Mixed Race Studies

Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

Time Magazine
2009-09-15

Alexis Okeowo

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it—and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration.

Read the entire article here.

Base Wretches and Black Wenches: A Story of Sex and Race, Violence and Compassion, During Slavery

Alabama Law Review
Volume 59 (2008)
pages 1501-1555

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

This Article examines in detail the local and trial records of a nineteenth-century Texas case to tell the story of a white slave master who had a thirty-year relationship with a female slave. This is a story of complexities and contradictions, and it is a story designed to add depth and detail to our current assumptions about the content of sex between the races during slavery times. Indeed, through these local records—a source traditionally underused by legal historians—the Article provides us with a pathway into the consciousness of ordinary people, and suggests a world with much more flexibility and fluidity along the lines of race and slavery than traditional accounts allow. The amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery will surprise no one; but, to hear the former slaves who lived on this plantation talk about it, this couple, at least, lived together as man and wife. It is this story—the story of the everyday life of slavery—that this Article seeks to tell, illuminating in the process a social order that was predicated on racial domination yet where men and women, white and black, often defied those ideologies. Ultimately, this Article concludes that the master narrative of rape so familiar to students of the subject is inadequate to account for a case like this, and urges us instead to focus on the fissures and blind spots created in the logic of slavery to further our understanding of the South and the relations between the races.

Introduction

In 1861, with the country in the midst of the Civil War, John C. Clark died at his home in Wharton County, Texas. He left a large estate, consisting of lands, slaves, and personal assets, valued at almost a half a million dollars. Ten years later, his three adult children filed suit to maintain what, they claimed, rightfully belonged to them. Their only problem: they were—under the law—black, and John Clark had been white.

What ensued was a lengthy trial, consisting of dozens of witnesses testifying about John Clark, his life, his holdings, and his relationship with a “dark mulatto” woman named Sobrina, Clark’s long-time slave and the mother of the three plaintiffs. For Clark died without a will, and since no heirs came forward in the immediate aftermath of his death, the local court ordered his property sold, and then had the proceeds deposited in the public trust. But with that much money at stake, it did not take long for forgotten relatives from as far away as Virginia to descend on the small community, many claiming that they were entitled to the vast estate despite never having met the man whom they now so eagerly embraced. But for the jury listening to testimony in the case of Clark v. Honey these other filings were of little importance. For them, the question of whether the three persons before them were entitled to take under the laws of intestacy was deceptively simple: were they John Clark’s legitimate children, or, stated differently, were John and Sobrina husband and wife?

The ensuing trial and its aftermath, however, proved to be far more complicated than anyone on that mild December day likely could have anticipated. Indeed, the question of whether Clark’s children were entitled to inherit his property took years to resolve—the case and its offshoots occupied the courts for the next several decades—and the issues it raised remain problematic for scholars interested in questions of race and slavery even today. No one doubted then and no one doubts now that white men were involved sexually with their female slaves. But the question of whether terms like “caring,” “devotion,” and “love” can be used to describe these relations remains controversial. Twenty years ago, in her landmark study, Deborah Gray White turned contemporary analysis of the sexual aspects of slavery on its head when she looked at the subject from the perspective of black women, not white men. Since that time, there has been an impressive outpouring of scholarship, reminding us that there was nothing romantic about planters taking advantage of their slave women. Sex in these circumstances was about power: it was brutal, it was ugly, and it was rape.

But to hear John Clark’s former slaves talk about the couple that occupied the small rustic cabin on the banks of the Colorado River, their relationship, at least, was anything but violent. “Clark and Sobrina lived together as man and wife until their deaths,” said one witness.10 Another agreed: “Sobrina had no other husband and Clark no other wife.” Such testimony throws the master narrative of rape into flux, suggesting the need to reexamine the broad generalizations about the nature of these relationships and the people involved. It is unlikely, in this case or in most others, that the relationship ever evolved into an entirely consensual one—Sobrina, after all, remained Clark’s slave until his death, inevitably tilting the relationship toward power and dominance. But if we listen to Clark’s former slaves—witnesses who arguably knew best—the relationship consisted of something more. How much more is the question, and it is the same question that a jury of twelve men were asked to answer in December of 1871, two years after Sobrina, now free, had passed away.

