Mixed Race Studies

The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s

Journal of American History
Volume 87, Issue 1 (June 2000)
pages 43-56
DOI: 10.2307/2567914

Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

In January of 1857 Jane Morrison was sold in the slave market in New Orleans. The man who bought her was James White, a longtime New Orleans slave trader, who had recently sold his slave pen and bought land just up the river from New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. Morrison, apparently, was to be one of his last speculations as a trader or one of his first investments as a planter. Sometime shortly after her sale, however, Morrison ran away. By the time White saw her again, in October 1857, they were in a courtroom in Jefferson Parish where Morrison had filed suit against him. Before it was settled, that suit would be considered by three different juries, be put before the Louisiana Supreme Court twice, and leave a lasting record of the complicated politics of race and slavery in the South of the 1850s. The reason for the stir would have been obvious to anyone who saw Morrison sitting in court that day: the fifteen-year-old girl whom White claimed as his slave had blond hair and blue eyes.

Morrison began her petition to the Third District Court by asking that William Dennison, the Jefferson Parish jailer, be appointed her legal representative and that she be sequestered in the parish prison to keep White from seizing and selling her. In her petition, Morrison asked that she be declared legally free and white and added a request that the court award her ten thousand dollars damages for the wrong that White had done her by holding her as a slave. She based her case on the claim that her real name was Alexina, not Jane, that she was from Arkansas, and that she had “been born free and of white parentage,” or, as she put it in a later affidavit, “that she is of white blood and free and entitled to her freedom and that on view this is manifest.” Essentially, Alexina Morrison claimed that she was white because she looked that way.

In his response, White claimed that he had purchased Morrison (he still called her Jane) from a man named J. A. Halliburton, a resident of Arkansas. White exhibited an unnotarized bill of sale for Morrison (which would have been legal proof of title in Arkansas, but was not in Louisiana) and offered an alternative explanation of how the young woman had made her way into the courtroom that day. Morrison, he alleged, was a runaway slave. Indeed, he said, he had it on good authority that Morrison had been “induced” to run away from him by a group of self-styled “philanthropists” who were “in reality acting the part of abolitionists.” In particular, White blamed Dennison, whom he accused of having used his position to “incourage” Morrison to run away and of having “afterwards harboured her, well knowing that she was a runaway.” White was drawing his terminology from the criminal laws of the state of Louisiana and accusing Dennison and his shadowy “abolitionist” supporters of committing a crime: stealing and harboring his slave.

The record of the contest that followed is largely contained in the transcription that was made of the records from the lower court hearings of the case when the state supreme court considered Morrison v. White for the final time in 1862. As codified in the statutes of the state of Louisiana and generally interpreted by the Louisiana Supreme Court, the legal issues posed by the case were simple enough: If Alexina Morrison could prove she was white, she was entitled to freedom and perhaps to damages; if James White could prove that her mother had been a slave at the time of Morrison’s birth or that Morrison herself had been a slave (and had not been emancipated), he was entitled to her service; if she was not proved to be either white or enslaved, her fate would be decided by the court on the basis of a legal presumption of “mulattoes’” freedom under Louisiana law. Captured in the neat hand of the legal clerk who prepared the record of the lower court hearings of the case, however, are circumstances that were apparently considerably more complicated than the ones envisioned by those who had made the laws.

Testimony from the lower court hearings of Morrison v. White provides a pathway into the complex history of slavery, class, race, and sexuality in the changing South of the 1850s: particularly into slaveholders’ fantasies about their light-skinned and female slaves; the role of performance in the racial identities of both slaves and slaveholders; the ways anxieties about class and capitalist transformation in the South were experienced and expressed as questions about racial identity; the babel of confusion surrounding the racial ideal on which the antebellum social structure was supposedly grounded; the relationship of the law of slavery as made by legislators and appellate judges to its everyday life in the district courtrooms of the antebellum South; and the disruptive effects of one woman’s effort to make her way to freedom through the tangle of ideology that enslaved her body. In the South of the 1850s, Alexina Morrison’s bid for freedom posed a troubling double question: Could slaves become white? And could white people become slaves?

