SOURCE: Fienberg, Lorne. “Charles W. Chesnutt's The Wife of His Youth: The Unveiling of the Black Storyteller.” In Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Joseph R. McElrath Jr., pp. 206-23. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999.

[In the following essay, originally published in the American Transcendental Quarterly, in 1990, Fienberg delineates the differences between Chesnutt's The Wife of His Youth, and The Conjure Woman.]

I

At the pivotal moment in Charles W. Chesnutt's “The Wife of His Youth” a mysterious old black woman walks through a doorway and tells her story. For twenty-five years she has been carrying this simple tale of the brutality of slavery and of her faithful love; each retelling of the story is a critical act of self-identification. Now she has found the ideal audience for whom the act of listening and re-telling will also constitute an acknowledgement of the past and a re-creation of the self. 'Liza Jane's passage over the threshold of Mr. Ryder's home and the narrative act which they share proclaim both the metaphor and the theme which unify Charles W. Chesnutt's second collection of short stories. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of The Color Line (1899). As the characters define themselves through their negotiation of barriers of race, so Chesnutt's experiments with the short story form mark his own process of creating a positive identity for himself as a black author at the turn of the twentieth century.

The publication in March 1899 of The Conjure Woman signaled Chesnutt's entry into the literary marketplace, and through Uncle Julius he explored the dynamics of the relationship between a black storyteller and his white listeners. Uncle Julius's various strategies of veiling were an essential first step for Chesnutt in entering into creative negotiations with his own audience.¹ But although veiling secures for Uncle Julius certain powers and material advantages, it is essentially a self-negating rather than a self-affirming move, the muffling rather than the amplification of an authorial and authoritative voice. Significantly, Houghton Mifflin never revealed the racial identity of the author of The Conjure Woman at any point in their publicity for the volume. By September 1899, the publishers were sufficiently encouraged by the reception of Chesnutt's first collection that they were hastily preparing a second volume of stories for the Christmas season. In this volume, Chesnutt would directly confront issues of racial identity and the unveiling of his own authorial voice.

Although the stories in The Wife of His Youth were written at intervals throughout the 1890s, even as Chesnutt was composing the Uncle Julius tales, taken as a collection they constitute a quite different strategy of presentation. In a letter to his publishers, Chesnutt explained one aspect of his intent:

I should like to hope that the stories, while written to depict life as it is, in certain aspects that no one has ever before attempted to adequately describe, may throw a light upon the great problem on which the stories are strung; for the backbone of this volume is not a character, like Uncle Julius in The Conjure Woman, but a subject, as indicated in the title—The Color Line.

(Andrews 74)

Not simply a “problem” or “subject,” “the color line” operates in each of the stories as a metonymy for the system of racial exclusion and the multiple barriers of oppression erected within American society. Unlike the veil, which inscribes silent vision and the subversive manipulation of hidden motives as versions of heroic action, the color line demands the more forceful assertion of identity which lies in crossing over the boundaries which inhibit and confine. And the characters' efforts to cross over, to devise new roles for themselves as social actors, parallel the unveiling of Chesnutt's own narrative voice.

The metaphor of the color line derives its historical complexity from the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. For the freed slaves, this redefinition of their status as citizens amounted to the creation of a kind of new republic in which they might test the core values of the culture which had for so long excluded them. In particular, these new citizens were freed to test the enabling power of ideas such as individualism, autonomy, and self-help in the shaping of their social identities.

The black aspiration towards participation in a new republic assumed several dimensions: political responsibility and voting rights, education, the acquisition of property and wealth, and the cultivation of manners and cultural refinement. Success in any of these areas served as a badge of admission into a privileged world which had previously been barred to them. It is little wonder, then, that in the period following the Civil War blacks were the most ardent apostles of the transforming power of republican virtue.

While the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed the most obvious forces of enclosure, it by no means articulated the way abstract rights and an adherence to civic and personal virtue might overcome the multiple barriers which remained. The stories which Chesnutt selected for The Wife of His Youth inscribe the potential for self-identification even as they test the limits of a newly-won autonomy. The collection never ventures into the political arena, and only “Cicely's Dream” and “The Bouquet” treat education as an avenue for self-improvement. Still, Chesnutt's early journal entries clearly link his literary aspirations to a range of social and economic motives:

I want fame; I want money; I want to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from. In my present vocation I would never accumulate a competency, with all the economy and prudence, and parsimony in the world. In law or medicine, I would be compelled to wait half a lifetime to accomplish anything. But literature pays the successful.

(Andrews 9-10)

Although Chesnutt had asserted elsewhere in his journal that his mission was to expose the confining ideology of race and to reform the racial attitudes of a white audience, his personal aspirations must have been founded upon a belief that there already was a degree of equity in American society which extended its promise of mobility and economic success to its black citizens. And in fact, as he was enjoying the early successes of authorship, his family was establishing its standing in the rising mulatto society of Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1880s and 1890s. Out of this ambivalence emerges the dialectic of enclosure and open space, of fixed and contingent values, of socially prescribed roles and the autonomous creation of identity in the stories.

