Mixed Race Studies

Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission

The Modern American
Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
Article 8
pages 22-23

Lydia Edwards

It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told Jon Velie her story about how her 13 year old son was denied clothing benefits because he is black. “It hit me as obviously wrong. So I naively took the case on a contingency basis not knowing there would be no real payment. I naively thought I could inform the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the tribe they missed this.” What Jon really stepped into was something like the uphill civil rights battles of the 1960s. “It was straight up racism in conversations with the involved parties including the tribe and BIA; the ‘N word’ was thrown all around.” For his entire legal career, Jon Velie has sought to bring justice to Ms. Davis and other black Seminoles as well as black Cherokees.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Jon Velie graduated from University of Oklahoma Law School in 1993. As an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley he was a Native American studies major. During law school he was a research assistant for Rennard Stickland, a renown Indian Law scholar who is now Dean of Oregon Law School. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Jon had already developed an affinity for Native American issues. As a child he grew up in the Absentee Shawnee tribal community. Many of his friends were from the tribe and he was exposed to sacred activities otherwise unseen by outsiders. His father, Alan Velie, taught the first course in contemporary Indian studies.

Alan Velie was a Shakespearean professor at the Oklahoma University in the 1970s in the midst of the American Indian rights movement when he was approached by Native American students and agreed to teach a course on American Indian literature. At the time, all the courses taught about Native Americans were concentrated on the past and more in the anthropological sense. He now travels the world talking about Native American literature and has written seven books on the subject.

WHO ARE THE BLACK INDIANS?

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek) have had long traditions of African membership and enslavement. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had a form of African slavery that closely mirrored that of Southern white plantation owners. The Seminole tribe, however, has had a unique relationship with its African members. The Seminole tribe and its African members (commonly referred to as Freedmen Freedmen) have coexisted together since the 16th Century. Many slaves of white plantation owners ran away to live with the Seminole tribe. Both Seminole Wars were fought over the number of runaway slaves who lived with the tribe. African members could intermarry and take on positions of leadership. Many served as translators between the Spanish, the tribe, and southern white plantation owners.

During the Civil War, the Five Civilized Tribes fought with the Confederacy against the Union. After the war, all of the tribes signed treaties with the United States government in order to maintain their sovereignty and reinstitute an autonomous government. In all of their treaties, there were clauses ordering the tribes to free their slaves and treat them and their descendants equally. Over the years, Congress and the courts have enforced the treaties to assure equal rights for the black Indians. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress set up the Dawes Commission to record all the members of respective Indian Tribes. Their records are called the Dawes Rolls. The commission recorded black Indians on separate rolls for all of the tribes. Cherokees and Seminoles that were ¾ white were recorded on a “full blood” list while their black members were enrolled on the Freedmen list. The quantity of Indian blood of each black Indian was not recorded by the Dawes Commission…

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Catholic records of slave baptisms in colonial New Orleans go online

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2011-02-01

Bruce Nolan, Beat Reporter

On Sunday, the 6th of May, 1798, an enslaved New Orleans woman named only Manon, owned by Mr. LeBlanc, presented her 2-year-old child, Antoine Joseph, at St. Louis Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas to be baptized at the hands of Father Luis Quintanilla, a Capuchin friar there.

Manon was probably accompanied by her owner, as was the custom of the day, according to Emilie Leumas, an expert on the era and the keeper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ sacramental records.

In racially complex, laissez-faire New Orleans, where categories of race were faithfully noted then sometimes dismissed, Quintanilla noted the pertinent details. Manon was a mulatto, or mixed-race woman, and the baby’s father was officially unrecognized but apparently white, as the baby is described with the Spanish term “quarteroon,” which means three-fourths white.

The record of that event has always been preserved in the rich archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But it has never been easily accessible.

But Tuesday, the 1798 baptism of Antoine Joseph, with thousands of similar baptismal records from colonial New Orleans, were posted on the Internet as a new tool for genealogists everywhere.

“Now people can sit in their slippers at 11 o’clock at night and read away,” said Leumas, the archdiocese’s archivist…

..In Antoine Joseph’s case, the godparents were there: Marie Joseph and Antonio, neither with a family name. Still attentive to the complex categories of race and color, Quintanilla noted that the baby’s godfather was “metis”—another mixed-race classification, perhaps suggesting American Indian blood, according to Leumas.

