Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 101 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Fri 12 Oct 2007 01:25 Post subject: Charles Chesnutt
Hey,
I just ordered the Library of America edition of his collected works. Read The Marrow of Tradition a couple of years ago, a heartrending account (in fiction) of the 1898 Wilmington race riots that led to the disenfranchisement of black North Carolinians. The terrorism that intimidated African Americans in NC also targeted their political allies among whites at the turn of the 20thc. Chesnutt's rejection of "passing"-- even though he could do so easily himself -- reflects the political circumstances of his era and the moral choices it imposed.
Those interested in the complex situation of antebellum Louisiana Creoles should find his posthumously published Paul Marchand of interest. I'll be reading it soon and posting about it.
Neither Fish, flesh, Nor Fowl: Race and Region in the Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt - Critical Essay
Anne Fleischmann
The Supreme Court's decision in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case is notorious for having sewn racial segregation into the fabric of American society. One of the decision's less obvious results was that it gave official sanction to the "one-drop" rule. That is, the Plessy ruling held that individual states could decide whether and how to classify citizens by race, and states which were so inclined could assert that any person with one black ancestor counted as black and was therefore subject to second-class citizenship. At its root, the Plessy decision was concerned with racial "purity"; between the Emancipation and 1896 the legal hierarchy that had elevated masters over slaves during slavery had been obliterated, and the "composite" race and attendant worries about "invisible blackness" threatened the South's de facto caste system, which elevated whites over blacks. The supremacist Plessy holding put mixed-race citizens back "in their place." Though biracial identity had long been used by whites and blacks a like as the basis for local discriminations, Plessy defined for the nation a way of conceiving race that has persisted to this day.
Ironically, the Plessy legacy has, up to now, affected the ways in which we have read and interpreted African American literature. In spite of our awareness of its absurdity, the one-drop rule has saturated our readings of African American authors and has contributed a nagging a historical quality to the project. In other words, we have been reading turn-of-the-century African American texts as if "race" has always been defined as it was by the justices who defined whiteness as inherently different and separate from blackness when they ruled on Plessy. The Court's dichotomizing move might be explained by Abdul R. JanMohamed, who has argued that "colonialist fiction is generated predominantly by the ideological machinery of the manichean allegory" (JanMohamed 102), the impermeable dichotomy between blackness and whiteness which spawns the racial stereotypes that make possible ideologies like "separate but equal." Recent post-colonial theoretical formulations can help us consider what biracial identity meant t o the culture upon which the Plessy verdict was leveled; indeed, it is clear that we must re-examine racial classification as a problem to which turn-of-the-century authors, like Charles Chesnutt, were responding.
Virtually all of Chesnutt's works involve characters of mixed racial ancestry. While he was by no means the only author of his day to speculate on biracial existence, Chesnutt's ethnographic profiles of biracial communities invite us to consider the mixed-race character in an original light, as a new term in the discussion of African American literature. Previous interpretations of Chesnutt's work have largely misread the significance of his mixed-race characters, either by ignoring their existence--i.e., perceiving them as black--or by classifying Chesnutt's use of them as consistent with the "tragic mulatta" genre so popular in the late nineteenth century. Earlier readings of Chesnutt's most widely anthologized short story, "The Wife of His Youth," have been inclined to consider the Groveland Blue Veins--Chesnutt's term or the Cleveland mixed-race socialites--not as a third race but as a group of upwardly mobile blacks who choose at the end to accept their black cultural heritage. This is an understandable tactic, given the dramatic and pervasive effect the onedrop rule has had on American race thinking. But when one considers the history of mixed-race peoples in America, "The Wife of His Youth" can be read more importantly as an allegory for the changing relationship between blacks and mixed-race peoples and between the free born and the freedmen during and after Reconstruction. Chesnutt's mixed society functions as a metaphor for the rejection of a two-race culture; as such, it also indicts segregation's color-coded "placing."
Two readings in particular illustrate the ways in which the significance of mixed race has been overlooked in "The Wife of His Youth." Werner Sollors's reading of the story focuses on Mr. Ryder's choice between his "consent" identification--that is, his present, modern, "Americanized" identity--and his descent identification, his link with his "ethnic past" (Sollors 157). Sollors commits an interesting misreading of the text when he writes that Mr. Ryder "sides with the past against the future" (160), implying that "a previous condition of... rural slavery" (156) is his past. Yet Chesnutt takes pains to create in Mr. Ryder a character who is both" 'merlatter'" and" 'free-bawn' "(Wife 12). Casting Mr. Ryder as an ex-slave and ignoring his mixed-racial identity, Sollors sees images of ethnic association in the character and argues that the ethnic trappings of Chesnutt's stories are paradoxical--a way of using difference to take part in a collective American identity. But when Mr. Ryder is seen as the freeborn hybrid character he is, rather than as an erstwhile slave, his story is less about an individual's choice to identify with his descent culture than a story about the post-Civil War extinction of "mulatto" and "free born" as social and legal categories. Sollors's concept of descent, then, is not complex enough to describe Mr. Ryder's mixed racial identity during Reconstruction, or the changing nature of racial classification that was both the impetus for and the result of the Plessy decision.
