" Miscegenation "
Passé pour Blanc, Passé pour Negro

Eston Hemings, son of American President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, was indisputably “Negro” when he was a slave at Monticello. Years later living in Ohio in 1850 as a free man, a Census taker described him as “mulatto”. A decade later, Eston and his wife moved to Wisconsin where a Census taker listed them as white.

Miscegenation or “race mixing” had it roots in slavery. During the infamous Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, black women and children were allowed mobility on board ship so that white sailors could have unlimited sexual access to them. Because slaves were property, like animals or objects, they had no rights, and all black women were sexually available to all white men. In addition, law did not recognize African-American marriage and parenthood, and there was no recourse for sexual abuse in the courts, government, church, or press. Virtually every plantation produced children of mixed race. Most mixed-blood slave children were simply worked and sold like all other slaves. Some of these mixed-race females were sold into what was known as “the fancy trade”. The trade was slaved–based organized prostitution which was prominent throughout the south but thrived in New Orleans. Thus, mulattos as a distinct third group between black and white emerged and flourished in New Orleans.

Antebellum New Orleans was a unique place for the practice of miscegenation. French planters, in Santo Domingo had long ago taken the handsomest slaves for their mistresses. The slaves came from what is now French Senegal, and they were thought to be a handsome people with silky black hair and straight fine features. Gold Coast Negroes were black and ferocious. Those from French Dahomey were the color of tobacco and considered “a gentle lot”. By a process of selective breeding, the French (and to a lesser degree the Spanish) had produced in Santo Domingo an exotically lovely type of woman with straight fine figures, small hands and feet and exquisitely chiseled features. During the slave uprising in Santo Domingo, the planters fled to Louisiana bringing their mistresses and children with them. It was the daughters of these women and their daughters' daughters who came to be called “Quadroons”.

Most of the young white planters had Creole mistresses. If they did not, it was a reflection upon their virility. Abstinence was no virtue, and a handsome mistress was as much a mark of social distinction as the possession of fine horses and carriages. They often met their mistresses at “Quadroon Balls”, coming-out party, of sorts, sponsored by Quadroon mothers to introduce their daughters to white men. The hostesses were always free women of color who had been the mistresses of white men, and the girls they brought out were always the illegitimate daughters of white men. The purpose of the balls was to display the youth and beauty of the girls in order to find rich protectors for them. Guests without exception were white men. No white woman would have dreamed of attending. No man of questionable color would have dared set foot inside the door. It was a frank and elegant sex mart where Creole bluebloods chose their mistresses with taste and decorum.

The legacy of the New Orleans Creole was the “gens de couleur libre” or free people of color. They shared neither the privileges of the master class nor the degradation of the slave. They stood between -- or rather apart -- sharing the cultivated tastes of the upper caste and the painful humiliation attached to the race of the enslaved. Nevertheless, New Orleans free people of color rose to positions of wealth and prominence. They became landowners, businessmen and women, musicians, doctors, poets. They prospered until the time before the Civil war. After the Civil war and with the institution of Jim Crow laws, the social status of the Gens de Couleur was not recognized as it had been. Although some Creoles remained prosperous after the war, many more did not. The Jim Crow state not only forced black women and men into semiautonomous and defiant communities, it also fixed the boundaries around privilege and citizenship. The abilities and rights to vote, to provide one's children with a suitable education, to live in a paved and electrified neighborhood, to drink clean water from a clean facility, to check out a book from a lending library, to obtain a fair trial, and to ally one's self, psychologically, with the ruling body, these were unquestionably tied to one's whiteness.

In writing the laws that protected white status and in dividing the public sphere into "colored" and "white" spaces, white legislators and citizens overlooked the large body of persons of mixed race, who presented many challenges to southern ideologues. Realizing that there were "white Negroes" in their midst and fearing that they would somehow slip into and poison the white world and bloodlines, white lawmakers began categorizing measurements of blood and defining the races accordingly.

Twentieth-century society proved to have little or no room for what was, in the antebellum period, a three-tiered social structure, with mixed-race free persons inhabiting a tenuous but real middle position. Thus, the descendants of the South's antebellum class of racially blended, freeborn, and socially entitled free persons of color were made "colored" throughout the southern states.

Given that many persons of mixed race had enjoyed a middle position with some privileges and had, for many generations, defined themselves according to their status as free and partially white, segregation laws forced a whole population into an unfamiliar position. Witnessing and often experiencing the poverty that black people braved and watching as southern whites erected the emblems--particularly "white" and "colored" labels that invariably represented superior and inferior facilities--of Jim Crow, persons of mixed race recognized the options available to them.

Many joined forces with other persons designated as "colored" and agitated for equal access and equal rights. Accepting the race label assigned to them, these persons often took leading roles in African-American political organizations. Others attempted, sometimes successfully, to maintain their "in-between" positions. Forming closed societies--tight-knit communities in which all the members shared the same ancestry, physical characteristics, and culture--they often rejected altogether racial designations that made their mixture impossibility.

Many recognized that, while the law made them "colored," their appearances often told another story. Seeing that segregation was essentially a dividing of persons by physical appearance, many of those with "white" appearances blended into the white world. This phenomenon is often called "going to the other side," "crossing over," or "passing."

The reasons for deciding to cross the color line or “pass” are as numerous as the people who chose to do so. This piece explores a little known aspect of American history and attempts to tell their story by shedding light on a most secret, and little discussed, phenomenon. The center is silk taffeta with embroidered elements. The photo images are embellished with lace, velvet cording, and faux pearls. Surrounding the center are personal narratives from Creole and other mixed-raced individuals. Their stories provide insight into the complexity of their experience. Silk velvet and sequins surround the letters. The borders are embossed velvet and silk brocade with beaded elements. The entire piece is sporadically embellished with swaroski crystals. The back is patchwork silk velvet with a centerpiece reminiscent of a corset. ( x )