Racial Identity, Indeterminacy, and Identification in the Nineteenth Century || Coloring History and...

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage andLouise Heaven's In BondsAuthor(s): ERIC GARDNERSource: Legacy, Vol. 24, No. 2, Racial Identity, Indeterminacy, and Identification in theNineteenth Century (2007), pp. 187-206Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679608 .

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Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and

Louise Heavens In Bonds

ERIC GARDNER

Saginaw Valley State University

While the figure of the "tragic mulatta" is writ large in American litera ture and literary criticism,1 this essay shares a recognition most recently

advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: "What is remarkable

though not always acknowledged ... is the fact that the majority of beautiful mulattas in American novels before 1865 ... do not end up unfulfilled" (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victors Maum Guinea, H. L. Hosmer's Adela, John T. Trowbridge's Neighbor Jackwood, Mayne Reid's The

Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth's Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they "must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers," "more often than not. . .

eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely" (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about "the majority"?especially given that Andrews and Kachun's own work illus trates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any "complete sets"?this

essay shares the sense that mixed-race characters who are not "tragic mulattas"

have been absent from our discussions for too long.2 This absence is complicated by the disproportionately larger presence in our

scholarship of archetypal examples of the tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons," William Wells Brown's Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore's Zoe, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of the novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. The reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond the scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child's early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown's story) and in part from the limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless,

LEGACY, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 2OO7. PP. 187-206. COPYRIGHT ? 2007 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS



the dominance of the figure of the tragic mulatta in our scholarship has lim

ited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant's dismissal of the full

range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters?a for

mation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to

Black women's texts.3 It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate

the first real resistance to the figure of the tragic mulatta in works such as

Child's Reconstruction-era Romance of the Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins

Harper's Iola Leroy.

This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early exam

ples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of

the tragic mulatta?one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a

tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeter

minacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in

a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I

examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far

from tragic?indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions

to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the pro

tagonists of both Levina B. Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven's In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type.

Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine the contours of our sense of

the mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American

literature.

I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors

for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in

both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: the

publisher of Sunshines fourth edition (which carried the entirely new title The

Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet

Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their

doing so; the publisher of In Bonds founded the Overland Monthly and was a

colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to consider

ations of race in American literature). Indeed, both books demonstrate a rich

awareness of the literary discourses of race and race-mixing swirling around

them. Though evidence about their composition is lacking, Sunshine repeat

edly invokes and rewrites the language of the tragic mulatta figure, while In

Bonds actually makes specific reference to Uncle Toms Cabin as part of the driv

ing force in the novel's plot (128-29). Though both novels and both authors are

188 legacy: volume 24 no. 2 2007



absent from contemporary critical work, Sunshine and In Bonds offer fascinat

ing counterpoints to the dominant sense of the figure of the tragic mulatta and

presage works that critics have treated as more revolutionary, such as Child's

Romance of the Republic and Harper's Iola Leroy. Indeed, both Sunshine and

(albeit a bit less so) In Bonds suggest that a mixed-race heroine who overcomes

potential tragedy is central to America's future.

I have not yet determined the circumstances that inspired the racial per

spectives Urbino and Heaven project in the two works to be examined here.

Urbino is absent from most biographical sources,4 and so little biographical work has been done on Heaven that the name used by library catalogers? and so the name that appears in the Wright American Fiction Collection?is

Heaven's pseudonym, Laura Preston.5 My initial digging shows that both were

white immigrants, though neither belonged to ethnic groups particularly sym

pathetic to African Americans. Interestingly, though, both lived in areas full

of active Black writers (if comparatively small Black communities). Boston

based Urbino may have read the Liberator and known of figures from David

Walker to William Cooper Nell, and San Francisco-based Heaven could have

read either or both of San Francisco's Black newspapers, the Pacific Appeal and

the Elevator.6 Both were active writers: Urbino gained a name for her art books, and Heaven, in her own name and under pseudonyms, for her narratives of

the West and Mexico. Both were connected to the publishing world: Urbino

through her bookseller husband, Sampson Urbino, and Heaven through the

Overland Monthly circle. Neither was especially active politically, and neither

engaged in organized abolition or battles for Black civil rights. Additionally, neither seems to have written of mixed-race characters purely for pecuniary gain (even though Urbino's Sunshine went through four editions, she, like

Heaven, never returned to the topic). If both differed substantially from move

ment authors who used the tragic mulatta plot or more broadly conceived mixed-race characters for abolitionist ends, both seem equally far from some one such as Dion Boucicault, whose 1859 play The Octoroon stunned audiences with its high melodrama and special effects.7

To begin to articulate a basic structure of the counter-discourse of the "not so tragic" (and, indeed, ultimately fulfilled) female mixed-race character?and because most contemporary scholars are likely unfamiliar with these texts?I first compare the plots of Sunshine and In Bonds to typical stories of tragic

mulattas to illustrate how their protagonists break out of the tragic mulatta

type. Key among these features is both heroines' embrace of their mixed-race mothers in ways that accept multi-racial heritages and, because white society places them there, their embrace of a Black community. I pay particular atten tion to the rhetoric of racial masking/unmasking deployed in both books and

Eric Gardner 189



begin to explore how these novels suggest a much more complex configuration of racial identity than that articulated by the tragic mulatta type, a configura tion with important ramifications for contemporary scholarship.

Eve Allegra Raimon's summary of the typical tragic mulatta plot is worth

quoting as a frame for an initial comparison:

Regardless of the racial ancestry of the author, the typical plot summary of such

writings involves the story of an educated light-skinned heroine whose white

benefactor and paramour (sometimes also the young woman's father) dies, leav

ing her to the auction block and/or the sexual designs of a malevolent creditor.