By the end of 2012, the archdiocese hopes to go both forward and backward in time, posting all of its sacramental records—baptisms, marriages, funerals and other life cycle events—from the founding of the city in 1718 to the date of Louisiana’s admittance to the union in 1812, Leumas said…

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Exploring Prejudice, Miscegenation, and Slavery’s Consequences in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 3 (2011)
5 pages

Steven Watson
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

This research paper analyzes Mark Twain’s use of racist speech and racial stereotypes in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. Twain has often been criticized for his seemingly inflammatory language. However, a close reading of the text, supplemented by research in several anthologies of critical essays, reveals that Twain was actually interested in social justice. This is evident in his portrayal of Roxana as a sympathetic character who is victimized by white racist society in Dawson’s Landing, Mississippi during the time of slavery. In the final analysis, Twain’s writing was a product of the time period during which he wrote. This knowledge helps students understand the reasons behind Twain’s word choices, characterization, and portrayal of race.

In his novel Puddn’head Wilson, Mark Twain uses racist speech and ideology to examine slavery’s consequences and make a plea for the elevation of the black race. Roxana, the true protagonist and an obviously sympathetic character, appears to be a white supremacist. This is a logical contradiction. It is one of many contradictions that lend the book its complexity and make it challenging to interpret. Roxana has a dual nature in more ways than one. She is smart yet always loses. She is committed to her own survival while being filled with self-loathing. She is free and relishes her freedom, yet can be bought and sold at any time.

The basic plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson involves Roxana, a house slave of Percy Driscoll living in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. She gives birth to a child on the same day that Driscoll’s wife does. Fearing her child will be sold down the river, Roxana switches the two babies in their cribs so that her son will be raised as Driscoll’s son and heir. She is able to do this because both she and her son are of mixed race and can pass for white (Twain 15). When the children become adults, one is accused of murder. Only the title character, a disgraced young lawyer, is able to sort out the identities and identify the murderer…

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“Cuffy,” “Fancy Maids,” and “One-Eyed Men”:  Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States

The American Historical Review
Volume 106, Number 5 (Decenber 2001)
pages 1619-1650 (55 paragraphs)

Edward E. Baptist, Associate Professor of History
Cornell University

In January 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote from New Orleans to his Richmond partner and slave buyer, Rice Ballard: “The fancy girl, from Charlattsvilla [Charlottesville], will you send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her. Say quick, I wanted to see her . . . I thought that an old Robber might be satisfied with two or three maids.” Franklin implied that his partner was holding the young woman, one of many “fancy maids” handled by the firm of Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard, for his own sexual use. Unwilling, the jest implied, to share his enslaved sex objects, Ballard was keeping the desirable Charlottesville maid in Richmond instead of passing her on to his partners so that they might take their turn of pleasure. The joke, and the desire it did not seek to disguise, was business as usual. In this case, the business was a slave-trading partnership, and systematic rape and sexual abuse of slave women were part of the normal practice of the men who ran the firm—and the normal practice of many of their planter customers as well. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard supplied field hands and carpenters to the raw new plantations of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the 1830s, but they also supplied planters with many a “fancy maid.” In fact, the letter quoted went on to suggest, tongue in cheek, that such women were in such heavy demand that the firm might do better selling coerced sex retail rather than wholesale. Referring to two enslaved women, Franklin mused self-indulgently on the conversion of female labor into slavers’ money: “The old Lady and Susan could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house.” Yet what did Franklin indulge most? Was sexual or monetary greed the trump suit in his own decision-making? Perhaps, he continued, in the vein of aggressive sexual banter that pervades the traders’ letters, the partners would rather see the house “located and established at your place, Alexandria, or Baltimore for the Exclusive benefit of the consern&[its] agents.”

Franklin and his colleagues passionately wanted “mulatto” women, and black people generally: as bodies to rape and bodies to sell. If these men were more than mere exceptions in the society in which they lived—and I shall argue that they illustrate that society’s half-denied and half-remembered assumptions about commerce and rape—then the stakes of explaining their desires are high. What sort of society did slaveowning white men create in the antebellum U.S. South? What sorts of ideas and psychological forces cemented their devotion to the supposedly pre-modern institution of racial slavery to a deep involvement in the rapid commercial expansion that reached a peak during the 1830s?

