Love Under the Skin

Interracial Marriages in the American South and France

Cécile Coquet-Mokoko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000044140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The rising visibility of interracial couples calls for increased attention to the overlapping of culture and race, in safe spaces centered on small-group dynamics, or in public spaces where peoples of African descent are under the public gaze. This comparative study seeks to de-center the U.S-centered viewpoint common to much of the literature on black/white relations. Based on nine years of fieldwork in the American South and in France, Coquet shows many unexpected parallels between the two societies. Gendered perceptions of cultural authenticity and sexual ethics are a guiding thread, being inseparable from the historical and political contingencies (re-)defining acceptable forms of dating, marrying, and parenting among cis-heterosexual couples in both societies. Her account emphasizes resilience and agency as couples seek to protect themselves and their children, while their extended or symbolic kinship networks help white partners acknowledge the existence of racial privilege.

PART I

Historical Backgrounds. “Out of A Past That’s Rooted in Shame”: How Interracial Marriage Became A Stigma

1

Criminalizing Interracial Attraction to Enshrine White Property in America (from 1630 to the Present)

In his classic work Neither Black nor White yet Both, Werner Sollors gives a striking analysis of an 18th-century German painting representing Adam and Eve as an interracial couple, with a red-haired, White Adam and a Black Eve. This unusual representation draws our imagination back to the mythical time of origins, when interracial encounters were perceived as the only possible breeding ground for a new world peopled with human beings of all hues. Conversely, it is just as striking to observe that interracial marriage was banned as “incestuous and void” in, for instance, the Mississippi code of 1880.¹ Meanwhile, efforts by lawmakers to prevent the increase of a progeny considered as “impossible,” or, in the terms of the famous 1691 Virginia law, “abominable mixture and spurious issue” consistently argued for the preservation of a visible distinction resulting from the will of the Almighty to keep the two races (at times defined as two “natures”) clearly separated. The reason why so many laws were passed in North America from 1630 up to the late 1930s is clearly the persistence of interracial desire and its enactment in spite of such powerful deterrents.

Creating race and gender has everything to do with establishing racial hierarchies and durable systems of subordination; even in the German painting, Adam could not have been represented as a Black man, while Eve the temptress, made from one of his ribs, could be assigned non-European features. This is why it is crucial to delineate as accurately as possible the parameters used in a given society to first construct, then legitimize as “natural,” social orders whose prime and only function is to ensure that individuals learn to accept their “place” in the system, so that the dominant group will not be challenged in their rule. Understanding how the White racial framing is constructed and implemented in matters of sexual policing helps unveil one of the most complex systems of subordination, for it is not only at the intersection of property, class interests, and privilege, but also of physical attraction to the Other and the acceptable or unacceptable public displays of such a bond.

National narratives—or rather mostly silences—around the reality of interracial sexual relations at the time of the first (colonial) encounters, as well as throughout the antebellum and Jim Crow periods, often result in clouding the private dimensions of individuals’ life choices, so that the parameters of choice and constraint become very difficult to sort out. How can we posit that all interracial relations were legally sanctioned rapes, when we see examples of couples striving to be legitimate against all social and legal odds? How can we rationally measure the risks taken by couples who fled their home colony or state to find some respite from laws criminalizing them and communities ostracizing them? To what extent was race central or used as a convenient pretext in the psychological evolution of a spouse seeking for the annulment of a marriage she or he knew to be interracial in the first place? This impossibility to account entirely for the lived experiences of interracial couples in the U.S.A. over the three centuries between the first anti-amalgamation laws of 1630 and the Loving decision of 1967 is not surprising. Indeed the racial ideologies of loyalty to a kinship group or broader “community,” and the set of sexual commandments they have explicitly or implicitly entailed, necessarily bury personal options under an all-political agenda.

