Rude Rejections vs Rose-tinted Reminiscence: Ramifications of the Reconstruction Period

             In class, we approached two different sets of readings approaching the Reconstruction era. In turn, the settings and attitudes of the characters featured in the readings initially approach the “opportunity” of Reconstruction differently. 

In Chestnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth”, we see a very clear pattern in Mr. Ryder’s (and the Blue Veins Society’s) ideology; a sect of racism which modern readers currently name as colorism. This discrimination causes Mr. Ryder and other mixed Black people to internally reject their Black identity and heritage in favor of trying desperately to gain white validation. Of course, in “The Wife of His Youth” these characters are fictional, but the story intends on being a realistic portrayal or parallel to real life circumstances. In this sense, recovery from slavery is no more than a rejection of the past; of the previous collective Black identity as chattel . 

The Blue Veins Society attaches an inherent sense of shame to slavery; the story reads “If there were one or two of the older members who had come up from… slavery, their history presented enough romantic circumstances to rob their servile origin of its grosser aspects” with the original intention of the Society being “to establish and maintain correct social standards among a people whose social condition presented almost unlimited room for improvement” (3, 1). The implication is that Black people who would not qualify for entering the Blue Veins Society (on account of being “too dark”) did not deserve “correct social standards”; despite the fact that darker African Americans were certainly “people whose social condition presented… unlimited room for improvement” (1). In itself, joining this society of “elites” would elevate and improve any person’s social condition, and yet, only people who were deemed “light enough”, and able to trace free people within their ancestry for a “safe” enough time, were deemed eligible to join. Essentially, Black people in the Blue Veins Society in “The Wife of His Youth” approached the racist wounds from American chattel slavery by forming a new colorist caste and collectively rejecting their Black identity, history, and other “black-er” people. 

As for Dunbar’s writing, only one of the poems we read is obviously placed during the Reconstruction Period, from the narrative: “Goin Back”. Thus, I’ll be analyzing the different way this poem broaches and interacts with the concept of slavery in this work, compared to “The Wife of His Youth”. 

We learn that the old Black man at the train station was a former slave through the lines “When fust the proclamation come / I felt too free to stay at home. / Freedom, it seemed, was a gift divine, / An’ I thought the whole wide world was mine”, inferring that the man had been freed during the Emancipation Proclamation (lines 19 to 22). He explains that he’s suffered hard labor for thirty years in a Northern town after travelling northwards to apply his new-found freedom, and became disillusioned with the popular but over-exaggerated promise of Northern meritocratic prosperity. (As seen in lines 31 to 32, “They said that things were better North, / An’ a man was held at his honest worth.”) Despite missing his hometown in the South, the old man became obligated not to leave for a new reason: “...money was skeerce, an’ time went on, / Till now full thirty years have gone”; he was now exploited under capitalism, and was not financially independent enough to afford the voyage home to Kentucky (lines 45 to 46). The physical effects of the hard labor the man worked is apparent in his description: he was “...aged and bent and frail. / His palsied hands like the aspen shook, / And a mute appeal was in his look; / His every move was pained and slow, / And his matted hair was white as snow”; all examples of how his 30 years of working in the North have taken a toll upon his body (lines 2 to 6). 

As he remained in the North, the old man grew to develop an extremely nostalgic memory of the South, describing “ol’ Kaintucky” as “the scene o’ my youth’s delights” (lines 48 to 50). The implication that the man considers the time and the land upon which he was enslaved as “the scene o’ my youth’s delights” feels both disturbing and inaccurate. Again and again, the old man describes the overwhelming joy he feels at returning to Kentucky, without an ounce of hesitancy about returning to the setting where he was once considered the property of a white person. His unconditional excitement implies that he has also experienced a form of denial– a selective memory of only the nostalgia of his youth and childhood, and the joy of first experiencing freedom. 

Thus, in both Chestnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Dunbar’s “Goin Back”, the two Black male protagonists reflect forms of denial about their experiences under slavery. Mr. Ryder, as a younger light-skinned Black man who was able to achieve wealth, education and status under the Reconstruction, rejects his previous identity under slavery by shunning it in favor of trying to garner validation by the greater White American elite society. Whereas, the unnamed Black man in “Goin Back” denies the reality of slavery’s oppression due to his long-term disillusion with the lack of financial opportunity and growth he was able to find in the North, and his growing nostalgia for the strength and happiness he associated with his initial discovery of freedom.

(https://kyforky.com/blogs/journal/kentucky-bluegrass-gets-you-high?srsltid=AfmBOorI5QhJ6bWDL5kGeR68JJ33JpBNsNnBBysSz38_wByL7XY2BacX)