bi-racial

Roxanne

This entry was posted in Pudd'nhead Wilson and tagged african-american bi-racial female white on by

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Character: Roxanna

Source Text:  Twain, Mark, and Sidney E. Berger. Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins: An Authoritative Text, Textual Notes, Criticism. New York: Norton, 1980. Print.

Entry Author:  Claire Tierney

Roxy is 1/16th black and 15/16ths white in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, where she is a slave to Percy Driscoll. She is resilient, resourceful, and pragmatic. She is very much a victim of her society and her station in life. She is described as looking white, “to all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody; but the one.sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro” (9).

She is described as beautiful, “Her complexion was very fair” and her hair was brown, “but it was not apparent because her head was bound about with a checkered handkerchief and the hair was concealed under it” (9). When she is “among her own caste” she had “an easy, independent carriage […] and a high and ‘sassy’ way” (9). But when she was around white people she was “meek and humble” (9). Society defines her as black only because of her tattered clothing and lower-class vernacular. These social constructions, along with her intellect and strength, highlight the fallaciousness of Dawson’s Landing’s definitions of race.

Her sense of morality is constantly in question. Early on the novel when she sees Judge Driscoll has left some money out, she does not take it, thanking the fact that she “was saved in the nick of time by a revival”, saying “‘Dad blame dat revival, I wist it had a ben put off till tomorrow” (12). Later on in the novel her only concern becomes protecting herself and her son. She is willing to do anything for him. She complicates the binary of good and evil, and becomes increasingly darker throughout the novel. This is a direct result of desperation, as she is forced to make decisions more erratically.

She switches Tom and Chambers in their infancy in an effort to save her son the pain of serving the same life sentence of slavery that she has endured. Nevertheless, she enjoys seeing her son, a black man, in a position of power. She actively seeks to change the status quo in her society, and uses her and her son’s multiraciality to do so.

Later when the death of Judge Driscoll frees Roxy, she works hard until her body is arthritic, and she comes back to see her son. She becomes enraged when she sees that her son has become a criminal, squandering the opportunity she gave him by falling prey to society’s spoiling of him. She takes control of his life, demanding that he turn over a part of his allowance to her. She masterminds criminal plans with her son, and he betrays her, selling her “down the river” to an abusive slave master. She escapes by attacking her overseer and returns to Tom, telling him that she will reveal his true identity as a black man if he does not buy her freedom. After Tom fails at doing this, and gets caught in the Murder of Judge Driscoll, Roxy lives the duration of her life with “the spirit in her eye quenched” and “the voice of her laughter ceased in the land” (120). She fulfills the prophecy of the tragic mulatto, forever an outcast to society, forever miserable.

Roxy comports herself with confidence as a beautiful light-skinned woman around black people, and as a lowly ignorant black woman among white people. Her presentation, her vernacular, and even her morality are largely defined by the perceptions of those around her, more than how she defines herself. Despite her pragmatism and attempts at disrupting the status quo, she falls victim to society’s cruel logic.

Sophie Fevvers

This entry was posted in Nights at the Circus and tagged animal beast bi-racial human on by

 

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Character: Sophie Fevvers

Source Text:  Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Entry Author:  Alexandra Katechis

 

Sophie Fevvers is the protagonist of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). Her status as a mixed race character stems from the very physical reality of being half bird and half human. In this work, I attempt to mirror Fevvers’ progress as an extremely complex character, beginning with the preposterous self-idealizations and transitioning slowly to the empowering self-reclamation. Voice is manipulated to emphasize the difference between self-identification and outer authorization of identity, a main (feminist) theme of the novel.

