The Tragic Mulatto Myth

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The Tragic Mulatto Myth MORE PICTURES
Lydia Maria Child introduced the literary character that we call the tragic mulatto¹ in two short stories: “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” (1843). She portrayed this light skinned woman as the offspring of a White slaveholder and his Black female slave. This mulatto’s life was indeed tragic. She was ignorant of both her mother’s race and her own. She believed herself to be White and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her “negro blood” discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her White lover, and died a victim of slavery and White male violence. A similar portrayal of the near-White mulatto appeared in Clotel (1853), a novel written by Black abolitionist William Wells Brown.

A century later literary and cinematic portrayals of the tragic mulatto emphasized her personal pathologies: self-hatred, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and suicide attempts being the most common. If light enough to “pass” as White, she did, but passing led to deeper self-loathing. She pitied or despised Blacks and the “blackness” in herself; she hated or feared Whites yet desperately sought their approval. In a race-based society, the tragic mulatto found peace only in death. She evoked pity or scorn, not sympathy. Sterling Brown summarized the treatment of the tragic mulatto by White writers:

Vara Caspary’s novel The White Girl (1929) told the story of Solaria, a beautiful mulatto who passes for White. Her secret is revealed by the appearance of her brown-skinned brother. Depressed, and believing that her skin is becoming darker, Solaria drinks poison. A more realistic but equally depressing mulatto character is found in Geoffrey Barnes’ novel Dark Lustre (1932). Alpine, the light-skinned “heroine,” dies in childbirth, but her White baby lives to continue “a cycle of pain.” Both Solaria and Alpine are repulsed by Blacks, especially Black suitors.

Most tragic mulattoes were women, although the self-loathing Sergeant Waters in Soldier’s Story (1984) clearly fits the tragic mulatto stereotype. The troubled mulatto is portrayed as a selfish woman who will give up all, including her Black family, in order to live as a White person. These words are illustrative:

These words were spoken by Peola, a tortured, self-hating Black girl in the movie Imitation of Life (1934). Peola, played adeptly by Fredi Washington, had skin that looked white. But she was not socially white. She was a mulatto. Peola was tired of being treated as a second-class citizen; tired, that is, of being treated like a 1930’s Black American. She passed for White and begged her mother to understand.

Imitation of Life, based on Fannie Hurst’s best selling novel, traces the lives of two widows, one White and the employer, the other Black and the servant. Each woman has one daughter. The White woman, Beatrice Pullman (played by Claudette Colbert), hires the Black woman, Delilah, (played by Louise Beavers) as a live-in cook and housekeeper. It is the depression, and the two women and their daughters live in poverty — even a financially struggling White woman can afford a mammy. Their economic salvation comes when Delilah shares a secret pancake recipe with her boss. Beatrice opens a restaurant, markets the recipe, and soon becomes wealthy. She offers Delilah, the restaurant’s cook, a twenty percent share of the profits. Regarding the recipe, Delilah, a true cinematic mammy, delivers two of the most pathetic lines ever from a Black character: “I gives it to you, honey. I makes you a present of it.” While Delilah is keeping her mistress’s family intact, her relationship with Peola, her daughter, disintegrates.

Peola is the antithesis of the mammy caricature. Delilah knows her place in the Jim Crow hierarchy: the bottom rung. Hers is an accommodating resignation, bordering on contentment. Peola hates her life, wants more, wants to live as a White person, to have the opportunities that Whites enjoy. Delilah hopes that her daughter will accept her racial heritage. “He [God] made you Black, honey. Don’t be telling Him his business. Accept it, honey.” Peola wants to be loved by a White man, to marry a White man. She is beautiful, sensual, a potential wife to any White man who does not know her secret. Peola wants to live without the stigma of being Black — and in the 1930s that stigma was real and measurable. Ultimately and inevitably, Peola rejects her mother, runs away, and passes for White. Delilah dies of a broken heart. A repentant and tearful Peola returns to her mother’s funeral.

