Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity

Abstract

IN JULY 1857 ABBY GUY SUED FOR HER FREEDOM AND THAT OF HER FOUR children in an court. The court records state that Abby Guy had been supporting herself and her children by farming and selling her own crops. The Guy family passed as persons: Abby's oldest daughter boarded out so that she attend school, and the family visited among white folks, and went to church, parties, etc.,-[such that one] should suppose they were white.' Following these accounts of where and how the Guys lived, the court required that the family be presented for physical by the jury, which was to base its decision of whether Abby Guy and her children were black or white, slave or free, on their appearance as well as on any testimony offered: Here the plaintiffs were personally presented in Court, and the judge informed the jury that they . . . should treat their . . . of plaintiffs' as evidence.2 Following their evidentiary inspection of the Guy family, the jury was told that the Guys had lived as free persons in since 1844. In 1855 they moved to Louisiana where Mr. Daniel took possession of them as slaves roughly two years later, claiming that Abby Guy came with ... [him] from Alabama to Arkansas as his slave.3 Witnesses for Daniel testified that Abby's mother, Polly, was said to have been a shade darker than Abby, such that they could not say whether Polly was of African or Indian extraction.4 Determining Abby Guy's status and race solely according to her complexion and that of her mother was complicated by the fact that neither woman's complexion was considered white, nor they be said to be of either African or Native American descent. Consequently, the nature and degree of Abby Guy's otherness as