#6 - All Caught Up in Color

At this point in American history and society, the color of one’s skin was very important in signifying one’s place in the social hierarchy of the times. Even amongst slaves, there was a certain strata amongst them according to the type of slave they were based upon the degree of darkness their skin complexion was. In the case of Lydia Maria child’s The Quadroons, the main character, Rosalie, had quite an atypical slavery experience when compared to other slave biographies ad narratives, due in part to the fact that she was the daughter of a wealthy merchant in New Orleans and that she also was of a mixed ancestry that resulted in her outward appearance being significantly lighter than most pure blooded African slaves. When Rosalie desired to marry the love of her life, societal norms and rules came into play, because she was of a mixed ancestry “a union with her proscribed race was unrecognized by law, and therefore the ceremony gave her no legal hold of Edward's constancy”(117). This is just one example of the conflict between society and slaves, even the mulattos.  Her race kept her from having any legal right to the freedom that her husband shared or to any will and testament he may have left upon his death, the societal rules went so far as to make them be married in a specific church, since the union wouldn’t be recognized by the state of Georgia. Rosalie and Edward were well aware of this limitation put on their relationship, but persevered through life by the power and passion of their love for one another, knowing there was nothing they could do to change it. Sadly, the same kind of contentions would fall to their daughter, Xarifa, who’s “complexion, of a still lighter brown than Rosalie's was rich and glowing as an autumnal leaf. The iris of her large, dark eye
had the melting, mezzotinto outline, which remains the last vestige of African ancestry”. She was utterly beautiful, with her exotic features. However this would pose a problem for the young girl socially. “Xarifa learned no lessons of humility or shame, within her own happy home; for she grew up in the warm atmosphere of father's and mother's love but in summer walks with her beautiful mother, her young cheek often mantled at the rude gaze of the young men and when some contemptuous epithet met her ear, as white ladies passed them by, in scornful pride and ill-concealed envy.” Xarifa was a problem to white elitist people for she did not fit wholly into the caste type system they had in place socially for blacks and slaves. When her parents had died, and she was captured by the sheriff and put for sale on the auction block, she became a victim to our American culture, and despite the fact that her father had been a freed man and her mother the child of a former slave, she too inherited the punishment of slavery at the hands of a white man who paid a very high amount for her. This harsh realization, so contrary to the way she had been raised in a peaceful paradise almost, was enough to drive the poor, beautiful girl mad, literally. The infamously beautiful Xarifa, became yet another victim to society, limited by white culture and her own ethnicity.