Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman
of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly
known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest
irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by
the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily
Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different
story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were
as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not
concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In
The
Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates
how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an
elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol
that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it
had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a
dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and
realities of New Orleans's free women of color.