The present essay seeks to explain the ideas about slavery, rape, and commerce embedded in and produced by the passionate desires of Franklin and his partners. For some years, historians interpreting the institutions and ideology of nineteenth-century southern slavery have focused their attentions on explaining slaveholders’ paternalist defenses of their planter institution. Like some of their sources, such histories have often explicitly or implicitly portrayed the domestic slave trade as a contradiction within an otherwise stable system. Recent works have returned the issue of that trade to the forefront, arguing that the commerce in human beings was an inescapable and essential feature of the region’s pre–Civil War society and culture. In the drop of water that is the correspondence between Franklin, Ballard, and their associates, one might perceive a need to push historians’ revisions of the slave South’s whole world further still. Indeed, these men reveal themselves as being so devoted to their picture of the slave trade as a fetishized commodification of human beings that we may need to insist on such a mystification as one of the necessary bases of the economic expansion of the pre–Civil War South. They also assert, especially through their frequent discussions of the rape of light-skinned enslaved women, or “fancy maids,” their own relentlessly sexualized vision of the trade. Finally, the traders insist in accidental testimony that sexual fetishes and commodity fetishism intertwined with such intimacy that coerced sex was the secret meaning of the commerce in human beings, while commodification swelled its actors with the power of rape. Such complexities lead one to wonder if historians might do well to reinterpret the antebellum South—a society in which the slave trade was a motor of rapid geographical and economic expansion—as a complex of inseparable fetishisms…

…The white world’s obsession with black female sexuality began, of course, long before the U.S. domestic slave trade, or even the United States itself. From the beginning of the European-African encounter, attempts to claim that black female bodies were disgusting because they did not obey European gender roles rang hollow. During the seventeenth-century rise of the plantation complex, black women became by law the sexual prey of all white men. Later, would-be patriarchs of the eighteenth century, such as Virginia’s William Byrd II, attempted to exert sexual control over black women as part of wider projects of household and self-dominion. By the nineteenth century, the belief that black women were inherently sexually aggressive, in contrast to allegedly chaste white females, increased their attractiveness to white men, even as white men publicly proclaimed their disgust with African-American women and their love for the pure and passive belle. Many encounters, rather than a single Freudian trauma of infantile sexuality, shaped the complex obsession with black women. Then the rejected black female body returned in the fixation on the fancy maid.

The rise of the domestic slave trade after 1790, as new lands opened up in the South and new demands for plantation produce—namely, cotton—arose in the Atlantic world, created a particular commercialized category of enslaved women that focused white fixations. Within the trade, light-skinned or mulatto “fancy maids” became to many white men the perfect symbols of slavery’s history, while also ensuring that being “a smooth hand with Cuff” helped make one a “one-eyed man.” To men such as the slave traders discussed here, women like the Charlottesville maid evoked a process of power and pleasure, remembered and forgotten in an ambiguous, simultaneous experience parallel to that which characterized the traders’ commodity-fetish relationship to “Cuffy.” Indeed, coercion, the trade, and the pairing of sexual imagery with women of mixed African and European ancestry were always close companions. Northern and British visitors to pre–Civil War New Orleans rarely failed to write about “yellow” women, “fancy maids,” and nearly white octoroons sold as both house servants and sexual companions in the slave trade. Some observers claimed to have knowledge of special auctions at which young, attractive, usually light-skinned women were sold at rates four to five times the price of equivalent female field laborers. Travelers and other writers constantly returned to the simultaneously offensive and exciting sight of coerced interracial sex, especially between white men and light-skinned “fancy” women…

…Yet the specific white focus on “fancy” or obviously mixed-race women relentlessly returns us to the place of history, especially its memory and its understanding, as the remembering that was present in the traders’ sexual fetishes. The exploitation of enslaved women of African and mixed African-European backgrounds was a part of plantation society long before the ideology of sentimental feminine domesticity could have ever unleashed male anxieties. And the same exploitation undoubtedly contributed, in ways not yet sufficiently investigated by cultural historians, to the ideal of the independent master. The traders’ own words remind us that “land pirates” believed that they became “one-eyed men” through the rape of women who symbolized the past, present, and future of slaveowning men. This becoming was a not-so-secret history that mixed anxiety and pleasure, attraction and control. Fancy maids, more than other enslaved women, embodied a history of rape in the pre-emancipation nineteenth-century South, one that reveals white anxieties about dependence on blacks but that allowed white men to assert and reassert their power and control.