This Article, through the close examination of John Clark’s relationship with Sobrina, seeks to broaden our understanding of sex between the races by focusing on a case that seems both unusual yet strangely emblematic of the South in the years before the Civil War. This is a story of complexities and contradictions, and it is a story which illustrates the importance of taking into account not just the circumstances of brutal exploitation so familiar to students of the subject, but also the rare case of genuine affection. Indeed, the central argument here is that sex between the races was far more complicated than traditional accounts suggest, as blacks and whites, men and women, intermingled with each other in ways that defied both the legal rules and the social conventions of the time. Reducing these cases to simple descriptions of power and powerlessness misses out on the rich details they have to offer, and risks minimizing the impact they had on both the people around them and on the larger community in which the participants lived.

To that end, this Article seeks to take advantage of a recent trend in slavery scholarship, one that draws on local records—and particularly trial records—to make its essential points. These records, as others have stressed, have been a surprisingly underused source among legal historians, a group who has traditionally spent time mining published appellate decisions and statutory provisions for hints of Southern ideologies. Yet trial records open up doors that these traditional sources can never do, by providing us with a window into the consciousness of ordinary people. Through their lawsuits and their testimony, litigants and witnesses argued about nothing of national significance yet about everything that mattered most to them. They fought over property rights and slave sales, over contested wills and slave hires—and in doing so they reveal a world that involved far less adherence to the bright line rules of race and slavery than previous studies would have allowed. Indeed, when it came to such topics as interracial sex and its consequences, guardians of the Southern social order spoke with a uniform voice. “Hybridism is heinous,” Henry Hughes roared in 1854. “Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters.” But at the local level, these seemingly rigid racial lines broke down with considerable frequency. Men left their entire estates to their former slaves; white women divorced their husbands after losing their affections to their black counterparts; and local prosecutors indicted interracial couples for living together as husband and wife. And the communities’ response—through testimony, through verdicts, through the filings of the cases themselves—tells us much about the substance of life of the ground, and about the complex interplay of slavery, race, sexuality, and power, in shaping people’s views of the world in which they lived.

In the end, then, this Article is about more than just John Clark and Sobrina; it is about a society struggling with its own identity. Far from the official ideologies of the South, men and women, blacks and whites, regularly met in the towns and on the streets—sometimes explosively and sometimes on more considerate terms. Yet, in either case, local communities had to reckon with a social order that never was how it was supposed to be. John Clark’s relationship with Sobrina, in other words, like so many others, forced a confrontation over the ideals white Southerners projected about themselves and the stuff of everyday life…

Read the entire article here.

Suing for Freedom: Interracial Sex, Slave Law, and Racial Identity in the Post-Revolutionary and Antebellum South

North Carolina Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 2 (January 2004)
pages 535-

Jason A. Gillmer, Associate Professor of Law
Texas Wesleyan School of Law

Introduction

A. Two Stories
 
In 1823 in Sumner County, Tennessee, Phebe, a “colored woman” transplanted from Virginia, brought suit against Abraham Vaughan for her freedom. Phebe alleged that she was being wrongly held in slavery because she descended in the maternal line from an American Indian woman named Murene, her great-grandmother.  Murene, Phebe alleged, was free, and since the rule in Tennessee, as in every Southern state, was that a person’s status as free or slave was determined by the status of the mother, Phebe claimed that she also was free. Phebe thus offered little in the way of her appearance (classed as she was as a woman of color), choosing instead to base her claim on evidence of her descent. Both the trial court and the Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals proved solicitous of her efforts, allowing her to rely on hearsay testimony to trace herself back to Murene and, also, to establish that Murene was both an Indian and free.  The Tennessee Supreme Court of Errors and Appeals also upheld the decision to permit Phebe to rely on the record from a case involving her maternal aunt, Tab, against her owner. In that case, Tab successfully sued for her freedom based on the same claim at issue here: that she was free because she descended from Murene.  In the end, the jury awarded Phebe her freedom, with the bulk of the evidentiary rulings upheld on appeal…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance

Cambridge University Press
August 2006
256 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Weight: 0.55 kg
Hardback ISBN: 9780521865395
Paperback ISBN: 9780521073042
Adobe eBook Reader ISBN: 9780511239465
Mobipocket eBook ISBN: 9780511247484

Ezra Tawil, Associate Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine ‘race’ for an emerging national culture. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the ‘Indian novel’ of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.

Contents

• Introduction: toward a literary history of racial sentiment
• 1. The politics of slavery and the discourse of race, 1787–1840
• 2. Remaking natural rights: race and slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s early writings
• 3. Domestic frontier romance, or, how the sentimental heroine became white
• 4. ‘Homely legends’: the uses of sentiment in Cooper’s Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish
• 5. Stowe’s vanishing Americans: ‘Negro’ inferiority, captivity, and homecoming in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 6. Captain Babo’s cabin: racial sentiment and the politics of misreading in Benito Cereno
• Index.

The construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts: A study of triracial family histories

University of Pennsylvania
2007
263 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3270863
ISBN: 9780549087526

Samuel M. Lemon, Director of Master of Science in Strategic Leadership Program
Division of Continuing Adult and Professional Studies
Neumann University, Aston, Pennsylvania

Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Education

Based largely on data collected from oral history interviews, this study examines the construction of triracial ethnoracial identities (African American-Caucasian-American Indian). Here in-depth narratives and analyses of two triracial family histories surface the complex, dynamic, and interactional social contingencies that act on individual and family psychologies to share ethnic identity; these processes are illustrative of the anthropological construct of situationality. In the role of a participant observer, the author reports the history of his own family, the Ridleys of Media, Pennsylvania, which he compiled from the family’s oral tradition, genealogies and archival documents, and the U.S. Census. His narrative revolves around three prominent family members on his mother’s side: Cornelius, a venerated, light-complexioned ancestor who escaped from slavery on an antebellum plantation in southeastern Virginia, and “passing” as white fled north to Pennsylvania on the Underground Railroad in the 1860s; Josefa, a mysterious, legendarily clairvoyant woman from the Danish West Indies, who married into the Ridley family in the 1880s; and Maud, the author’s remarkable maternal grandmother, whose story begins in Media, Pennsylvania, in the 1890s. The author’s narrative history of the Harveys, another triracial family of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, well known to the author, offers illuminating points of comparison and contrast with the Ridleys. Concepts and arguments drawn from the fields of cultural theory, social history, and Southern literature provide the theoretical framework for the study.*

*This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Adobe Photoshop; Roxio; CD Now.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
  • 1.1 Background of the researcher
  • 1.2 Mulatto identity versus Native American identity
  • 1.3 The Original Impetus to Construct a Family History:
  • A Grandmother’s Inspiration
  • 1.4 Purpose, Significance, and Conceptualization of the Study
  • 1.5 Research questions
  • 1.6 Families selected for the study
  • 1.7 The Harvey Family
  • 1.8 The Ridley Family
  • 1.9 Supporting Families Tangentially Included in this Study
  • 1.10 Notes for Chapter One
• 2 The Nexus of Ethnoracial Identity and Culture
  • 2.1 Etymological Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity
  • 2.2 Difficulties in Discerning Ethnic and Cultural Differences
  • 2.3 Methods Used in the Study
  • 2.4 Interview Script
  • 2.5 Notes for Chapter Two
• 3 Culture, Ethnicity, and Assimilation: A Literature Review
  • 3.1 Historical and contemporary examples of the construction of culture
  • 3.2 The Great Melding Pot: Perspectives on Immigration and Globalization
  • 3.3 New country, new culture, new people
  • 3.4 Notes for Chapter Three
• 4 New People: Triracial Families and Their Traditions
  • 4.1 The Harvey Family: background
    • 4.1a Mrs. Lee Ethel Gregory Harvey
    • 4.1b Life in the North for the Harvey Family
    • 4.1c The Children of Dr. Reginald and Mrs. Lee Harvey
    • 4.1d LeRoy Harvey
    • 4.1e Reginald Olive Harvey, II
    • 4.1f Robert Bruce Harvey
    • 4.1g Bonnie Lee Harvey Elliot
  • 4.2 The Ridley Family
  • 4.3 Situational Variables in the Construction of Ethnoracial Identity
  • 4.4 A Gift and a Curse
  • 4.5 Ridley Family Belief System
  • 4.6 Experientially Based Beliefs
    • 4.6a Helena Ortiga Miller
    • 4.6b Tomas Ridley Ortiga, Sr.
    • 4.6c Josepha Ortiga Allen
  • 4.7 Samuel M. Lemon
  • 4.8 Notes for Chapter Four
• 5 The Self-Determination of Ethnoracial Identity: Findings
  • 5.1 Importance of Oral Tradition
  • 5.2 Ethnoracial identities are constructed within situational contexts
  • 5.3 Conflicts in Cultural Perspectives
  • 5.4 Self-determination of ethnoracial identity
  • 5.5 Crossing Ethnic Boundaries
  • 5.6 Conclusion
  • 5.7 Notes for Chapter Five
• Index to Photographic Appendices
• Bibliography
• Appendices (on compact disc)
  • Ridley Family Photographs and Documents
  • Harvey Family Photographs
  • Oye Family Information
  • Genograms: Ridley and Harvey Families

