Race, Politics, and Irish America by Mary M. Burke

Author:Mary M. Burke [Mary M. Burke]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780192675842
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-11-04T09:13:02+00:00

‘Remember Haiti?’ The Foxes of Harrow’s Ambivalent Irish Planter

Stephen Fox is introduced in The Foxes of Harrow as a dishonest gambler being ejected from a Mississippi riverboat onto a sandbar.161 In his ‘Dublin guttersnipe’ youth in pre-Catholic Emancipation Ireland, the illegitimate Stephen ‘slept in the streets, and lived by begging food’.162 In New Orleans, he gambles his way to acquiring the land upon which he will build his Louisiana plantation, Harrow. The implied racial ambiguity of Stephen’s heritage is made explicit in the description of his son Etienne’s Texan bride, the daughter of a squatter who was ‘“part Navaho and part Irish – two very savage races”’.163 Once Fox is in possession of his plantation, he upgrades his social status and whiteness by marrying Odile, a local elite French woman who is described as being white Creole. However, in the novel’s racially fluid French Louisiana, mixed-race characters in the novel speak French and are part-French, most notably Desiree, a refined woman who becomes Stephen’s ‘shadow wife’ through morganatic marriage after his union with Odile sours. Moreover, the intimation that French Creole ancestry is, ultimately, racially mixed, emerges in the description of Etienne, Stephens’s son by Odile: ‘He had reached far back among his swarthy Mediterranean ancestors for a complexion that was as dark as a mulatto’s, and inky hair that curled in great masses.’164 Kolchin suggests that there was indeed room for generative ambiguity with regard to the term ‘Creole’, as used in the antebellum Louisiana of the novel’s setting.165 ‘Creole’, a self-ascription of whites of colonial French or Spanish origin, was also a self-ascription of paler-skinned free people of colour with colonial French or Spanish ancestry that they used to differentiate themselves from the dark-skinned and enslaved.166 In Louisiana, especially, free ‘Creoles of color’ comprised a third racial category under French and Spanish rule, becoming educated and cultured, taking the names of white fathers or lovers, and often receiving property from such ‘protectors’, as Foxes’s Desiree does.167

However, after the US negotiated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the increasing numbers of white Anglo-American settlers in New Orleans in the decades that followed imported a starker racial binary, as Yerby depicts. This narrowing of possibilities over the course of the nineteenth century is portrayed in the Creole-Irish Chopin’s story, ‘Désirée’s Baby’ (1893).168 Désirée, a foundling of unknown parentage, marries Armand, the planter son of a Creole family who had been raised in France. When their partially clothed baby is suddenly perceived to be dark-skinned when seen in proximity to an ‘octoroon’ child,169 Armand asserts that his wife must be mixed-race and spurns her. Désirée takes their baby and walks into a bayou, never to be seen again. Later, Armand discovers that his mother—and, thus he, also—is of African descent, which was why his parents had lived in France.170 Chopin tracks the movement from the possibility in French American that a person of known African blood may be discreetly accepted as a spouse, to a white Anglo-American mindset in which death is the only possible outcome if the lover is revealed to be mixed-race.

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