The Wife Of His Youth

“The Wife of His Youth” reflects the influence of realism in American writing of late nineteenth century, and it is one example of Chesnutt’s many efforts to grapple with race issues through a realist short story. While the story’s grounding is in the history of slavery in the American South and the realities of a nascent black middle class in the American North during Reconstruction, the story also includes countervailing tendencies toward sentimentality. The realist elements of the story are apparent in Chesnutt’s careful attention to the lives of Liza Jane and Sam during slavery, the sharply ironic but accurate portrayal of colorism among upwardly mobile mixed-race people during Reconstruction, and his use of dialect.

The decision of the master to sell Sam despite Sam’s being an apprentice is a historically accurate representation of the vulnerable legal status of freeborn African Americans in both the slaveholding South and ostensibly free Northern states that also controlled their free black populations with harsh black codes. Families comprising people with various legal statuses—freeborn, slave, manumitted—are also accurately rendered. Finally, the devastating impact of slavery and its aftermath on black families is well-documented, so contemporaneous readers of the story would have found nothing far-fetched about Liza Jane’s tale of separation and long efforts to reunite with her husband.