The protagonist, sheltered from the outside world, is driven to desperation by her

predicament and perhaps to an early death, (7)?

The protagonist of Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage, Esther Le

Gendre, is indeed a very pale young woman whose American mother has died

and whose French father has arranged for her to be raised in a rural French

home by Christian friends. What is initially most striking in Sunshine is that

over 160 pages?two thirds of the book?pass before Esther falls victim (or, more properly, almost falls victim) to a predator who knows the secret of her

race. Called to Paris to reunite with her rich and kind father, Esther develops a strong friendship with Louis De Lacy, the philanthropic son of an American

planter who has exiled himself to Paris to avoid an arranged marriage. (Part of

the basis of this friendship is Louis's hope that he will be able to free his fam

ily's slaves.) The friendship grows into love, but on the eve of marrying Esther, Louis is called home to his mother's deathbed. Esther's father's health wors

ens significantly, and father and daughter agree that taking a trip to the States

would benefit both. Their ship, however, is nearly destroyed in a storm. Though both Esther and her much-weakened father survive, their support is washed

away: in a convenient plot twist, Esther's long-lost uncle returns to Paris in their

absence, takes over the family holdings, and refuses to acknowledge his missing brother and niece.

The first tragedy in Urbino's Sunshine, then, is not tied to race at all; the suf

fering Esther endures after the shipwreck is based almost solely on class and

gender. Esther must figure out how to support her dying father and herself

in a strange land: when a man on the street gives her a dollar, for example, it

is an occasion for her father to explain how "wicked men and women often

enticed innocent females into places of wickedness" (139). Still, Esther man

ages to gain basic sustenance until her father dies?just after penning a letter

to Esther's maternal grandfather, who, it seems, is actually still living. Esther

travels south with her new supposed-friends, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, but Esther's

hopes unravel when Mr. Brown?a scoundrel in disguise, Urbino's version of




Raimon's "malevolent creditor"?discovers that Esther's mother was of mixed race. He quickly makes plans to sell Esther, but this is as close to the auction block as Esther comes.

Were Sunshine a typical tragic mulatta tale, Esther would be sold into bond

age by Brown?or perhaps even become prey to his lascivious desires?and

probably die soon after.9 However, the actions of key Black characters and a

renewed sense of agency save her. Ever kind to servants, Esther is befriended by the Browns' domestic, a free Black woman named Lucile. Lucile overhears Mr. Brown's plotting, filches the letter that proves Esther is mixed race, and takes it to Esther. However, as Esther attempts simultaneously to deal with the stunning revelation, to avoid letting the Browns know what she knows, and to bide her time until she can escape, she is abducted. Urbino withholds the identity and

motive of Esther's kidnappers until a cloth covering Esther's eyes is dramati

cally removed. Esther and Sunshine's readers then discover that Lucile and a

fellow free Black named James have taken her in a daring rescue. In essence, the African Americans around Esther recognize that she is worthy of deliver ance and then do, actually, deliver her from the "tragedy" tied to her newly discovered racial status: "Courage, miss," the "gentle voice of Lucile" tells her,

"you are saved!" (175). Once saved and delivered to her maternal grandfather Lopez, "a healthy

negro of about seventy," Esther breaks more fully with the tragic mulatta type and begins to embrace a multi-racial identity within the Black community (191). Esther writes to her friends in Boston and Paris about her racial gene alogy, grows close to her Black grandfather's extended family, and reconciles herself to the fact that she will never marry Louis. But when, in another con venient plot twist, Louis's cousin is seriously injured in a riding accident and

taken, immobilized, to Esther's grandfather's house, Esther cares for her. Louis finds them, declares his love for Esther in spite of their racial difference, and

eventually convinces Esther to marry him. They talk briefly of moving to the more liberal-minded France?Esther's unfeeling uncle has made her rich again by conveniently dying without issue?but decide to live, instead, in "America, where they formed a sort of colony" on combined Lopez and De Lacy lands

(239). This colony, the narrator says, will contain Esther's new, extended Black

family, those De Lacy slaves who have chosen to stay with Louis (instead of

being immediately freed), and, one would assume, Esther and Louis's mixed race children. "Does the reader believe," the narrator asks in Sunshine's final

words, "it [is] impossible to live happily, as these good people did, in a commu

nity of negroes? Let him pray that his Christianity may be more Christ-like, and his heart so enlarged that he can take in all mankind as his brothers" (239).

Even more than Urbino's Sunshine, Heaven's In Bonds seems to begin as a

Eric Gardner 191



typical tragic mulatta tale. Heaven's protagonist, La Guerita, is introduced as

"very pale" (her name translates to "the little light one"), "not purely white?but

of that rich olive tint which distinguishes beauties of the far South" (5). She has

also been cared for outside of her birth family and told that both of her parents are long dead. She spurns the advances of the wicked planter Claude Leveredge and chooses to marry the "[h]igh-minded and good-natured" Harold De Grey (6). After a joyous wedding, five years of bliss, and the birth of two children,

Harold is called away because of "private news of great importance" (42); when

he returns, he is stricken with "brain fever" and dies (57). In going through her husband's effects, La Guerita discovers the "private news": a letter from

Leveredge (note the name's suggestion of how he might use La Guerita's secret) that tells how, years before, a planter returned from a trip to Cuba with "a beau

tiful quadroon" (77). The letter then provides proof that La Guerita "was the

daughter of [this] bond woman" (78). Traumatized, La Guerita burns the letter

and becomes comatose for the next ten days, during which her daughter dies.