Whiteness and Slavery

By the time Morrison v. White went to trial, Alexina Morrison would claim that her whiteness made her free, but when Morrison and White first met, in the slave market, it might simply have made her more valuable. It is well known that slaveholders favored light-skinned women such as Morrison to serve in their houses and that those light-skinned women sold at a price premium. What is less often realized is that in the slave market apparent differences in skin tone were daily formalized into racial categories—the traders were not only marketing race but also making it. In the slave market, the whiteness that Alexina Morrison would eventually try to turn against her slavery was daily measured, packaged, and sold at a very high price.

The alchemy by which skin tone and slavery were synthesized into race and profit happened so quickly that it has often gone unnoticed. When people such as Morrison were sold, they were generally advertised by the slave traders with a racial category. Ninety percent of the slaves sold in the New Orleans market were described on the Acts of Sale that transferred their ownership with a word describing their lineage in terms of an imagined blood quantum—such as “Negro,” “Griffe,” “Mulatto,” or “Quadroon.” Those words described pasts that were not visible in the slave pens by referring to parents and grandparents who had been left behind with old owners. In using them, however, the traders depended upon something that was visible in the pens, skin color. When buyers described their slave market choices they often made the same move from the visible to the biological. When, for example, they described slaves as “a griff colored boy,” or “not black, nor Mulatto, but what I believe is usually called a griff color, that is a Brownish Black, or a bright Mulatto,” buyers were seeing color, but they were looking for lineage.6 The words the buyers used—griffe, mulatto, quadroon—preserved a constantly shifting tension between the “blackness” favored by those who bought slaves to till their fields, harvest their crops, and renew their labor forces and the “whiteness” desired by those who went to the slave market in search of people to serve their meals, mend their clothes, and embody their fantasies. They sectioned the restless hybridity, the infinite variety of skin tone that was visible all over the South, into imagined degrees of black and white that, once measured, could be priced and sold…

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“Quadroon” Balls in the Spanish Period

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 14, Number 3 (Summer, 1973)
pages 310-315

Translated and Edited by

Ronald R. Morazan, Assistant Professor of History
Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

With the influx of free blacks into Spanish Louisiana from the island of Santo Domingo, the Spanish authorities provided them with special privileges to hold public dances which eventually became known as “quadroon balls.” Soon after the public dance hall for whites was established in 1792, Governor Carondelct granted Santiago Bernardo Coquet the privilege of giving weekly a public dance for the blacks. Preferring black women, as they were “less demanding,” the white men began patronaing the dance hall for blacks. To correct this situation, Gabriel Fonvergne, the Attorney General (Sindico Procurador General) of the Cabildo, asked the City Council to petition Governor Carondelet to prohibit slaves from entering the dance hall. The governor, because of numerous complaints and objections from slave owners, refused the request of the Cabildo and the attorney general but decided instead to prohibit white people from going into the dances for blacks. Permission to continue the dances was given by the following administration, which was that of Don Manuel Gayoso de Lcmos, but after his death, the new Attorney General of the Cabildo, Don Pedro Dulcido Barran, asked the City Council to petition Acting Civil Governor Don Nicolas Maria Vidal to abolish the dances once and for all; however, Governor Vidal refused…

Creole Angel: The Self-Identity of the Free People of Color of Antebellum New Orleans

University of North Texas
August 2006
136 pages

Ben Melvin Hobratsch

Thesis Prepared for the Degree of Masters of Arts, University of North Texas, August 2006

This thesis is about the self-identity of antebellum New Orleans’s free people of color. The emphasis of this work is that French culture, mixed Gallic and African ancestry, and freedom from slavery served as the three keys to the identity of this class of people. Taken together, these three factors separated the free people of color from the other major groups residing in New Orleans—Anglo-Americans, white Creoles and black slaves.

