"Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto") is a short story by Victor Séjour, a free person of color and Creole of color born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was written in French, Séjour's first language, and published in the Paris abolitionist journal Revue des Colonies in 1837. It is the earliest extant work of fiction by an African-American author. It was noted as such when it was first translated in English, appearing in the first edition of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature in 1997.Frances Smith Foster, "Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie," in African-American Poets, vol. 1, edited by Harold Bloom (Infobase Publishing, 2009), p. 91; M. Lynn Weiss, introduction to Victor Séjour: The Jew of Seville, translated by Norman R. Shapiro (University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. xvii–xxiii.
Before the importance of French literature by writers of color from New Orleans was recognized, histories of African-American fiction had conventionally begun with "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass in 1852,Foster, "Creative Collaboration", p. 100. and "The Two Offers" by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1859 had been considered the first African-American short story.Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 414, note 7. French-language literature flourished from the late 18th and into the early 20th century in Louisiana, and the francophone literary community among people of color was intellectually rich and sophisticated. This reality was obscured by the identification of American literature with writing in English.Werner Sollors, foreword, p. xii ff., and M. Lynn Weiss, introduction, in Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-century Louisiana (University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. xxiii ff. The literary dynamism of New Orleans prepared Séjour to have a successful career as a dramatist in Paris. He emigrated there at the age of 19 for his education and to escape racial restrictions in the U.S.Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718–1868 (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 94.
"The Mulatto" has been described as "a gothic revenge tale revolving around the psychological conflicts of a mulatto searching for the identity of his father."Foster, "Creative Collaboration", p. 100, note 8. It is one of the earliest works of fiction driven by the psychological trauma of American slavery.Philip Bader, African-American Writers (Facts on File, 2004), p. 213.
Publication The Revue des Colonies was an abolitionist journal edited in Paris by Cyril Bissette from 1834 to 1842. Its contributors were mainly free persons of color, from French Caribbean colonies and the United States. Bissette published "Le Mulâtre" in the March 1837 issue, not long after the 19-year-old Séjour arrived from his native New Orleans to further his education and career.Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, pp. 95–96.
A Louisiana state law passed in 1830 restricted the dissemination of "seditious" writing. Séjour's story detailing the injustice and cruelty of slavery was not published there, although it may have circulated privately through family connections.Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, p. 97.
An English translation of "Le Mulâtre" was not published until 1997, when Philip Barnard's edition was included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Another translation, by Andrea Lee, was published in the Multilingual Anthology of American Literature in 2000.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xvii and note; Bader, African-American Writers, p. 213.
Structure and setting The main story takes place in Saint Domingue before the Haitian Revolution, and is told in third person. The narrative frame, however, is post-revolutionary: the first-person narrator, a visitor to the place, identifies Saint Domingue as "now the Republic of Haiti". This visitor, addressed as "Master," is presumably white.Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, p. 96; Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 72. The "I" of the introduction hears the story told by an "old negro," Antoine, who is a contemporary of the mulatto protagonist of the events related. The author gives Antoine license to tell the story from a nearly omniscient point of view, but the story ends without returning to its initial narrative setting.Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, p. 165.
The story is set specifically in Saint Marc, the city from which Séjour's father, a free man of color, had emigrated to New Orleans. Some of the writer's relatives still lived in Haiti, including a nephew, Frédéric Marcelin, who was a political activist and writer of the Romantic movement.Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, p. 96. The elder Séjour was a free mulatto whose parents were a white man and a free woman of color. Victor's mother was also a free woman of color. Séjour's baptismal record identifies him as a "free quadroon".Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 210. "The Mulatto" is the only extant work by Séjour to be set in the "New World".Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxii.
The setting established by the narrative frame—both the time of day and the site—enhances the story's themes. It begins as dawn is turning the black mountains white ("Les premiers rayons de l'aurore blanchissaient à peine la cime noire des montagnes"). Werner Sollors offers the interpretation that dawn and dusk are points in the 24-hour cycle that are neither night nor day, but both. The Classical goddess of the dawn, Eos to the Greeks, Roman Aurora, had myths associating her with Aethiopia, and was the mother of a black son, Memnon. Characters named Aurora, Aurore or Dawn in fiction on biracial themes—including The Quadroon by Mayne Reid, The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable, The Foxes of Harrow by Frank Yerby, and "The Black Madonna" by Muriel Spark—are symbolically situated between night (black) and day (white).Sollors, Neither Black Nor White But Both, pp. 37–38, 165.