People of mixed racial heritage, or “mulattoes,” symbolized the dependence of white men on black labor, both in the field and in the bed. Marked by their very skin color and other features as products of the white-black encounter in the South, mulatto women were obviously white and not-white, like “our white Caroline.” They were products of the long encounter between white exploiters of labor and black sources of labor, productive and reproductive. Their commodification reminded all that, in the South, every child of an enslaved mother was some form of slave laborer, an arrangement that enabled plantation slavery to function. Every enslaved man, woman, and child was a repository of reproductive capital and a source of production. The white political economy of the South would have collapsed without the legal and cultural fictions that assigned the “mulatto” and other children of African women to the created categories “black” and “enslaved.” Women like the “fair maid Martha,” and “the Yellow Girl Charlott” also, in their phenotypes, illustrated the long past of white sexual assault. “Mulatto” women thus embodied white dependency and white power, and offered men the chance to recapitulate and reexamine the past that had produced both white power and mixed-race individuals. Unwillingly, such women introduced a pornographic history, one obscene yet for that very reason more lusted-after, into the parlors, bedrooms, and above all, the markets of the elite white man’s world. They made flesh the years of white men desiring and depending on women (and men) who were supposedly less than civilized, Christian, or even human.

If the presence of “mulattoes” poorly concealed dependence, in both the past and present, on black labor, the presence of fancy maids allowed white men to remember and reassert a sort of control over both past and present. The history of rape, obvious to all, though openly spoken by few, was the remembered meaning of the fetish of the “fancy maid” in the white male mind. Assaults repeated and thus confirmed a history that had produced white men who bought and sold black women and men, and had made mulattoes as well. The historic penis, the one-eyed man, of earlier generations had in fact fathered the fancy maid—creating in the flesh a symbol of the history of coerced sexuality to which white men like the slave traders could return to at will. Like the Freudian fetishisms that do not produce neuroses, this symbolic relationship was the sexualized prose of the slave traders’ world. It worked for them…

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‘all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes.’: Towards a Thick Description of ‘Slave Religion’

The American Religious Experience
1999

Patrick Neal Minges

The time was in the late 1760’s and the place was Charleston, S.C. A young musician was on his way to a performance with his french horn tucked under his arm. As he passed by a large meetinghouse, he heard much commotion on account of a “crazy man was halloing there.” He might have ignored the event but his companion dared him to “blow the french horn among them” and disrupt the meeting. Thinking they might have some fun, John Marrant and his companion entered the meeting hall with the intent of mischief. As he lifted his horn to his lips, the crazy man — evangelist George Whitefield — cast an eye upon him, pointed his finger at John Marrant and uttered these words: “Prepare to Meet Thy God, O Israel!” Marrant was struck dead for some thirty minutes and when he was awakened, Reverend Whitefield declared “Jesus Christ has got thee at last.” After several days of ministrations by Reverend Whitefield, the Lord set John Marrant’s soul at liberty and he dedicated his life to the propagation of the gospel.

Marrant first witnessed to members of his family and when they rejected his newfound evangelical spirit, he fled to the wilderness where he sought solace among the beasts of the woods. Marrant was not afraid for God hade made the beasts “friendly to me.” When Marrant happened upon a Cherokee deer hunter, they spent ten weeks together killing deer by day and preparing brush arbors by night to provide sanctuary for themselves in the wilderness. Becoming fast friends by the end of the hunting season, the Cherokee deer hunter and the African American missionary returned to the hunter’s village where they would continue their cultural exchange. However, when he attempted to pass the outer guard at the Cherokee village, the Cherokees were less than excited with Marrant and he was detained and placed in prison. It was not that Marrant was a black man that troubled the Cherokee, the peoples of the Southeastern United States had relations with Africans that stretched back perhaps as far as a thousand years. It was just that ever since black people had started showing up with their friends, the white people, that things had started going particularly bad for the Indians of the Southeastern United States.

It seems that as soon as Europeans showed up on the coasts of the United States, they started reading from a formal document called the Requierimento that declared themselves to be Christians and by nature superior to the uncivilized heathens that they encountered. The indigenous people were then informed by the Requierimento that if they accepted Christianity they would become the Christian’s slaves in exchange for the gift of salvation; if they did not accept the gospel of Christianity, they would still become slaves but that their plight would be much worse.⁷ Everywhere that explorers such as Ponce De Leon, Vazquez De Ayllon, and Hernando De Soto went on their “explorations” throughout the American Southeast, they carried with them bloodhounds, chains, and iron collars for the acquisition and exportation of Indian slaves. A Cherokee from Oklahoma remembered his father’s tale of the Spanish slave trade, “At an early state the Spanish engaged in the slave trade on this continent and in so doing kidnapped hundreds of thousands of the Indians from the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to work their mines in the West Indies…

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The “ethnology” of Josiah Clark Nott

Journal of Urban Health
Volume 50, Number 4 (April 1974)
pages 509–528.

C. Loring Brace, Ph.D.
Museum of Anthropology
University of Michigan

It is only rarely that a person so completely transcends the ethos of his age that the recorded results of his scientific endeavors can be read a century or more later with any real profit, and apart from the desire to gain some historical perspective on the time in question. Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, among others, can still be read with instruction, not so much for their conclusions, but for the methods by which these were reached. This is because the conclusions, while now taken for granted, are no more intuitively obvious today than when they were first advanced.

Except for the rare transcending genius, the best minds of an age tend to typify the thinking of the time rather than to advance it. It is no surprise, then, to discover that the ablest figures in the American South prior to the Civil War, including Josiah Clark Nott, were unanimous in the defense of their “peculiar institution,” slavery. Although educated Southerners were unanimous in their defense of slavery, they diverged widely in their justification for doing so. As the 19th century progressed, two camps emerged which were engaged in vigorous, prolonged, and often acerbic debate at the time the Civil War broke out. Both sides took it as self-evident that Negroes were inferior and slavery justified, but they differed in their attempts to explain how racial differences arose in the first place.

The issue, at bottom, involved the relation between scientific and historical reality, and the written accounts in the Protestant Bible. On the one side it was argued that the words in the Bible were inspired by God and must therefore be literally true-all men, black and white, slave and free, were the descendants of Adam and Eve. On the other, the argument suggested that the inspiration in Holy Writ was largely moral and that the geographic and scientific information reflected the human fallibility and ignorance of the human authors. Neither side questioned the rectitude of a world view dominated by Protestant Christianity; both declared that, by definition, the basic teachings of science and religion must be in agreement. However, since there were apparent discrepancies between the views of the two realms, disputes arose over which should bend to accommodate the other…

…On August 12, 1845, Nott wrote to his friend John Henry Hammond, governor of South Carolina, that “the negro question was the one that I wished to bring out and embalmed it in Egyptian ethnography, etc., to excite a little more interest.”‘ He was referring specifically to his second published foray into the realm of “anthropology,” which had appeared just the year before and which set the tone and the dimensions of everything he was to write in an anthropological vein for the next 20 years. Once started, his involvement snowballed. As he wrote Hammond in a subsequent letter, September 4, 1845, “the nigger business has brought me into a large and heterogeneous correspondence,” and he declared his intention “to follow out the Negro, moral and physical in all his ramifications.”

Nott’s first anthropological contribution, entitled “The Mulatto a Hybrid-Probable Extermination of the Two Races If the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” was published in i843 in the highly respectable American Journal of the Medical Sciences.’ In this article, Nott became the first American public figure to declare that whites and blacks belonged to separate species of the genus Homo. As he stated, “this I do believe, that at the present day the Anglo-Saxon and Negro races are, according to common acceptation of the terms, distinct species, and that the offspring of the two is a Hybrid” (italics Nott’s) . To support this conclusion he reprinted figures from a paper that had appeared the year before in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, written by an anonymous author who signed himself Philanthropist.

The figures purported to show that the life spans of mulattoes are the shortest of any kind of human population, indicating that in the long run they were destined for eventual extinction. While it was not so acknowledged, the data on which these conclusions were based originally came from the census of  1840, which was filled with unverifiable claims and gross errors and slanted in a blatantly proslavery manner. Nott could hardly have been ignorant of the problems associated with the data of the census since these had been exposed in the very same Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, but he used them anyway without apology or qualification. In this instance, as in many others in his “anthropological” career, it is clear that the lip-service he gave to science was mainly camouflage to cover the racist advocacy that lay beneath.