The introduction provides an overview of the topic and states the need for this study. Chapter 1 provides a look at New Orleans from the perspective of the free people of color. Chapter 2 investigates the slaveownership of these people. Chapter 3 examines the published literature of the free people of color. The conclusion summarizes the significance found in the preceding three chapters and puts their findings into a broader interpretive framework.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION
• Chapters
  • 1. THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR’S ANTEBELLUM NEW ORLEANS
  • 2. THE SLAVEHOLDING OF NEW ORLEANS’S SLAVEHOLDING FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1820-1840
  • 3. THE LITERATURE OF NEW ORLEANS’S FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR, 1837-1845
• CONCLUSION
• Appendices
  • A. CENSUS SLAVE SCHEDULES, 1820-1840
  • B. EMANCIPATION PETITIONS, 1814-1843
• BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Free people of color, or gens de couleur libres, were men and women of either African or mixed African and European ancestry that were legally free from slavery, yet were proscribed in their social condition by the law. These men and women had always played a significant role within New Orleans. This was due, in part, to their sheer numbers. In New Orleans in 1840, for instance, free people of color numbered 19,226 of a total population of 102,193 or 18.8% of the population. Only Baltimore, Maryland could claim relatively similar numbers of free people of color. Of Baltimore’s total population of 102,313 in 1840, 17,967 or 17.5% were free people of color. Other southern cities did not even come close to approaching such levels. In the same year, in Charleston, another southern city in which a significant population of free men and women of color resided, only 5.4% of the population or 1,588 of a total population of 29,261 were free people of color.

The important role of free men and women of color within New Orleans was also due to the fact that until the implementation of American order in Louisiana in 1803, there had existed a tripartite socioracial stratification within the city, along the Latin model. This non-Anglo socioracial stratification allowed the gens de couleur libres to enjoy more social rights than free people of color in any other area of North America, in addition to near-equality with whites in regards to legal rights. In the Anglo-dominated United States, a binary socioracial hierarchy existed that placed free people of color at the same level as enslaved men and women of color.

The tripartite socioracial stratification of colonial New Orleanian society was one of fracture and fragmentation (see Table 0.1). One’s place in society was determined by economic and racial factors. As with most societies, individuals in antebellum New Orleans were categorized based upon their economic status. Individuals were wealthy, poor, or somewhere in between.

Factors of racial ancestry complicated a purely economic classification. Individuals, regardless of their economic status, were labeled white, black or “of color” (somewhere in between). In antebellum New Orleans, an individual’s racial phenotype took precedence over wealth. As a result New Orleanian society was first ordered by skin color, then, within each of the three separate racial groups, by economic condition. Within this Latin-style tripartite social stratification, the free people of color occupied the middle strata. As occupants of the middle strata, free people of color were viewed as socially “below” whites (of whatever economic condition) and “above” all black slaves…

Read the entire thesis here.

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920

Louisiana State University Press
2004
282 pages
6 x 9, 27 Halftones, 2 Maps
paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3112-1

Alecia P. Long, Assistant Professor of History
Louisiana State University

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city’s sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.

Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans’s lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1 “It’s Because You Are a Colored Woman” Sex, Race, and Concubinage after the Civil War
• 2 The Business of Pleasure: Concert Saloons and Sexual Commerce in the Economic Mainstream
• 3 “Where the Least Harm Can Result”: Sex, Race, and Respectability in a Single Neighborhood
• 4 “Unusual Situations and Remarkable People”: Mary Deubler, Respectability, and the History of Storyville
• 5 “As Rare as White Blackbirds”: Willie Piazza, Race, and Reform
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Biibliography
• Index

Problems with Plaçage: Historical Imagination and Femmes de couleurs libres in Colonial and Antebellum New Orleans