In To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Eric Sundquist approaches Chesnutt from the opposite camp. Sundquist argues that, even in his urban tales of mixed-race high society, Chesnutt uses authentic African American cultural tropes and "even African retentions"--like conjuring and the cakewalk--to signify on the declining state of race relations during the post-Reconstruction era in which he lived (271). Sundquist believes Chesnutt's subtle focus on his African roots is meant to highlight his sense of difference and alienation from the mainstream. But which mainstream--black or white? Sundquist insists only on Chesnutt's alienation from the white mainstream, and at the base of his analysis is the essentialist notion that "the folk beliefs of African origin were contained somewhere in Chesnutt's own imaginative reservoir" (298). Without debating the merits of an essentialist stance, we might notice reverberations of Plessy in Sundquist's firm placing of Chesnutt and Mr. Ryder within a black folk tradition, taking part in the "symbolic past of [theiri race" (299).
Of course, Soilors and Sundquist are not incorrect for privileging Mr. Ryder's African origins. The dramatic tension of the story itself arises from the fact that the Blue Veins are "more white than black," a description meant to be physical as well as historical or temporal. Their blue veins designate them as almost white physically, and their concern with upward mobility and the absorption of their almost white group into the privileged, "pure" white race by way of "passing" is the future for which Mr. Ryder and presumably the other Blue Veins ardently hope. This dramatic tension beckons us to read the text as a romance about race in which the black self, nearly extinguished or absorbed, is at the last moment resurrected and claimed. The threat of the whole race eventually "passing" is diffused at the end when, by accepting 'Liza Jane, the Blue Veins symbolically become black like her. But when in this romantic ending blackness is not erased, what is lost is the hybrid or mixed-race identity. In spite of t heir disagreement over Chesnutt's use of racial difference, Sollors and Sundquist assume Chesnutt and his mixed-race characters are grappling only with the legacy of an African American past rather than with the complex and separate issues that faced mixed-race peoples in the late nineteenth century. We might use Homi K. Bhabha's theory of hybridity as a strategy for reading "The Wife of His Youth" with greater historical accuracy, problematizing rather than erasing the category of the racially hybrid character.
"The Wife of His Youth" is not a post-colonial text; that is, U.S. slavery is not equivalent to British colonialism, and the post-slavery migration north that the story depicts is not the same as the post-colonial worlds of India, Africa, or the Caribbean. Nevertheless, because post-colonial texts and theories deal with intersections of races, classes, and cultures, post-colonial theoretical strategies are available as models with which to re-read "The Wife of His Youth." Jenny Sharpe's helpful definition of the way post-colonial theories might apply to United States literature suggests that the term post-colonial can be used with respect to literature of the U.S. to designate "the presence of racial minorities and Third World immigrants." Sharpe argues that, "given its history of imported slave and contract labor, continental expansion, and overseas imperialism, an implication of American culture in the postcolonial study of empires is perhaps long overdue" (181). Applying the concept of hybridity demands t hat one search for intersections between colonizer and colonized locate the composite subject that stands between the dominant and the minority cultures. Such a theory, then, offers us a way to understand "The Wife of His Youth" that comes closer to solving the racial quandary of the story and its literary critical readings. Moreover, the history of mixedrace families in America as well as Chesnutt's own journals offer the basis for a significant revision of previous readings of "The Wife of His Youth." A closer look at biracial existence as a phenomenon separate and distinct from either "black" or "white" identity demonstrates that "The Wife of His Youth" is not so much a racial romance as it is an allegory for the disappearance of the biracial person as a social and legal entity during the darkest days of Jim Crow.
Certain conditions of late-nineteenth-century biracial existence are well-discussed. "The Wife of His Youth," for example, begins with a familiar portrait of a group of wealthy, professional biracial people who, because of the one-drop rule, occupy an interstitial space at the border of white society. Their existence, as "a little society of colored persons [whose] purpose it was to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited room for improvement" (Wife 1), reflects what is well-known about biracial existence during the late nineteenth century: their tentative social status in relation to the white community. Once defined as a third race and counted as such in the 1850 census, the antebellum "mulatto" elite was a group that had managed, for different reasons in different regions, to hold onto their partial membership in the dominant class in spite of the race prejudice and antipathy toward miscegenation that pervaded the South. As Joel Willi amson points out, using a term borrowed from Chesnutt's novel of passing, The House Behind the Cedars, biracial Americans had originally been seen as a "new people," [1] a group separate and distinct from black Americans. Between 1850 and 1915, however, this third race virtually disappeared from America's racial landscape. Williamson argues that after 1850, and particularly during Reconstruction, "mulatto communities...confronted an increasingly hostile white world implementing increasingly stringent rules against them in the form either of laws or of social pressures" (New 62). Their response was to relinquish sympathy for the white world and form black alliances. As the white world "arrived at an almost total commitment to the one-drop rule," and as part of "a larger cultural fusion," comparatively privileged mixed-race individuals and freedmen were thrown together to tackle the task of racial uplift. Indeed, Williamson writes, even wealthy "mulatto" families who had once owned slaves were now "fully identi fied in interest with the mass of colored people," though not at first willingly (8.
