From Quarantine to Mainstream: The Literary and Historical Journey of American Mixed-Race Heroines

Abstract

From Quarantine to Mainstream: The Literary and Historical Journey of American Mixed-Race Heroines THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN QUADROON: Free Women of Color in the Revolution- ary Atlantic World. By Emily Clark. Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press. 2013.THE ROMANCE OF RACE: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930. By Jolie A. Sheffer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni- versity Press. 2013.Racial color in the United States and the plight of those who have dared to cross them have long fascinated historians, sociologists, psychologists, novel- ists, and playwrights alike. In the nation's early years, especially from the period of the Haitian Revolution to the American Civil War, the specter of threatened the social and political structures in a nation built upon race-based slavery. As abolitionists cried out against slavery, they were met with a fierce resistance. They were accused of supporting amalgamation, a term that was used as a rallying cry against emancipa- tion. For anti-abolitionists, black freedom would too likely lead to a nation of racial hybrids. Abolitionists responded by pointing out that most of the racial mixing in the nation resulted from the power white men held over enslaved black women on southern plantations, but even many white opponents of slavery admitted to discomfort with the notion of too much intimate contact with African Americans.During the Civil War, those who opposed black freedom coined the term miscegenation and used it to play on existing fears and stir others, in both the North and the South, to resist any new social order based on social equal- ity, claiming that in such conditions blacks and whites would mix freely. This message was loud and clear, and so was the response. The post-Civil War years saw the emergence of Jim Crow segregation and the use of brutal tactics such as lynching to ensure the maintenance of white racial purity. Legal and extra- legal means sought to prevent people from crossing the carefully constructed and rigidly maintained racial divide in the U.S. well into the twentieth century. Whether amalgamation or miscegenation, mixing would not be tolerated in mainstream culture. At the same time, however, Americans remained in many ways fascinated with this taboo subject. What of those who dared to cross the lines, or of those born of such unions?1In recent years, scholars of American Studies have begun to examine in depth the history of, and reaction to, love across racial and ethnic lines in the U.S.2 Two new works in this field, Emily Clark's The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World and Jolie A. Sheffer's The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Mul- ticulturalism in the United States, 1880-1930, collectively illustrate the unique and challenging position of those born of such unions. Focused primarily on history but also incorporating literature, Clark creates a case study to explain the historical origins of New Orleans' reputation as the exotic home of the al- most mythical American quadroon, often portrayed as the mulatto. Clark's work highlights the otherness of the legendary quadroon and the pro- cess that left her colonized in that city to show how the tragic mulatto became a prominent but very much misunderstood figure in the cultural imagination. Sheffer employs history but relies primarily on literary technique to examine works in the literary genre of romance as she brings the topic into a later period and shows how mixed-race writers at the turn of the twentieth cen- tury built on tales such as that of the tragic mulatto to call for a more inclusive multicultural American society. She explains how writers with firsthand famil- iarity of that special space between races appropriated the image for their own ends as they tried to open the door for acceptance and equality. …