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research
Coastal Carolina University
Issue 3 (Winter 2009)

Philip Whalen, Associate Professor of History
Coastal Carolina University

This essay compares two approaches to understanding the condition of free women of color who struggled to maximize their autonomy and sustain social relations within the repressive environment of colonial and antebellum New Orleans. While recent scholarship squarely addresses how free women of color constructed and sustained a viable Creole heritage, it must reckon with a tradition of primary sources written by moralists, and itinerant observers—ranging from Fanny Trollope and Gustave de Beaumont to Amos Stoddard and Grace King—whose analysis of the daily lives of Creole women was suspect in that it drew disproportionate attentions to the sexual activities of free women of color with white men.

In Louisiana the highest position that can be held by a free woman of color is that of a prostitute… She raises herself by prostituting herself to the white man.
—Gustav de Beaumont, Marie (1835)

Free women of color, or filles de couleurs, occupied a unique and precarious social position in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Louisiana. Legally defined as being of no more than ¼ African ancestry but commonly identified as belonging to a class of free persons exhibiting some degree of color (Garrigus, 1988, p. vii and Berlin, 1998), they rejected identification with black slaves and free whites in order to construct distinct identities for themselves in a racially oppressive and sexually exploitive environment (Gould, 1996, p. 193). The strategies they employed to advance and protect their interests illustrate how they tackled the circumstances and conditions that defined their struggle. These ranged from taking advantage of their slim but not inconsequential legal rights, to educating themselves, to holding and transmitting property, to developing exclusive community networks, to cornering various market activities, and engaging in a variety of legal and extra-legal personal unions.

From the first introduction of slaves to the early twentieth century, Louisiana’s efforts to legally establish a hierarchy of racial identification—especially where Creoles and “mixed bloods” were concerned—were bedeviled by competing identity claims, a disorderly population (Spear, 1999, p. 155), and an environment in which “antimiscegenation measures were flagrantly disregarded” (Lachance, 1994, p. 214). In fact, Doris Garraway notes, “the class of free people of color was quite diverse in gender, color, and circumstance. Referred to variously… the free people of color included former slaves and the descendants of all skin tones” (2005, p. 211). It should also be remembered that early nineteenth-century accounts described white creoles in terms of ethnicity and heritage rather than skin color. Amos Stoddard, for example, described the “Creoles, or native inhabitants” in his Sketches Historical and Descriptive of Louisiana as partly the descendants of the French Canadians and partly of those who migrated “intermixed with some natives of France, Spain, Germany, and the United States, and in many instances the Aborigines” (1973, p. 323). Despite contradictory evidence provided in the narratives of novelists, historians, moralists, and other chroniclers of life in New Orleans who frequently observed that Creole women resembled “the women of Cadiz and Naples and Marseilles; with a self possession, ease, and elegance which the Americans seldom possess” (King, 1920, p. 273), considerations of ethnicity, lineage or linguistic (especially French, German, Caribbean) identity rarely, in the final analysis, inhibited them from using the preferred racial schemas to taxonomize Louisiana’s gens de couleurs. The gens de couleurs, wrote Grace King:

were a class apart, separated from and superior to the negroes, ennobled, were it by only one drop of white blood in their veins…. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleurs. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely guarded distinctions; mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, griffes, each term meaning one more generation’s elevation, one degree’s further transfiguration in the standard of racial perfection; white blood. (1920, p. 333)

This inferior racial identity projected onto gens de couleurs was compounded by moral and social prejudices. Assumptions hardened into received opinion—easily detected in contemporary literature, memoirs, and histories—as racial prejudices were translated into laws designed to increase the legal distinctions between different racial groups were legislated when Louisiana became part of the Unites States (including the reestablishment, by the Louisiana Legislature of the French Code Noir of 1724 as the Black Code in 1806), and New Orleans Creoles evolved into a separate and more self-conscious ethnic caste with fewer exogamous marriages by the mid nineteenth century (Spear, 1999, pp. 101-153 and Lachance, 1994, p. 213, p. 229 and pp. 233-35)…