Bent on establishing a biracial society, Southern whites passed strict laws forbidding interracial marriage, naming the issue of such unions illegitimate. Racial identity became more than ever a legal category in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, as states decided what fraction of Negro blood constituted black identity, an identity which forbade its owner from centers of higher learning and cultural enrichment. The prevalence of the one-drop rule required light-skinned African Americans to choose between identifying wholly with blacks or passing, which meant, in effect, entirely renouncing the black part of their heritage. In the South, where "everyone knew his color and, hence, his place" (Williamson, New 99), biracial people had no official place. [2] Indeed, by 1890, census officials stopped counting mixed-race people as a separate category, and the nation became officially biracial.
In the black community, however, color and class distinctions remained. According to Willard Gatewood, "mulatto" aristocrats maintained a social distance from lower-class blacks. "In a sense," as Gatewood says, "the aristocracy embraced a modified version of Booker T. Washington's famous hand and fingers analogy: in all things purely social the aristocrats tended to be as separate from other blacks as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things for racial uplift" (2. Emancipation eradicated the social structure by which free blacks, who were usually of mixed parentage, maintained superiority over slaves, and the lines of the social hierarchy were subsequently redrawn after 1865. Emancipation produced a legion of new distinctions within the black community based on skin color, parentage, and legal status--slave or free--at birth. A family history worthy of aristocratic status "was in large measure bound up with blacks' experience with slavery--their place in the slave system, their role in opposing it, a nd the extent to which their families had been free from it" (Gatewood 9). Mulatto identity in the black community both before the Emancipation and after, then, had accorded its possessor a status that the white community had sought to deny by imposing the one-drop rule. So even as Southern society moved toward a legal and social biracial status, biracial identity and history--what we might call "biracial culture"--persisted.
Chesnutt's literary career spanned these years of racial redefinition within and outside the black community, and he uses the biracial characters in his fiction to comment on the changing nature of racial identity during this era. Chesnutt's own experiences during this time shed some light on his use of the mixed-race person as a literary construct. His highly written journal, which might be compared in its belletristic style to the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, or Booker T. Washington, casts the mixed-race character as a culturally placeless entity, a perception held not only by Chesnutt but also by his black and white acquaintances. In his 1881 journal Chesnutt describes the feeling of a "poor white man" toward welleducated black men who, like Chesnutt, were light-skinned enough to pass for white. Chesnutt writes: "McL[aughlinl wound up with this declaration, which embodies the opinion of the South on the 'Negro Question.' 'Well he's a nigger; and with me a nigger is a nigger, and nothing in the world can make him anything else but a nigger'" (Journals 161). In a posthumous tribute to Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois offered the contrary view: Chesnutt was of that group of white folk who because of a more or less remote Negro ancestor identified himself voluntarily with the darker group" (qtd. in Render 30). This perception of mixed-race placelessness is reflected often in Chesnutt's journal as he describes his youthful attempts to place himself.
In 1875, the seventeen-year-old Chesnutt writes of his estranging experiences as a light-skinned teacher among black freedmen. Searching for work in the country districts of North Carolina, Chesnutt arrives in a town called "Jonesville or Jonahsville, I don't know which" (Journals 59). The biblical allusion here makes sense in terms of Chesnutt's cultural misplacement; like Jonah, who was instructed to preach in the wicked city of Nineveh, Chesnutt follows the call for racial uplift and ventures out into what to him is a cultural wilderness. He writes: "Where the 'vile' was I am not able to say, for there was but one house within nearly a half mile of the 'church' " (Journals 60). Clearly an "other" both racially and culturally, Chesnutt struggles to fit into a world in which the urban color prejudice he had grown accustomed to is reversed. At Jonesville, Chesnutt would be replacing a former teacher much maligned for favoring a light-skinned student. He writes, "I suppose they were prejudiced against her bec ause she was yellow, for they are the blackest colored people up there that I ever saw" (Journals 60). Yet Chesnutt would like to achieve status on the basis of the color prejudice he is accustomed to; when accosted by "a high-headed gentleman of considerable color" who calls him, familiarly, "'Uncle Chess,' " Chesnutt takes offense and remonstrates that he "was unaware of sustaining that relationship to him" (Journals 77).