Introduction

In late July 2006, my next-door neighbor, Gilbert, a quiet and dignified black man with graying hair and a large and spirited extended family, invited me to his backyard barbecue to celebrate his sixty-first birthday. Although I had made a prior commitment for that same evening to attend another barbecue (an asada, in Portuguese) at the home of my Brazilian neighbors across the street, I felt that it would be rude of me not to stop at least briefly at Gilbert’s house for a spare rib or bottle of beer. Although we are acquaintances rather than friends, I have known Gilbert’s family since they moved to my hometown of Media, PA, from the nearby city of Chester, about forty years ago. They are one branch of a larger family that includes cousins who live in Media who were among my childhood friends and classmates. And because my family has lived on the same block where I currently reside for over eighty years and on the same street for over one hundred and thirty years, we have strong communal ties and have always felt a social obligation to attend community events whenever we are invited. However, this invitation gave me some vague sense of trepidation, the reasons for which I could not pinpoint. My neighbor, Gilbert, although a man of very few words, has always been polite to me. But he readily admits that some of the members of his extended family who still reside in Chester are often ill-mannered, and he refers to them disdainfully as “Chester niggers”

As I walked around the side of Gilbert’s house and approached the gathering, I heard the quiet rumblings of imaginary thunder in the distant regions of my mind. I chided myself for having qualms, and reassured myself that this was just a party I was visiting briefly. But I sensed that something unpleasant was about to happen. Upon entering Gilbert’s back yard, I spoke to several individuals sitting under a canopy that shaded them from the still hot, late afternoon summer sun. I recognized a few of his guests as members of his family, and another as a neighbor who lives two doors down from me. By virtue of their cool stares and lack of an audible greeting, the rest of the group seemed to view me as an uninvited guest. I also noticed that there were no white people present. As a person of color, I immediately notice the racial or ethnic composition of any large group, as it gives me clues about the nature of the event and the social and cultural dynamics at work—all of which are helpful in assessing and navigating an unfamiliar social situation.

Normally, there would be one or two white people—often, one male and one female, though not necessarily related—conspicuously present at Gilbert’s parties. But on this occasion, they were conspicuous by their absence. I didn’t see Gilbert in the crowd, so I asked his daughter if he was around. When she called for him, he came out of the house and we exchanged pleasantries. He then invited me to sample some of his array of could still hear that quiet, distant, imaginary thunder.

Gilbert’s daughter, a tall, slightly muscular, dark brown woman in her late thirties with a charming smile, led the way. As I stepped into the house, she introduced me to a group of mostly middle-aged black women who were enjoying the air conditioner on this steamy ninety-five degree day. I recognized one woman as Gilbert’s girlfriend—a stocky, serious, street-tough woman in her late fifties, from Chester. His girlfriend and I exchanged casual hellos. Next, Gilbert’s daughter introduced me to another woman who looked resembled the girlfriend enough for me to assume that they were sisters, explaining to the woman that my brothers and I had grown up in this neighborhood. She exclaimed in a very loud voice tinged with derision, “Oh you mean, them ‘yallow’ [sic] brothers who used to live up the street?”

I was taken aback by her verbal slap and had a visceral reaction to it. I punctured the sudden pregnant pause in the room with an assertive, visibly annoyed and equally voluminous, “Yeah, that’s right.” I shot a glance at Gilbert’s brown-skinned daughter across the room, who was smiling an uncomfortable smile of embarrassment. I replied to her smile with a classic rolling of my eyes, which she appeared to enjoy and gestured to me that it was the appropriate response to the offensive remark. Though it was difficult, out of respect for my host, I succeeded in controlling my anger. But I was seething as I exited the room with the racial insult still stuck in my craw. Passing by the food table, I picked up a massive beef rib and moments later found myself absent-mindedly gnawing on it—sitting at a table under the canopy, chatting with my host, who was unaware that anything awkward had just occurred. After making customary small talk, I excused myself, wished Gilbert a happy birthday, and headed for the cultural comfort of my Brazilian friends, in whose multiracial culture of origin, or so they tell me, this incident would probably never have occurred—because most people in Brazil consider themselves mixed-race. As I crossed the street, still seeing only the ignorant woman’s face in my crosshairs, I muttered quietly to myself: “It never ends. It just never f— ends!”