To reach a more workable understanding of the construction of a social stigma, it is necessary to grasp more precisely what exactly was branded as “unnatural” and what was prioritized in establishing these codes of sexual mores. The constructed impossibility to live together, which James Baldwin defined as “the pathology of the Deep South,” originated shortly after three decades of apparently unhampered romantic interest and sexual contact in the early beginnings of colonial America, where the scarcity of White women had not been immediately perceived as an urgent problem to be solved. While socio-economic equality and daily interaction were the norm between indentured servants as well as free persons of all racial backgrounds in colonial America, White male elites criminalized interracial desire to make it appear inextricably tied to the notion of sin. This was made plain in the language used by colonial lawmakers from the 1630s on. Engaging in interracial marriage was punished even more harshly than engaging in interracial “fornication,” the children born from such unions being invariably defined by White ruling castes as “burdens” to society and doomed to a life of bondage until age 30 in most colonies and, later, founding states of the Young Republic. Why choose to stigmatize interracial marriage so harshly, as opposed to extramarital interracial relations? Because it represented the hinge between personal choice and the collective endorsement of this choice, which is ultimately ensconced in a system of laws bearing on the couple’s line of descent for many generations to come, as Peggy Pascoe highlights it:

As a social institution, marriage links individual desire to social respectability and financial responsibility; it also links citizens and their dependants to the state. Because it stretches seamlessly from romance² to respectability to responsibility, marriage has extraordinary power to naturalize some social relationships, and to stigmatize others as unnatural. When societies decide who can and who can’t legally marry, they determine who is and isn’t really part of the family. These inclusions and exclusions take place at such an intimate level that they shape what seems natural and, in turn, what is stigmatized as unnatural.³

The terms used to construct interracial couples as anti-models of families and, soon after, anomalies of nature, were thus social, political and legal tools crafted by White male elites to give a name to sexual practices which had not been considered worthy of notice in the first generation that colonized Northern America. “Amalgamation,” repackaged as “miscegenation” after 1864,⁴ designated a natural evolution of social relations that had to be thwarted, or at least controlled in its consequences, as effectively as possible for the state lawmakers to define individuals’ rights to freedom and property—in short, access to citizenship rights for a couple and their progeny. The same logic was thus reinforced throughout the antebellum period and in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods, with a combination of pseudo-scientific and biblical arguments to buttress the process of criminalization and de-naturalization of interracial intimacies. As Eva Saks puts it:

Drawing on the social sciences as then understood, miscegenation jurisprudence was instrumental in stabilizing white property. In substance, it prevented the creation of legal homes and families and legitimate social exchange between blacks and whites by preventing marriage.⁵

Ultimately, under the pretense of obeying “natural law” and working for the “peace and happiness” of both races⁶—and, immediately after the Civil War, additional “non-White” races under cover of neutrality to all—, the first goal of all these laws was to make sure that mixed-race children would never be entitled to the same rights as White children. The 1691 statute of Virginia prohibited masters to emancipate any slave within the boundaries of the colony, thus forcing planters to exile their mixed-race children if they were loath to raise them as their slaves. In Revolutionary years, Thomas Jefferson penned a bill proposing that the Virginia legal system banish any White woman bearing a child by a “Negro or mulatto,” providing that non-compliance would result in the mother being outlawed and her child bound out (enslaved) for an unspecified amount of time before being banished from the state.⁷ That the bill never passed makes it no less ironic and emblematic of a system entirely framed by all-powerful White men: Thomas Jefferson himself fathered at least five children by his sex slave Sally Hemings, who was his departed wife’s half-sister and the maid of his younger daughter. Acting upon the promise he had made to 16-year-old Sally during their stay in France, Jefferson, who never remarried, skirted the very laws he had helped write and repeatedly defended. He arranged for their four children who lived into adulthood to be emancipated by age 21 and thus durably escape slavery, petitioning the Virginia legislature to allow them to remain in the state. Both his son Beverly and his daughter Harriet married into the White upper class, thus passing permanently; his other two sons, who married free women of color, took care of their mother until her death in 1835 and then left Virginia for free states.⁸

