 During slavery, blacks were not given any sort of legal identity, and thus under the law did not qualify as human beings. This enabled white slave-owners to treat their slaves like they were property or a commodity, oftentimes treating them the same or even worse than animals.  In slave narratives, ex-slaves like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass meditated on the question of identity, once they had a legal identity after the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments were passed.  Reconstruction literature, like Charles Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear The Mask,” address the idea that blacks must wear a figurative mask in order to both protect themselves and advance within this new, developing society.

The Wife of His Youth  Mr. Ryder is considered a respected pillar of his community and is a member of the prestigious Blue Veins Society.  He claims to have “no race prejudice,” yet he still believes that people who are biracial have a harder struggle than those who aren’t because they are a mix between a race that does not want them and another that would gladly accept them, but “would for us be a backward step” (626).

The Wife of His Youth  For 20 years following the Civil War, Mr. Ryder effaced his slave identity to cultivate a new one, that of a cultured, educated, wealthy, light-skinned biracial man.  The irony that he was one of the conservative members of the Blue Veins Society makes sense at the close, because he was was attempting to protect the traditions of a society that he knew would have never accepted him if they knew who he truly was.  In the end, he decides to risk social criticism in order to preserve his moral character by acknowledging Liza Jane as the wife of his youth.

Wearing a Mask  Both Chesnutt and Dunbar address questions of identity, however Dunbar’s motivations are different than Chesnutt’s and he never truly removes his guise.  Douglass: it was a mistake to think slaves singing was a sign of happiness.  Dunbar: utilizes the image of a smiling mask that appears to show joy, that really hides true sadness and pain underneath.

Chesnutt and Dunbar’s Different Masks  Mr. Ryder and Dunbar’s narrator both use masks to create new identities for themselves.  Mr. Ryder hid behind a false identity, however he appears to attain some sort of peace, possibly because he knew he was an upright person and needed to do the right thing in acknowledging Liza.  In Dunbar’s poem there is no happy or peaceful ending.  The narrator appears to justify his mask in order to protect himself from the prying eyes of white people.

 Both Chesnutt and Dunbar address the problems facing those slaves who struggled with questions of their own identity following Emancipation.  Both Chesnutt and Dunbar deal with questions stemming from their slave heritage. Both narrators have to cultivate a façade in order to shield their true identities.  Mr. Ryder appears to do the right thing and acknowledge his wife, and so we think he would be happy knowing that he made the morally right decision. Dunbar’s poem somberly, and almost bitterly, writes : “We sing, but oh the clay is vile / Beneath our feet, and long the mile” ( ).  Both authors try to establish the necessity and importance for ex- slaves and other blacks in the Reconstruction era to continue to develop and cultivate their an evolving, African American identity.