Chesnutt doesn't get the Jonesville job, mainly because the church has no money to hire him, but he describes at length a conversation he has while there with a local white man and member of the school committee. This conversation reflects the way in which Chesnutt's biracial identity has left him placeless:
We arrived at once at Mr. Ayler's, and I immediately discovered that he was a German, and began a conversation in that language. He asked me my name, where I was educated, &c. He asked me what countryman was I, and when I told him I wanted a colored school he told me in Dutch [sic], which was unintelligible to my guide, that the white people wouldn't respect me if I taught a colored school. Said that the colored people ought to have colored, and the whites, white teachers. He even offered me the white public school which I respectfully declined. (Journals 61)
Here we see both the ease with which Chesnutt could have passed and the class barrier which enabled him to identify more closely with well-educated whites than with poor blacks. The scene is almost anthropological or ethnographic in nature; Chesnutt is led by a native "guide" in an unknown region in which he meets a "countryman" with whom he can share a conversation in a common language. The fact that the "countryman," the man with whom Chesnutt can converse, is German and not a Southern white underscores Chesnutt's alienation from both black and white cultures and the extent to which his self-description as "neither fish[,] flesh, nor fowl--neither 'nigger', poor white, nor 'buckrah' "is apt (Journals 157). Chesnutt voluntarily passes in this scene because he does not advise the German of his error in assuming Chesnutt is white. But the scene also shows how mixed-race people can be "misread," how their bodies become the sites of misapprehension and misplacement in a land in which race is a social fiction, in which a man considered black can be as fair as a man considered white.
In Chesnutt's own history, then, one can see his concern with the disappearance of a hybrid identity, an identity which was neither black nor white. Indeed, internal and external factors prevented Chesnutt from asserting his membership in either the dominant or the subordinate class. And in "The Wife of His Youth," certainly, politics and sentiment allow the reader to champion Mr. Ryder's choice of 'Liza Jane over Molly Dixon and to read this choice as an appropriate and welcome privileging of his African connection. But to interpret Chesnutt's mixed-race characters as struggling only with their black heritage, as Sollors and Sundquist do, is to overlook the position of the mixed-race character during the 1890s and to ignore Chesnutt's condemnation of the two-race caste society in which he was living. The journals Chesnutt kept as a young man demonstrate his struggle to retain his hybrid identity in a culture that would cast him as black by default and allow him to be white only if he denied his heritage. His subsequent portrayals of mixed-race characters in "The Wife of His Youth" problematize the racial boundary drawing of the one-drop rule and the regional boundary drawing of programs such as Booker T. Washington's program of racial uplift that would accede to second-class citizenship for African Americans. In "Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness, Stephen Knadler argues that in his earliest political essays "Chesnutt was reinterpreting race as less a stigma against blacks, or an advantage for whites, than a cultural practice by which all are marked" (426). Knadler illuminates Chesnutt's concern with what race means when he reports on Chesnutt's correspondence with George Washington Cable, who told Chesnutt that his own quadroon characters "really ask this question, 'What is a white man, What is a white woman?' "(qtd. in Knadler 427). Chesnutt also tries to rescue the mixed-race character from his residence in a racial no-man's land and to re-place him in both the social and literary worlds, not as a tragic figure emblematic of racial strife but as a testimony to the possibility of racial hybridity. Chesnutt's biracial characters challenge the nineteenth-century racial definitions that opposed whiteness and blackness in a manichean allegory which made possible widespread prejudice and exclusion on the basis of racial difference.
Post-colonial theoretical constructions, such as Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity, give us a way to describe Chesnutt's personal dilemma and the outcome of his story. Bhabha's complex redefinition of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized imagines a middle ground or border upon which both colonial authority and native oppression are disrupted. Bhabha argues that, "if the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs" (173). This third space, which interrupts the polarity inscribed by the victor-victim, conqueror-conquered relationship, might work equally well to describe the racial hybrid or that which is lost by the end of "The Wife of His Youth." Though slavery cannot be equated with colonialism, the post-bellum era invites comparison with post-colonial situations because of the cultural syncretisms occasioned by th e biological and cultural intermixing of master and slave, white and black. In places, the cultures of Africans, slaves, free-born African Americans, and Europeans melded during the antebellum and post-war periods, creating a social and racial hierarchy that was both complex and dissimilar to a more simplistically imagined master-slave relationship. For this reason, though hybridity cannot function the same way in an American post-bellum context as it does in a European post-colonial one, articulating a space between oppressor and oppressed lets us read "The Wife of His Youth" without erasing the third term, the character of mixed races.
The notion of hybridity explains why Chesnutt imagines Ryder as a free-born African American man. Certainly this choice metaphorically reminds readers that a prior condition of freedom predates African enslavement. And, because Sam's freedom is discounted by 'Liza Jane's master in the early part of the story, this choice suggests the racial peril even free blacks lived under. Most importantly, however, that Mr. Ryder has always been free asserts a third position in the landscape of the story; in contradistinction to the positions of master and slave, Sam Taylor is neither master nor slave. This third subject position foreshadows the hybrid identity Mr. Ryder later adopts.
Chesnutt emphasizes that the hybrid occupies a middle ground and stresses, from the outset, the "neither/nor" aspect of mixed-race existence. We might see in Mr. Ryder's complaints, for example, the problem of post-Civil War racial identity: I have no race prejudice ... 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. (Wife 7)
This statement bewails the prospect of the mixed-race characters' disappearance and establishes their identity as a third race within the context of the story. Indeed, the Blue Veins choose to be neither white nor black; they are a group of light-skinned African Americans who choose not to pass for white but who could, given that "most of them would not have attracted even a casual glance because of any marked difference from white people" (1. At the same time, they refuse to admit dark-skinned ex-slaves to their group. The Blue Veins have, in effect, sustained their own racial identity and have fought for the color designation, neither white nor black, that attaches to it: "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). The narrator describes the society in the same geographic terms Chesnutt uses to describe his own search as a biracial person for terra firma-- "the society was a life-boat, an anchor, a bulwark and a shield ... to guide their people through the social wilderness" (2). Established as clearly separate from whites and blacks at the beginning of the story, the Blue Veins are a third race attempting to clear a space for themselves in the social turmoil that followed the Civil War. The end of the story, in which Mr. Ryder acknowledges the wife of his youth, articulates the impossibility of this project. The polarized, two-race world of the South, established in part by the Plessy decision, makes hybridity and syncretism impossible in the world of the story.