Waking, but still mad from grief, La Guerita takes her son and secretly travels

to North Carolina to find her enslaved mother, who confirms her parentage. She then finds the scion of the now-dead planter's family and demands that

he make her his slave. Aided by a secessionist lawyer who dreams of disprov

ing Uncle Tom's Cabin with a report of a black woman choosing to be a slave

(128-29), La Guerita is written into slavery. Ironically, however, her experience as a slave is not that bad, though later, amid requests (tinged with hints of

potential sexual violence) that the planter sell his "fancy article" (223), she real

izes, "I was mad!" (207), and unsuccessfully begs for her freedom.

La Guerita's rescue from her tragic status is more convoluted than Esther's, in part because In Bonds becomes a novel of the Civil War and in part because

Heaven seems more hesitant than Urbino about having her heroine fully embrace a multi-racial identity. La Guerita is gradually befriended by her mis

tress, the scion's daughter, and promises to aid her mistress's northern beau,

who has been captured by the Confederates. In a daring plan, La Guerita, with

the aid of her fellow slaves, paints her face black, dresses as a stereotyped slave,

sells fruit to the Rebel troops, suddenly speaks in dialect, passes several charac

ters?including the secessionist lawyer?who fail to "see" her, and then secures

the escape of the wounded beau and four other soldiers. Her mistress's grati

tude, the news that Leveredge has been killed in battle, and La Guerita's own

daring suggest that she will no longer be a victimized "tragic mulatta"; narra

tively, her rescue of the Union soldiers translates into her own rescue.

While the ending of Heaven's In Bonds is more conservative than that of

Sunshine, in many senses, it, too, radically revises the typical tragic mulatta's

end. After several plot twists, the planter dies and frees La Guerita, and she is




reunited with her brother, who has been ignored through most of In Bonds and

is now, ironically, shown as a Union officer leading an all-Black unit. La Guerita

moves North, commits herself to "the helpless and down-trodden of [her] race"

(411), and founds an orphanage/academy for young freedwomen. While this

academy "[fits its charges] for lives of industry" and maintains a clear sense

of both white and mulatto/a superiority (431), it is fully in line with the uplift

language of the Freedmen's school movement.10 The novel's final tableau?a

heavily domestic grouping of La Guerita's family by a fireside praising God?is

quite similar to Child's conclusion in Romance of the Republic.

Beyond marking the differences in rising action and resolution between these

novels and most tragic mulatta tales, I detail the novels' plots at some length to allow for consideration of a key trajectory in both narratives: the unusual

positive acknowledgement of the heroines' maternal heritage. This aspect of

the stories revises elements common in tragic mulatta plots and is an issue that

has sparked some critical debate about the role of the maternal in such narra

tives. Not surprisingly, conventional tragic mulatta stories pay special attention

to the mixed-race character's white parentage (usually the father), but schol

ars are not in agreement about how to interpret references to the other parent

(the mother) and her (or his) Blackness. Thus, Berlant argues that the tragic mulatta "gives lie to the dominant code of juridical representation by repress

ing the evidence' the law would seek?a parent, usually a mother?to deter

mine whether the light-skinned body claimed fraudulent relation to the privi

leges of whiteness" ("National Brands" 113). More accurate might be Foreman's

argument that" [t]he captive or runaway of'mixed parentage'" has traditionally been "characterized by the repression of the white father. In part, most narra

tors elide and simultaneously express evidence of bodily violence, coercion, or

'choice' as they recuperate rather than repress the enslaved mother" ("Who's Your Mama?" 510).

Sunshine and In Bonds (albeit a bit less so) seem to search for a third alterna

tive: an attempt not simply to recuperate but actually to embrace pieces of the

maternal without fully dismissing the paternal. Building upon the phenom ena Foreman describes, this plot trajectory challenges race-based codes and

consciously argues for a higher law. Because Sunshine emphasizes that Esther's

father was not a slaveholder, but was a man honestly in love with a woman of

mixed race (so deeply in love that he never married again), and because his

wife was a free Black woman, the narrative never confronts the questions of

"bodily violence, coercion, or 'choice'" vis-a-vis their relationship. Throughout Sunshine, Esther's father is idealized, not in the sense of being a white American, but as a European who holds views toward race more enlightened than those

of Americans. His repeated illnesses, as well as his mode of connecting to Louis

Eric Gardner 193



(learning to play the piano and talking about domestic reform work), repeat

edly place him in rhetorical spaces many nineteenth-century texts mark as fem

inine. In short, he is affirmed throughout the text in opposition to phallocentric American planter-class fathers. When he dies, he sends Esther?who has always had a deep desire to know about her mother?to her mothers family.

Esther can, of course, find her dead mother only symbolically, but the text

clearly suggests that she finds a rich and living maternal legacy embodied by the Black domestic Lucile, the memories of her mother, and maternal relatives

such as her grandfather Lopez. So strong is the pull toward the maternal?

and Esther's embrace of it?that the final chapters of Sunshine repeatedly link

her (both directly and metonymically) to her mother. The narrator even draws

direct parallels between the two women by suggesting that Esthers fiancee

Louis resembles her father when he was courting Esther's mother (232). Heaven's In Bonds represses the white father, though a pair of surrogates (La

Guerita's initial caregiver and her husband Harold, with his notably colored

surname De Grey) is an exception. In Bonds also consistently concerns itself

with La Guerita's mother.11 Indeed, La Guerita finds her mother with relative

ease and then embraces her mother's status, though the text marks this choice

as "mad" (207). However, this constitutes a plot twist even the most sympathetic readers may find baffling. Still, as In Bonds moves on, the narrative does make

some attempts to recover La Guerita's mother, showing her trying to convince

La Guerita of the folly of choosing slavery and later dying a free and sentimen

tal Christian death. Further, La Guerita's position at the novel's end?in the

role of teacher so key to republican motherhood?is both less convoluted than, and more clearly tied to, the Black matriarchal role that Foreman describes.

