The March 1837 edition of Cyrille Bisette's La Revue des Colonies included one of the first pieces of fiction by an African American author, Victor Séjour's “Le Mulâtre” ("The Mulatto"). Séjour's story was not the first fiction written by an African American; that distinction, as far as I can tell, goes to the anonymous author S. who wrote "Theresa—A Haytien Tale" which appeared in four installments from January 18 through February 15, 1828, in John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish's Freedom's Journal. Today, I would just like to talk a little about Séjour's story. If you would like to read "Theresa" follow the links above the first and last installments. The middle installments can be found by following the Freedom's Journal link.Born to a free man of color from Santo Domingo and a free mulatto woman of New Orleans in 1817, Séjour lived within a society where free people of color, like himself and his parents, could prosper. While they were able to prosper, they did not have all of the same rights as whites, but they also did not face all of the oppression that slaves did as well. Louisiana provided a unique space in the antebellum period. That space created the distinctions that we start to see in Gaines's works where there are four distinct groups of people: whites, blacks, Cajuns, and Creoles. Because of his parentage, Séjour received a good education, and like many other children of free people of color in the city, he left New Orleans at the age of nineteen to continue his education in Paris. There, he launched his literary career and ran in the same circles as Alexandre Dumas and Bisette. It was in Paris, at the age twenty, where Séjour's "The Mulatto" initially appeared. The story is extremely graphic for 1837, going much further in its descriptions of slavery and the liscenteous nature of slave owners towards female slaves than say Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1843), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), or even William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853). In fact, I can not think of anything as graphic in regards to slavery as "The Mulatto" until 1861 with the publication of Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Perhaps the graphic nature of the story can be attributed to the fact, as the writer of the head note in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature puts it, that Paris provided Séjour with a space where he could be "unhampered by the racial proscriptions of the antebellum South" (286).
Taking place in Saint Domingue, "The Mulatto" tells the story of Georges and his life in slavery. His father, Alfred, is also his master. Alfred purchased Laïsa at a slave auction and later raped her, thus producing Georges. Laïsa never told Georges who his father was, and on her deathbed, she presented Georges with a pouch that contained his father's portrait. She also made Georges promise that he would not open the pouch until his twenty-fifth year. One night, thieves broke into Alfred's house and attempted to rob him. Alfred believed that Georges orchestrated the incident, but in fact Georges took a bullet in order to protect his master. Even with his protection of Alfred, Georges could not escape his master's predilections for his wife Zelia. When Zelia refused Alfred's advances and caused him to fall down stairs injuring himself, he condemned her to die, and even though Georges pleaded with Alfred to let her go, Zeila perished at the end of a rope. Zelia's death prompted Georges to seek revenge. He poisoned Alfred's wife before eventually beheading Alfred and killing himself soon afterwards.
The above summary shows that Séjour's story can be grouped together with other tragic mulatto stories of the antebellum period. For me, what sets it apart is the descriptive nature of the narrative and also the psychological insight it provides to the slave-owner's mindset. Along with these aspects, the frame of the story is important. The story is set up with a frame story around the main narrative. The unnamed, white narrator sits down to listen to the story of his friend Georges from an "old negro" named Antoine. The entire narrative, except for the first few paragraphs, are completely told by Antoine. This method can be seen in later works of the nineteenth century such as Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) where Uncle Remus and Uncle Julius provide the narration respectively. I do not want to talk about this aspect, but I did want to mention it. For more information about the framing, see the article by Ed Piacentio below.
For me, Séjour's graphic descriptions of slavery are important because of the time that the story first appeared. When desribing the auction house, Antoine says that there are three groups in the one room of the building that "resembles a temple": one group "purchases negroes; that is, free men who have been torn from their country by ruse or by force, and who have become, by violence, the goods, the property of their fellow men" (288). This description does not appear much different than others of the period, and Antoine continues by describing the scene of families being torn apart. When twenty-one-year-old Alfred approaches a young Sengalese woman and starts to bid on her, the auctioneer "ran his shameless hands over the ample and half-naked form of the beautiful African" (288). Alfred then asks the auctioneer if the slave is "guaranteed," and the auctioneer responds with "As pure as the morning dew" (288). Georges mother has not been violated when Alfred purchases her.
Antoine tells his friend that "Alfred may have been a decent man, humane and loyal with his equals, but you can be certain he was a hard, cruel man toward his slaves. I won't tell you everything he did in order to possess Laïsa; for in the end she was virtually raped" (290). "Virtually raped" would not appear in Child's "The Quadroons," the conquest there is implied. Séjour's story, however, blatantly lays out what Alfred does to Laïsa. After Laïsa dies, Georges marries Zelia, and Alfred tries to conquer Zelia while Georges recovers from the gunshot wound he receives while protecting his master. During his visits to Georges, Alfred "became enamored by Zelia," Georges young mulatto wife (292). Zelia continually refuses Alfred's advances, and Alfred becomes so frustrated that he condemns her to hang. During Zelia's shunning of Alfred, images of women being part of a harem appear. This same type of imagery pops up in Child's "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" as well. Antoine says, Alfred thought of himself as "the despot, the Bey, the Sultan of the Antilles" (293). To Alfred, Zelia and Laïsa serve as nothing more than commodities for his own purposes. In many ways, this recalls Jimmy Caya discussions with Tee Bob over what he should do about Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
The story concludes with Georges getting revenge for his wife's death. Remember, Georges does not know that Alfred is his father. Georges first poisons Alfred's wife then proceeds to behead his own father. As he swings the ax forward, Alfred exclaims, "Strike executioner . . . strike . . . after poisoning [my wife], you might as well kill your own fa--" (299). Alfred cannot finish the last syllable before the ax severs his head from his body: "The ax fell, and Alfred's head rolled across the floor, but, as it rolled, the head distinctly pronounced the final syllable, 'ther . . . '" (299). Piacentio makes an excellent point about Alfred's head being lopped off. He writes, The word "father" is severed, broken in two, a reminder that in a slave society normal paternal connections could not exist with slave children. Georges's action results in two children, one mulatto (his son) and the other white (Alfred and his wife's son), being orphaned. For both the slave boy and the free white boy of "The Mulatto," family is destroyed." The institution of slavery did not just destroy George's family, but it also destroyed Alfred's, not providing him with the opportunity to acknowledge his own son.
More could be said here, of course. If you would like more insight into Séjour and the story, see:
O'Neill, Charles Edward. Séjour: Parisian Playwright from Louisiana. Lafayette: UL Press, 1995. Print.
Piacentio, Ed. "Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction:Victor Séjour's 'The Mulatto.'" Southernscapes, 2007. Web.
Séjour, Victor. "The Mulatto." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 1996. 286-299. Print.