Readers who turn from the antebellum conjure tales of Uncle Julius to “The Wife of His Youth” must reposition themselves in time and place. They also face the challenge of attuning themselves to Chesnutt's narrative voice and to his shifting point of view. The story begins with the barest of assertions, that “Mr. Ryder was going to give a ball,” and encourages the reader to anticipate an enumeration of “several reasons why this was an opportune time for such an event” (1). Instead of a straightforward list, however, the narrator introduces a complex set of social conditions and relationships:

Mr. Ryder might aptly be called the dean of the Blue Veins. The original Blue Veins were a little society of colored persons organized in a certain Northern city shortly after the war. 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. Some envious outsider made the suggestion that no one was eligible for membership who was not white enough to show blue veins. The suggestion was readily adopted by those who were not of the favored few, and since that time the society, though possessing a longer and more pretentious name, had been known far and wide as the “Blue Vein Society,” and its members as the “Blue Veins.”

(1-2)

This early parenthesis which delays the unfolding of the action marks the narrator's control over the tale's evaluative apparatus. This is a decisive shift from the conjure tales of Uncle Julius, in which the privilege of judging the narrative repeatedly falls to John and Annie, Uncle Julius's white listeners. The language of the parenthesis is itself at marked variance with the simplicity of the first paragraph, and it characterizes a narrative voice which hedges, qualifies, and even evades direct assertion in its process of explanation.

The purpose of the Society itself is clear: “to establish and maintain correct social standards” and boundaries of exclusivity which will demarcate the domain of “the favored few.” The effect of the narrative voice, however, is everywhere to undermine the validity of the Blue Veins' social stance, as it calls into question all fixed positions and standards. The first verb in the passage, “might aptly be called,” with its conditional passive voice and embedded adverbial qualifier, subtly undercuts Mr. Ryder's position of leadership. There is an archness to the narrator's initial refusal even to name the “certain Northern city” in which the Blue Veins' social successes are being played out. Their hope that they can improve their social condition is qualified by the insight that the potential for mobility is “almost unlimited.” Similarly, the racial standard upon which membership in the Blue Vein Society is based is subtly compromised. Qualifiers such as “by accident,” “perhaps,” and “generally speaking” suggest that the terrain where racial distinctions are made, among the Blue Veins and in Chesnutt's fictive world, will be shadowy at best. Although the social program of the Blue Veins is devoted to the separation of insiders from outsiders, the sacred circle itself is marked by a name which signifies both the envy and the contempt of those who are on the outside.

Moreover, the ranks of the little society are constantly subject to invasion. Chesnutt evokes the ongoing process of judging the social elite in a single dazzling sentence which itself enacts the process of crossing over the Blue Veins' lines of exclusion:

There were those who had been known to assail it violently as a glaring example of the very prejudice from which the colored race had suffered most; and later, when such critics had succeeded in getting on the inside, they had been heard to maintain with zeal and earnestness that the society was a lifeboat, an anchor, a bulwark and a shield,—a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, to guide their people through the social wilderness.

(2)

Here the narrator delicately places all judgments in the mouths of an unidentified group (“there were those”) who view the Society from both sides of its color line. But what appears at first glance to be an ironic exposure of the hypocrisy of their evaluation is complicated by the likelihood that Chesnutt (who was himself a member of the Cleveland Social Circle upon which the Blue Vein Society was patterned) held both views to be true. The Blue Veins have become implicated in the very strategies of racial exclusion which have oppressed them, and the piling up of the metaphors of survival, stability, and protection clearly suggests the insecurity of an indefensible position. The allusion to Exodus and to the struggles of a recently enslaved people in the wilderness seems more complicated, however, because Chesnutt was, like W. E. B. DuBois, deeply committed to the social and intellectual leadership of a small group of the best black citizens, or a “talented tenth.” And the Blue Veins constitute for Chesnutt such an elite.

The Blue Veins, and Chesnutt among them, face the dilemmas inherent in any society when a group of people are given, for the first time, the promise of mobility and the autonomy to create social roles for themselves. For such people, the social structure must simultaneously embody openness and closure. The openness creates the potential for progress upward, but without levels and barriers of exclusion there is nothing to make the rise meaningful. When the autonomy to create one's social roles involves a denial of origins and the obligations of the past, exhilaration may be accompanied by a profound state of anxiety.

In “The Wife of His Youth,” Mr. Ryder is able to shield himself from these conflicting emotions only until external forces intrude to exert the influence of memory and prior identity. To his credit, Ryder is uniquely susceptible to the transformative powers of the tale which the old black woman tells. He must sense that his claims to gentility and high economic standing are limited; this is one reason why he is seeking to improve his social position through marriage to a woman who is lighter-skinned than he is. He is prompted by more than polite condescension to admit the stranger into his home. The hope that hearing her story will “refresh [his] memory” (11) is an invitation to the storyteller to break down the barriers between the present and the past, and to admit the listener to a recognition of his origins.