When read as a parable about race consciousness, Mr. Ryder's acknowledgment of 'Liza Jane, reinforced by the unanimous agreement of the Blue Veins, is apparently the morally right choice willingly made. When I teach "The Wife of His Youth," my students invariably see it as a story about one character's transformation from an acquisitive, class-and race-conscious snob to a man who "does the right thing." They buy, in other words, the romance of the ending. If one reads the story as harboring a concern for the hybrid's difference, for the notion that the division between white and black need not be so sharply determined, and for evidence of the idea that Chesnutt advocated a multi-cultural, syncretic world view, then "an important change of perspective occurs."
Consider this: Mr. Ryder's choice is only overtly voluntary. A close look at the meeting between Mr. Ryder and 'Liza Jane demonstrates the extent to which this right choice has been orchestrated by forces beyond the control of the Blue Veins. Mr. Ryder's choice seems voluntary because of the obvious physical and class distinctions between himself and 'Liza Jane. No one--not the reader, not the Blue Veins, and not even 'Liza Jane herself--would have expected two such opposites to unite. In fact, though, Mr. Ryder and 'Liza Jane are linked not physically, but geographically. Their shared regional identity--that is, their Southern roots--forces their final union.
The raison d'etre of the Blue Veins is to avoid leveling, to maintain their position in the social hierarchy. Mr. Ryder, as their "dean," is pictured therefore as completely non-ethnic; he is as white as possible without actually being white. 'Liza Jane is imagined as his polar opposite--"black" in every aspect. Indeed, on the surface, 'Liza Jane could not be more different from Mr. Ryder; that he acknowledges her in spite of her difference is meant to show the heroism of his choice. 'Liza Jane is imagined as a throwback to slavery and as a personification of the hard but quaint rural life she has left behind. She is a picturesque curiosity, "a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician's wand" (10). She is "little," "with very bright and restless eyes," "quite old, for her face was crossed with a hundred wrinkles." She has "short, gray wool" and "very black toothless gums," and she is dressed garishly (9-10). What Mr. Ryder loses for not being quite "as white as some of the Blue Veins," he makes up for in the refinement of his features, his sartorial conservatism, his nearly straight hair, and his modern, urban life (3-4). Chesnutt's focus on his characters' physical features evidences the pervasive nineteenth-century concern with physicalized descriptions of racial qualities and testifies to the obsession with looking at and deciphering black and mixed-race bodies for the evidence or non-evidence of their racial "purity." But this focus also masks the similarities between 'Liza Jane and Mr. Ryder which are expressed in spatial or regional terms rather than in physical or social ones. This geographic coding draws the characters together and shows that Mr. Ryder's "choice" is governed by the nineteenth-century notion that fueled both Jim Crow and Plessy--that blacks should maintain their proper spatial and social "place."
Despite their physical and social differences, Mr. Ryder and 'Liza Jane share Southern regional markers. Mr. Ryder's rise to respectability has taken place in a distinctly urban setting, and his home, his passion for learning, his language, his white-collar job, and his leisure activities all signal his rejection of his rural beginnings. But although Mr. Ryder can deny his rural roots, he cannot seem to deny his Southern ones. At the meeting scene, Mr. Ryder is sitting in "the shade of a vine," on the front porch of his home (. This image recalls a sharecropper in Chesnutt's journal who criticizes black teachers for "sitting in the shade" and reminds us of class distinctions in the black community. Certainly, the image casts Mr. Ryder as a member of the leisure class who maintains "an air of kindly patronage" (11) toward his lower-class visitor. But the image is odd because it is tinged with a Southern flavor, despite the fact that the story is set in fictionalized Cleveland, an urban center of the Midwest and a Northern mecca for middle-class blacks fleeing the prejudice of the South. Mr. Ryder's porch inspires a vision of a cooling wisteria vine shading a large plantation gallery and portrays Mr. Ryder as an unreconstructed Southerner. Ostensibly, this is a positive image, showing how far Mr. Ryder has come to his current position of wealth and influence. But as Mr. Ryder asks 'Liza Jane to have a seat "behind the vine," we must wonder whether he is pulling her up into his world, as the story purports, or stepping down into hers, as history would suggest. Indeed, when Mr. Ryder retells 'Liza Jane's story to the Blue Veins, he does so in the "same soft [Southern] dialect" (20) she uses.
