Le Mulâtre

[3] 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.

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.

[9] 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.

[12] 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.

It begins as dawn is turning the black mountains white ("Les premiers rayons de l'aurore blanchissaient à peine la cime noire des montagnes").

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.

[16] 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".

As in gothic literature by white writers, a grand human façade contrasts with the beautiful otherness of nature and masks a horror within.

[17] 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.

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.

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.

[22] 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.

"[23] 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 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.

[28] 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.

[34] In 1861, a journal reported that Séjour was planning a play about the American abolitionist John Brown, who led an attack on a US armory, but this work too remains unknown.

But while demonstrating his gratitude with frequent visits, Alfred begins to desire Georges' young and beautiful wife, Zélie, also a mulatto.

Although the story is presented as a melodrama—the villainous slave-dealer twirls his mustache—it conveys the injustices of the Code noir and realities of how slavery disrupted family life.

The mulatto, as he is called repeatedly throughout the story in place of his given name, is denied the oedipal knowledge of his identity that would prevent a tragic end.

[41] Helpless to save his wife, Georges suffers the "tragedy of masculinity"[42] that Antoine predicts as the fate of the enslaved "negro" male.

[45] In English-language literature by African Americans, the figure of the mulatto has usually been a victimized female, especially in works published after the Civil War and emancipation.

[48] After the execution of his wife, Georges escapes with his young son and joins the Maroons, described by Séjour as "slaves who have fled the tyranny of their master".

[49] Séjour's contemporary readers may have viewed the familial bloodshed at the end of "The Mulatto" as prefiguring the Haitian Revolution, with the author casting Haiti as "the cradle of black freedom".

Although his career in France was rather unstable, he befriended a number of French authors of great influence to Creoles of color in New Orleans throughout the 19th century—Cyril Bissette, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas among them.