Journal #10 The Aha! Moment

I had an "aha!" moment while reading Charles W. Chestnutt's "The Wife of His Youth." It is a story about a well-to-do Mulatto man, Mr. Ryder twenty-five years after the war who plans a party in order to win the love of a Mrs. Dixon, but the day of the party an older black woman comes to his door asking after the man she was married to during slavery. She shows him a picture of Sam Walker, the man she is searching for. Then he tells her he will let her know if he hears anything and she leaves. Mr. Ryder walks up to his room and looks in the mirror for a good while after this meeting. It was here that I first thought Mr. Ryder was Sam Walker. Why else would the author include him staring at himself in the mirror thoughtfully? It wasn't until he began to tell the story of the woman during the party that I knew for sure, I was pleasantly surprised at the end when he recognized her as his wife.

Chestnutt started out the story in a way that made it seem like Mr. Ryder was against marrying a black woman, that he saw white as the goal, especially when Mr. Ryder explains his personal philosophy, "I have no race prejudice," he would say, "but 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. The one doesn't want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step" (57). This made me doubt that Mr. Ryder would claim "The Wife of His Youth," plus I doubted that a man would want a woman once she is old and they obviously have so little in common from her speech to her profession as a cook.

Whenever I have an Aha! moment I think about learning to read, much like the poem by Frances Harper,  "Learning to Read." I of course was not prohibited from reading, I was encouraged and worked with, but in first grade I hadn't quite mastered it yet. Like the speaker in the poem, I thought I might be incapable, and for a 6 year old that is an extremely stressful experience. Anyway, then one day it just clicked for me, I could read, it was the first Aha! moment in my living memory, and one of the best.