Fevvers
A found Abecedarian

Anatomy of our avian wonder, aerialiste extroidinare:
Azrael, Azrail, Ashriel, Azriel, Azaril, Gabriel,

Broken blossom of the present tense. Fevvers,
Brothel-bred burlesque of Brobdingnagian symmetry, a

Chorus of a woman, cheering on the coming century, the
Circus of our Cockney ringmaster, celestial fishwife,

Dark angel of many names, and all the rest of this dolorous litany. We, the
Denizens of down below, all with hearts that beat and souls that suffer, sir,

Excavated from England, once held above the spinning world,
Effervescent and eager, now dropped back into place. Think twice about turning

From a freak into a woman, the female part where Terror rules. Our
Feathered friend advises the fool with festering teeth. Fevvers

Groks with a joyous awe, almost a gratitude, that luxury should exist like
Gin palaces in heaven where she might reside behind the bar

Hemmed in the heavy envelope of simplest delusion. Walser and
His hobby of the humbug hunt, hung up with her on the high trapeze.

Is she fiction or is she fact? The idea of it condemns them both.
I feared the proof of my own singularity, and no longer alone, they

Join in with the stable-boys, roustabouts and grooms, elephants and equestrians,
Jugglers and tumblers, all drawn to the amazing spectacle, all succumbed to it.

Knowing no other tricks, the circus could absorb madness and slaughter, and
Knit together the hypnotic tension between the flesh and the spirit.

Lovely London, the shining city, the new Jerusalem,
Lit with candles of midnight, burns up the nuclear core of our luciferity:

Magic, the museum of women monsters, made pure in
Midsummer, yes, the year’s green hinge.

Once and for all, find the oracular proof in the organ of this gilded cage, and
One by one we might be made free from this

Panopticon, step from our platforms of prolegomena and slowly, slowly begin to
pull, dragging with us our freight of dreams. With a pressure

Queer as combustion and composure of equal and celebratory
Quality, she proclaims, all the women will have wings, the same as I. The

Rhapsodic rush of the interrogatory, What is your name? Have you a soul? Can you love?
Requiem for her dazzling reflection, restorer of her soul. We rise from a

Sleep more lifelike than living which consumes the world, the
shaman’s elixir coaxed out of the samovar with sulfuric

tongues. We are abandoned between tundra and taiga in our mind’s
Transbaikalia, steeped in the bliss of a new century. Fevvers, the

Universal word of wonder, of grief, cracks the black, black vortex of the
Uroboric snake with its tail in its mouth. Once the

Verified and venerated virgin whore, channel of volcanic sighs; now a miracle of frail
Violets, frost nipped and pale, the colour of tired eyelids yet big

With wilderness and wildness, in full bloom…Violets on New Years Eve.
Wherever we go we’ll need no more fathers, her heart crushing with commotion and

Expectation of pleasure. Once the old world has turned on its axis,
exacerbated with the customary endings of the old comedies,

You shall give yourself to me but I shall not possess you.
Year One, the envoi of this extensive ritual;

Zed to this linear story which seemed to happen in the third person

Annelies Mellema

This entry was posted in This Earth of Mankind and tagged bi-racial daughter dutch female indonesian javanese light-skinned on by

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Character: Annelis Mellma

Source Text: Toer, Pramoedya Ananta This Earth of Mankind

Entry Author: Mike Steigman

Annelies Mellema is the illegitimate daughter of Dutch settler, Herman Mellema, and Javanese (Indonesian) Concubine, Nyai Ontosoroh. She is the sister of Robert Suurhoff. Both he and Annelies are part Javanese, part Dutch or “Mixed-blood”, as referred to in the novel. Both Mr. Mellema and Nyai rushed to board a ship when she was in labor so Robert could be born a Dutch citizen, but to no avail.

Annelies’ introduction begins thus, “In front of us stood a girl, white-skinned, refined, European face, hair and eyes of a Native” (25). Her description is told through Minke, the protagonist’s perspective. Minke is Javanese, yet fluent in Dutch and Western studies thanks to his schooling. Annelies on the other hand stays home, assisting her mother in working the fields and raising animals.

She acts incredibly childish throughout the narrative, with all decisions imposed upon her. mother, love interest, father, doctor and brother all and forcibly make decisions for her. Her will is frail and she falls ill at the slightest touch, namely without Minke’s presence, continually drugged by the family doctor until Minke returns to her.

