Mixed Race Studies

Passing, in Moments

Topic Magazine
Issue No. 25, Journeys
July 2019

Mat Johnson

The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.

When I was 12, my Aunt Margaret told me, “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them.”

Aunt Margaret was black, but if you said “black” and not “colored,” she would go off on you. I was black too—still am—but I look white. Or I look whitish; it depends on the viewer. My father’s white and my mother is black, but high yellow and racially ambiguous. Though my mom insisted I was black too, I found a strong argument against that every time I looked in the mirror. And I grew up cut off from my extended black family, which just added to that feeling of disconnection. Sometimes I’d tell other kids I was black, and until they saw my mom, they wouldn’t believe me.

One time I told Aunt Margaret, “Nobody at school knows I’m black—”

“Colored.”

“Nobody at school knows I’m colored.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. That’s when she said it, holding one of my flaccid brown curls in her hand like it was a piece of gold. “You got straight hair, you got pale skin. If people don’t know you’re colored, don’t tell them!”

At 12 years old, I thought Aunt Margaret was confused. I thought her response was antiquated, ridiculously old-fashioned, like how she insisted on using the word “colored” instead of “black.” I thought it was cute. I thought it was funny.

At 19, radical as all undergraduates should be, I thought that, despite how much I loved Aunt Margaret, that she was a color-struck sellout for telling me to live my life as a white man. That, in essence, she was encouraging me to abandon my roots, to reject the black community, in exchange for complete access to white privilege.

At 49, I think she told me what she told me because she loved me. Because she’d been black in America for 80-some years and she didn’t want me to have to endure the way she did. That she wanted the safety of whiteness for me. That she wanted me to thrive, but also to have the full force of America’s wind at my back, instead of getting hit with it head-on.

That Aunt Margaret was expressing what generations of black mothers sometimes told white-appearing children, particularly boys: escape from blackness for your survival.

(And, also, she was color-struck.)…

Read the entire article here.

When Ancestry Search Led To Escaped Slave: ‘All I Could Do Was Weep’

Fresh Air (From WHYY in Philadelphia)
National Public Radio
2016-01-18

Terry Gross, Host

When she was in fifth grade, Regina Mason received a school assignment that would change her life: to connect with her country of origin. That night, she went home and asked her mother where they were from.

“She told me about her grandfather who was a former slave,” Mason tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “And that blew me away, because I’m thinking, ‘Slavery was like biblical times. It wasn’t just a few generations removed.’ ”

But for Mason, slavery was a few generations removed. She would later learn that her great-great-great-grandfather, a man named William Grimes, had been a runaway slave, and that he had authored what is now considered to be the first fugitive slave narrative.

“William Grimes’ narrative is precedent-setting,” Mason says. “[It] was published in 1825, and this was years before the abolitionist movement picked up slave narrative as a propaganda tool to end slavery. It sort of unwittingly paved the way for the American slave narrative to follow.”

Grimes’ original narrative tells the story of his 30 years spent in captivity, followed by his escape in 1814 from Savannah, Ga. He describes how his former owner discovered his whereabouts after the escape and forced him to give up his house in exchange for his freedom. (An updated version, published in 1855, includes a chapter about Grimes’ later life in poverty.)

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave was again republished in 2008 by Oxford University Press. The latest edition was edited by Mason and William Andrews, a scholar of early African-American autobiography…

…Interview Highlights

On learning from her mother that her ancestors had been slaves

She talked about Grandpa Fuller, who was a mulatto slave. And I inquired about his parentage and she told me that his father, from what she knew, was a plantation owner, and his mother was an enslaved black woman. …

And I’m asking, “Well, that’s weird. Did his father own him?” … I mean, how do you explain … to children that slavery existed in freedom-loving America, No. 1; and No. 2, how do you explain to a child about an enslaved heritage shrouded in miscegenation? It’s not an easy thing to do…

Read the story highlights here. Listen to the interview (00:35:55) here. Download the interview here.

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave

Oxford University Press
2008-07-28
192 pages
21 illus.
5 1/2 X 8 1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780195343311
Paperback ISBN: 9780195343328

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English; Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Regina E. Mason, Grimes’s great-great-great-granddaughter

• The first fugitive slave narrative in American history
• A candid, unfiltered, and fully authenticated account of both slavery and so-called freedom in the antebellum U.S. before the advent of the American antislavery movement
• A unprecedented editorial partnership blending scholarship and family history to yield a unique modern edition of a neglected classic of antislavery literature
• No other slave narrative has been recovered, researched, and annotated by a slave’s descendent until now

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in the famous antebellum slave narratives of the period. This edition of Grimes’s autobiography represents a historic partnership between noted scholar of the African American slave narrative, William L. Andrews, and Regina Mason, Grimes’s great-great-great-granddaughter. Their extensive historical and genealogical research has produced an authoritative, copiously annotated text that features pages from an original Grimes family Bible, transcriptions of the 1824 correspondence that set the terms for the author’s self-purchase in Connecticut (nine years after his escape from Savannah, Georgia), and many other striking images that invoke the life and times of William Grimes.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction by William L. Andrews
• Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave
• Chronology: the life and times of William Grimes
• Afterword by Regina E. Mason

Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line: Collected Stories

Penguin Classics
June 2000
304 pages
5.23 x 7.59in
Paperback ISBN: 9780141185026

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Edited by:

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Unlike the popular “Uncle Remus” stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt’s tales probe psychological depths in black people unheard of before in Southern regional writing. They also expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence, and moral compromise.

This important collection contains all the stories in his two published volumes, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, along with two uncollected works: the tragic “Dave’s Neckliss” and “Baxter’s Procustes,” Chesnutt’s parting shot at prejudice.

