider African-American community (such as ‘Liza Jane) who can help them to sustain a strong and positive self-concept.” This is the opportunity for the Blue Veins to turn more sincerely and emphatically to the full black community, but Chesnutt does not imply it will be easy.
