The Wife of His Youth Summary

Mr. Ryder is a middle-aged, mixed-race man living in the Northern city of Groveland 25 years after the end of the American Civil War. He is one of the leading figures of the “Blue Veins” society, an association of mostly professional-class, light-skinned mixed-race people seeking social improvement. Mr. Ryder is one of the more conservative members, looking down on people with lower social statuses and darker skin and excluding them from membership in the society. He believes that mixed-race people should seek “upward absorption” into the white race. Mr. Ryder has decided to propose marriage to a woman, Molly Dixon, who is younger, lighter-skinned, and from a higher social status than him. He is planning a ball for members of the Blue Veins society as an occasion to propose to her.

But on the day that the ball is scheduled to take place, Mr. Ryder has a chance encounter that causes a life crisis for him: a middle-aged Black woman, Eliza Jane, visits his house and tells him that she is looking for her husband, a mixed-race man named Sam Taylor. She tells him the story of their marriage and how they were separated. Sam was free-born, but he was an orphan and was apprenticed to work on the same plantation where Eliza Jane was enslaved. They married, although marriages made in slavery had no legal status.

One day, Eliza Jane overheard a conversation that revealed the plantation owner, Bob Smith’s, plans to sell Sam into slavery, and she warned Sam, allowing him to escape. He promised that he would return someday to free her. However, Smith discovered that Eliza Jane warned Sam, and in retaliation, he sold her away. After the Civil War, she returned to the plantation to see if she could find out where Sam was now, but she couldn’t get any information about him, so she started to search everywhere for him, first in the South and then in the North. She has spent the last 25 years looking for Sam, certain that she will find him and that he will love her just as before.

After Eliza Jane tells her story, Mr. Ryder asks to see a photograph of her husband, and she shows it to him. He tells her that he will give the matter some consideration and asks for her address so he can inform her if he finds out anything about her husband. Then, he goes into his house and stares at his reflection in the mirror.

At the Blue Veins ball that night, Mr. Ryder gives a speech in which he recounts Eliza Jane’s story to the attendees. Then, he asks them to imagine the following scenario: that a husband, soon after escaping being sold into slavery, had discovered his wife had been sold and unsuccessfully tried to find her. Then, the husband made his way to the North to improve his standing, and eventually he became a much more educated and respectable man, putting his humble past far behind him. Finally, he asks the audience to imagine that the man’s former wife, who has been searching for him all these years, encountered him by chance, right before he was about to marry another woman. But the wife did not recognize him. The man could either choose not to acknowledge her, and continue his life as before, or he could acknowledge her and reunite with her, giving up his planned marriage to another woman.

Mr. Ryder asks the audience which option this man should have chosen. The audience members realize that Mr. Ryder is, in fact, referring to his own situation—that he is Sam Taylor, the husband that Eliza Jane has been searching for all this time. Molly Dixon is the first to say that the man should’ve acknowledged his former wife, and the rest of the guests agree. Mr. Ryder says that this is the response he was expecting, and he leads Eliza Jane into the room, announcing that she is “the wife of [his] youth.”