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Brackish Bayou Blood: Weaving Mixed-Blood Indian-Creole Identity Outside the Written Record

American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Volume 32, Number 2 (2008)
Special Issue: Indigenous Locations Post-Katrina: Beyond Invisibility and Disaster
Online Date: 2008-08-22
pages 93-108
ISSN: 0161-6463

L. Rain Cranford-Gomez

As a child on the Gulf of Mexico, evacuation to higher ground for floods, hurricanes, and tornado warnings were common. At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the homelands of this author’s father and grandfather in Louisiana. Hundreds of miles of wetlands, already threatened, were turned to open water; vital brackish waters were flooded with seawater, thus damaging the delicate balance between fresh and salt that many plants and animals need for their habitats. Vital records and historic documents were flooded, damaged, besieged with mold, and lost to the ravages of wind and water. However, these records do not tell the only stories in Louisiana. In the wake of the devastation that has impacted Louisiana communities, in particular Creole and Indian communities, it makes other forms of record-keeping, such as historic oral narratives and material culture, vitally important as they seek to preserve their histories as Indians, Louisiana Creoles, and uniquely mixed-blood people in Louisiana. This article is taken from a greater conversation, a work in progress. The text presented in this article should be read as a story and a conversation that seeks to open possible dialogues and interaction, shared histories, narratives, and cooperation between Louisiana Indians and Louisiana Creoles as manifested in shared material culture practices and mixed racial-cultural inheritance. By revisiting the racial mixing of Creole identity from a metis/mestizo perspective, “reading” Indian and Creole basketry as a material culture source that speaks for a people, and sharing personal reflections, the author hopes to illustrate converging narratives and dialogues further rooting Louisiana Creoles in an indigenous history; a metis/mestizo people separate but linked to their indigenous land and kin ties. The author urges other scholars to explore further the indigenous connections between Louisiana Creoles and Louisiana Indians with a particular focus on those of both Louisiana Indian and Creole descent.

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Black, White, Light, and Bright: A Narrative of Creole Color

Past Narratives/Narratives Past Graduate Conference
Stanford University, Stanford, California
2001-02-16 through 2001-02-18
20 pages

Christopher N. Matthews, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hofstra University

Much of the world of life is made real through the symbolic application of color, shade, hue, and other features of visual meaning to the physical matter around us. This interplay of light and dark gives shape to form and place to space. This same mode also works discursively allowing forms and spaces to be recognized not only physically but culturally as representations of the social construction of reality. This paper explores this issue by seeing color both in fact and symbol in the development of the Creole cultures of New Orleans. A city steeped in multiple traditions, New Orleans is a spectrum of colors which act out the tensions of past and present. At the root is a conflict between that which is Creole and that which is not. The archaeology here is a story about this story.

Race cannot allow ambiguity, fluidity, or mixture, for it then ceases to refer to something pure, something distinct. The absolute strength of mestizaje is the power it has—by its even being able to be thought—of dissolving race and everything associated with it, ultimately dissolving even itself.

Rainier Spencer, Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour

Introduction: race and color

The discussion of color is simultaneously at the heart of American historical archaeology and left out altogether. Without doubt archaeologies of race and racism, of cultures of alterity framed by these social issues, and the relatively new yet established sub-field of African-American Archaeology are a center of concern and productivity for the field. It goes without saying that these archaeologies are concerned with exploring the dimensions of social life driven by color and the implied social and cultural differences that existed among past people. It is also agreed that because color continues to elicit deep social significance in contemporary society that the search through archaeology for its constructions and expressions carries some extra special resonance for archaeology today.

I contend, however, that historical archaeologists have yet to reveal the depth of meaning behind color differences that their subjects, collaborators, colleagues, institutions, and living social formations represent, struggle with and against, and perhaps too quickly assume. The historical archaeology of race and racism in particular has yet to explicitly consider how race becomes identity, choosing instead to employ racial identities as givens and produce archaeologies of their expression rather than their construction. To work against this, we must not produce archaeologies about race which assume its existence, but archaeologies that explain the material of racing and the materialities of racism (see also Orser 1998, Mullins 1999, Epperson 1999, Matthews et al n.d.)…

…Culture to Race

During this era of Creolization, however, the undoing of Louisiana’s Creole culture was literally born. Issued from the union of natives, settlers, and slaves, “mixedrace” children were regularly born in New Orleans after 1730. Their numbers were not large and to be sure they were not always planned, chosen, nor welcome. Nevertheless, throughout the 18th century their population grew with each decade (Hanger 1997, Bell 1997). A growing population, however, was not their problem. Rather, new influences emerged in Louisiana towards the end of the century that challenged the Creole tradition by redefining Creole in the terms of race….

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Census Bureau Reports Final 2010 Census Data for the United States

United States Census Bureau
Census 2010
2011-03-24

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that 2010 Census population totals and demographic characteristics have been released for communities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These data have provided the first look at population counts for small areas and race, Hispanic origin, voting age and housing unit data released from the 2010 Census. With the release of data for all the states, national-level counts of these characteristics are now available.

For each state, the Census Bureau will provide summaries of population totals, as well as data on race, Hispanic origin and voting age for multiple geographies within the state, such as census blocks, tracts, voting districts, cities, counties and school districts.

According to Public Law 94-171, the Census Bureau must provide redistricting data to the 50 states no later than April 1 of the year following the census. As a result, the Census Bureau is delivering the data state-by-state on a flow basis. All states will receive their data by April 1, 2011.

Highlights by Steven F. Riley

• The United States population (for apportionment purposes)  is 308,745,538. This represents a 9.71% increase over 2000.
• The U.S. population including Puerto Rico is 312,471,327.  This represents a 9.55% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (excluding Puerto Rico) checking two or more races (TOMR) is 9,009,073 or 2.92% of the population. This represents a 31.98% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (including Puerto Rico) checking TOMR is 9,026,389 or 2.89% of the population.  This represents a 29.23% increase over 2000.
• Hawaii has the highest TOMR response rate at 23.57%, followed by Alaska (7.30%), Oklahoma (5.90%) and California (4.87%).
• California has the highest TOMR population at 1,815,384, followed by Texas (679,001), New York (585,849), and Florida (472,577).
• Mississppi has the lowest TOMR response rate at 1.15%, followed by West Virginia (1.46%),  Alabama (1.49%) and Maine (1.58%).
• Vermont has the lowest TOMR population at 10,753, followed by North Dakota (11,853), Wyoming (12,361) and South Dakota (17,283).
• South Carolina has the highest increase in the TOMR response rate at 100.09%, followed by North Carolina (99.69%), Delaware (83.03%) and Georgia (81.71%).
• New Jersey has the lowest increase in the TOMR response rate at 12.42%, followed by California (12.92%), New Mexico (16.11%), and Massachusetts (17.81%).
• Puerto Rico has a 22.83% decrease in the TOMR response rate and New York has a 0.73% decrease in the TOMR response race.  No other states or territories reported decreases.

