Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South |
Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South
The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588
Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma
My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…
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