Ed Piacentino, Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"

A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto") by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette's Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of "Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs" owned and sponsored by a "society of men of color." A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

La Revue's cover, according to Charles E. O'Neill, Séjour's biographer, features a "black slave in chains, with palms and waterfall in the background; kneeling on one knee, hands clasped in petition [and] ask[ing] 'Am I not a man and your brother?'" This illustration accentuates the journal's anti-slavery intent: to expose the "dissatisfaction with the slow, evasive parliamentary handling of poverty and oppression in the colonies" (O'Neill 14). In this iconic image, the slave expresses his humanity although secured by chains and kneeling in supplication.1 The slave proffers a plea for personhood and liberation that evokes the plight of the enslaved throughout the Plantation Americas, a zone, as George Handley notes, "of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean nations, the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America and Brazil, and the U.S. South...." (Handley 25).

Illustration on the cover of La Revue des Colonies 3 (1837): 376-392 where the story was originally published by Victor Séjour as "Le Mulâtre."

As a native of New Orleans and resident of the French Quarter, Séjour spoke French, attended private school, and was free but not white. When Séjour resided in New Orleans, free persons of color (gens de couleur) were numerous and did not enjoy political rights equal to those of whites (O'Neill 1). At nineteen, Séjour became an expatriate by choice, moving to Paris to continue his education and find work, and eventually joining forces with Cyrille Bisette, publisher of La Revue, and other members of the Parisian literary elite who helped him to start a formal writing career. In Paris, Séjour, a colonial mulatto, found a more open-minded milieu with less racial prejudice where he could exercise liberties not allowed in antebellum New Orleans. In 1837, a black man living in the United States could not have published as stark and haunting an antislavery revenge narrative as "The Mulatto." With this publication, the first African-American fictional narrative and the first of Séjour's works to appear in print, he launched a popular and successful literary career, with twenty of his plays produced on the Paris stage between the 1840s and '60s.

"The Mulatto" is not set in the continental United States, but its location, Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) in the West Indies, is an important site of slavery and revolution in the African diaspora where plantation slaves experienced barbarous conditions eliciting comparison to Louisiana sugar plantations.2 Designating Louisiana as an "appendage of the French and Spanish West Indies," Thomas Marc Fiehrer perceives significant links between the two, including "shar[ing] the socio-economic expreience of the larger circum-Caribbean culture, (3-4), and Louisiana's becoming a major sugar producer as Saint-Domingue had formerly been. Louisiana, like Cuba, also experienced the "same cycle of expansion and intensification of slavery after 1800 which had occurred in Saint-Domingue between 1750 and 1794," and many planters, refugees, and free persons of color (many of who had migrated to Cuba first) found Louisiana a "politically desirable point of relocation..., afford[ing]... an ecosystem comparable to that of the [Caribbean] islands" (4). With the expansion of sugar-plantation slavery came familiar atrocities (10).

Although little known in its era, "The Mulatto" presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown's Clotel or; The President's Daughter and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt's Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery — particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks — "The Mulatto" deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery.