Mixed Race Studies

‘The Black Count:’ the epic true story behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

The Seattle Times
2012-11-16

Tyrone Beason

Tom Reiss’ swashbuckling new book, “The Black Count,” tells the true story of Alex Dumas, son of a French nobleman and an African slave, the father of author Alexandre Dumas and the inspiration for the younger Dumas’ classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Crown, 414 pp.

There are no statues in monument-laden France commemorating the legendary 18th century swordsman and general Alex Dumas, whose son Alexandre based literary classics like “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” on scenes from the elder’s epic life story.

It’s a sad civic oversight, but nothing compared to the tragic decline suffered by the novelist’s heroic father as laid out in Tom Reiss’ fascinating, and dare to say, swashbuckling new biography, “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”

It turns out that the heroes in those classics are modeled on a black man who was born in 1762 in the French colony of Haiti. Alex Dumas was the son of a wayward French nobleman and an African slave, and it is his biracial identity that adds such rich complexity to his rise through the ranks of the French military to become one of the most beloved generals of his time, arguably even more admired than Napoleon, a fact that probably didn’t sit well with the megalomaniacal future ruler.

It was Napoleon who tapped Dumas to command the cavalry that invaded Egypt, an enormous, and as it turns out, fateful honor.

“The Black Count” meticulously evokes the spirit of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, but it also explains the exasperating paradox of a nation that was simultaneously a huge slaveholding empire and the pioneering exponent of the concept of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.”

Let’s not forget the context. By the 1750s, black slaves taken to France were able to sue their masters for freedom. After the French Revolution in 1793, special schools were set up in France to educate the children of “revolutionaries of color” from the colonies. Black and mixed-race politicians were allowed to serve in the national government…

Read the entire review here.

Woman traces her Tanzanian roots in film

The Citizen
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
2012-02-04

Tyrone Beason

Sometimes a journey begins with a song. In the case of Seattle documentary filmmaker Eli Kimaro, it was a transporting version of the classic lullaby Summertime from the African-American opera Porgy and Bess, this one sung by the Benin-born artist Angelique Kidjo as a West African spiritual, full of cooing background vocals and soul-tapping percussion.

Kimaro’s father is Tanzanian. Her mother is Korean. She’d always been comfortable with her mixed-race background, but something about hearing that song eight years ago sparked a longing to better understand the people she came from, particularly the relatives in Kilimanjaro region, where her father grew up and where she’d visited many times as a child.It dawned on her that she should make a film about her father’s side of the family, even though she’d never directed a movie in her life.

The result, A Lot Like You, debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival last year to positive reviews.

The film helps raise the profile of a population in the United States that many people who identify with just one racial or ethnic group scarcely understand…

…Elikimaro is part of a new wave of multiracial pride, discussion and activism rooted in a very real demographic shift.

America is, in fact, more multiracial. According to the 2010 U.S. census, more than 9 million Americans identified themselves as belonging to two or more racial groups, or about 2.9 per cent of the total population, up from 2.4 per cent a decade ago.

Since 2000, the census has made it easier than ever for people answering its surveys to pick more than one racial group; and Americans who have mixed-race backgrounds, long a cause for derision and marginalization, are ever more comfortable checking all the boxes that apply to them…

Read the entire article here.