Despite the weakness in his case, Nott’s hybridity argument drew favorable notice from Morton and helped enlist the latter in the ensuing debate. The ostensible issue was the criterion for the establishment of valid species. If members of different populations either could not crossbreed or, having done so, could only produce offspring that were sterile or of reduced viability and fertility, then the populations could be considered as different biological species. All agreed that the failure to crossbreed or the production of sterile offspring-the mule, for example-indicated a valid specific difference. The argument concerned the evidence for cases of reduced viability and fertility. In Mobile, Ala., Nott lacked the library resources as well as the time and inclination to pursue the matter beyond its initial stages. Morton, however, had the inclination; he also had the collections of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He had just completed the second of his two principal contributions to anthropological research, his Crania Aegyptiaca, in which he had demonstrated that the physical characteristics of Caucasian and Negro populations were just as distinct in ancient Egypt as they are today. With the dates of Egyptian antiquity established by the follow-up of Champollion’s translation of the Rosetta stone, and with a concept of the antiquity of human existence assumed to be on the order of those appended to the English Bible by Archbishop Ussher, Morton felt that human racial distinctions must have existed “in the beginning. Realizing that such an opinion was likely to stir up controversy, Morton was diffident about advancing it, but he finally did so with qualified caution in his defence and expansion of Nott’s hybridity position…

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AMST 294-03  Mixed Race America: Identity, Culture, and Politics

Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Spring 2012

SooJin Pate

This course is an introduction to the animating debates, themes, and issues in Critical Mixed Race Studies. Utilizing critical race theory and postcolonial analysis, we will examine the identities and experiences of multiracial or mixed race people, as well as the ways in which they have played a fundamental role in constructing race and shaping race relations, politics, and culture in the U.S. Topics in this course address the following: conquest and slavery, miscegenation laws, debates about the U.S. Census categories, U.S. militarism, representations of “mixed” people in the media, cultural expressions of “mixed” Americans, transracial adoption, queering mixed race studies, and the Mixed Race/Multiracial Movement.

“Freedom By A Judgment”: The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family

Law and History Review
Volume 30, Issue 1 (February 2012)
pages 173-203
DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000642

Honor Sachs, Assistant Professor of History
Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina

Forum: Ab Initio: Law in Early America

On May 2, 1771, John Hardaway of Dinwiddie County, Virginia posted a notice in the Virginia Gazette about a runaway slave. The notice was ordinary, blending in with the many advertisements for escaped slaves, servants, wives, and horses that filled the classified section of the Gazette in the eighteenth century. Like countless other advertisements posted in newspapers wherever slaves were held, Hardaway’s advertisement read: “Run away from the subscriber, a dark mulatto man slave named Bob Colemand, 25 years old, tall, slim, and well made, wears his own hair pretty long, his foretop combed very high, a blacksmith by trade, claimed his freedom under pretense of being of an Indian extraction.”

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The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans: Images of pale mixed-race slaves used to drum up sympathy among wealthy donors in 1860s

Daily Mail
2012-02-28

When eight former slaves aimed to drum up support for struggling African-American schools in the 1860s, they believed they had just the thing.

In order to garner sympathy – and funds – from rich northerners as they toured the country, organisers from New Orleans portrayed the slaves as white for a propaganda campaign, using four children with mixed-race ancestry and pale complexions.

They believed the white faces of Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs and Augusta Broujey would encourage donors to sympathise with the plight of recently-emancipated slaves and give more generously…

…They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county…

Read the entire article and view 11 other photographs here.

Pruning the Family Tree

Vassar: The Alumnae/i Quarterly
Volume 99, Issue 3 (Summer 2003)
Online Additions
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York

Virginia Edwards Castro ’64
Blanco, Texas

When I was in grade school my family subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post. There was a cover I will never forget. It was an illustrated family tree, with pirates, dandies, Yankees, confederates, Indians, Puritans, cowboys, dance hall floozies and a Spanish lady with a comb and a mantilla. At the top, like a shining star, was a little redheaded, freckle-faced, blue-eyed all-American boy. The cover wasn’t big enough to include everyone. For example, I don’t recall any kilted men playing bagpipes or Germans in lederhosen. And had there been room, not even Norman Rockwell would have dared to include African slaves.

In the fifties, my family had not yet acquired a television, which they considered a health hazard and a waste of time and money, so I amused myself by playing board games, making scrapbooks, reading books, and my favorite activity-Sunday snooping. I spent weekends at my grandparents’ home, which had five bedrooms, four servants’ rooms, a study, a den, storage rooms, a billiards room, a ballroom, a pantry, the breakfast room, the dining room, the living room, the parlor, the coal room and the laundry room. The dining room had a huge buffet containing secret compartments. My grandmother’s dressing room contained an iron safe built into the wall, worthy of a country bank. My grandfather’s bedroom had a jewelry safe behind an oil painting of a landscape. And the huge buffet in the dining room had several secret compartments. I knew where every key hung and every combination.

