Mixed Race Studies

The Mule as Metaphor in the Fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Theory and Practice in English Studies
Volume 4 (2005):
Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of British, American and Canadian Studies. Brno: Masarykova univerzita

Christopher E. Koy, Faculty of Arts
University of West Bohemia, Plzen

The term “mulatto,” meaning the offspring of one black parent and one white parent, is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish word “mulatto” meaning a young mule. The mule, a sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an important metaphor in early African American literature and folklore. Anthropologists collected African American tales with mules, and Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), inspired in part by this folklore, employed the mule as a metaphor in his literary works to represent the subjugation of blacks.

1 Introduction

The mule, the sterile offspring of a mare and a male donkey, is an important symbol in early African American literature and folklore. The term mulatto, meaning the offspring of one black parent and one white parent, is a racist term etymologically derived from the Spanish “mulatto” meaning a young mule. It is racist because it associates offspring of animals of different species with a person of mixed ancestry. The term “mulatto” is a cognate—even the Czech language uses “mulat/mulatka” to indicate a person of mixed African and Caucasian ancestry. The old-fashioned Czech idiom “drít jako mezek” (to slave like a mule) likewise links slave and mule.

Sander L. Gilman has argued that “the abyss between the perceiver and the object in concepts of race is total. It is a complete form of distancing. Placing the Other beyond the pale by stressing an unchanging sense of self provides an image of the Other that is the antithesis of self” (Gilman 1986: 255). One might assume that the case of people of racially mixed ancestry might fill in this “abyss” described by Gilman. If the person were between black and white, the distance would be shortened, so to speak. Yet, then again it may be an examination of the myth-making which forms the basis of any communal identity that needs to be addressed.

the United States today as in Charles Chesnutt’s time, legally as well as otherwise, a person is classified either as black or white. Birth certificates and visa applications require classification of a person’s race, i.e., “Caucasian” or “African American,”—one or the other, since these forms leave no alternative. The “mulatto” term served as a linguistic means to maintain distance between the “white” and “black” race by defining the mixture of the two as Other (than white). After the Civil War “miscegenation” came to express the unacceptable notion of race mixing which in American English came to replace the term “amalgamation” as the word of choice.

2 The degeneracy of mulattos

Chesnutt implicitly and explicitly refutes the myth of race mixing as degenerate in part through the trope of the mule. On the plantation, the mule was known as the superior beast of burden to either the horse or donkey. The hybrid animal ate less, worked longer hours and lived longer. It became ill less frequently and required less attention from its owners. These characteristics are echoed in literature about lighter-skinned slaves, who were sold at higher prices at slave auctions. House slaves are further described as more refined, wearing finer clothes, surrounded by wealth as well as mastering to a greater extent than their darker skinned brethren the “more cultivated” language of their white master. Indeed, the lighter the pigmentation of Chesnutt’s African American characters, the closer their English language resembles that of their master, whereas darker blacks always speak African American vernacular…

Early African American fiction and folklore frequently focus on hybrid mulattos and mules. Chesnutt challenges the Anglo-Saxon myth that the mixing of races constitutes degeneracy (implying most often the degeneracy of the white race), an allegation directed against fair skinned heroes and heroines in his fiction. In Chesnutt’s first published novel, The House behind the Cedars, a medical journal reported that “…the smallest trace of negro blood would inevitably drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior” (Chesnutt 1993a[1900]: 71), replicating notorious medical racist notions of the time. In Chesnutt’s most renowned novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a white journalist rebukes a black man who works for him for purchasing hair straightening solutions and chemicals to lighten skin pigmentation:

“Jerry, when I hired you to work for the Chronicle, you were black. The word ‘negro’ means ‘black.’ The best negro is a black negro, of the pure type, as it came from the hand of God. If you wish to get along well with the white people, the blacker you are the better,—white people do not like negroes who want to be white” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 245-246).

The advertisement claims, “mulattoes turned perfectly white” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 244). A change of appearance is regarded as degenerate as well as a threat to white Southerners. The white journalist knows that Jerry wants to join the privileged group in order to gain power. When his “black face is splotched with brown and yellow patches,” he is publicly exposed as a shoddy counterfeit, his face a metaphor of the “pathetic effort to escape from the universal doom of his race” (Chesnutt 1969[1901]: 245). At the same time that they decried race mixing as degenerate, in Chesnutt’s novels white characters persistently prefer lighter-skinned blacks. In The Quarry, which is set in the first quarter of the 20th century, the hero, Donald Glover, is fair-skinned. He

often had to explain that he was a Negro—he soon found out that most white people preferred the word to any designation that suggested or assumed blood kinship with themselves, though it was quite obvious that he got along better with them than a darker man would have, and in this way they acknowledged in practice what they rigorously ignored in theory (Chesnutt 1999b:189).

This experience was universal in the ante-bellum period, when lighter-skinned slaves served as domestic servants (or “house slaves”). The preference for fair-skinned blacks and the credence that they were somehow “better” or deserved preferential treatment is also not a uniquely American trait but can be observed among liberal-minded European intellectuals of the 19th century as well, even in countries with little experience in slavery or African colonialism…

Read the entire article here.