For her part, the wife of Ryder's youth moves with consummate assuredness of her identity. The very first act of her narrative is to name herself, “‘My name's 'Liza, … 'Liza Jane’” (12), and to give an account of her slave experience. She is utterly confident about her entitlement to pass into Ryder's kitchen and tell her tale, and she never doubts that her example of fidelity must command respect. The dialect of her tale has the jarring quality of truth, when placed beside the polite locutions with which Ryder masks his linguistic past. So straightforward is the story, that it is possible to gloss over the brutalities which it recounts: the intended enslavement of the free black apprentice; the whipping and the punishment of being sold down the river which she endures to save her husband. After such sacrifice, Ryder's intimation that her husband may have forgotten or “outgrown” her is unimaginable to her. Her repeated assertions of fidelity accentuate Ryder's own life of denial, and he is finally compelled to confront his true identity: once when he beholds his own faded daguerrotype which 'Liza Jane wears around her neck; and then after she departs, as he “stood for a long time before the mirror of his dressing-case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection of his own face” (17).

It would appear that the story's revelations either deal a shattering blow to Ryder's expectations, or they condemn him to a life of deceit and hypocrisy. In fact, the opportunity to retell and to complete 'Liza Jane's story becomes for Ryder the means of recasting his identity and creating the terms under which he will remain an admired center for the Blue Veins. In the process, Ryder becomes a figure for the writer, Chesnutt himself, who yokes literary authorship with the achieving of social pre-eminence.

Ryder's ball has the trappings of a courtly theatrical occasion. He intends it to be a celebration of his own social triumph, accompanied by singing, dancing, and a prepared toast to “The Ladies” which he has larded with quotations from Tennyson, his favorite poet. The intrusion into the festivities of the wife of his youth and his decision to tell 'Liza Jane's story destroy the prepared script for the event, but he simultaneously gains greater freedom to manipulate the ball's theatrical effects. His narration of the story commits him to a full revelation of his past, but he retains the power to shape his own role within the narrative and his audience's response to it.

Where 'Liza Jane's story achieves its impact through openness and a straightforward exposition of fact, Ryder's performance is an elaborately structured dance of the veils, which relies upon concealment and several kinds of artifice to insure that his truth will be received as he wishes it to be. When Ryder begins his revelation, he appears to be playing his role according to the original script which calls for a sentimental paean to the “fidelity and devotion” (19) of the Blue Vein ladies. He then artfully strips off the veil of linguistic cultivation by duplicating 'Liza Jane's tale “in the same soft dialect, which came readily to his lips” (20). The “responsive thrill” which greets this improvisation offers evidence that each of the Blue Veins is susceptible to the powers of the memory of great suffering.

Ryder proceeds by indirections with an “imagined … case” (20) which is, in fact, the story of his own life rendered in the third person, introducing each element with the word “suppose” to cast the cloak of hypothesis upon it. Having recounted his life without yet acknowledging it. Ryder challenges his listeners to judge the case: “‘My friends, what would the man do?’” (22). His manipulation of the terms of the evaluation—this was a man “who loved honor and tried to deal justly with all men”—ought to underscore the critical nature of the narrative moment: the future course of the teller's life depends upon his audience's reply. Mrs. Dixon, the wife who will never be, speaks for all of the Blue Veins: “‘He should have acknowledged her.’” Only then does Ryder approach the final “closed door” to introduce the wife of his youth and to announce his own identity: “‘Ladies and gentlemen … this is the woman, and I am the man, whose story I have told you’” (24).

Ryder's narrative ends where 'Liza Jane's began, with an acknowledgement of identity, but it is much more than a confession. His skillfully enacted drama of self-revelation calls upon the Blue Veins to examine and redefine the foundations of their own exclusivity. Ryder's performance proposes that henceforth not property, nor the veneer of culture, nor specious distinctions of race will constitute the dominant values of their little society, but eloquence, theatricality, moral responsibility, and human compassion. His story of identity inscribes justice and a more egalitarian code of ethics upon his social group, and establishes himself as a leader precisely because of his abundant possession of those values. Through Ryder's act of storytelling, Chesnutt can celebrate the exemplary behavior of the Blue Veins, even as he creates the possibility of a community of virtue which embraces rather than excludes.

Ryder is a more supple and versatile storyteller than Uncle Julius, and his narrative strategies announce a very different program for Chesnutt's second collection of short stories. While he understands the powers of concealment and silence, the vestiges of the “economies of slavery,” his goal is finally openness and the affirmation of identity (Baker 21-33). For Uncle Julius, storytelling offers the unusual opportunity to manipulate an audience for psychological power and economic gain, and his art represents Chesnutt's own first negotiations with his readership. For Ryder, however, the potential for authoring the self through narrative carries the additional power to reshape his audience and to create its values. The most enduring stories in The Wife of His Youth comprise Chesnutt's exploration of the black author's more self-affirming roles.