The large entry hall with a grand piano ended in a staircase that divided on the landing before it continued upstairs on either side. The walls were covered with family portraits, as were the walls of the ballroom on the third floor. I memorized the identities of all our relatives, living and dead. The library contained volumes of family trees to go with them. The Poages were of Scotch-Irish origin. They were said to go back to the 1300’s to “a mighty Gael named Thorl who slew a would-be assassin of the king”. He was knighted Earl of the Poage, which was variously interpreted as “poke” referring to the blow he dealt, or also “poke”, referring to the kiss bestowed on him by a grateful king. The list of descendents went all the way to my mother, I recall. Their coat-of-arms on the wall featured two wild boars rampant, with the motto “Fortuna Favet Fortibus” (fortune favors the brave.)

A Poage married a Starke, a descendent of General Starke who fought in the Revolution. His portrait was said to hang in the White House. (If it did, it must be in the basement, a victim of remodeling.) My great grandfather was named Return Jefferson Starke, if that is any indication of what side the Starkes were in the Civil War. I remember coming across a portrait of one of the two families in a confederate uniform with a notation of membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, even at my young age my awareness of the meaning of this activated the censor in my mind, and I can’t recall the details. It was this same censorship in reverse which suppressed all memories of other races in our family.

I always suspected something was missing, although at first-to use a well-worn but appropriate metaphor-I barked up the wrong tree. First, there was the portrait of what appeared to be an Italian noblewoman in the place of honor over the mantel in the library. Since my mother and her father both looked Italian, we assumed this was our ancestor. However, my grandmother finally confessed that, lacking a suitable portrait, she had purchased this one at an art auction, when an art curator attending a party at their home correctly identified it as the portrait of a famous Italian courtesan. (After some lengthy family debate, it stayed there, as a work of art.)

Rummaging through the forbidden recesses of my grandfather’s roll top desk, I found references to his mother’s family, the Tongs. I then assumed we had Chinese ancestry until I learned that Tong, variously spelled Tonge and Tongue, was an old English name. There was a letter from my great aunt Flora claiming that she descended from French Huguenots who changed their name from d’Estaing to De Tongue when they moved to England. Whether this is true or not, there are documents and books that show we descended from a William Tongue who fought in the Revolution. In his late seventies he was forced to ride all the way from Missouri to Washington D.C. to see why he was not receiving his pension. I learned that the Tongues, who later shortened their surname to Tong, were on the union side. Another letter from my great aunt Flora stated that grandfather William, in his blue velvet suit with white ruffled collar, cried at the fact that brothers would fight brothers and cousins, against cousins.

My father’s name was Joseph Castro Edwards. Most of my life I was considered to have Hispanic roots-particularly by those aware of the Spanish tradition of the second name being the father’s surname and the last in sequence being the mother’s. Instead, I found out my father was named after Dr. Jose Gabino Castro (by my grandfather, unaware of the aforementioned tradition) in honor of a Filipino doctor who saved my grandfather’s life when he was a prisoner in the jungle for eight months during the Spanish-American war in the Philippines. As my grandfather later told me, the opposing general sent a messenger with the order to “let the enemy soldier die, by the order of the highest authority.” The doctor humbly explained he had to obey even higher orders to save a human life. When asked who might be the higher authority, he replied, “Almighty God.” (Fortunately, the general was a religious man, or I wouldn’t be writing this.)…

…We found a tiny town with antiques so old they were worthy of New England. I asked a man in the antique store if he had ever heard of the Bedell family. “Of course,” he replied. “If you want to know about them, go next door to the president of the local historical society.” From there, things progressed rapidly. We found her unloading bags of groceries. “You will be pleased to know that we just had a ceremony honoring your family at the old cemetery held by Sons of the Revolution.” She put down a bag. “You may not be so pleased to know something else about your family.” She looked at me carefully. I hoped we were not part of the James gang. Maybe it was Wild Bill Hickock, lived there for a while and shot some poor, unsuspecting soul. I waited. “Your family was mixed race.” I released a small sigh of relief. “I know, my father already told me he was part Cherokee. “ Surprised, she replied, “I don’t know about the Cherokee, but your great great grandmother was a slave.” That, indeed, hit home…

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