The Wife of his Youth

Wife of his Youth, The

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories
of
the Color Line, and Selected Essays, by Charles Waddell Chesnutt, et
al
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Title: The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and
Selected Essays
Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Release Date: February 12, 2004 [eBook #11057]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIFE
OF HIS YOUTH AND OTHER STORIES OF THE COLOR LINE,
AND SELECTED ESSAYS***
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Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and
Selected Essays
Charles W. Chesnutt
1899

INTRODUCTION
Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932)--African-American educator,
lawyer, and activist--was the most prominent black prose author of his
day. In both his fiction and his essays, he addressed the thorny issues of
the "color line" and racism in an outspoken way. Despite the critical
acclaim resulting from several works of fiction and non-fiction
published between 1898 and 1905, he was unable to make a living as
an author. He kept writing, however, and several works which were not
published during his lifetime have been rediscovered (and published) in
recent years. He was awarded the Springarn Medal for distinguished
literary achievement by the NAACP in 1928. The library at Fayetteville
State University, in North Carolina, is named after him.
The Wife of His Youth (1899) was Chesnutt's second collection of
short stories, drawing upon his mixed race heritage. These deal largely
with race relations, the far-reaching effects of Jim Crow laws, and color
prejudice among African Americans toward darker-skinned blacks.
Eric J. Sundquist wrote: "Chesnutt's color-line stories, like his conjure
tales, are at their best haunting, psychologically and philosophically
astute studies of the nation's betrayal of the promise of racial equality
and its descent into a brutal world of segregation. [He] made the family
a means of delineating America's racial crisis, during slavery and
afterward." For our PG edition, I have added three of Chesnutt's essays
on the "color line" in an Appendix to this collection.
Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Project Manager

CONTENTS
The Wife of His Youth
Her Virginia Mammy
The Sheriff's Children
A Matter of Principle
Cicely's Dream
The Passing of Grandison
Uncle Wellington's Wives
The Bouquet
The Web of Circumstance

APPENDIX
Three Essays on the Color Line:
What is a White Man? (1889)
The Future American (1900)
The Disfranchisement of the Negro (1903)

The Wife of His Youth

I

Mr. Ryder was going to give a ball. There were several reasons why
this was an opportune time for such an event.
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."
The Blue Veins did not allow that any such requirement existed for
admission to their circle, but, on the contrary, declared that character
and culture were the only things considered; and that if most of their
members were light-colored, it was because such persons, as a rule, had
had better opportunities to qualify themselves for membership.
Opinions differed, too, as to the usefulness of the society. 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.
Another alleged prerequisite for Blue Vein membership was that of free
birth; and while there was really no such requirement, it is doubtless