When reading The Wife of his Youth, the moment I realized that Mr. Ryder was Liza's husband was when he stood up in the middle of his dinner party and told the story of his afternoon visitor. But I didn't know what he would do with that information until the last paragraph of the story. That is the point in the story when I learned something new about slavery; it was never too late for any of them. By the time Liza was freed, Mr. Ryder (Sam) had already begun his new life, but she didn't stop looking for him. She never gave up in the hopes that she could finally begin her life with him. In the Harper poem, in the last two stanzas, we find out that the speaker is sixty years old. When I first read the poem, the way it talked about beginning an education, I thought the speaker was much younger. It reminded me that, when the Civil War ended, African Americans of all ages were freed, and some of them were finally able to start their lives as free people when they were already in their later years.
Another point in the story that stood out to me was hen Mr. Ryder says, "we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black" (57). It showed that there was a heirarchy in society after the Civil War. It wasn't a utopia of free citizens. White people were still at the top, Black people were still at the bottom, and mulattos were not accepted by either group. In other words, mulattos were too white to be considered black and too black to be considered white. In this story they had their own separate society and it may have been frowned upon for Mr. Ryder to acknowledge Liza as his wife because she was a black woman born into slavery and she did not fit into their mulatto society.
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