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Grace King & Jari Honora.
"Little Convent Girl."
"The Pains of Racial Passing."

Grace King (1851-1932) began her literary career as a spite writer. She disliked the way that George Washington Cable portrayed Creoles in his fiction. I myself have noticed the condescending way that he wrote about Creoles. In a discussion with Richard Watson Gilder about why she disliked Cable's fiction, he asked her why Creoles didn't represent themselves. She started writing the next day. In some ways, she is the inverse of Kate Chopin. She was very popular at the time, but has not remained as popular. Kate Chopin has gained stature in recent decades, especially since the beginning of the modern feminist movement.

"Little Convent Girl" takes us into today's theme — race in Louisiana during the Jim Crow era. In the 1830's, white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice created the minstrel character of Jim Crow, which he performed in black face. After a brief period of racial progress in during Reconstruction, white supremacists regained control of southern states and passed a series of laws collectively known as Jim Crow Laws. Louisiana contributed the "Grandfather Clause" as 1 way of preventing black citizens from voting. Even the most ignorant, backward racists prove themselves to be quite ingenious when it comes to new forms of discrimination. A similar backlash has followed the advances made during the modern civil rights movement.

Jim Crow.
Jim Crow.

The only reason that being mixed race would be a problem is because of racism. The concept of race itself is not backed by the science of biology; it's a social construct. Louisiana had historically followed the classification of black, white, and mixed race. Mixed race people enjoyed a higher status than black but a lower one than white. With the creation of Jim Crow laws, even the formerly more tolerant south Louisiana began to follow the discrimination patterns set in the rest of the country. In the case of Plessy v Ferguson, originating in New Orleans, the Supreme Court decided that Plessy's status as ⅛ black (an octoroon) made him too black to sit in the white section. The only escape was to "pass" as white. But passing to gain the social and economic advantages of whitenes came its own price. Jari Honora states that to bring off such a such a strategy, people had to cut themselves off from their families and communities, usually by moving away and cutting off contact. Such disconnect between the person passing and his/her community resulted in a kind of social death.

"The Little Convent Girl" is a case of a tragic mulatto who doesn't even know she's mixed race. Sent by her father to be raised and educated by nuns in Cincinnati, Ohio (Ohio?!), she came back to New Orleans upon his death only to discover that her mother was black. Seeing no future for herself as a colored woman, she commits suicide. At least part of her problem was in being raised separately from other people of color. Had she grown up with her mother in New Orleans, she would have been surrounded by a vigrant community of people like her. Jari Honora writes about his work as a genealogist helping such people re-connect to their roots in our somewhat less racist era.


Ada Jack Carver.
"Redbone."

'Redbone' is a term describing tri-racial people who are a combination of Native American, black, and white. Originally perjorative, it has been adopted by the redbone community itself. I personally suspect that the main difference between them and the Cane River Creoles was cultural. The Cane River Creoles were a mix of black, white, and very likely Native American. But they were French-speaking Catholics, and some were prosperous. The Redbones were English-speaking Baptists, and they gravitated toward western Louisiana because it was a lawless no-man's-land at the time. It was a way to escape the prejudice of the Anglo-Americans in other regions. Redbones were legally and economically white, attending school with white children, but socially isolated. They developed a reputation for fierceness that helped protect them from the white community. Ada Jack Carver seems to have confused Redbones with the Cane River Creoles, making Baptiste a Catholic. Her description of redbones could be written about most discriminated-against minorities:

They are shiftless and slovenly, childlike and treacherous; and yet from somewhere, like a benediction, they have been touched with something precious.
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson.
"Brass Ankles Speaks."

Brass Ankles in this case means somebody passing as white. As a light-skinned Creole of color, she was light-skinned and straight-haired enough to pass, but she chose not to. Instead, she worked as an activist for the rights of African Americans and women.

The focus of her article is not the racism of white America, but internal racism within the black community. Alice's first-grade teacher represents the structural racism of the time — the light-skinned girl gets picked out by the teacher to sit by her. Because light-skinned black people were viewed more favoribly by the white community, they were resented by darker-skinned people locked out of the advantages that were just handed to the light-skinned. The black community often internalized the attitudes of the white community as a survival strategy. It would be easier for members of the community to get ahead in life if they conformed to white stereotypes. And so as the black community worked to help some of its members get ahead, that job was made easier if they helped lighter-skinned people get ahead.

This brings us to the concept of the talented tenth, popularized by W. E. B. Du Bois. The idea is that in the era of Jim Crow, the power structure of the country was racist and working hard to keep black people from excelling. Most black people would be stuck in the drudgery white society assigned to them. But perhaps 1/10 could get ahead. They needed a full education like that received by white people, not simply the job training available to the rest. Since it was simpler to test for skin tone than talent, Alice's experience was not that unusual. A harried teacher looks around a room and picks the light-skinned child out for special attention. And the other students resent it. The child grows up and becomes a teacher, and the other, darker teachers still resented her. When she came to work wearing a new dress, the other teachers assumed some white man bought it for her.


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