Mary Johnston Rose – How to become legally white

The Spanish Town census, featured here recently, listed three people who were described as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”.
They included Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter. Mary was a free mulatto, the daughter of Elizabeth Johnston who died in 1753 a free negro. Mary may have been born as early as 1700 when there is the baptism of a Mary Elizabeth daughter of Elizabeth Johnston ‘a negro wench’ on 5th July 1700. If this is the right mother and daughter then Elizabeth was probably a house slave at the time and later freed. It seems probable that Mary’s father was one of the Rose family, possibly Francis Rose (1656-1720), or William Rose (d. about 1724).
There is no record of how Mary acquired her education, but that she did so at a time when most women, whatever their colour, were illiterate suggests that she had a favoured upbringing at the hands of her father.
Mary was said to be related to Rose Fuller (a plantation owner and key player in island politics; Francis Rose was his great-uncle and William Rose his cousin) and she was his housekeeper for about twenty years until he returned to England in the summer of 1755, landing at Portsmouth on the 18th August. The role of housekeeper frequently equated to that of common law wife and there was clearly a strong degree of affection between Mary and her employer who was the acknowledged father of her son William.
After Rose Fuller left Jamaica he sent her various items, including a carpet. In May 1756 she wrote that these were “such marks of your esteem for me as I shall never forget” and she forwarded a list requesting calimancoe[1] shoes, coarse linen (probably for servant or slave clothing), chintz (perhaps Indian chintz such as pictured above), tea and a white beaver hat. She sent him some boxes of sweetmeats “which will serve to remind you that you have left here a person who always thinks of you”. In a further letter in December 1756 she wrote “I most heartily thank you for all your favours which have been very great to me, but notwithstanding them, I have often known the want of your being here, since your departure. May you long enjoy your health is the sincere wish of your most affectionate honourable servant Mary Rose”.

Adrian Piper: Texts

http://www.adrianpiper.com/docs/Passing.pdf

http://www.adrianpiper.com/docs/WebsiteNGBK3Hats.pdf

http://www.adrianpiper.com/docs/Oprah-Warrior.pdf

The Rhinelander Case

The Rhinelander case (1925) was news across America, it was on the front pages of the New York Times for a month: Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, son of one of the richest men in New York, took Alice Jones to court for tricking him into marrying her by passing for white.
Her love letters were read in court and she was made to show her breasts to the judge and jury (in private), but she won: from her breasts Rhinelander would have known she was black. And while Jones looked white, acted white and lived white, her father was clearly part black, which made her black too by the One Drop Rule. So either way Rhinelander had to know.
She won, but the Rhinelanders got her to agree to give up all rights to the Rhinelander name and fortune in exchange for a nice sum of money. But, as she was the last of them to die, she put “Rhinelander” on her gravestone all the same.
Mixed marriages were not against the law in New York. But if Jones had presented herself as a white woman then Rhinelander was not marrying who he though he was, making the marriage no good.
Alice Jones became the first black person ever to marry into New York high society. The Rhinelanders were not just rich, they had been rich longer than even the Vanderbilts. Jones herself was a servant, the daughter of a taxi driver.
It is clear that Rhinelander was in love with her, but his father was against it and threatened to cut him off from the family and its fortune.
Both sides in the trial agreed Jones was black. The question was not that, but whether Rhinelander knew it at the time of marriage.
Yet the case would never have gone to trial unless Jones stood right on the colour line between black and white: she was white – yet not white.
Both sides in the case took advantage of this by using stereotypes to persuade the jury of white men:
    * Rhinelander’s lawyers wanted the jury to think of Jones as a black woman: black women were (and still are) seen as loose, as using sex to get their way with men: the Jezebel stereotype.
    * Jones’s lawyers, on the other hand, were able to get the jury to see her mainly as a white woman and apply the pure white woman stereotype. This kept her off the stand and made Rhinelander look like someone who was taking advantage of her – instead of the other way round. It worked.
The NAACP had this to say:
    If Rhinelander had used this girl as concubine or prostitute, white America would have raised no word of protest; white periodicals would have printed no headlines; white ministers would have said no single word. It is when he legally and decently marries the girl that Hell breaks loose and literally tears the pair apart. Magnificent Nordic mentality!
Blackface entertainer Al Jolson was at the trial to watch and give testimony.