The meeting between Mr. Ryder and 'Liza Jane is a significant passing scene in which the usual objective for passing--that is, not to be recognized by whites as black--is redefined. Mr. Ryder passes, in the company of 'Liza Jane, a former slave, not for a white man but for someone who was never connected with or threatened by slavery; he represents the Blue Veins, who ignore slavery because it is a "servile origin of...grosser aspects" (3). But Mr. Ryder's need to pass here reminds us of how close he, and perhaps the other Blue Veins, has come to falling victim to slavery's grosser aspects. His flight from the South as a young man demonstrates how dangerous it was to be a free-born black or mixed-race person in the South in the years just prior to the Civil War, as light-skinned free blacks were stripped of rights and threatened with being sold into slavery. In other words, his destiny, in spite of his free birth and light skin, had been, during slavery, more closely linked to 'Liza Jane's than he acknowledg es at their first meeting, when he passes for a Northerner unaffected by slavery. His transformation from Sam Taylor to Mr. Ryder, which is figured in images of travel and movement, shows that his destiny continues to be linked to hers, even after Emancipation and even after he has acquired the stable identity of the propertied elite.
Mr. Ryder's attempts to modernize 'Liza Jane for her debut at the ball reflects how his fate is inextricably linked to hers. With his acknowledgment of the wife of his youth, Mr. Ryder renounces his desire to marry Mrs. Dixon, a light-skinned Northerner who by marrying Mr. Ryder "would help to further the upward process of absorption he had been wishing and waiting for" (. Mrs. Dixon is, of course, another polar opposite of 'Liza Jane; she is nearly white, well-educated, refined, wealthy, and very young. To make his choice of 'Liza Jane over Mrs. Dixon seem more palatable, Mr. Ryder re-dresses 'Liza Jane for the ball, making her appear more refined. When she makes her appearance, she is "neatly dressed in gray" and wearing "the white cap of an elderly woman" (24). 'Liza Jane's new clothes, however, have less the effect of making her seem appropriate for the gathering and more the effect of distinguishing her from the other guests, who are dressed in formal evening wear. While she may have lost the garish t rappings of the slave mammy, her gray dress and white cap make her seem like a servant of another type. [3] In fact, 'Liza Jane looks suspiciously like an incarnation and an indictment of Booker T. Washington's program for racial uplift. She has been cleaned up and dressed up, but the fact that she stands mute in this scene, "trembling at the sudden plunge into this scene of brilliant gayety" (24), suggests that she remains in a servile position. That her fate has implications for the Blue Veins can be seen in the fact that Mr. Ryder has no choice but to accept her into his group with her servile qualities intact. Rather than showing the distinction between the Blue Veins and the freedmen, the acceptance of 'Liza Jane shows how both groups have very little control over the way they are perceived by the white world.
For example, Mr. Ryder's choice of name and his occupation reflect the futility of his attempts to advance toward full equality with whites. The name Mr. Ryder resonates with the Plessy decision, which sanctioned segregation on the basis of race. "Mr. Ryder" can be read as a reference to the actual plaintiff, Homer Plessy, a mixedrace train passenger who challenged the Jim Crow laws of Louisiana that had made race the ruling fact of life in the South. Walter Benn Michaels reminds us that Plessy was indistinguishable from a white man, and thus of the "stunning incoherence" of the Supreme Court decision. As Michaels points out, the Court argued that "'legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instinct or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences,' but the question of what race Homer Plessy actually belonged to and so of what ineradicable racial instincts might be his could be determined only under the laws of the State of Louisiana" (189). [4]
This formulation emphasizes the extent to which the Plessy decision was a sectional or regional controversy. In finding against Plessy, the Supreme Court restored sectional power lost to the South following the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Thus, as the question "what makes a white man white?" became a legal issue, it also became a regional one. "The Wife of His Youth" reminds us of the idiocy of this decision, in which one's racial designation and therefore one's rights and opportunities could differ from state to state, from region to region. Thus Mr. Ryder's movement through the story--his transformation from a shiftless Southern almost-slave to a prosperous, Northern near-white--cannot be viewed optimistically. While he may be a member of the elite in his own Northern city, in his own club, and in his own home, his equality under the Plessy law is possibly temporary and certainly restricted to these locales. As 'Liza Jane's change of clothing only trades one servile identity for another, Sam T aylor's change of name has not masked the ruling fact of his life--that even though he was born free and nearly white, he cannot escape the fate of the Southern black.
In Mr. Ryder's name and in his occupation as "stationery clerk" for a railroad company, we see the dilemma of the mixed-race character post-Reconstruction. In light of Plessy, paradoxes abound. Mr. Ryder is not, in fact, allowed to ride on the same railroad car as whites, and so he fits, in a punning way, his occupation as stationery clerk. The stability of his homeownership may represent his social rise, but the house's Southern trappings also show that he is hemmed in and limited by his racial and regional designations. The recognition scene between 'Liza Jane and Mr. Ryder reflects his untenable position. Mr. Ryder could, without being discovered, avoid acknowledging 'Liza Jane, and so his eventual decision to do so can seem all the more heroic. And yet, when read in the context of the South's anxiety over "invisible blackness" and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the acknowledgment seems, short of passing as white, Mr. Ryder's only choice. Nationally sanctioned segregation on the basis of racial heritage forces his acknowledgment of 'Liza Jane and belies his statement to her that "their marriage was a slave marriage, and legally binding only if they chose to make it so after the war" (21). The "marriage" between blacks and mixed-race people, between the free-born and freedmen, is legally enforced after 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson.