Mandy Oxendine

University of Illinois Press
September 1997
136 pages
ISBN-10: 0252063473
ISBN-13: 9780252063473

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Foreword by

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In a novel rejected by a major publisher in the 19th century as too shocking for its time, writer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) challenges the notion that race, class, education, and gender must define one’s “rightful” place in society. Both a romance and a mystery, Mandy Oxendine tells the compelling story of two fair-skinned, racially mixed lovers who chose to live on opposite sides of the color line.

Foreword

Mandy Oxedine is Charles W. Chesnutt’s first novel, though it has had to wait one hundred years to find a publisher. The leading African American fiction writer at the turn of the century, Chesnutt apparently began Mandy Oxendine a few years after he made his initial literary success as a short story writer for the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Failing to interest his publisher in Mandy Oxendine, Chesnutt decided to focus his energies on making a book of short fiction, an effort that was doubly rewarded in 1899 with the publication of The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Mandy Oxendine returned to its creator’s file of unpublished manuscripts; evidently Chesnutt never placed it in circulation again.

The effect of Mandy Oxendine on the long evolution of The House behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt s first published novel, was significant, for in both stories the central issue is the dilemmas a fair-skinned African American woman must confront in passing for white. When compared with Mandy Oxendine, The House behind the Cedars has reater narrative density and is more sure-handed in its development of secondary characters and plots. On the other hand, with regard to the depiction of the mixed-race woman, the central figure in both stories, the earlier unpublished novel is more resistant to popular notions of femininity and less willing to accommodate itself to the protocols of “tragic mulatta” fiction than is The House behind the Cedars. Perhaps the fate of Mandy Oxendine helped convince Chesnutt that to get his version of the novel of passing into print, he would have to tone down and conventionalize some of the qualities that make Mandy Oxendine remarkable. Certainly next to Rena Walden, the pathetic ingenue who plays the victimized heroine in The House behind the Cedars, Mandy Oxendine seems almost italicized by her bold self-assertiveness and her canny sense of how a woman of color must operate if she is to protect and advance her interests in the post-Reconstruction South. Through her plainspoken southern vernacular, Mandy Oxendine articulates a tough-minded assessment of her racial, gendered, and class-bound condition, which sheds a good deal of light on her creator’s firsthand experience of life along the color line in a region of North Carolina very much like Mandy’s own milieu.

Whether Chesnutt agrees with Mandy s solution to her situation or whether he favors the strategy espoused by her eventual husband, Tom Lowrey, is left deliberately vague in Mandy Oxendine. In the later published novels, Chesnutt usually states or strongly implies his moral perspective on social issues, but in Mandy Oxendine he seems more reticent, as though testing the waters. He may have been trying to determine for himself just how far a writer in his position should go in representing forthrightly and objectively the complex web of personal desire, racial obligation, and socioeconomic ambition that held the mixed-blood in social suspension in the post-Civil War South. Is Mandy Oxendine to be condemned for having spun her own web of deceit, or has she always been caught in a cage designed by the new southern social order to restrain those who might challenge its official deceptions about color and class? However a reader responds to these questions, one suspects that the social and gender issues that probably caused Mandy Oxendine to seem beyond the pale one hundred years ago are likely to make the novel of more than passing interest today, for Mandy Oxendine is a prototype of a new brand of African American literary realism in the early twentieth century.

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s ‘Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage’ and Louise Heaven’s ‘In Bonds’

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 24, Number 2 (2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-0643, Print ISSN: 0748-4321
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2007.0018

Eric Gardner, Professor of English
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

While the figure of the “tragic mulatta” is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: “What is remarkable though not always acknowledged . . . is the fact that the majority of beautiful mulattas in American novels before 1865 . . . do not end up unfulfilled” (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor’s Maum Guinea, H. L. [Hezekiah Lord] Hosmer’s Adela [The Octooon], John T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood, [Thomas] Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they “must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers,” “more often than not . . . eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely” (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about “the majority”-especially given that Andrews and Kachun’s own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any “complete sets”-this essay shares the sense that mixed-race characters who are not “tragic mulattas” have been absent from our discussions for too long.

This absence is complicated by the disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of the tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of the novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. The reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond the scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child’s early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown’s story) and in part from the limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, the dominance of the figure of the tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant’s dismissal of the full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters-a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women’s texts. It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate the first real resistance to the figure of the tragic mulatta in works such as Child’s Reconstruction-era Romance of the Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy.

This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta-one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic-indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven’s In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine the contours of our sense of the mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature.

I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: the publisher of Sunshine’s fourth edition (which carried the entirely new title The Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; the publisher of In Bonds founded the Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). Indeed, both books demonstrate a rich awareness of the literary discourses of race and race-mixing swirling around them. Though evidence about their composition is lacking, Sunshine repeatedly invokes and rewrites the language of the tragic mulatta figure, while In Bonds actually makes specific reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of the driving force in the novel’s plot (128-29). Though both novels and both authors are absent from contemporary critical work, Sunshine and In Bonds offer fascinating counterpoints to the dominant sense of the figure of the tragic mulatta and presage works that critics have treated as more revolutionary, such as Child’s Romance of the Republic and Harper’s Iola Leroy. Indeed, both Sunshine and (albeit a bit less so) In Bonds suggest that a mixed-race heroine who overcomes potential tragedy is central to America’s future…

The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt

Louisiana State University Press
March 1999
312 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Paper ISBN-13: 9780807124529

William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: “Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community.”

Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt’s most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of “bright mulatto” caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage.

Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation’s moral progress. Andrews argues that “along with [George Washington] Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated [William] Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history.” Although Chesnutt’s career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America’s race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will.

William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in the context of the author’s times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt’s works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.