Then, lawmakers’ second aim was to signify to socially powerless White partners in interracial couples that their attraction to a person of color estranged them from the sexual norms of “civilization.” These laws effectively deprived ordinary White women in particular, but also White men outside the planter class, of the possibility of building a secure family cell. For instance, Captain Hemings, Sally’s White grandfather, who was the captain of the slave ship on which he coerced into sex her captive African grandmother “Susanna,” was willing to purchase the baby daughter he had by her. However, John Wayles, the planter who had bought the pregnant captive, refused to sell the baby to her father, “though he was offered an extraordinarily large price for her,” arguing “the child was so great a curiosity that its owner desired to raise it himself that he might see its outcome.” By that time, pseudo-scientific classification of the various degrees of race mixing had become common, entailing unverified claims about the physical and mental particularities of mixed-race individuals and designating such a baby as “mulatto” or “mulatta” (a term borrowed from the Spanish and Portuguese word for “mule”).⁹ Oral tradition in the Hemings family contended that Captain Hemings was not impelled by similar financial interests to those of Wayles, but was so “determined to own his own flesh and blood” that “he resolved to take the child by force or stealth.” This led Wayles to lock up Susanna and her baby in the big house. Yet in lieu of raising young Elizabeth Hemings, the planter made her his sex slave as soon as he was widowed, and bequeathed her and their children to his daughter Martha, the future Mrs. Jefferson.¹⁰

Lower-class White men and women in interracial relationships could also be stripped of their right to freedom—quite literally at some junctures in U.S. history. For instance, in Maryland in 1715, the planter caste could use the law to increase the contingent of indentured servants at no financial cost, as the free parents of “mulatto” children (whether legitimate or illegitimate) were both sentenced to seven years of indenture. Two years later, Maryland lawmakers further targeted free Blacks in interracial marriages, by ordering they should be enslaved for life and their White spouses forced into indenture for a seven-year period.¹¹

In the 1870s, the provisions of state miscegenation laws allowed imprisonment for interracial couples who persisted in living together, even as married couples¹²—a behavior which directly challenged the legal construction of interracial intimacy as inherently illicit sex. Such laws effectively reinforced the notion that deprivation of freedom for both partners was the rightful punishment for such a crime. This was particularly true in Alabama, which was one of a handful of states (with Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland) where miscegenation laws not only banned interracial marriage but also set specific imprisonment terms for interracial couples, both unmarried and married, ranging from two to seven years in prison.¹³

Surprisingly, though Alabama had been anchored in slaveholding culture from its incorporation in 1819, it was not until 1852 that the state legislature deemed it necessary to ban interracial marriage. Even at this late period in the national debate over slavery then raging throughout the nation, it was “a relatively mild statute that made it a finable misdemeanor for any state official to solemnize an interracial marriage but set no penalties for the partners to [sic] such a marriage.”¹⁴ Hence, it can be said that Alabama did not make the political decision to secure White supremacy by criminalizing such couples until the immediate post-Civil War period, since it was the 1866 state constitution which

directed the General Assembly to “enact laws prohibiting the intermarriages of white persons with negroes, or with persons of mixed blood, declaring such marriages null and void ab initio, and making the parties to any such marriage subject to criminal prosecutions.” In 1866, the Alabama legislature did just that, passing a classic postwar miscegenation law. Under the 1866 law, any such couple bold enough to “intermarry, or live in adultery or fornication with each other” faced felony convictions that carried prison sentences of two to seven years. The penalty for officials who performed interracial marriages covered marriage license clerks as well as justices of the peace and ministers; it was increased to a fine of $100 to $1,000, with a possible additional jail sentence of six months.¹⁵

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
• PART I: Historical Backgrounds. “Out of A Past That’s Rooted in Shame”: How Interracial Marriage Became A Stigma
• PART II: Comparative Sociological Analyses. “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors”: Internalizing and Contesting the White Racial Frame in The Realm of Intimacy Today
• Conclusion: “Love’s Revolution” Will Not Be Racialized
• Questionnaire
• Bibliography
• Index