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley. Source: United States Census Bureau

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley.  Source: United States Census Bureau

Fear and Desire: Regional Aesthetics and Colonial Desire in Kate Chopin’s Portrayals of the Tragic Mulatta Stereotype

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 43, Number 1 (Fall 2010)
pages 1-22
E-ISSN: 1534-1461 Print ISSN: 0038-4291

Dagmar Pegues

The interrogation of the category of race in Kate Chopin’s fiction represents an essential dimension of regional aesthetics, and it offers an alternative view to previous interpretations that focus primarily on feminist themes. This article examines the role of Louisiana as a specific region in the construction of the tragic mulatta stereotype in the fiction of Kate Chopin, primarily in her stories “Désirée’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraïde,” and by analogy in her most successful novel The Awakening. I propose to extricate Chopin’s work from the virgin/whore dichotomy so often applied to white and non-white characters respectively. From a new perspective, an illumination of the portrayals of the tragic mulatta figure in Chopin’s texts invites a reconsideration of the stereotype of the tragic mulatta that typically oscillates between evocations of the exotic and the sentimental. Attempting to reclaim the category of race in regionalist fiction by examining the tragic mulatta stereotype in the selected texts, I see parallels between this pervasive image of southern local color fiction and the post-colonial paradigm, i.e. the dichotomy of the colonizer versus the colonized as it is suggested by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks as well as the notion of stereotype as a form of normalizing, yet contradictory, judgment in Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. From this perspective, the trope of the tragic mulatta appropriated by Chopin in her fiction represents an essential point of concurrence of the issues of gender, race, and region, and it points to the underlying racial anxiety manifested by the existence of ambivalent feelings of fear and desire toward the racial Other. Consequently, the internalization of colonial commodification of the racially Other can be interpreted as the true tragic element in the…

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Miscegenation and competing definitions of race in twentieth-century Louisiana

Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 621-659

Michelle Brattain, Associate Professor of History
Georgia State University

MARCUS BRUCE CHRISTIAN, AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR AT DILLARD University, observed in the mid-nineteen-fifties that while New Orleans might be known for “gumbo, jambalaya, lagniappe, poor boy sandwiches, pralines, Mardi Gras and Creoles,” it also has “another claim to distinction which has not been bruited about very loudly. ” New Orleans is a place, he wrote, where family lines “waver back and forth across color-lines like wet wash in a high March wind.” The city has given to America “more ‘passer pour blanches’ [people who pass for white] than any other city in our country.” A poet and scholar of black history, Christian anticipated much of the current academic interest in race as a social construction. (1) His meticulous histories of eighteenth—and nineteenth-century families recreated an era when racial lines were more fluid and southern society accepted—or at least expected—interracial sex. In the latter half of Christian’s career, as a civil rights struggle charged with anxieties about interracial contact swirled around him, his interests broadened to include the progeny of those early families. Among thousands of newspaper clippings that Christian saved over his lifetime—documenting New Orleans history from the protracted fight over school desegregation to the debate over stereotypical and degrading representations of Africans in Mardi Gras–one finds dozens of society photographs, wedding announcements, and obituaries that he compiled, seemingly in an attempt to discover a similar secret interracial history of the twentieth century. In the margins, he sometimes annotated genealogies, alternate spellings, or anecdotes about similar names encountered on the other side of the color line. In 1959, for example, he noted, and documented, the strange coincidence of a death notice for a man he thought was a “Negro,” who had died at an “all white” hospital, and speculated on the dead man’s familial relationship to a realtor listing a “colored” apartment a couple of weeks later. Of the family name in question, he later wrote to himself, “Joubert? What about the white family that says it spells its name ‘Jau’ and not ‘Jou’ [?]” Christian often wrote simply, as he did on a 1960 photograph of a couple cutting their fiftieth-anniversary cake, the word miscegenation. (2) The basis for such judgments was rarely explained. Perhaps it was a distant memory, a rumor, or merely Christian asserting his ability as a black man to spot passer pour blanches. Unfortunately he never published his side of these stories…