II

In the arrangement of the nine stories in the collection, there is a ceaseless oscillation across boundaries: from present to past, from North to South, from freedom to slavery and back again. This fluidity, which is both structural and thematic, upsets the reader's assumptions about the dialectics of openness and enclosure which shape the characters' lives. “A Matter of Principle” is apparently a story about freedom and about the capacity to cross over social barriers. Chesnutt once again examines the Blue Veins' attempts to define the racial and cultural standards of their small society. But the very freedom to determine principles of exclusion makes “A Matter of Principle” the most rigidly bounded story in The Wife of His Youth. The story's central character, “Brotherhood Clayton,” fails to see that the barriers he erects to protect his privileged position will eventually oppress and confine him. And the narrative structure and metaphors of the story reinforce Chesnutt's awareness that enslavement may be both socially- and self-imposed.

“A Matter of Principle” is bounded in several ways. Within the collection, Chesnutt places this story of free black society evolving in the urban North following the Civil War between two stories, “The Sheriff's Children” and “Cicely's Dream,” which deal explicitly with slavery and its residue in the rural South. The narrative itself is framed by the voice of Brotherhood Clayton expressing his racial “principles” in nearly identical words at the beginning and the end. Clayton achieves only a limited measure of self-knowledge from his humiliation and social failure, and his own words and beliefs are the forces which inhibit his growth as a character. Within this enclosure, Chesnutt's narrator occupies a delicate position, simultaneously distancing himself from the racial attitudes Clayton expresses, even as he acknowledges the legitimate aspirations of the social elite to which he belongs.

Clayton's attempt to name his own racial status is an act of self-denial: “The fundamental article of Mr. Clayton's social creed was that he himself was not a negro” (94). His explanation of his racial principle consists of a variety of contradictory impulses:

I know … that the white people lump us all together as negroes, and condemn us all to the same social ostracism. But I don't accept this classification, for my part, and I imagine that, as the chief party in interest, I have a right to my opinion. People who belong by half or more of their blood to the most virile and progressive race of modern times have as much right to call themselves white as others have to call them negroes. … Of course we can't enforce our claims, or protect ourselves from being robbed of our birthright; but we can at least have our principles and try to live up to them as best we can. If we are not accepted as white, we can at any rate make it clear that we object to being called black.

(95)

Despite the passage's apparent indignation towards the color line, the reader quickly sees that Clayton's true racial agenda is to redraw the line so that he, himself, will be able to cross over. Only by defending the legitimacy of the idea of “the color line” can Clayton make the act of crossing over it personally significant. However, once he has established the barrier which separates him from those whom he considers “black,” he has positioned himself in a racial no-man's land. His only hope for social recognition is to throw himself upon the mercy of “‘the Anglo-Saxon race [which] loves justice, and will eventually do it, where it does not conflict with their own interests’” (95).

Having allowed Clayton his rhetorical freedom, Chesnutt's narrator proceeds to undermine the authority of his racial views. Certainly, there is nothing contemptible about an appeal to standards of justice and equity in a republic which prides itself on such values. But the narrator immediately calls upon the judgment of “the discerning reader” who can perceive the selfishness of Clayton's selective application of his own principles. From a distance, this discerning reader observes the extravagant pretensions of Clayton's life and the difficult compromise which that pretense entails.

Despite all his hopes for breaking down social barriers, Clayton leads a miserable life of exclusion, much of it self-imposed. The process of excluding “black people” from their company deprives the family of numerous social pleasures. Far from moving freely in society, they take “refuge in a little society of people like themselves.” They attend a predominantly white church and participate in several religious and benevolent associations

where they came in contact with the better class of white people, and were treated, in their capacity of members, with a courtesy and consideration scarcely different from that accorded to other citizens.

(96)

Such sanitized “contact” hardly constitutes a breaking down of barriers. In fact, it tends to reinforce the Claytons' status as outsiders who have only the impersonal contact of organization “members,” and even then the courtesy and consideration are “scarcely different” from the treatment accorded to all members.

The true prisoner of this double process of social- and self-imposed enclosure is Clayton's daughter Alice. Her father's minute gradations of racial identity make the marriage market a barren economic space for Alice Clayton, where men darker than she are unacceptable, and where lighter-skinned men find more attractive offers. The central action of “A Matter of Principle” focuses upon the visit to Groveland of Congressman Hamilton M. Brown and the presumption by Mr. Clayton that he has been delivered a man whose skin color and social standing entitle him to marry his daughter. In the story's crucial scene, Clayton wrecks his daughter's chances by mistaking the Congressman for a different man, one who was “palpably, aggressively black, with pronounced African features and wooly hair, without apparently a single drop of redeeming white blood” (117).

Clayton's racial ordeal is played out in the imposing Union Depot of Groveland. It is one of Chesnutt's most detailed settings in the collection, and it metaphorically reinforces the story's sense of the oppression of barriers created by society and by individuals. The Depot is described in terms of its immensity and its mass; recurring lines of force and barriers of exclusion create an aura of officialdom and authority. The interior of the building is segmented by “a dozen parallel tracks” running East and West. On either side of the tracks, the various departments and administrative offices extend “in a row for the entire length of the building” (114). A long open space is “separated from the tracks by an iron fence or grille.” Access to the train area is restricted to “two entrance gates in the fence at which tickets must be shown” (114). This description clearly images the racial enclosure of Clayton's own consciousness. Although a railroad terminal is by function a place of mobility, of coming-and-going, this particular depot is rigidly bounded and only those who possess proper credentials are allowed to pass the threshold. Clayton's failure to identify the real Congressman Brown as he passes through the gates follows from his inability to negotiate the lines of racial demarcation which he has helped to create.