Audiences, Black and White (and they were separate), hated what Peola did to her mother — and they hated Peola. She is often portrayed as the epitome of selfishness. In many academic discussions about tragic mulattoes the name Peola is included. From the mid-1930s through the late 1970s, Peola was an epithet used by Blacks against light-skinned Black women who identified with mainstream White society. A Peola looked White and wanted to be White. During the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, the name Peola was an insult comparable to Uncle Tom, albeit a light-skinned female version.

Fredi Washington, the Black actress who played Peola, was light enough to pass for White. Rumor has it that in later movies makeup was used to “blacken” her skin so White audiences would know her race. She had sharply defined features; long, dark, and straight hair, and green eyes; this limited the roles she was offered. She could not play mammy roles, and though she looked White, no acknowledged Black was allowed to play a White person from the 1930’s through the 1950’s.

Imitation of Life was remade in 1959. The plot is essentially the same; however, Peola is called Sara Jane, and she is played by Susan Kohner, a White actress. Delilah is now Annie Johnson. The pancake storyline is gone. Instead, the White mistress is a struggling actress. The crux of the story remains the light-skinned girl’s attempts to pass for White. She runs away and becomes a chorus girl in a sleazy nightclub. Her dark skinned mother (played by Juanita Moore) follows her. She begs her mother to leave her alone. Sara Jane does not want to marry a “colored chauffeur”; she wants a White boyfriend. She gets a White boyfriend, but, when he discovers her secret, he savagely beats her and leaves her in a gutter. As in the original, Sara Jane’s mother dies from a broken heart, and the repentant child tearfully returns to the funeral.

Peola and Sara Jane were cinematic tragic mulattoes. They were big screen testaments to the commonly held belief that “mixed blood” brought sorrow. If only they did not have a “drop of Negro blood.” Many audience members nodded agreement when Annie Johnson asked rhetorically, “How do you explain to your daughter that she was born to hurt?”

Were real mulattoes born to hurt? All racial minorities in the United States have been victimized by the dominant group, although the expressions of that oppression vary. Mulattoes were considered Black; therefore, they were slaves along with their darker kinsmen. All slaves were “born to hurt,” but some writers have argued that mulattoes were privileged, relative to dark-skinned Blacks. E.B. Reuter, an historian, wrote:

Reuter’s claim that mulattoes were held in higher regard and treated better than “pure Blacks” must be examined closely. American slavery lasted for more than two centuries; therefore, it is difficult to generalize about the institution. The interactions between slaveholder and slaves varied across decades—and from plantation to plantation. Nevertheless, there are clues regarding the status of mulattoes. In a variety of public statements and laws, the offspring of White-Black sexual relations were referred to as “mongrels” or “spurious.”⁴ Also, these interracial children were always legally defined as pure Blacks, which was different from how they were handled in other New World countries. A slaveholder claimed that there was “not an old plantation in which the grandchildren of the owner [therefore mulattos] are not whipped in the field by his overseer.”⁵ Further, it seems that mulatto women were sometimes targeted for sexual abuse.

According to the historian J. C. Furnas, in some slave markets, mulattoes and quadroons brought higher prices, because of their use as sexual objects.⁶ Some slavers found dark skin vulgar and repulsive. The mulatto approximated the White ideal of female attractiveness. All slave women (and men and children) were vulnerable to being raped, but the mulatto afforded the slave owner the opportunity to rape, with impunity, a woman who was physically White (or near-White) but legally Black. A greater likelihood of being raped is certainly not an indication of favored status.