C. Vann Woodward suggests that the particular argument advanced by Plessy's attorney, Albion Tourgee, "illustrated the paradox that had from the start haunted the American attempt to reconcile strong color prejudice with equalitarian commitments." According to Woodward, Tourgee argued that Plessy had been deprived of property without due process of law. "The 'property' in question was the 'reputation of being white ... the most valuable sort of property, being the masterkey that unlocks the golden door of opportunity'" (224). [5] This defense, of course, was specific to the biracial person who appeared white, for the visibly black man could claim ownership of no such "property." Obviously, this argument did not convince the Court, but it must have concerned Chesnutt. Neither Mr. Ryder's figurative property--his nearly white appearance and his free birth--nor his real property--his house--shields him from being associated with his "slave" past. The Blue Veins fear that admitting ex-slaves to their group would remind people of their "servile origin" (Wife 3); this reaction seems to refer directly to another of Tourgee's arguments against segregation, that it "perpetuated distinctions 'of a servile character, coincident with the institution of slavery'" (Woodward 225). We see here how Chesnutt uses "The Wife of His Youth" to weigh in against the Plessy v. Ferguson decision and its acquiescence to the South's drive to become a biracial, segregated society. When read in light of the Plessy case, Mr. Ryder's physical dissimilarities to 'Liza Jane become less a statement about class distinctions among blacks and more an indictment of the move to quantify "black" blood and restrict rights on that basis.
Thus, passing in "The Wife of His Youth," in all its guises, is at once a metaphor for placelessness, for the disappearance of "mulatto" as a racial or cultural category, and a metaphor for being "placed," unable to shed one's regional identity and its attendant constrictions. Mr. Ryder has passed from South to North; he has passed as a black man unconnected with the ravages of slavery; and he has even inadvertently passed in Groveland as white. But he cannot, ultimately, pass into a place of his own making. Even Mr. Ryder's Northern piece of property cannot shelter him from being carried South, as it were, and associated with the servile, regional identity that is 'Liza Jane. Thus, Mr. Ryder's porch becomes a mirage, and we must see it as a false vision of the mixed-race character's social superiority over the freedman. This is perhaps the way 'Liza Jane sees it as she approaches from her hot, dusty journey. And 'Liza Jane, imagined at first by Mr. Ryder as the product of the magician's wand, becomes the re ality. The hybrid character's connection with slavery and its vestiges--segregation and discrimination--cannot be denied.
Like many post-colonial texts, "The Wife of His Youth" reminds us in several ways that a history of oppression and subordination will continue to exert its power upon the cultures that follow it. When she appears at his porch, 'Liza Jane--one of slavery's vestiges--disrupts Mr. Ryder's "Dream of Fair Women," asserting herself into his imagination just as "the poet's fancy had called into being the gracious shapes of which Mr. Ryder had just been reading" (Wife 10). Startling Mr. Ryder out of his mimetic reverie, 'Liza Jane's presence erases the images of Tennyson's fair women and prompts Ryder to cast his lot with black identity rather than with the unattainable white identity embodied in the allusions to "pale Margaret" and Queen Guinevere. In Mr. Ryder's awakening and transformation, Chesnutt challenges what Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin call "the mimicry of the centre proceeding from a desire not only to be accepted but to be adopted and absorbed" (Ashcroft et al. 4). This reading inter prets Mr. Ryder as a post-colonial subject who discards the ideology of self-hatred inscribed by his white oppressor. As plausible and inviting as it is, this reading oversimplifies the tangled relationship between Mr. Ryder and his erstwhile wife and therefore does a disservice to the complexity of Chesnutt's vision. In an equally compelling reading, the elision of Mr. Ryder's and the Blue Veins' hybrid identity is a tragedy because it rein-scribes the same two-race system of white dominance and black submission that orchestrated Mr. Ryder's self-hatred in the first place. Deeply concerned about the racial thinking that inspired the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, about Jim Crow, and about the concessions to it advocated by Booker T. Washington's hand and fingers analogy, [6] Chesnutt wrote the following criticism of segregation to Washington in October of 1906: "I do not believe it possible for two races to subsist side by side without intermingling: experience has demonstrated this fact and there will be more experience along that line" (H. Chesnutt 199). By "experience" Chesnutt here refers both to social and conjugal racial mixing in general and to the outbreak of race-based violence at the turn-of-the-century that he had chronicled so forcefully in The Marrow of Tradition. Chesnutt's use of Mr. Ryder and the hybrid community in "The Wife of His Youth" questions the feasibility, the logic, and the potential equality of a two-race society kept "separate but equal."
Anne Fleischmann is a lecturer in English at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches American literature and writing. Her current project, of which the present essay is a part, is a study of the intersections of race and region--scenes of racialized and regionalized contact--in late nineteenth-century American fiction.