As a means of avoiding his obligation to entertain a “black” Congressman, Clayton has recourse again to his preferred strategy, the construction of a barrier. The elaborate faking of the diphtheria quarantine shuts up his house and his daughter, while Congressman Brown pays suit to another woman. Clayton discovers his error in a newspaper column entitled “A Colored Congressman,” which hurls the rhetoric of his own racism back at him:

The bearing of this son of South Carolina reveals the polished manners of the Southern gentleman, and neither from his appearance nor his conversation would one suspect that the white blood which flows in his veins in such preponderating measure had ever been crossed by that of a darker race.

(125)

The beneficiary of the story's mistaken identity is Mr. Clayton's shop assistant, Jack, who is left the master of Alice's affections. Jack is both the source of Clayton's error about the Congressman's identity and also the author of the quarantine plot which seals Alice off from his potential rival. But the text is silent about Jack's motives and his intent. If his flawed report is deliberate, then we may see in Jack a version of the wily trickster who, like Uncle Julius, knows and manipulates his employer's racial attitudes, and who can turn barriers of mis-communication to his own benefit.

The process of narrative judgment is both delicate and complex in “A Matter of Principle,” because Chesnutt is dealing so closely with the aspirations of the social group with which he himself identified. In fact, the narrator's preferred strategy of evaluation is silence. The story particularizes Clayton's racial attitudes by placing them in direct discourse; then it uses the character of Jack and the “official” language of the newspaper accounts to bring him to an awareness of the way his racism has entrapped him. The ending seems to allow Clayton relief from his ignorance. But his wistful repetition of the creed of “Brotherhood” causes the work to close in upon itself, thus reinforcing the coffin-meaning of race in the story.

III

“Cicely's Dream,” which follows, forms an unusual and troubling companion to “A Matter of Principle.” Both stories establish the color line as a barrier which the main characters attempt to cross. For Cicero Clayton, society's promise of mobility proves to be a delusion, and the freedom to cross boundaries degenerates into an insistence on devising new forms of self-enclosure. Cicely, however, exercises extraordinary power to cross boundaries. So adept is she at negotiating the liminal world of Emancipation created by the Civil War, that she succeeds for much of the story in reversing entirely the terms of racial oppression in America. That Chesnutt finally denies Cicely the success of transforming her dream into reality may underscore his awareness of the powerful danger she would embody for the white readership he sought.

The opening paragraphs of “Cicely's Dream” create a significant fluidity of time, space, and situation. Chesnutt has plunged the action back from the urban North of the post-bellum period to an indeterminate rural landscape which is only marked indirectly by Cicely's submissive reference to “‘de w'ite folks up at de big house’” (138). The narrative never specifies Cicely's slave status, and the bonds which enslave her remain imperceptible until the midpoint in the story when Emancipation theoretically erases them.

Similarly, the opening paragraphs metaphorically situate the action at a threshold, and the story's initial impressions are of openness, illuminated vistas, and abundant potentialities. Old Dinah gazes out at her grand-daughter Cicely through “the back door of the cabin” shading her eyes from the sunlight which bathes the vast cornfield “stretching for half a mile” before her. The crop “just in the ear” bespeaks growth and fertility with “its yellow pollen-laden tassels over-topping the dark green masses of broad glistening blades” (132). The setting is replete with veils, lines, and barriers, none of which form any obstacle for the girl. Her first action is to climb “the low fence between the garden and the cornfield,” where the long rows “vanished in the distant perspective.” After picking down the lines of crops, Cicely reaches the “rail fence” which separates the cultivated terrain from “the thick underbrush of forest” (136), and she does not hesitate to climb this barrier in pursuit of “luscious blackberries” in their “wild state.” In the early episodes of the story, Cicely crosses over the barrier repeatedly and unselfconsciously. When her grandmother cannot climb the fence, Cicely quickly replies “‘I'll take it down,’” and she dismantles the barrier in a matter of minutes (140). This exploration of the wilderness and the tasting of its luscious fruits is a rehearsal for the more serious testing of racial boundaries which is to follow.

The other dimension of Cicely's ability to cross over from the safely cultivated to the “wild state” is her dream vision. In it, Cicely imagines that she is loved and married by “a young man whiter than she and yet not all white” (139), the same dream that Cicero Clayton had for his daughter. In the case of “Cicely's Dream,” however, Chesnutt provides the young girl with the materials—a wounded young man of indeterminate race and origins who has lost his memory—and the will to actualize her fantasy.

Realizing that the mysterious man's race will be the decisive factor in her future happiness, Cicely determines to make him black. Memory and the recovery of the past, the forces which redeem Silas Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth,” are the only obstacles to Cicely's creation of a perfect lover. She “taught him to speak her own negro English, which he pronounced with absolute fidelity to her intonations” (147), and is able to make not only his speech, but also his manners and his daily life “an echo of [her] own” (147).