The mulatto woman was depicted as a seductress whose beauty drove White men to rape her. This is an obvious and flawed attempt to reconcile the prohibitions against miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) with the reality that Whites routinely used Blacks as sexual objects. One slaver noted, “There is not a likely looking girl in this State that is not the concubine of a White man….”⁷ Every mulatto was proof that the color line had been crossed. In this regard, mulattoes were symbols of rape and concubinage. Gary B. Nash summarized the slavery-era relationship between the rape of Black women, the handling of mulattoes, and White dominance:

George M. Fredrickson, author of The Black Image in the White Mind, claimed that many White Americans believed that mulattoes were a degenerate race because they had “White blood” which made them ambitious and power hungry combined with “Black blood” which made them animalistic and savage. The attributing of personality and morality traits to “blood” seems foolish today, but it was taken seriously in the past. Charles Carroll, author of The Negro a Beast(1900), described Blacks as apelike. Regarding mulattoes, the offspring of “unnatural relationships,” they did not have “the right to live,” because, Carroll said, they were the majority of rapists and killers.⁹ His claim was untrue but widely believed. In 1899 a southern White woman, L. H. Harris, wrote to the editor of the Independent that the “negro brute” who rapes White women was “nearly always a mulatto,” with “enough white blood in him to replace native humility and cowardice with Caucasian audacity.”¹⁰ Mulatto women were depicted as emotionally troubled seducers and mulatto men as power hungry criminals. Nowhere are these depictions more evident than in D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915).

The Birth of a Nation is arguably the most racist mainstream movie produced in the United States. This melodrama of the Civil War and Reconstruction justified and glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the Klan of the 1920s owes its existence to William Joseph Simmons, an itinerant Methodist preacher who watched the film a dozen times, then felt divinely inspired to resurrect the Klan which had been dormant since 1871. D. W. Griffith based the film on Thomas Dixon’s anti-Black novel The Clansman (also the original title of the movie). Griffith, following Dixon’s lead, depicted his Black characters as either “loyal darkies” or brutes and beasts lusting for power and, worse yet, lusting for White women.

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of two families, the Stonemans of Pennsylvania, and the Camerons of South Carolina. The Stonemans, headed by politician Austin Stoneman, and the Camerons, headed by slaveholder “Little Colonel” Ben Cameron, have their longtime friendship divided by the Civil War. The Civil War exacts a terrible toll on both families: both have sons die in the war. The Camerons, like many slaveholders, suffer “ruin, devastation, rapine, and pillage.” The Birth of a Nation depicts Radical Reconstruction as a time when Blacks dominate and oppress Whites. The film shows Blacks pushing Whites off sidewalks, snatching the possessions of Whites, attempting to rape a White teenager, and killing Blacks who are loyal to Whites.¹¹ Stoneman, a carpetbagger, moves his family to the South. He falls under the influence of Lydia, his mulatto housekeeper and mistress.

Austin Stoneman is portrayed as a naive politician who betrays his people: Whites. Lydia, his lover, is described in a subtitle as the “weakness that is to blight a nation.” Stoneman sends another mulatto, Silas Lynch, to “aid the carpetbaggers in organizing and wielding the power of the vote.” Lynch, owing to his “White blood,” becomes ambitious. He and his agents rile the local Blacks. They attack Whites and pillage. Lynch becomes lieutenant governor, and his Black co-conspirators are voted into statewide political offices. The Birth of a Nation shows Black legislators debating a bill to legalize interracial marriage — their legs propped on tables, eating chicken, and drinking whiskey.

Silas Lynch proposes marriage to Stoneman’s daughter, Elsie. He says, “I will build a Black empire and you as my queen shall rule by my side.” When she refuses, he binds her and decides on a “forced marriage.” Lynch informs Stoneman that he wants to marry a White woman. Stoneman approves until he discovers that the White woman is his daughter. While this drama unfolds, Blacks attack Whites. It looks hopeless until the newly formed Ku Klux Klan arrives to reestablished White rule.

The Birth of a Nation set the standard for cinematic technical innovation — the imaginative use of cross-cutting, lighting, editing, and close-ups. It also set the standard for cinematic anti-Black images. All of the major Black caricatures are in the movie, including, mammies, sambos, toms, picaninnies, coons, beasts, and tragic mulattoes. The depictions of Lydia — a cold-hearted, hateful seductress — and Silas Lynch — a power hungry, sex-obsessed criminal — were early examples of the pathologies supposedly inherent in the tragic mulatto stereotype.