Word: quadroons
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Race has long been a muddled matter: 1890 classifications included mulatto, quadroon and octoroon, Chinese and Japanese. In 1930, Mexican was listed. The 2010 survey has caused a stir with the inclusion of Negro in addition to black and African American...
...first Census, in 1790, explicitly asked about only one race: white. Blacks, for the most part, fell into the slave category. Race was about civil status. In the 19th century, concerns about keeping the white race pure led to the addition of the "mulatto" category in 1850 (and "quadroon" and "octoroon" in 1890), a process traced by Harvard political scientist Melissa Nobles in her book Shades of Citizenship. With rising immigration, Chinese and Japanese were added as categories - but not Irish or Italian - underscoring that somehow Asians were more fundamentally different...
During his five years in Paris, Jefferson was attended by his quadroon slave girl, Sally Hemings, who-to complicate matters-had been fathered by his father-in-law. Though she could have technically claimed freedom in France, Sally and her oldest son remained slaves when Jefferson returned to Washington in 1789 to become Secretary of State. Although the details of the relationship have never been clear, Brodie claims that in 38 years Jefferson had seven children by Sally Hemings. Her prominent place in Brodie's biography offers one of the few rational clues to Jefferson's ambiguous position...
...flag rank or a staff officer in the so-called "Battle of Valley Forge." He was also, despite land speculations in the Caribbean and Pennsylvania, ever at sea financially. When a native insurrection threatened his Haitian holdings in 1790, he brought young John and another lovechild (by a quadroon) back to his complaisant in-port wife in Nantes. She happily adopted both of them...
...scenario, gave Designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian ample scope for lush sets that imparted a sense of grandeur to the opera's five scenes. American Soprano Mary Costa, who played Ninette, sang beautifully but seemed lost in the schmalz-larded story. Only the heroine's quadroon mother, Cleo, superbly sung by Contralto Irene Dalis, took on the dimensions of life-a singular achievement while coping with some embarrassing lyrics: "Love had fled from your white heart, but my black one still lives in its hell...