This incident was just the most recent in a lifetime of similar disquieting experiences—actually, many lifetimes of such experiences—in the history of my family, always posing the same question: “Why? Why do they say these things to us?” This deeply personal and perennial question has in large part prompted my interest in the construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts. Why have so many of our African American neighbors routinely treated us with such disdain? This vexing question once inspired me to write the following poem entitled, Who Am I? during my early teenage years—circa 1963.

Who am I?
My skin is light,
Why not black
Why not white?

Where are my roots?
And were they born,
To hold African spear
Or English horn?

Perhaps I am,
The bubbling foam,
Some inward ocean
Washes home.

The quandary and frustration regarding the challenges of racial hybridity are palpable in this poem. The last three lines of verse may at first blush seem simplistic. However, the metaphor refers to the desire to be genetically restored to one original racial identity prior to miscegenation—i.e. either black or white—rather than to be forever condemned to the racial limbo inhabited by mixed-race people in America. Regarding the personal construction of ethnoracial identity, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed this very query when he stated “Every man must ultimately confront the question of ‘Who am I?’ and seek to answer it honestly. One of the first principles of personal adjustment is the principle of self-acceptance. The Negro’s greatest dilemma is that in order to be healthy he must accept his ambivalence. The Negro is the child of two cultures—Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures… The old Hegelian synthesis still offers the best answer to many of life’s dilemmas. The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western. He is Afro-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures.”…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels [Review]

Rocky Mountain Review
Rocky Mountain Language Association
Volume 61, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 41-43

Susana M. Morris, Assistant Professor of English
Auburn University

Ryan Simmons. Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 198p.

Ryan Simmons’ Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels is a timely work that proposes a key paradigm shift in critical studies about Charles W. Chesnutt. Simmons argues that all too often Chesnutt is on the periphery of studies on realism when he should be considered as a major contributor to the genre, alongside William Dean Howells, Henry James, and others. Nonetheless, Simmons’ goal is not to simply judge Chesnutt against canonical white authors. Rather, Simmons contends that criticism should recognize Chesnutt for his challenge to white readers to reconsider their racial politics and his life-long career goal to determine the best way to sway an often indifferent mainstream audience. For Simmons, labeling Chesnutt as a realist is not posthumous classification, but rather a recognition of how Chesnutt viewed himself as a writer…

…Simmons explores the “tragic mulatta” in the posthumously released novella Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars and argues that while these texts may, on the surface, recycle the oft-told tragic nature of the mixed raced woman, they actually reveal a more complex negotiation about race, identity, and community. characters in these texts upset rigid classifications of race and, for Chesnutt, the very possibility of the passing motif illustrates both “cultural fluidity” and the fragility of the foundations of race-based discrimination (78). Thus, these works are part of Chesnutt’s mission to have his readers recognize that while they cannot change the history of slavery and oppression, they do have the power to not let these circumstances overdetermine their society’s future. While Simmons champions Mandy Oxendine and The House Behind the Cedars as complex renderings of race, he does, however, finds fault with what he sees as Chesnutt’s inability to forward solutions to the problems that he documents. This critique is a running commentary for Simmons and he cites it as one of Chesnutt’s major critical shortcomings…

Read the entire review here.

Zoë, Or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume II)

Truman and Spofford (Cincinnati)
1855
323 pages

Mrs. Elizabeth D. Livermore

With Illustrations Henri Lovie, and Charles Bauerle

“God has bid away the human soul in the black man’s skin and his darker person, that in finding it, we may re-discover our alienated and forgotten nature; and rejoice more over the one that was lost, than the ninety and nine who went not astray.”—Belllows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.— Santa Cruz
CHAP. II— Emancipation
CHAP.III— The Retrospect
CHAP. IV.— Zoë’s Greeting to the Tropics
CHAP. V.— Mingling op the Old and the New
CHAP. VI.— Young America expatiates
CHAP. VII.— Zoe opens her Mission
CHAP. VIII.— Young America is heretical on Art
CHAP. IX.— The Queens op the Queen City
CHAP. X.—Diamond cut Diamond
CHAP. XI—The Shipwreck
CHAP. XII.—”Books in Brooks.”
CHAP. XIII— Mrs. Pumpkin’s Tract for the Times
CHAP. XIV.— The Quarrel and its Denouement
CHAP. XV.— Young America makes a Declaration, not of Independence
CHAP. XVI.—The War-horse Eagle
CHAP. XVII—Home, with its Shadows
CHAP. XVIII.—The Wormwood and the Gall
CHAP. XIX.— The Hurricane
CHAP. XX.— Light after Darkness
CHAP. XXI.— A Voice from Amazona
CHAP. XXII.—The Church Recusant
CHAP. XXIII.— Letters and Reminiscences
CHAP. XXIV.—The Closing Triumph

We must now return to Santa Cruz and give a hasty sketch of the fortunes of George Carlan and his wife, during the twelve years absence of their daughter in Denmark.

