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Facsimile retrieved from original at University of Calgary, Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds
This incomplete typescript explores a common topic in Eaton’s oeuvre: the lived experience of mixed-race people. Rather than presenting this figure as a spectacle, however, I am a White N[---]
highlights the precarity of racial passing in the US, where a single drop of Black blood disqualified one from whiteness and full citizenship. In this regard, it recalls contemporary narratives such as James Weldon Johnson’s
Creoleand
quadroonshowcases this period’s attention to minute degrees of racial and cultural distinction. The phrase
white n[---]entered English usage as early as the late 1820s. The US antebellum period witnessed a shift in racial ideology from nativism to white supremacism (i.e. a shift in attention from one’s origins to one’s skin color), during which Northern politicians and union organizers often made invidious comparisons between white wage labor and slavery. In 1836, a story with a similar title (
The White N[---]) was published by the (then) well-known Nova Scotian humorist Thomas Chandler Haliburton. His usage, in a tale about the auctioning off of white orphans and elderly folk, suggests
a white person likened to or treated like a black slave(
The Half Caste(1898), she observes that the word
n[---]was sometimes applied to mixed-race people of Japanese and European descent.
See Editorial Principles.
Sydney Lines is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of British Columbia and Project Manager of
Spencer Tricker is Assistant Professor of English at Clark University.
See the Biographical Timeline for biographical information on Winnifred Eaton.
Joey Takeda is the Technical Director of
Leean is an Honours English language and literature student at the University of British Columbia and a research assistant for
Mary Chapman is the Director of
Collection of Winnifred Eaton’s papers and unpublished manuscripts, which were transferred to the University of Calgary in 1982. The finding aid for this material is located here: https://searcharchives.ucalgary.ca/winnifred-eaton-reeve-fonds
If you do not know what a White nigger
means, I will try to explain. It means that although your skin
I was born in New Orleans. My lovely mother was who is by descent three-quarters white and one-quarter black; a person with one black grandparent
(family
.
I know I was pretty, even in those days, for even the white folk who came to our house to have their sewing done by my mother, used to exclaim over my beauty and once I heard a woman say to my mother:
You would never know but what she was all white
.
It seems a pity that she should have to live among colored people
.
My mother Creole
here refers to its definition as a descendant of white European settlers (esp. Spanish or French) who is born in a colonized country
(Creole
implies colored blood, but that is not so. It means the very cream of old French and Spanish blood, without a taint of black to despoil it. My Creole aunt examined me with great and detached interest, holding up her
Remarkable!
For a long time after that she and my mother spoke in whispers. My mother’s face was flushed. She seemed to be pleading for something and her great dark eyes were moist with undropped tears. My aunt kept saying:
.
Then my mother said:
But there need be no other generation. It can stop with Fleur. I beg you to take
.
My aunt shook her head slowly, and my poor mother continued:
She is white---all white---as white as any of the high and mighty LaTouches. Then let her be brought up a white girl
.
I saw my aunt looking at my mother very gravely and then she said:
What of you, Madame? Do you care so little for your child that you are willing to give her up like this
.
My mother flamed back:
You forget
said she, that my ancestors were slaves. Our women saw their daughters taken from them and sold on the block like cattle to strangers--brutes and beasts. If my grandparents could do that, can I not be stoic enough to send my child to a place where I know her life’s happiness will be found
.
I am not so sure of the happiness
said my aunt drily, but I will think it over
.
Think it over she did, and within a few days after that conversation, I found myself on a train, with my aunt bound for the City of Chicago. Of course, I was too distracted and heartbroken at the time to know
My aunt said:
You must stop crying. You must not abandon yourself to grief in that uncivilised fashion. You are now a white girl
.
I’m not
I retorted wildly. I hate white people
.
My aunt said coldly:
You will lower your voice, if you please, when you address me. Anyone on the train might hear you
.
I don’t care if they do
I sobbed tempestuously. I hate, I hate, I hate all white people
.
Then
said my aunt if you do not obey me I shall be obliged to punish you
.
I flashed back scornfully:
You can’t ---on the train The people won’t let you beat me
.
I am going to pass over the several years of my life spent in Chicago. My aunt was not a rich woman, but we had a nice little flat near the park. I went to school where, unlike New Orleans, there were both white and black children. They took it for granted that I was white, and as time passed I almost forgot myself that there was even that one drop taint in my blood. From time to time letters came from my mother, always with money enclosed. Not very much money, for I believe she
So time passed of course, I had no desire whatsoever to return. I acquired a sort of snobbish aversion for colored people, and I always avoided contact with them.
When I was seventeen years old, as we were in very poor circumstances and my mother’s remittances had become smaller and rarer, I had to go to work. I got a job at a newstands in the Ambassador hotel. I think Tante Marie felt very badly about my having to work at so young an age, and she made me keep at my music and French lessons, for she always hammered into me the fact that culture was everything, and if I could maintain an