The tragic mulatto

The tragic mulatto was a stock character in white American fiction from 1842 till at least 1959. She – most often it was a she – was nearly all white but part of her was black. She would hide or deny her blackness through most of the story but in the end it would catch up with her and her life would end in tragedy. The most famous tragic mulattoes were Peola in “Imitation of Life” (1934) and Dorothy Dandridge, both on film and off.

Whites do not seem to write about tragic mulattoes much any more, but it still comes up, as in “The Human Stain” (2003). The ideas behind it are still there. Barack Obama, for example, could wind up being read as one by whites: being part white he held such promise, but his blackness proved his undoing. Even today some whites see biracial people (mulattoes) as having a divided soul: being neither truly black nor truly white, it is hard for them to be at peace with themselves and the world.
In most cases it does not work that way. Because of the One Drop Rule in America a white person who is part black is seen as all black. Blacks will accept him as one of their own but whites will not. To whites his blackness is a stain, a sign that he is not quite right inside. That is why Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Halle Berry, Alicia Keys and other Americans who are partly or even mostly white see themselves as black.

To think they could or would have divided loyalties you would have to be white or be someone who has never found himself at the wrong end of the white American world. Yet in all the stories the mulatto is torn between the two worlds. The moral of the tragic mulatto is the One Drop Rule. Trying to pass for white always ends in tragedy. You might fool the world for a while and even yourself, but in the end your one drop of blackness will come out and be your downfall. To be truly white you must be all white. Tragic mulattoes hate their blackness and all things black. They want to be loved and accepted by whites. They want a white lover. They get one, but it never lasts. The most famous tragic mulatto was the character Peola in “Imitation of Life” (1934), a film based on the book by Fannie Hurst. Peola became a byword among blacks until the 1970s.

Peola had a black mother but was light enough to pass for white. She was played by Fredi Washington, herself a light-skinned black woman who could have passed for white. Peola hated being black: she wanted to be white. But to do that she would have to turn her back on her own mother. She did. Her mother died of a broken heart. Peola came to the funeral and came to her senses – but it was too late.

Passing for White

Passing for white is where you get people to assume you are white even though you are not pure white. Millions of blacks in America have done it down through time so that now a tenth of all white Americans are at least one-tenth black.
Passing is a direct consequence of how race works in America. Because of the One Drop Rule if you look at all part black African you are seen as “black” by “whites” and suffer all the racism that goes with that.
The government does not keep records about your race – it is not on your passport or even birth certificates any more – so it comes down to how you look - and, to a degree, how you talk and dress and act.
which-is-negro-which-is-whiteIn the old days to pass you had to move away to some town where no one knew your family. Many were not willing to do that. These days, though, in big cities few people are ever going to meet your family, so it is much easier to pass, at least part of the time.
It was more important in the past when racism was worse, but it is still going on, some say at a rate of about 35,000 a year. Men seem to do it far more than women.
According to one study about one person in 500 who is born to black parents looks white. If you are less than one-eighth black by blood you have a good chance of passing, but you can be as much as a fourth black and still pass. It all depends on how you look – and what likely story you can tell people who get curious about your background. Some say they are Sicilian, Arab or American Indian.
Some people are part black and do not even know it because they have been lied to or kept in the dark about their family history.
From looking at the DNA of white Americans we can tell that the mixing and passing has been going on all along for 400 years and not just in the 1600s or the late 1900s when mixed-race marriages were allowed by law throughout the country.
The census also tells us that passing is going on: Every ten years the government counts everyone in the country and, among other things, asks what their race is. From that and immigration records you can tell that there are fewer blacks and more whites than there should be: blacks are disappearing without dying or leaving the country and whites are appearing without ever being born or entering the country. A study done along these lines in 1958 showed that 21% of whites must be part black.

In American fiction those who pass often come to a bad end – the idea of the tragic mulatto. The most famous example is “The Imitation of Life”, a book twice made into a film by Hollywood. A true-life example of someone who passed is Anatole Broyard, pictured above.