Only after Cicely has perfected her creation, secured his love, and shut the door on outsiders, does Chesnutt's narrator begin to interpret her work. The language of appropriation and possession prevails: “He was hers—hers alone” (148), and “She had found him; he was hers” (155). The narrator also offers a significant Biblical analogy:

She had found him, as Pharaoh's daughter had found Moses in the bulrushes; she taught him to speak, to think, to love.

(149)

The analogy casts Cicely as the daughter of the master and her lover as the son of slaves. Cicely's fantasy has daringly reversed the colors of the racial oppression she has herself known. Nevertheless, her happiness depends upon the re-enactment of a system of appropriation of human beings which Chesnutt's short stories constantly repudiate.

It is unlikely that Cicely perceives the underside of the sentimental romance which she has authored. But Cicely's dream is clearly Captain Arthur Carey's nightmare, and a source of unease for the white reader who possesses comfortable preconceptions about racial difference. When the caprice of a temporary case of amnesia can shunt a man back and forth across the color line, skin color and the concept of “race” itself become the most arbitrary of signifiers.

From Carey's perspective, his melodrama of the discovery scene in which he regains his memory, Martha Chandler his beloved, and his whiteness is an agony of emancipation:

The imprisoned mind, stirred to unwonted effort, was struggling for liberty; and from Martha had come the first ray of outer light that had penetrated its dungeon.

(164)

“And Cicely?” (167). At the end of the story, Cicely simply vanishes, and the narrator, ignoring her emotional devastation, philosophizes briefly about the pitiable condition of the jilted woman in a love triangle. The image of a daring reversal of the terms of American racial experience struggles against and finally succumbs to the imperatives of the sentimental romantic tale. Cicely's dream constitutes a thrilling experiment in the erasing of racial boundaries, but Cicely's failure is Chesnutt's retreat. While Chesnutt could link his own quest for an affirming narrative voice to the self-discovery of Silas Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth,” he was, apparently, more reluctant to link the rebellious power of Cicely's romantic fantasy with his own fictional craft.

IV

“The Passing of Grandison” also seems poised between an affirmation of its hero's capacity to author his racial identity and his freedom, and Chesnutt's evasion of the extraordinary power involved in such an assertion. The title introduces the enigmas of identity and intention in the story. It explicitly reveals Grandison's ability to cross boundaries in his passing from slavery to freedom. But the title also carries with it the ambiguities of the very different practice of “passing” for white which constituted one of the most paradoxical ways of breaking the bonds of blackness at the turn of the twentieth century. As Michael Cooke has pointed out, “passing” is “self-assertion as self-denial, self-annihilation as self-fulfillment” (32).

Of the stories in Chesnutt's second collection, “The Passing of Grandison” bears the closest resemblance to the tales of Uncle Julius, not only in its slavery setting, but also in its hero's self-veiling. For several reasons, however, Grandison's veiling strategies are more mysterious and more laden with potential. His mask is at all points impermeable, not only to his masters, but also to the reader, who is repeatedly denied access to his motivation. Moreover, “The Passing of Grandison” is the only story in the collection in which the narrative voice largely suspends its adjudicative role. Finally, Grandison's veiling results in the most heroic form of self-identification available to a slave—his escape to freedom with his entire family.

In “The Passing of Grandison,” we sense most clearly the absence in Chesnutt's second collection of the narrative frame which unifies The Conjure Woman. That frame in the first collection guarantees that the telling of each tale will be motivated by Uncle Julius's immediate material needs and then mediated by John's Yankee capitalism or Annie's genteel sentimentalism. The frame, moreover, establishes the limits of Uncle Julius's autonomy and powers of negotiation, limits imposed by his age, his attachment to the land, and his economic need. For all of his daring as a storyteller, within the frame, there are pattern, repetition, and a fixity of social condition beyond which Uncle Julius is unprepared to step. The absence of the frame in “The Passing of Grandison,” and in The Wife of His Youth as a whole, bespeaks the characters' refusal to be bound by forms of identification and constraints upon action imposed by others. In the story, the crossing of boundaries is both metaphorically and literally a means of self-identification.

Nevertheless, the awareness of Grandison's greater potential dawns suddenly; within the story, the reader is held in narrative bondage. The passing to freedom of this docile slave and his apparent ecstasy for chains are viewed entirely through the eyes of his white masters. Readerly intuition might enable us to detect the irony in Colonel Owens' satisfaction at “this blissful relationship of kindly protection on the one hand, of wise subordination and loyal dependence on the other” (179). But Grandison's bowing and scraping, and the fearful invective he hurls at “‘dem ab'lishuners,’” preclude alternatives to the Owens' vision of their childlike, irresponsible, and ignorant chattel. For the duration of the story, the reader is shackled by the masters' delusions of perfect control over their slaves' minds and motives.