It will be recollected that the former, in emerging from slavery, had placed before himself two objects for which to live and labor—wealth, and independence; or as it may be expressed in one phrase, independence through wealth. Towards these his aims were directed and his ambitious hopes constantly aspiring.

Sophia, on the contrary, affectionate and retiring, as she was, shared but in a slight degree her husband’s restless wishes; and if ever her thoughts were turned towards his favorite goal, and her imagination excited by his visions of distant good attained through these means, it was that he and her child, more than herself, might win the happiness which would accrue from their possession.

Mr. Carlan’s industry and enterprise had been crowned with success so far as to place them in comfortable circumstances.   Indeed, in comparison with most of his tribe, he was wealthy and was regarded with consideration by his own caste. But his affluence gave him no honorable position among the white Creoles of the island. To-be-sure, he had business relations with them, and the Danish officials treated him with a half friendly, half condescending familiarity, which was anything but agreeable. But by the English residents he was looked upon with distrust and aversion as an ambitious, discontented man, who was to be avoided and scorned on every possible occasion to prevent his impertinent encroachments upon their dignity and aristocratic rights. As these latter saw their power and influence decline in the island just in proportion to the losses and poverty incurred by their miserable management of their property, spendthrift habits, and ruinous absenteeism, so in the same ratio did they hate the Irish emigrants into whose hands their estates had fallen, or the colored people who, through their enterprise, were seizing upon their commerce and manufactures.

Had George Carlan, when he emerged from slavery, possessed a true idea of the value of freedom in its relations to the training and development of the human soul above all things else, he would have been saved much bitterness of feeling and many heartaches, and in the end have prospered much better also in his worldly affairs. For by this principle deeply-rooted and acting vitally upon his daily life, he would have gained a self-possession equal to every emergency, an insight into the laws of commercial intercourse, and proper appreciation of the forces of nature, and the due balance to be preserved between the consumption of the products in which he dealt and the law of their supply, quite indispensable to success in any business department. This, too, would have given him that patient reliance on Providence in untoward seasons, and that geniality and kindness of demeanor in his social and business relations, which are better than a capital of thousands to one who launches forth on the sea of commercial life. But these ideas he had had no opportunity of learning in slavery, and it was not to be expected that he would begin his career as a merchant under better auspices, in these respects, than multitudes, who commence life with none of his disadvantages. Still he had much skill, shrewdness, and industry, and for several years his success was without a drawback, and, as was remarked in the commencement of this story, he was enabled to surround himself and family with not only the comforts, but many of the luxuries of life…

Read Volume II here.

Zoë, Or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume I)

Truman and Spofford (Cincinnati)
1855
353 pages

Mrs. Elizabeth D. Livermore

With Illustrations Henri Lovie, and Charles Bauerle

“God has bid away the human soul in the black man’s skin and his darker person, that in finding it, we may re-discover our alienated and forgotten nature; and rejoice more over the one that was lost, than the ninety and nine who went not astray.”—Belllows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE
CHAPTER I.— The Sacrifice
CHAP. II.—The Voyage
CHAP. IH—New Scenes and Associations
CHAP. IV.— Questionings
CHAP. V.—Children at Home
CHAP. VI—The Teacher and Taught
CHAP. VII.—Bereavement
CHAP. VIII.—Lady versus Law
CHAP. IX.— Color can Feel
CHAP. X.—Anglo-Saxons do not know Everything
CHAP. XI—The Cloud hangs low
CHAP. XII.— Fresh Breezes From the West
CHAP. XIII.—A New Preacher in the Field
CHAP. XIV.—Spirit-Sister
CHAP. XV.—Pic-Nic —the Wandering Jew reappears
CHAPTER XVI.— Castle Building on the Prairies
CHAP. XVII—Chit-chat
CHAP. XVIII.— Spiritualism
CHAP. XIX.—Magnetism
CHAP. XX.—The Parley
CHAP. XXI.— Steel in the Ore
CHAP. XXII—Fire in the Flint
CHAP. XXIII—The Dedication

The story of Zoë Carlan, a young colored girl, of the little Danish island of Santa Cruz, is a pathetic illustration of the false position into which a refined and educated nature may be thrown, by the fierce prejudices of caste and color.