Once she wakes up from being drugged, the doctor tells Minke to “‘Have pity on this child. She cannot face violence or harshness. She dreams of someone who will love her, who will give her pure love. She feels like she is living alone, by herself, without knowing the world’” (202).

Considered the “better child” between herself, and her mixed brother Robert Mellema, she maintains the farm with her mother, Nyai. Robert Mellema had also dropped out of school and “for him there would be nothing greater than to become a European and for all Natives to bow down to him (67). He desires to pass as Dutch, but is unable to do so due to lack of education and his darker skin color. Annelies leans toward her Javanese identity based off her close relationship with her mother. Nyai has told her stories about how Herman Mellema had slowly turned an incredibly evil man after Nyai had attempted to educate herself to be fluent in Dutch and Western studies. Ever since, Nyai has decided to keep Annelies out of schools. Coupled with Robert Mellema sexually assaulting her, Annelies wants nothing to do with her “Dutch” side of the family.

Before he and Nyai had met, Herman Mellema was married and had a son. His biological son visits and accuses him of having “committed a blood sin, a crime against blood” (99).
The text concludes with her forced departure from Java, being the illegitimate wife of the main character and the illegitimate daughter of Nyai in the eyes of Dutch law. The courts then decide to send her off to Europe. Once she exits the safe haven of her home, she leaves Nyai and the main character, the two natives or Dutch-educated “pure-bloods” alone in the house, newly confiscated by the government.

The first installment in the Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind was originally an oral story shared between Indonesian prisoners. When Pramoedya Ananta Toer transcribed the text to paper, he sought to ‘correct the accepted version of the history of the ride of Indonesian nationalism’ through Annelies, who embodies the frailty of the nation, the instability of relationships as a counterpart to Minke and Nyai, both pure-blood Natives well-versed in Dutch teachings yet rendered powerless.

Annelies’ weakness is a microcosm of the relationship between colonizer and colonized. As an involuntary ambassador of the tragic princess, the walking manifestation of the union between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, she is wiped out by the end of the novel. As she exits, any hope of reconciliation between the Natives and the Dutch is systematically erased.

Tom Driscoll (Valet de Chambre)

This entry was posted in Pudd'nhead Wilson and tagged african-american bi-racial black male Mark Twain on by

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Character: Tom Driscoll (Valet de Chambre)

Source Text:  Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

Entry Author:  Adam Kelley

The character known throughout the text of Puddn’head Wilson as Tom Driscoll, a white southern aristocrat, was actually born Valet de Chambre, a mixed race child born a slave, but was switched at birth by his slave mother Roxana, “Roxy”.  Chambers, hereafter referred to as Tom, ‘passes’ as the son of Judge Driscoll, descended from the “First Families” of aristocratic “Old Virginia” lineage.  Tom’s real identity is later revealed using forensic evidence that proves his birth, but his appearance and success as an imposter challenge 19th century notions of racial identity.  Tom, is born a ‘black’ slave by the ‘one drop’ rule, lives half his life as free white man of a locally respected family, and is ultimately revealed and sold back into slavery.  The irony of his fate draws out the arbitrary nature of socially and legally constructed racial identity.

The imposter Tom’s race is known through his mixed race mother Roxy. The narrator describes her as “white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black out voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro” (Twain 9).  Twain’s matter-of-fact tone parodies the absurd nature of 19th century legal definitions of race.  He presses this point farther when he describes of Roxy’s son that “he was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro” (9).  Both Roxy’s and her child’s racial status is defined legally in terms of the “one drop rule” that defines them as slaves by descent.

Physically, Roxy’s son ‘Chambers’ and the child Tom Driscoll appear identical.  Twain describes of Chambers that “he had blue eyes and flaxen curls, like his white comrade” (9).  The only discernable marker between the two infants is their clothing: the Driscoll child dressed in the finest garb and ornament, and Chambers stuffed into a “course” shirt that “barely reached his knees” (9).  This further links the racial identity of the children to social cues imbedded in status symbols, and not in anything inherent in the children themselves.