Grandison himself finds his ability to act freely confined by a double enclosure: not only by the slave system, but by the role he is designated to play in young Dick Owens' amorous theatricals. The plot is grounded in idleness and folly. The Colonel's son will take upon himself an absurd act—to lead Grandison into a situation where he will automatically embrace his freedom, masquerade it as heroic abolitionism, and then offer it to a superficial girl as a love token. Owens never ponders the value of freedom to those who are enslaved; he simply assumes that freedom is a “virus” which will inoculate the susceptible Grandison when he is placed in an infected environment.

The great imponderable of the story, for the young master and, inevitably, for the reader, is Grandison's refusal to play his part in this travesty of emancipation. Owens attributes the failure to Grandison's “stupidity” and the unaccountable fidelity of his race. Judging the slave only by the standard of his own selfishness and indolence, it never occurs to Owens that Grandison cannot place any value upon his personal freedom while his family remains in bondage. There is, in a sense, more freedom in Grandison's choice to cross back into slavery than in the trivialized gift of his master. In the act, Grandison demonstrates that the line which divides slave states from free states constitutes no barrier for him. Much more than his role in Dick Owens' farce, this reverse crossing of the slave border is a rehearsal for the genuine drama of emancipation which he will author for himself and for others.

But if Grandison repeatedly demonstrates his mastery of racial boundaries, Chesnutt grants no similar power to the reader in gaining access to his hero's mind. It is impossible to determine whether Grandison is simply a model of dogged family loyalty, or whether he is the calculating rebel, creating the role of the cowardly slave, fabricating tales of his escape from the abolitionists, mastering the masters through deceit in order to effect a mass escape. The story concludes with two powerful images. The first is the tableau of Grandison's family upon the fleeing Lake Erie steamboat, unified in their final gaze back into the place of enslavement. The second is the wave of derision by an anonymous sailor which mocks the slaveowner. In their flight, Chesnutt seems to merge two dominant nineteenth-century ideologies, the republican emphasis on freedom and the primacy of love and family bonding in the cult of domesticity. The essence of Grandison's “passing,” however, is that his own motivation and power remain invisible to the end.

V

The concealment of “The Passing of Grandison” and its simultaneous affirmation of the heroism of crossing boundaries are an essential counterpoise to Chesnutt's intent in “The Web of Circumstance,” which concludes The Wife of His Youth. Although the concluding story is set in the rural South following the abolition of slavery, the title's metaphor of entrapment suggests that the action will be played out within confining circumstances. The blacksmith, Ben Davis, does not wish to violate boundaries or to rebel against standards which exclude him. Rather, he believes that the laws of the land have placed him within the privileged circle, and he simply wishes to live out the promise of that privilege. His naive optimism about the egalitarianism of the Reconstruction South and his potential for self-making constitute the dangers which the white men in the story feel they must eradicate.

Ben Davis is not simply a victim of “circumstance” who succumbs to an unmerited doom. The white characters are correct in their assessment of him. Ben Davis is a dangerous man—dangerous because he dares to articulate a version of black pride and black striving which constantly exposes the fraudulence of a social and economic system which tantalizingly extends him membership and then denies him meaningful participation. As a means of overcoming this injustice, Chesnutt's narrator struggles to achieve an affirming voice. He takes up Davis's final imaginative vision, a dream of “purity and innocence and peace,” and makes it, even at the moment of Davis's murder, the foundation for his own appeal for justice and a shared sense of humanity.

The story begins at the glowing forge of the blacksmith, a place of light emerging from dark shadows, of openness, and of intense industry. Ben Davis's given name invokes images of Franklin, of the accumulation of wealth through virtuous enterprise, and also of the goal of civic participation and responsibility. At the forge, the men of the community gather daily to discuss their affairs and their political beliefs. That Davis is a “blacksmith” speaks not only of his trade, but also of his potential as the “smith” or fashioner of a genuine “black” identity, following the agony of slavery. What Ben Davis demands of the economic system of the Reconstruction South is that it redeem its promise of the opportunity to better himself and to reap the rewards of his own industry and thrift. Because his dream of “self-making” is the dream of the American republic, it never occurs to him that fulfillment is available only selectively. But his assessment of economic conditions in the Reconstruction South and the potential for economic advancement are indeed a threat:

We colored folks never had no chance ter git nothin' befo' de wah, but ef eve'y nigger in dis town had a tuck keep er his money sence de wah, like I has, an' bought as much lan' as I has, de niggers might a' got half de lan' by dis time.

(293)

Ben's goal is a fundamentally American one, to pay off the mortgage: “‘den we won't owe nobody a cent. I tell you dere ain' nothin' like propputy ter make a pusson feel like man’” (294). The version of himself which Ben wishes to fashion is not simply an economic one; it is a vision of virtuous conduct and citizenship in a thriving republic. At a more threatening level, however, it is a vision of southern society turned upside-down, of the possibility for self-mastery after twenty years as a slave. But the society in which Ben Davis lives will simply not make room for a black man who doesn't “owe nobody a cent.” Significantly, the crime of which Ben Davis is falsely accused is the theft of the richly adorned whip of the former slaveholder, Colonel Thornton. If Davis has not literally stolen the colonel's whip, then the white citizens of Patesville are surely correct that he has designs on the power of self-mastery that the whip represents.