The fact that both heroines, when confronted with their genealogies, choose

the maternal (or, in Esther's case, the memory of both parents) also highlights a

choice of Blackness over the possibility of escaping and passing as white. Esther's

and La Guerita's choices then lead to "families"?or, at least, to communities?

that are multi-racial. They identify as Black because, in the dominant racial

ized taxonomy, once they recognize their maternal lineage, they have no other

choice. These choices hint at how both heroines resolve their own internalized

racism and struggle with their racial indeterminacy. Thus, examining the rhetoric of racial masking and unmasking in both nov

els?as well as both authors' understanding of race more broadly?becomes crucial to establishing how these novels replace the tragic mulatta type with

mixed-race characters who not only find individual fulfillment but who also

favor and foster multi-racial communities. As I've noted, the opening descrip tions of both protagonists echo those of conventional tragic mulattas?"the

lustre" of Esther's "black hair" as well as her "satin skin, and ruby lips, of the




torrid zone," stand in "striking contrast" with "her clear blue eyes and pensive look, so characteristic of the north" (23, 25). This display of whiteness amid

other colors certainly echoes Suzanne Bost's recognition that "[m]ost writers . . . provided elaborate detail about their heroines' near-white appearances to suggest a racial affinity with white readers" (60). Still, both Urbino s and

Heavens descriptions also function as a multi-layered language of masking, with the surface level "hiding" the heroine 's "true" race even as the artificiality of such hiding calls attention to itself?as when Urbino s description of Esther's

Paris chamber uses words such as "alabaster" six times in the novels first three

paragraphs (7-9). In doing this, both novels suggest that relying on the mask of racial labeling

in such indeterminate situations is always already deconstructive. The descrip tions of Esther and La Guerita themselves, to readers of antebellum stories

of race or advertisements for slaves, clearly signify mixed race. Both authors

inhabit similar racially indeterminate?or, at least, unspoken?spaces: neither

book has an authorial portrait or a biography, neither narratorial voice marks

itself directly as white or Black, and both narrators write (in their protagonists' voices) of their heroines' internalized racism.

Given these factors, and the ways in which racial labeling is not based solely on color, it is no surprise that the "proof" that leads to both unmaskings is

textual rather than epidermal: in Sunshine, Brown acquires a letter that details

Esther's mother's race; in In Bonds, Leveredge's letter to Harold similarly tells

the story of La Guerita's mother. In this and in the broader rhetoric of unmask

ing, Urbino and Heaven again challenge the expectations of the tragic mulatta

narrative. Urbino's representation of Brown's revelation is calculated to shock.

Thinking Esther is white, Mrs. Brown refers to her as "the dear, young creature"

and "prais[es] her every day" until Brown asserts that she is indeed "remark

able, for a negress" (169,168). Lucile's secret theft of the letter and the fact that

Esther has spent much of Sunshine wondering about her mother emphasize that the letter solves a deep, "dark" mystery with a shocking revelation. That revelation causes Esther to "[weep] and [pray]" (173), makes Louis "indig nant" when the possibility of Esther's being Black is even suggested (194), and is passed around as "a secret" that "throw[s] a barrier in the way of [Louis's]

happiness" (195-96). Still, in contrast to conventional tragic mulatta tales, Esther's discovery is

buffered by its source. Lucile tells Esther in straight-forward, pragmatic lan

guage: "Mr. Brown has ascertained that you belong to a colored family; and if he is like other gentlemen who live upon the blood of us poor slaves, so to say, he will try to get some excuse for making out that you are a slave, so as to sell

you. I have tested the tender mercies of these white people, before I bought

Eric Gardner 195



my freedom; and I don't trust any of them" (170). Lucile's language?with its

immediate sympathetic link to Esther set against "these white people"?gives Esther a viable space of racial identity and identification. Without lessening the

potential for tragedy, Urbino represents Lucile not only as a survivor, but as a

survivor powerful enough to aid others.

Urbino juxtaposes Lucile's smart and practical sense directly with the white

hypocrisy shown only a page before: upon hearing Brown's assertion that

Esther is a "negress," Mrs. Brown (despite the signifying power of her name)

nearly shouts, "[W]hat impertinence, to palm a mulattress upon our care and

society" (168). When Mr. Brown sarcastically calls her on her quick switch, she

can say only, "Well, but I didn't know that she was black" (169). Sunshine thus

calls to mind not so much the typical tragic mulatta story (which does indeed

sometimes play with the idea of white slaves) as the more direct commentary on hypocrisy and racial designation in works such as William Wells Brown's

wickedly funny play The Escape.12 The unmasking of Heaven's La Guerita is more sensational, and, in this

way, In Bonds is again initially more in line with the expectations of the tragic mulatta tale. When La Guerita's husband Harold returns after discovering his

wife's racial identity, he can only mutter in response to La Guerita's question

ing about what has befallen him, "The worst!... O, my God, can it be so?" (55). Then he faints. Further, to mark the separation between Harold and his family that is caused by the revelation, their young son Harry, on seeing his pale and

sick father, insists, in language that includes a contraction evocative of nine

teenth-century representations of Black dialect, "No?no! that's not my papa! ... my papa is not white, like him.... [T]ake me away; I's so afraid!" (57-58).