The first-person narrator as a visitor describes the verdant landscape as picturesque and exotic, expressive of "the sublime diversity of God's works." But Antoine, as he begins to take over the narrative, points to the dominant man-made structure, "an edifice that ... in its peculiarity resembles a temple and in its pretense a palace". Here the rentiers and idlers would gather to play billiards and smoke Cuban cigars along with planters who were in town to buy slaves. As in gothic literature by white writers, a grand human façade contrasts with the beautiful otherness of nature and masks a horror within.Wester, African American Gothic, pp. 71–72. The description of this "edifice" as a temple, surrounded by fields "like young virgins at the foot of an altar," marks the violation of the black female body as a form of sacrifice.Wester, African American Gothic, p. 74.
Genre and themes "The Mulatto" is a melodrama with the gothic elements of curses, suicide, murder, and the monstrous.Wester, African American Gothic, p. 90. It is an example of how European artistic forms were adapted for transatlantic slave-owning culture.Marshall, The French Atlantic, pp. 210–211. Melodrama in a domestic setting was particularly transferable to interracial questions of family legitimacy:
Dramas of patriarchal right, and hyperbolic investments in moral polarities of good and evil, virtue and villainy, are about investing the family with new symbolic potency ... In the context of Saint-Domingue and Louisiana, and in 'Le Mulâtre,' the symbolic crisis of the Law of the Father and of social legitimacy is lived literally and viscerally. The colonial family romance here really means killing the father, as the conflict between slave and slave master is, so often, a family drama too.Marshall, The French Atlantic, p. 211.
Séjour's treatment of the "tragic mulatto" trope is unusual in that the protagonist is male rather than a beautiful woman. While it was common for stories employing this trope to end in the death of the mulatto, Séjour complicates his audience's response to the protagonist by having him commit patricide as well as suicide. The themes of slavery and "miscegenation" are thus imbued with oedipal conflict.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxiii.
Sollors views "The Mulatto" and American slavery literature in general as having an inherent kinship with Greek tragedy in focusing on the violent disruption of family. In particular, he writes, "the biracial heir ... may be denied his birthright and inheritance by his father and hence have to engage in a quest for recognition."Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, p. 244. The character doomed by biracialism is a theme that recurs in later African-American literature, including the short story "Father and Son" by Langston Hughes and the play he developed from it, The Mulatto.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxii.
Séjour's strong use of dialogueSollors, Neither Black Nor White But Both, p. 165. points toward his future career as a noted playwright. Weiss suggests that Sejour's play The Jew of Seville, set in 15th-century Spain, allows him to deal with racism and the concept of blood purity while evading the potential censorship that a more direct and contemporary treatment of slavery was likely to provoke.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxix. "Purity of blood" statutes (limpieza de sangre) had imposed a lesser political and social status on conversos, those who had converted to Christianity from Judaism or Islam, or who had descended from converts, making ancestry a liability the individual could not overcome.
In the New World, Spain applied the concept to the ethnicity of descendants of Spanish colonists, indigenous people and mixtos, and people of mixed African descent, creating an elaborate caste system related to blood purity. Séjour may have seen parallels to the "one drop rule" or binary racial caste that predominated among some elements of American society.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, pp. xxx and xxiv—xxv.
The Jew of Seville was Séjour's first play, accepted in 1843 for production at the Comédie Française. Around the same time, two other plays on Paris stages featured a mulatto character.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxix. Like the protagonist in Séjour's earlier short story, the character in The Jew of Seville who is of mixed ancestry also commits suicide, and the family is destroyed.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxiv. Although the grand, classically constructed drama may seem removed from the abolitionist passion of "The Mulatto,"Marshall, The French Atlantic, p. 211. historical distance allows Séjour to show that categorizations by "blood" are socially constructed and subject to change.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xix. The historical perspective also highlights that 1492—the year in which Jews were expelled from Toledo, and one of the acts in the anti-Semitic background of Séjour's play—was the year in which the New World was "discovered" by the expedition sponsored by Spain.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxx; Marshall, The French Atlantic, p. 211. Séjour can be seen as linking traditions of racism in the Old and New worlds in order to criticize them.Weiss, introduction to The Jew of Seville, p. xxxiii.