In contrast to the special silence which pervades “The Passing of Grandison,” Chesnutt re-asserts his narrative control and the authority of his judgment in “The Web of Circumstance.” The abrupt shifts of scene create vulnerable readers who must struggle to fill the gaps of time during which Ben Davis has become ensnared in the web of circumstance. Since the appointed officers of the legal system are the primary agents of injustice, the narrator's commentary must assume the dimensions of the genuine inquiry into right and wrong which exposes the travesty provided for by the law.

The narrative repeatedly allows the reader access to the minds of principal players, such as the State's attorney who “was anxious to make as good a record as possible. He had no doubt of the prisoner's guilt.” Behind the scenes we observe the “gentlemen” of the county advising a guilty verdict and stiff punishment to curb an outbreak of “petty thieving.” We learn that Davis's own attorney “secretly believed his client guilty” (304). During the barrage of judicial bombast, the narrator's tone of superior judgment also extends to Davis's ignorance of the proceedings and the forces at work against him:

He had never heard of Tom Paine or Voltaire. He had no conception of what a nihilist or an anarchist might be, and he could not have told the difference between a propaganda and a potato.

(299)

Perhaps most significantly, the narrator places in the clearest light the single truth which the court has no interest in discovering—the identity of the real thief. The narrator's superior grasp of guilt and innocence in the case, as well as the ironic tone of his commentary, establish his position outside “the web of circumstance.” He cynically eavesdrops on conversations between the lawyers and the judge which the accused himself cannot hear. He invades the judge's private chambers to listen to Davis's chief accuser, Colonel Thornton, plead for leniency, because “‘he's the best blacksmith in the county.’” The arrangement of other details highlights the irony of the verdict. Davis's outrageous five-year sentence is set against the sentencing of a white man to one year for manslaughter and another to six months for forgery. The judge bases this sentence, which he calls “light,” upon the single standard that a “society rests upon the sacred right of property.” The trial thus manifests a fundamental conflict at the heart of the republican ideology, between the desire to reward civic virtue and a capitalistic commitment to uphold the value of private property. Finally, Davis is convicted by the ideology which he once believed would protect his own efforts to prosper in a transformed southern economy.

During the proceedings, the narrator ironically observes that “the law in its infinite wisdom did not permit the defendant to testify on his own behalf” (305). Ben Davis, always garrulous at the forge, is virtually silent in the court of law. Once deprived of a self-affirming voice, his only alternative is the self-negating construction of a barrier: “There was one flash of despair, and then nothing but a stony blank, behind which he masked his real feelings, whatever they were” (313).

This same veiling of identity characterizes his return from the penitentiary. Behind his mask, he derives a tortured delight from hearing his ignorant neighbors magnify his crimes. As they spread wild gossip about his children's deaths and his wife's infidelity, he fashions for himself a striking new identity to replace the failed role of the virtuous tradesman:

he reasoned himself into the belief that he represented in his person the accumulated wrongs of a whole race, and Colonel Thornton the race who had oppressed them. A burning desire for revenge sprang up in him. …

(318)

In the story's climax, however, Ben Davis experiences a vision of transformation in which he crosses the ultimate threshold from the anguish of hell to heavenly peace and comfort: “Suddenly the grinning devil who stood over him with a barbed whip faded away, and a little white angel came and handed him a drink of water” (320). When the angel, with her “halo of purity and innocence and peace” (321), turns out to be a child in fact, Davis casts off the mask of the black avenger only to be gunned down by Colonel Thornton. In a society which demands that men like Ben Davis be enslaved, imprisoned, or held powerless by laws and custom, even his smallest attempt to reach across the color line towards the angelic child necessarily seals his death warrant.

Had the story and the collection ended with Davis's ghastly murder, The Wife of His Youth might be viewed as depressing evidence that “the color line” is an insuperable barrier to the efforts of the characters in all the stories to author their own social identities. But “The Web of Circumstance” concludes, instead, with the narrator's prayer for the coming of “another golden age.” With its recurring future tenses and language of anticipation (“hope,” “foretaste,” “hopefully await its coming”) the passage represents an opening out rather than a sign of closure, and Chesnutt's resistance to fixed positions or strategies of presentation. For the black storyteller at the turn of the twentieth century, the process of unveiling moves beyond the heroic refusal to be enmeshed in the web of circumstance, and initiates the exhilarating challenge of affirmation and self-identification.²

Notes

1. For an extended analysis of Uncle Julius's and Chesnutt's strategies of veiling, see Fienberg.

2. The reading and research for this essay were carried out while I was a participant in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar entitled “American Literature: Portraits in Black and White” (Yale University, 1989). My thanks go to Michael G. Cooke and the other participants in the seminar for their encouragement and intelligent response to my work.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of The Color Line. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968.

Cooke, Michael G. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Fienberg, Lorne. “Charles W. Chesnutt and Uncle Julius: Black Storytellers at the Crossroads.” Studies in American Fiction 15 (1987): 161-173.