While Harold remembers his love of La Guerita and dies a sentimental death, readers of In Bonds are left with the knowledge that the revelation has killed

him; it almost kills La Guerita, too. Once she "[takes] forth the closely-written sheets," she sees that they are from Leveredge, who sarcastically promises to

"reveal" "nothing uncommon" while asserting, "[M]y words will blast all your

hopes, and darken your whole life" (69-70). He recounts how he promised to

"unravel the mystery" of La Guerita's birth and finally made his "discovery" of

what the Holmes family had kept "silent" and "secret" for years (74, 76,74,77). The language of sensational revelation and vengeance?"the whole world shall

point with shame and scorn to him who shares the fortunes of the slave-born

woman, La Guerita DeCuba" (78)?dominates the early chapters of the novel.

While In Bonds is nowhere nearly as liberal as Sunshine in its thinking about

race and is less innovative in its challenges to the rhetoric of racial mask

ing, Heaven is still quite blunt about the hypocrisy of characters who rely on

simplistic phenotyping. Some of this work centers on the secessionist lawyer,




Ernest Gordon, who always "[smiles] in his peculiar manner" and "uses the

arts of persuasion he knew so well" to convince the planter's family that it is

their paternal duty to enslave La Guerita in the face of her mother's "prayers and tears" (129,135)?even though his central desire is to attack the abolitionist

feeling sparked by Uncle Tom's Cabin and so expand his political career as a fire

eater. Much, though, is illustrated when La Guerita paints her face and "passes" several key characters, including the lawyer (who claims to understand Blacks

better than anyone). This moment also marks the loss of both her "madness"

and some of her need to equate all Blacks with stereotyped slaves. The face

painting sequence in In Bonds emphasizes the hypocrisy of simplistic racial

marking by showing the protagonist creating a racial mask that goes in the

opposite direction one might expect and hiding the heroine's much more com

plex racial identity behind the cover of stereotypes. While In Bonds generally maintains myriad vestiges of racism and racial

determinism, La Guerita does move toward a more progressive sense of race

and racial politics, albeit one tied to a sense of mulatto/a superiority. As uncom

fortable as Heaven and the larger narrative remain about race, once La Guerita

begins her school for Black children, she has "about her an air of deepest tran

quility and content, and in her sable weeds she looked more beautiful than

when the bridal wreath rested upon her brow" (435). The book's assessment

of freedpeople?"minds long abased by slavery must struggle long, and cast

off a thousand cerements of custom and ignorance, ere they can take upon them the work of those who have ever lived beneath the vivifying influences of

freedom" (425)?certainly features the language of white and mulatto/a supe

riority. However, In Bonds also makes frank demands for schools for African

Americans, directly invokes the Freedmen's Bureau in the novel's final pages, and places mixed-race individuals (as opposed to white teachers) at the heads

of schools. These elements mark a massive break from expectations, rising as

they do from the ashes of a novel that begins as the tale of a tragic mulatta.

Interestingly, Sunshine also features a face-painting sequence, and Urbino's

treatment not only uses this "re-masking" to call attention to the foolishness of

simplistic phenotyping but also leads the heroine ultimately to set aside masks

and fully to embrace a multi-racial heritage and future. When Lucile's friends are finally able to move Esther, they ask that she "allow her face to be painted black" to make her transport more "safe and convenient" (189). Esther initially

objects, but the language she uses is not tied to race so much as it is to claiming both her God-given face and all of the pieces of her identity:

This proposition was an unexpected blow. How could she change the face which

God had given her?... At length, necessity constrained, and, as she cast her eyes in

Eric Gardner 197



the glass, she drew back and shuddered. Lucile saw it. "Alas, Esther!" said she, "do

you, too, feel it a degradation to be black?"

"No, no, my good friend!" answered the excited girl; "that is not the feeling. I

know not what it is. I cannot analyze it." (189-90)

The narrator, though, does intervene to offer such analysis, albeit a bit vaguely:

"Many were the kind words ... as they took leave of her, and good the resolu

tions of the latter [Esther] to live as before God, and not in the sight of men"

(190). Esther does, then, "pass" for Black; disguised, she also meets white char

acters who have mistreated her. They do not even look at her. In essence, as per the narrator's analysis, Esther's face-painting mocks "the sight of men" (that is

so susceptible to masks) in order to achieve the Christian ends of preserving her virtue and fighting against slavery. God knows that, painted or not, labeled or not, Esther is Esther.

That recognition is furthered when Esther wakes in the cottage of her free

Black friends on her first morning of freedom; waking allows her to escape from a racist dream in which a former servant is "busily employed in dipping the petals of a beautiful rose in the inkstand, laughing and crying out, from

time to time, 'Nigger! nigger!'" (180). Esther wakes in a "white chamber" with

"whitewashed" walls, "curtains of clear white muslin," a "white pine table," and a quilt of "white cotton,"?a room deeply reminiscent of her chamber in Paris

that opens the novel (180). In a sort of second beginning, clearly marked by the

title Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage, Esther quickly sees that the white ele

ments blend seamlessly with the "vases filled with fresh flowers of the sweetest

fragrance" and "a large Bible" that are essential to her Black hosts (180), and

she hears "the sweet voices of negro children singing" (181). When she looks out of her window, she sees her hosts reading yet another Bible and must ask

herself, "Are these the roses, dipped in ink, of which I was dreaming?" While she

momentarily concludes, "I, too, am a negro!" and "I'm stamped, though I see it

not," she quickly checks her tears when she hears the children sing, "Thanks to

Thee, Giver of good" (181-82). Her gradual acceptance of her new identity (and her simultaneous recogni

tion that she is still, indeed, Esther)?something almost never seen in tragic mulatta tales?increases with her arrival at the home of her grandfather Lopez, who welcomes her "with open arms" and makes her "almost [forget] her

painted face, and that she was, henceforth, to be among the degraded children

of Ham" (191). Lopez's home is far from degraded: it is wealthy, industrious,

Christian, loving, and intelligent. It is also, simply, hers?and it demands no

face-painting to articulate her race or genealogy: Esther's relatives?"some very black, some whiter, but none so white as herself" (205)?immediately see her




physical resemblance to her mother. Lopez himself, though, turns to the meta

physical: he says (echoing the language of living "as before God, and not in the

sight of men" [190]) that "if she is as good" as her mother "she will make us all

happy" (206). At Esther's urging, Lopez tells her about his daughter/her mother, claiming, " [O] ur hearts are warm, and our love as pure as the white man's" (207). Though