Her father, George Carlan, was a native of the island, and originally a slave. His ancestry on the father’s side for two generations had been whites, so that with his light complexion, he combined much of the energy and restiveness under despotic rule of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Slavery under the Danes had some mild and alleviating features. Schools were supported by government, in which the rudiments of knowledge were taught the slaves, with a view to their eventual freedom, and provisions were made, by which it could be purchased by those who would employ the requisite exertion.

George so diligently used these means, that at the age of twenty-eight, he stepped forth under the clear vault of Heaven, a free man. He could but imperfectly read and write and cast accounts; and he reasoned thus with himself. “Here I am, with none to rule over me but my God and my King.   Independence and influence I will have, but how to gain them is the question. I am too old to educate myself; but rich I may become, and rich I will be, will take my stand beside the haughty whites, and whatever consideration and power may be mine through wealth, I will attain.”

Through his industry and perseverance, he had become a successful merchant; and at the time when this story commences, he was living in the enjoyment of not only the comforts, but many of the luxuries of life. On attaining his freedom, he married a young colored woman, of much gentleness and native refinement of character, and one child, the little Zoë, was given them, to be the light of their home, and the object of all his aspiring hopes and desires.

But the free blacks and colored people (for that distinction is very carefully made in the islands), though experiencing much favor from the Danish government, and sometimes even preferred to the proud and discontented white colonists, when indulgences are to be awarded, have no position in society.   In the first place, the latter are, for the most part, the children of illicit connections, and where is the community where the odium of such sin falls not upon the weaker party and her innocent offspring. Then the people of color are a continual source of contention and trouble; they are restless, discontented, aspiring. For every step they advance higher than the full black, they cast behind them a glance of indifference or of scorn, while they are ever looking upward and striving to plant their feet side by side with the whites, if not in advance of them. This is met with unflinching opposition by the dominant race. In all spheres within their control, they omit not to give the most scathing demonstrations of their contempt. In social life they seldom meet, of course. It is, however, the custom for the Danish governor-general to hold levees, from time to time; and to these the chief mulattoes are invited as well as the whites. Gladly would the latter excuse themselves from the honor of attendance, knowing the odious companionship to which they will be subjected, but it is well understood that an invitation is equivalent to a command, and policy, perchance safety, forbids a refusal. There is by no means a very cordial  feeling between many of them and their rulers. The population is a mixed one. Many of the old and more wealthy families are of English descent. Their religion is only tolerated, the Lutheran being that of the State. Almost all offices are held by Danish officials, often unscrupulous and grasping, and the Creoles are made to feel in numberless ways, that they are but step-children to the mother-country, and that their interests are ever second to her own. Then, more than all other causes of jealousy is the slackening of their control over the blacks, by the measures of the home-government. They see in it their humiliation and ruin; and as prudence forbids a very open expression of their outraged feelings to their rulers, they display a temper all the more bitter towards the immediate cause of them…

Read Volume I here.  Read Volume II here.

Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions

Routledge
2003-02-28
Pages: 144
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94349-9