Later in life the imposter Tom is informed by his mother that he was switched at birth and this has a devastating effect on his sense of self.  After the revelation he wakes in the morning to exclaim the infamous lines “‘A nigger!—I am a nigger!—oh, I wish I was dead!’” (48).  Profoundly disturbed by the news of his origin, Tom’s personality is shattered and he immediately begins to internalize the racial stereotypes he once cast on others.  He feels “the curse of Ham upon him” (49) and “the ‘nigger’ in him was ashamed to sit at the white folks table” (49).  He becomes deeply aware of his vulnerability under the law, and lives his life in constant fear of being found out.

All of Tom’s social relationships become inverted: his mother, once his slave, now lords her secret knowledge of his identity over him, and his perception of his relationship to his Uncle and his community alters drastically from entitlement to suspicion.  His drastic shift in mood draws out the effects of racial prejudice on the marginalized of society.  Tom is unwittingly forced into the position of ‘passing’ as white, and grows up oblivious of his origin.    But, once he learns his true origin, he immediately begins to question his own identity and alters his personality and behavior.  Nevertheless, Tom is consistently a despicable character: callous, cruel, and manipulative, but his punishment of being “sold down the river” feels unjust even for such an unlikable person.  Tom, although being guilty of multiple counts of theft and even a murder, is ultimately punished merely for being a fraction ‘negro’.

 

Armand Aubigny

This entry was posted in The Awakening and tagged bi-racial black male part black white on by

 

armandCharacter:  Armand Aubigny

Source Text:  Chopin, Kate. The Awakening: With a Selection of Short Stories. 1899. Reprint. New York City: Bantam Dell, 1981. 177-182. Print.

Entry Author:  Emma Baker

 

In Kate Chopin’s short story, “Desiree’s Baby,” Armand Aubigny is the father of the titular child and the husband of Desiree. Belonging to a well-known, respectable Creole family, he owns a plantation called L’Abri that he inherited from his father. He spent his childhood in Paris until his mother’s death, and returned home to the United States with his father. Presumably, he lived with his mother when she was still alive. His role in the short story focuses on falling in love with Desiree, the adopted daughter of the Valmondés, another well-known creole family. Although Desiree comes from an ‘obscure origin,’ as the Valmondés found her around the ‘toddling age’ near the gateway to their home, Armand initially finds that no obstacle to marriage instead asserting, “What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana?” However, while his father treated the slaves under his ownership with kindness, “Young Aubigny’s rule was a strict one, too, and under it his negroes had forgotten how to be gay.” (Chopin, 177)

As such, Chopin positions Armand Aubigny as the character with the most power in his societal context. He is male, wealthy, and at the start of the story, both the reader and the surrounding characters believe he is white. One can see evidence of his exercise of this power in the treatment of his slaves as well as evidence of prejudice and racism. He seems reasonable in his acceptance of a nameless wife whose origins are unknown at the start of the novel, but after the birth of their child one perceives changes in his behavior. Others notice the child’s skin tone before he does but he begins to absent “himself from home; and when there, avoided [Desiree’s] presence and that of her child, without excuse.” (Chopin, 179) After Desiree herself realizes the similarity to one of the quadroon boys of La Blanche, a mulatto slave, she pleads with Armand to tell her what it means. He only responds, “it means…that the child is not white; it means that you are not white.” (Chopin, 180) Armand is not suspected to be the reason for the child’s quadroon appearance, as Desiree’s origin is unknown. As she attempts to defend herself by naming her features, he cruelly responds, “As white as La Blanche,” (Chopin, 180) demonstrating that the physical appearance of whiteness holds no power when one carries ‘black blood.’  Following this, he draws further away from his wife, begins to treat his slaves with a greater cruelty than before and does not prevent his wife from walking unprotected into the bayou with her child never to return. His position in a place of power demonstrates how influential his actions and decisions are on the lives of others around him, as well as highlight the discrepancy between an unknown origin or namelessness and the possibility of having black ancestry.