Lopez, like Esther's fiancee, offers to send her back to France, where he assumes

she will not be discriminated against, here, as throughout Sunshines final chap ters, Esther chooses to stay with her Black family in America. After these scenes,

we hear little more of the "I'm stamped" rhetoric that characterizes the post

unmasking scenes of conventional tragic mulatta stories.

Indeed, Esther makes a choice in some ways even more stunning than Iola's

famed decision to marry a light-skinned Black (rather than white) doctor in

Iola LeroyP Esther marries the man she loves?even though he is white?but

she refuses to pass. Together, Esther and Louis agree to live in a multi-racial

family and community, one they know will be classed as Black and discrimi

nated against because of simplistic binaries of racism, but one they nonetheless

feel offers the most hope for the future. That Sunshine ends with Urbino turn

ing from their "colony" directly to address readers and demand their accep tance of Esther and Louis's choice is even more striking. It is a moment when, instead of tragedy, the mixed-race heroine symbolizes the hopeful beginnings of a new nation.

The face-painting and resolution scenes in In Bonds and Sunshine call to

mind not so much tales of tragic mulattas as scenes in slave narratives centered

on women of mixed racial ancestry. Given their i860 publication of Sunshine

and their plans to publish Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for

example, Boston publishers Thayer and Eldridge might well have made a con

nection between Esther's escape and Linda Brent's. As does Brent's risky and smart blackface disguise, both Esther's and La Guerita's face-painting essen

tially forces racially indeterminate bodies into the overly determined spaces of

popular depictions of slaves. Like Jacobs, these heroines create a space of lim

ited agency in the midst of hypocrites dependent on "the sight of men" through their acts of masking?agency that allows them to resist being made into tragic

mulattas.

But these scenes also call to mind the infamous passing of Ellen Craft

(Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom was written between Sunshine and In

Bonds), as well as similar moments in which passing as white offers a tem

porarily expanded agency rather than a life choice of denial. However much

Craft might have been read as a tragic mulatta by some audiences, she was

not. Rather, as Foreman points out, she exerted considerable agency in chal

Eric Gardner 199



lenging "the sight of men" and, in essence, passed through whiteness rather than for white ultimately to avoid tragedy ("Who's Your Mama?" 508). During Reconstruction, she, like La Guerita, founded a school for freedpeople.14 It is thus important to note that the face-painting scenes in In Bonds and Sunshine

mark, for La Guerita and especially for Esther, a passage into Blackness and a

chance to step beyond the simplistic definition of sight that bound much of the eras understanding of race. Thus, these novels directly challenge many of the texts and the rhetoric that anchor our critical discussions of mixed-race female characters today.

A CODA

The ways in which these novels color?or perhaps re-color?history by chal

lenging the tragic mulatta type and by showing mixed-race heroines who are

both strong and successful allow us to rethink several conventional assump tions. Popular in their time and all but ignored today, these novels articulate an important alternative to the discourse of the tragic mulatta and so, given the whiteness of their authors, suggest yet another way to formulate Frances

Smith Foster s concept of the "gray envelope" of Blacks and whites functioning in dialogue (95)?a way suggested by Esther's Black grandfather Lopez when he tells her, "[Y]ou will do good to all mankind, for you are white enough for the whites, and black enough for us" (213). It is ultimately Esther's racial inde

terminacy in which Lopez locates her greatest potential. Our scholarship needs better to reflect?or at least to acknowledge?the cultural work and optimistic promise such sensibilities suggest.

A recent example of this need can be seen in the "unmasking" of Emma

Dunham Kelley-Hawkins. Thought to be African American since the mid

twentieth century, Kelley-Hawkins authored two novels, Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, both of which were included in the Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century. Kelley-Hawkins was recently featured in the Boston Globe (Jackson; Mehegan), in the Chronicle

of Higher Education ("In Brief"), and in an NPR segment (Chideya)?not because of her writing, but because she had been "uncovered" (Chideya) and

"reveal[ed]" (Jaschik, par. 5) in "a stunning piece of detective work" (Dawkins

36) as white, an event that "set the literary world abuzz" ("Doctoral Student,"

par. 4).15 Such language, which is eerily similar to the rhetoric of unmasking dealt with so harshly by Sunshine and In Bonds, suggests that the popular press has again engaged in some of the race-centered sensationalism?albeit racially reversed?common in tragic mulatta tales. Indeed, the press's special emphasis on Schomburg Collection editor Henry Louis Gates's promise to pull Kelley Hawkins's works from the Schomburg in the next edition (qtd. in Mehegan)




similarly pushes Kelley-Hawkins into an either/or binary?she must be Black

or white, she must be in or out.16

Hopefully, the complexities of Louise Heavens In Bonds and especially Levina

Urbino's Sunshine can further encourage readers to embrace a more sophis ticated reading of the phenomenon of the whiteness of Kelley-Hawkins?a

writer whose work is nonetheless important to Black cultural study not only because her discussion of Cottage City offers an early look at what became a

thriving Black resort community but also because the critical treatments of

her work (both pre- and post-"unmasking") tell us much about the practices and gaps in African American literary study to date. Such a reading might be

especially useful as we more fully contend with the lack of biographical infor

mation on the woman who called herself Hannah Crafts, as well as with the

white second husband and white Spiritualist ties of Harriet Wilson. More

broadly, such a reading is more consonant with the rich interplay of race,

ethnicity, and color that runs across the history and culture of nineteenth

century America. Over the last half-century, African Americanist critics and

historians have reminded us that American literature was far from simply white; as we fill in even more of that lost history, we need to think about the

rich breadth of coloring that is now possible.