Carlos Hiraldo, Professor of English
LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region’s literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring Latinos, Coloring the United States
  • The Novel as Popular Culture
  • Race in Latin America
  • Latinos as a U.S. Race
  • The Novel in the Dissemination and Reconfiguration of Notions about Race
• Chapter One: Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Nation and Race in the Americas
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and the “New World” of the Novel
  • Benedict Anderson and the Novel as a Tool of National Imagination
  • Fredric Jameson and the Many Worlds in the Americas
  • Novels and the Fictionalization of Racial Attitudes
• Chapter Two: Enslaved Characters: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Novels and the Absence of Bi-racial Consciousness
  • Differences between Bi-racial and Mulatto Characters
  • The Myth of Racial Purity versus the Dreams of a Miscegenated Paradise
  • The Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Racial Representations
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bi-racial Characters in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Latin American Literatures
  • Sab as a Nineteenth-Century Cuban Romantic Tale about Race
  • The Complicit Ignorance of Cecilia Valdes
  • A Thin Line between Black and White in Martin Morua Delgado’s Sofia and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Race without Romance in Antonio Zambrana’s El negro Francisco
• Chapter Three: Mulatto Fictions: Representations of Identity-Consciousness in U.S. and Latin American Bi-racial Characters
  • Mulatto Characters as Racial and Cultural Nexus
  • Passing the Tragic Mulatta in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Gabriela and the Sexualized Mulatia in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Pobre negro, The Violent Land, and the Limits of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Joe Christmas and the Unmerry Existence of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Go Down, Moses and the Mumbled Recognition of Racial Confluence in the United States
  • The Bluest Eye and the Persistence of Anti-mulatto Fiction in the United States
• Chapter Four: Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African European
  • Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States
  • Latino Authors and the “One Drop” Rule
  • Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, and the Limitations of Choosing Sides in the U.S. Racial Divide
  • Esmeralda Santiago and Negi’s Persistent Puertoricanness in the Face of the “One Drop” Rule
• Chapter Five: Choosing Your Own Face: Future Trends of Racial
  • Discourses in the United States
  • Latino Influence in Other Cultural Products
  • The Latin American Racial Paradigm behind the “Wigga”
  • The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a Universal Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Minstrel passing: Citizenship, race change, and motherhood in 1850s America

Saint Louis University
2009
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3383188
ISBN: 9781109452945

Roshaunda D. Cade, Writing Coordinator, Academic Resource Center
Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Saint Louis University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the egree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores how mixed race slave mothers in American literature of the mid-Nineteenth Century combine the performances of blackface minstrelsy and racial passing in order to perform minstrel passing and access the freedoms of citizenship. Minstrel passing seeks to gain the advantages of the other through performances of deception, and it gains more liberties for the performer than either passing or minstrelsy do alone. While minstrel passing does not grant freedom, it grants the freedom to behave like and be treated as a citizen. During this era, motherhood defined female citizenship. But instead of solely resigning women to the domestic sphere, motherhood emboldens women to try things they have never done before. For these slave women, motherhood pushes them to seek the benefits of citizenship.

I argue that in the following the texts, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe; Clotel (1853), William Wells Brown; The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2002), Hannah Crafts; Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain, these bids for citizenship happen largely through the acts of blackface minstrelsy, racial passing, and minstrel passing. Because these performances privilege self-definition, they become tools in the feminist arsenal of autonomy and create space for feminist citizenship. Each of these novels deals with mixed race slave mothers minstrel passing their way into freedom. Additionally, the complexity of the minstrel passing situations intensifies in each novel, revealing the complicated nature of the mid-Nineteenth Century moment.

The mid-century collision of increasingly confusing racial definitions, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the emergence of blackface minstrelsy as a national form of entertainment, and the Women’s Rights Movement created a unique atmosphere for American women, black and white. To that end, the 1850s offered a variety of ways for women to accommodate citizenship. I maintain that this era created a space for mixed race slave mothers to perform racial deception, in order to exercise autonomy and define their own spheres, and find the freedom to enjoy the privileges of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness inherent in U.S. citizenship.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: CREATING CITIZENSHIP IN 1850s AMERICA
• CHAPTER 2: CREATING CITIZENSHIP THROUGH MOTHERHOOD, MINSTRELSY, AND PASSING IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
  • Introduction
  • Stowe’s Search for Mother
  • Accidental Feminism
  • Citizenship
  • Eliza, George, and Harry: Minstrel Trio
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 3: SECURING LIBERTY AND CITIZENSHIP THROUGH PASSING AND MINSTRELSY IN WILLIAM WELLS BROWN’S CLOTEL
  • Introduction
  • Growing up with Currer
  • Althesa’s Attempts at American Liberty
  • Clotel’s Migration from Black Female Slave to Free White Man
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 4: MOTHERHOOD AND DECEPTION AS FREEDOM IN THE BONDWOMAN’S NARRATIVE BY HANNAH CRAFTS
  • Introduction
  • Searching for Mother
  • White Womanhood
  • Othermothering
  • Little Orphan Hannah
  • Conclusion; or, White Womanhood Revisited
• CHAPTER 5: MULATTA MAMA PERFORMING PASSING AND MIMICKING MINSTRELSY IN MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
  • Introduction
  • Mark Twain and Motherhood
  • Privilege, Citizenship, and Race
  • Roxy as Racial Passer
  • Roxy as Blackface Minstrel
  • Conclusion
• CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION: MINSTREL PASSING INTO AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
• Works Cited
• Vita Auctoris

Purchase the dissertation here.