Dead and Buried (40 page)
Authors: Barbara Hambly
Common also in the records of the South are cases of children, adopted by white parents, who were later ‘outed’ as being of such distant and negligible African descent as to be completely indistinguishable from their adoptive families – and who lost jobs, families, and in many instances, civil rights thereby.
Similar cases existed prior to the Civil War, and the social consequences, at that time, were horrific – not the least of which being that if one of the unfortunate
passe blanc’s
parents could be proved to be a slave, he or she would lose not only social position, but liberty as well. (Three of Thomas Jefferson’s reputed children by the slave Sally Hemings – herself a fair-complected ‘quadroon’ – were said to have slipped invisibly into white society: something that was easier in the 1790s than in the 1830s.)
Moreover, to literally add insult to injury, most of the
gens du couleur libre
– the free colored of New Orleans – appear to have identified with, and sided with, the whites who had money and power, and to have distanced themselves as far as possible from the darker-skinned blacks, slave or free, who came into New Orleans with the Americans in the 1820s and ’30s. This tendency did not end with the Civil War, though the genres of music purely native to America – ragtime and jazz – are a combination of the greater Classical training of ‘downtown’ black musicians with the stronger African musical traditions that had not been erased from the less-snobbish ‘uptown’ players.
In all these matters and all others, I have tried, as always, firstly to entertain.
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Fever Season
Table of Contents
The Benjamin January Series from Barbara Hambly
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