NOTES

The author wishes to thank Jodie Gardner, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Cherene Sherrard

Johnson, the editors of Legacy, the participants and audience of the session on "Racial

Identity, Indeterminacy, and Identification in the Nineteenth Century" at the 2006

Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, and the staff of the

Saginaw Valley State University Library for their support.

1. Bost, Rosenthal, Zackodnik, and Raimon are among recent scholars whose work

extends a complex genealogy going at least as far back as Sterling Allen Brown's The

Negro in American Fiction.

2. This essay uses the phrase tragic mulatta to signify a type and the less loaded

descriptor mixed race for characters who do not fit that type.

3. See Berlant, "National Brands/National Body" (110-15) and "The Queen of America

Goes to Washington City" (455-67). Foreman usefully argues that some African American

women writers who seem to be deploying the tragic mulatta type are actually using

"their own bodies to challenge such constraints by expressing a desire, not for whiteness,

but for familial and juridical relations in which partus sequitur ventrem produces free

dom rather than enslavement" ("Who's Your Mama?" 506). Such writers thus work to

regain "African-American agency by recovering black female motive[,] will[,] and active

desire as well as by recuperating an economically, legally viable and racially inflected

Eric Gardner 201



motherhood" (507). Raimon's reading of Our Nig is also particularly informative in this

vein (120-45), as is Foreman's consideration of Louisa Picquet and Ellen Craft ("Who's

Your Mama?" 512-18; 522-27).

4. In the interest of spurring further work on Urbino, I share the following partial

biography. Born c.1814 in Massachusetts, Levina B[u]ounc[u]ore first appears in the US

census of Massachusetts in 1850, when she is listed as a "Teacher of Languages" in Boston.

Unmarried and occupying the slot for head of household, she was living with what

appears to be her Italian-born father, Massachusetts-born mother, younger brother, and

two boarders. One of those boarders, listed only by the surname "Urbino," is likely the

Sam[p] son R. Urbino (c. 1817-1896) whom she married before 1854. By i860, the couple

had moved to West Roxbury, where Sampson worked as a bookseller and sometime

publisher. The i860 US census of Massachusetts gives no occupation for Levina, and

both the 1870 and 1880 US censuses of Massachusetts records list her simply as "keeping

house." By the mid-i86os, though, she was already very much a writer, sometimes pub

lishing as L. B. Urbino and sometimes as Mrs. S. R. Urbino. Soon after the first edition

of Sunshine, she penned short tales for children published by the New England Sabbath

School Union and by her husband. She also wrote language and dictation texts and a

travel narrative. Her work on the arts became her most enduring: her Art Recreations

(first published in 1859) went through at least a dozen editions from different publish ers. By 1870, the Urbinos had moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where they lived the

rest of their lives. Levina Urbino was one of the founding members of the West Newton

Women's Club, an organization supportive of women's suffrage and intellectual devel

opment, before her death in 1888. Though Urbino does not seem ever to have returned

in written form to questions of slavery and race, the West Newton Women's Club did

host a visit from Olivia Davidson Washington, Booker T. Washington's second wife, who

hoped to secure support for her husband's Tuskegee Institute. All extant records list

Urbino as white. The material above is drawn from entries for Buoncuore/Urbino in

the 1850, i860,1870, and 1880 US censuses of Massachusetts; Allibone "Urbino"; and the

Guide to the Papers of the West Newton Women's Educational Club, 1880-1961.

5. Louise Palmer Heaven is listed in all extant records as white and left no record of

political activism. Born in England in March 1846, she immigrated to the United States

as a child. Palmer was in California by the mid-i86os and seems to have interacted with

other women writers; under her pseudonym, Laura Preston, she co-wrote a collection

titled Stories from Golden Lands with "Carrie Carleton" (Mrs. M. H. Chamberlain) and

"May Wentworth" (Allibone "Preston"; Allibone "Wentworth"; Kirk "Chamberlain";

Kirk "Heaven"). She wrote several books for San Francisco publisher Anton Roman.

An 1895 account of her life notes that "she seriously thought of embracing literature as

a profession" and that she was even offered the editorship of Roman's new magazine

venture, the Overland Monthly ("Literary Chit-Chat" 19). Roman himself, like later lit

erary historians, does not mention this offer and notes Bret Harte as the publication's




initial editor (73). In 1869, Palmer left literature for marriage to the mysterious Samuel

Heaven and moved to Mexico. By 1880, the now-widowed Heaven and her extended

family were living in Philadelphia. During the 1880s, she published several short pieces in the Overland Monthly. Her novel Chata and Chinita was serialized in the magazine

in 1886 and 1887 and published in book form in 1889 and 1890. Various signs of afflu ence suggest that Heaven was not motivated to write solely because of economic needs.

Heaven moved to Washington, D. C, c. 1889, and again set aside writing; this time to

concentrate on helping her daughters find places in Washington society ("Literary Chit

Chat" 19). The last recorded mention of Heaven I could locate is in the 1920 US census of

the District of Columbia. I have not yet found a record of her death. The material above

is drawn from listings for Heaven in the 1880 US census of Pennsylvania; the 1900,1910,

and 1920 US censuses of the District of Columbia; and all the Washington Post references

listed in the Works Cited, below.

6. The Elevator, edited by transplanted New Yorker Philip A. Bell (formerly of the

Colored American), featured an especially wide range of Black writers, including, begin

ning just after Heaven completed In Bonds, the lively columns of Black woman writer

"Semper Fidelis." See my forthcoming Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist in the Early West.

7. Boucicault's play is consistently and over-simplistically categorized among typi

cal tragic mulatta tales. It seems that most critics have examined only the well-known

American ending, wherein the tragic mulatta character dies, and not the later British end

ing, wherein her state is less certain. See Bost 67-68 for an example of this tendency.

8. For similar descriptions of the typical plot, see, for example, Zackodnik 42, Bost

60-61, and Andrews and Kachun xlii. Raimon offers her description in part, as I do, as a

locus for examining challenges to the conventional tragic mulatta tale.

9. In addition to Raimon's work (especially 6-25), see Bost 60-61 on the function of

such deaths.

10. See Bost 74 for useful comments on the use of mulatto/a superiority in tragic

mulatta tales.

11. Compare this to the story of Louisa Picquet, a mixed race woman who, as Foreman

and Fulton point out, seems to fight her amanuensis's desire to place her in the posi

tion of a tragic mulatta, and who struggled for years in an attempt to find her mother.

See Fulton 102. See also Foreman's "Who's Your Mama?," especially her discussions of

how such texts create a "narrative crisis of knowing and seeing" and of how Hiram

Mattison's description of Louisa Picquet takes up the language of slave advertisements

(509,518-19). Also see Reginald Pitts's profile of Picquet in this issue of Legacy. Though

Bost's use of the term "biracial" can be problematic, her discussion of the "biracial sub

ject" offers useful extension and complication of these points (19-25).

12. The main slaveowners in The Escape, Dr. and Mrs. Gaines (note the pun on their

greed-centered lives), are consistently the butt of Brown's sarcastic humor; one thinks

especially of the scene in which a Black house-boy is mistaken for Mrs. Gaines's child?

Eric Gardner 203



and is later revealed to be one of many mixed children fathered by Gaines. It is impor

tant to note that The Escape was designed as a one-man show, with Brown playing all of

the characters. The ways in which the Black Brown voiced the hypocritical comments of

Gaines and his wife on race and "paternal slavery" add another layer to the consideration

of racial (in)determinacy in nineteenth-century literature. Unfortunately, The Escape

has not yet received the same level of notice as Clotel, which is much more traditional in

its formulation of the tragic mulatta.

13. Foreman's "'Reading Aright'" offers the most complete recent analysis of Iola's choice

(344-46), though Bost offers an interesting perspective on Iola's sense of duty (73-74).

14. See Zackodnik (especially 42-58) for a reading of how Craft used the figure of the

tragic mulatta to "redirect a sensationalistic interest toward... antislavery goals" during

her time in Britain (43). 15. Though her work first appeared in the popular press, Holly Jackson, the Brandeis

doctoral student who first published findings that revealed Hawkins's race as white, did

not indulge in such sensationalism. Katherine E. Flynn's "A Case of Mistaken Racial

Identity," which was in galleys when Jackson's discovery was reported in the Boston

Globe, is a model of thorough research and similarly avoids sensation. I must confess

that I was one of the many scholars looking for information about Kelley-Hawkins who

found nothing because I allowed the assumption that she was Black to shape my meth

ods. In a crowning irony, by comparing Flynn's work to my own genealogy, I discovered

that I am Hawkins's ninth cousin once removed.

16. While the popular press was obviously fascinated by Gates's comment (it appears

in several reports, including Mehegan and Jaschik, always with the assumption that

Gates is using a tone of the utmost seriousness), I must confess to being a bit baffled by

it, as it seems questionable that there will be a second edition of the forty-volume set.

Similarly, while Kelley-Hawkins's novels were certainly considered by some critics, her

work was hardly at the center of anyone's sense of a canon of Black literature, so the

"removal" that the popular press repeatedly and sensationalistically asserted would be,

in part, a removal from a place she never really occupied.

WORKS CITED

Allibone, S. Austin. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American

Authors, Living and Deceased, from the Earliest Accounts to the Middle of the Nineteenth

Century. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1858-71.

"American Authors Meet." Washington Post 24 May 1892: 4.

Andrews, William L., and Mitch Kachun. "Editors' Introduction: The Emergence of Julia

C. Collins." The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American

Novel. By Julia C. Collins. 1865. Ed. Andrews and Kachun. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

xi-lxvi.

Berlant, Lauren. "National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life." Comparative




American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J.

Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991.110-40.

-. "The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances

Harper, Anita Hill." Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko

to Anita Hill. Ed. Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

455-80.

Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas,

1850-2000. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003.

Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon. Gardner, Major Voices 479-553.

Brown, Sterling Allen. The Negro in American Fiction. Washington: Associates in Negro

Folk Ed., 1937.

Brown, William Wells. The Escape. Gardner, Major Voices 365-434.

"Chamberlain, Mrs. M. H." Kirk 1: 308.

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with Ed Gordon. National Public Radio. 21 Mar. 2005.

"Clubs." Washington Post 5 May 1918: A12.

Dawkins, Wayne. "Lost in Time." Black Issues Book Review 7.5 (2005): 36-37.

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<http://my.brandeis.edu/profiles/one-profile?profile_id=5i7>.

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of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy." Yale Journal of Criticism 10 (1997): 327-54.

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Eric Gardner 205



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