…Two striking conclusions emerge from an analysis of these records. First, Louisianans held much more complicated and historically contingent views of race than the statutes and court decisions alone would suggest. The legal adjudication of race in the twentieth century, as Pascoe has argued, historically had a complex, interdependent relationship with popular and scientific beliefs about race. This essay examines one aspect of that tension. By necessity, politics and the courts represented abstract law that could recognize only black and white, but the people who entered the courts worked with a more practical understanding that was also born of necessity. Most noteworthy about the testimony of people brought into Louisiana courts by miscegenation law is the fluidity and contextual nuance with which many people viewed race. In spite of the mid-twentieth century’s increasingly rigid lines of demarcation with regard to race, many ordinary Louisiana citizens instinctively understood and accepted the essentially social nature of racial definitions, and they worked with these definitions in the most private areas of their lives…

…Second, though miscegenation law frequently failed to prevent sex across the race line, it served another equally significant function in the twentieth century: a tool to monitor racial boundaries. Louisiana state law had often been able to tame and contain the contradictions of black and white, but by the mid-twentieth century, the demands of massive resistance increasingly brought about more ideological and less practical applications of jurisprudence. Official public records associated with essentially private and gendered actions such as birth and marriage became a gatekeeping mechanism for maintaining segregation in Louisiana schools, sports, and public conveyances. Government-employed bureaucrats carried out increasingly stringent investigations of once-routine applications for marriage licenses, death certificates, and birth certificates in order to police the boundaries of race and expose those who in the past might have “passed” as white or married across race lines. These private points of individual connection with the state, therefore, took on a substantial burden in the maintenance of racial boundaries, the punishment of miscegenation, and the defense of whiteness. The objective of anti-miscegenation law was ostensibly to discourage and punish sex across the race line, but it also permitted the state to use gender and private life to control the same boundary. In doing so, it made significant contributions to the redefinition of miscegenation and race itself.

Incidents of “race mixture” and white attempts to control such encounters have a long and infamous history in the South. Although prohibition of interracial sex was typically legislators’ stated objective, recent scholarship also underscores the deeply contextual nature of the statutes’ various incarnations. In colonial Virginia, where the earliest legislation on interracial liaisons appeared in 1662, the law reflected first the English conception of broadly defined racial hierarchy and later the social and economic dominance of explicitly racial slavery. At all times, colonial law addressed the reality of ongoing racial mixing, even as it represented what A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff have aptly described as “attempts to patch holes in the fabric of the system.” (10)

The solution, as Peter W. Bardaglio puts it, was a legal attempt “not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them” in directions that bolstered the slave system and existing racial and gender hierarchies. (11) While the specific definitions of the crime and punishment varied, as Charles Robinson notes, “In each colony a violation of the law required some party, man, woman, and/or child, to make restitution by sacrificing freedom.” Doubling the fine for interracial fornication, Virginia’s assembly, for example, declared in 1662 that an interracial child’s status would follow that of the mother. This ruling insured that the most common transgression of the color line–between black women and white men–would not undermine a social system increasingly based on a dichotomy between black slaves and free white persons. Maryland’s 1664 anti-miscegenation law did not proscribe marriage, but it declared that a white woman who married a slave would serve that slave’s master for the remainder of the husband’s life and that any offspring would be required to labor for the parish for thirty-one years. After 1692 in Maryland and 1725 in Pennsylvania, free black men who married white women were sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia enacted provisions similar to those of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (12) Colonial officials also singled out white women who had sex with black men for special punishment, a double standard that reflected, among other concerns, a perceived need both to control white female sexuality and to eliminate the threat that interracial offspring posed to the institution of slavery…

…In the early nineteenth century, as moral reformers encouraged the spread of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States, Louisiana law continued to reflect a greater preoccupation with racial hierarchy and property than with sex. In 1825, for example, the legislature revised the civil code to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers, prohibit children of color from claiming paternity from white fathers, and make it more difficult for biracial children to receive an inheritance by disallowing all but formal legal acknowledgement as a basis for establishing paternity. Through such measures Louisianans eliminated the old French laws governing support of children born within placage and protected the interests of white heirs from siblings of color. Interracial marriage remained illegal in the sense that it was legally invalid, but the law did not prescribe punishment for violators…

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