esnutt'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
all