Notes
(1.) Tracing the emergence of the "mulatto elite" from its beginnings in the seventeenth century through its gradual absorption into the Negro world following the Civil War, Williamson shows that the mixed-race Southerner was "new" not only in terms of his mixed black-and-white ancestry but also in terms of his mixed cultural heritage--and, given that he was neither a poor freedman nor a legitimate heir to the plantation class, his middle-class economic status.
(2.) The nineteenth-century association of race with place is well documented by George Fredrickson, who traces the nineteenth-century defense of colonization which rested on ineradicable prejudice, fear of the "black peril," and the popular desire for racial homogeneity. His explanation of the forces behind Reconstruction can be used as a way to understand Chesnutt's sense of placelessness. Apparently believing that whites and blacks were biologically suited to inhabit different regions, Lincoln attempted to satisfy a constituency which favored racial homogeneity and, "during the first two years of the Civil War[,] ... labored to combine hesitant steps toward emancipation with a workable plan of colonization" (150). By 1864, however, the colonizationists' dream was eclipsed. "What had ... happened," writes Frederickson, "... was that the Lincoln administration had adopted a deliberate policy designed to keep the freedmen in the South. V. Jacque Voegeli has demonstrated that the failure of colonization was f ollowed by a political decision to do the next best thing as far as Northern opinion was concerned, namely, to institute a policy of 'employing and caring for blacks in the South' ... which 'effectually sealed the vast majority of them in the region'" (166-67). Thus, national public policy reflected the South's drive to become a biracial society.
(3.) Clyde O. DeLand's illustration that accompanies the story depicts the moment when Mr. Ryder introduces 'Liza Jane to the assembled Blue Veins. In this drawing, 'Liza Jane's cap and the white piping on her dress look distinctly like a maid's uniform. Moreover, none of the Blue Veins in the picture is depicted as any whiter than 'Liza Jane. There would be no mistaking these folks for whites. These details suggest that to market the story it was necessary to portray mixed-race people as black--the very state of affairs the story critiques.
(4.) Michaels's excerpts are from the Plessy decision, which is reprinted in Clark 155-67. See also Sundquist's chapter on Plessy and Mark Twain in To Wake the Nations.
(5.) Woodward quotes here from the brief Albion Tourgee filed with the Supreme Court on behalf of Plessy in October of 1895.
(6.) In his Atlanta Exposition Address, Booker T. Washington advocated segregation to his Southern white audience by making the following analogy: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress" (129).
Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tifflin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Bhabha, Homi K. "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817." Gates 163-84.
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Richard Brodhead. Durham: Duke Up, 1993.
---. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories. 1899. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968.
Chesnutt, Helen. Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1962.
Clark, Thomas O., ed. The South Since Reconstruction. New York: Bobbs, 1973.
Frederickson, George. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper, 1971.
Gates, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. "Race," Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. "The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature." Gates 78-106.
Knadler, Stephen P. "Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness." American Literary History 8.3 (1996): 426-48.
Michaels, Walter Benn. "The Souls of White Folk." Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
Render, Sylvia Lyons, ed. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt. Washington: Howard UP, 1974.
Sharpe, Jenny. "Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race." Diaspora 4.2 (1995): 181-99.
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
Washington, Booker T. Up From Slavery. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1980.
Woodward, C. Vann. American Counterpart: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue. Boston: Little, 1971.
Joined: 03 Jun 2005 {Posts: 270 } Location: California
Posted: Wed 14 Nov 2007 03:57 Post subject:
Chesnutt is one of my favorite authors.
A fairly recently found gem "Mandy Oxendine" is an interesting positive look at 'passing'. Usually the 'passing' genre bodes ill for the passer. White audiences at the turn of the century were not all that open to reading about happy endings for the 'tragic mulatto/a'. It's a very good read.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 101 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Wed 14 Nov 2007 15:41 Post subject: Fleischmann's article is a great find
Thanks to A.D. for posting it. I'm just about to get started on The Wife of His Youth. Does Mandy Oxendine involve NC Indians? That is one of the core surnames of Lumbees, as common as Locklear.
Hearing about it on local radio reminded me that I'd planned to offer a comment on The House Behind the Cedars here. It's a highly nuanced passing novel that is not just historically informative about the color line but specifically about how it differed in the two Carolinas. The tragic heroine Rena lives with her mother Molly in a comfortable, well-furnished house on the edge of a black neighborhood in Patesville (Fayetteville.) Molly is biracial and Rena is a quadroon. The father of Molly's children, now dead, was a prominent white man who lived openly with her as his mistress. Molly's son John, older than Rena, has crossed the color line by going to South Carolina where he is legally white. His successful passing, followed by his unsuccessful attempt to bring his sister into his white South Carolina world, provide the contrast that makes the narrative so engaging. It's available in full online:
The library at Fayetteville State University is named after Chesnutt, and one of the novel's many strengths is his successful evocation of late nineteenth century Fayetteville. What makes it most valuable to me is its empathetic portrayal of all characters, black, mulatto, and white. He presents the color line itself as the villain of which all the characters are tragic victims.
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