Chopin does not reveal his parentage until the last lines of the story. As he burns all of Desiree’s belongings he finds a letter sent from his mother to his father saying, “I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” (Chopin, 182) The reader then retroactively remembers various mentions throughout the story of “Armand’s dark, handsome face,” (Chopin, 179) and when Desiree pleads, “look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand.” (Chopin, 180) As such, Chopin constructs Armand as a mixed race character who passes for white and maintains, if not enforces, the status quo in order to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Louisiana culture. In the revelation of his mixed race as the final and pivotal plot-point, Chopin upsets the status quo by suggesting a complete lack of adherence throughout the piece, as well as emphasizing the dire consequences that resulted from adherence to those conventions.

Golden Gray (2nd exhibit)

This entry was posted in Jazz and tagged bi-racial black male white on by

jazz_cover2Character: Golden Gray

Source Text:  Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Vintage International, 2004.

Entry Author:

The majority of Jazz’s narrative takes place in a lower class African American community in Harlem during the 1920s. The plot centers on the violent love triangle formed when Joe, married to Violet, began an affair with a young girl named Dorcas. However, as the pasts of the various characters are explored, the narrative extends back to the mid-19th century American South. The novel introduces Golden Gray, the son of a rich white Aristocratic woman, Vera Louise, and her family’s African American slave, Henry LesTroy. He unites the past of Violet and Joe: He was raised by Violet’s grandmother, True Belle, and as an adult saved Joe’s mother while searching for his father, Henry.The narrator connects the anxiety Vera Louise’s father experiences upon discovering his daughter’s pregnancy by a slave to the fact of there being seven mulatto children on the plantation. Those mulatto children represent the unspoken, yet well known secret about the transgressions in Southern society wherein white male slave owners had sexual relations with their black female slaves, creating mixed race generations. The anxiety stems from the possibility that Gray’s mother would’ve unknowingly committed incest with one of her half siblings, who was born to one of the female slaves.

Gray’s racial identity threatens the structure of the society because his racial mix is identical to those born as slaves to African American mothers, and yet his mother’s racial identity directly connects him to the supposedly elite white family. Golden Gray brings up interesting questions: by law he could be a slave, but his upbringing has created permanent features in his way of carrying himself that translates into whiteness.

Superficial aspects of his appearance create a thin veil hiding his identity. His mother would have regretted him just as she did her affair and given him away if not for his “golden” aspect.

“When [they] bathed him they sometimes passed anxious looks at the palms of his hand, the texture of his drying hair. … True Belle just smiled, and now he knew what she was smiling about, the nigger. But so was he. He had always thought there was only one kind – True Belle’s kind. Black and nothing. Like Henry LesTroy. Like the filthy woman snoring on the cot. But there was another kind – like himself,” (149).

When Gray confronts his father, he seems to project on him all the anxieties and the cognitive dissonance and desires that his newfound knowledge burdens him with. Lestroy narrows in on his fears and confronts him by saying, “‘I know what you came for. To see how black I was. You thought you was white, didn’t you?’” Lestroy offers him ways to be comfortable with his identity and Gray retorts, “’I don’t want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man.’” He is sensitive to the psychological impact of the categorization even though the reality is the same for him.  Lestroy replies, “‘Be what you want – white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up – quicklike, and don’t bring me no whiteboy sass,’” (173).

Morrison takes care to note that Gray’s torn identity comes not only from the mix of his race alone, but from the way it locates him in between classes and races, making his full membership/authenticity in either group contested.

“What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture,” (160).

The reality is that he can choose which race he performs, but the knowledge of his parentage has made him confront the reality that race is a performance. Gray’s crisis results from having become a self-conscious actor in this broadened playing field of racial identity. Being aware of his choice and the fiction of race, but still afloat in the world of identity politics, he no longer feels naturalized in the choice of either identity.