A tale of disunion: the racial politics of unclaimed kindred in Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride.

A reader familiar with 19th-century African American fiction might turn the last page of Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride in disappointment because the novel does not satisfy expectations that initiated readers bring to antebellum fiction written by African Americans. The Curse of Caste does not directly indict the southern aristocracy for its slaveholding appetite. The novel does not expose northern whites' callous contempt for blacks during the antebellum era. It offers no critique of corrupt slave owners' predatory pursuit of slave women, and it does not make a direct appeal for the abolition of slavery. These are mystifying omissions, given the timing of the novel's publication and its publication venue. The Curse of Caste was published during the Civil War from February to September 1865 in the AME Christian Recorder, a 19th-century black-owned newspaper that championed African American political aspirations, chronicled the Civil War for African Americans, and spearheaded the massive effort by African Americans to locate relatives separated during the War. (1) Two disappointed readers, in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries respectively, roundly criticized The Curse of Caste publicly. In 1870, AME congregant James Embry penned a letter to the Christian Recorder in which he charged that the work of African American writers promoted self-deprecating attitudes toward blackness. "Among our own people," Embry wrote,

   ... it is a matter of shame, that almost all our writers who
   have attempted to produce a book, or write a serial in the
   papers, delineating the Negro's wrongs including the late
   'curse of caste' have chosen their heroes from the class of
   persons of barely 'visible admixture' to represent the race.
   Away down in the future centuries, the readers of the history
   of our times will find in this fact alone a stronger proof of the
   malevolent character of slavery which existed in this age.... (n.p.)

The 21st-century critic Sven Birkerts also locates the novel's offense in its dubious historical worth. Birkerts considers The Curse of Caste "... a sketchily developed romance ... [that] will not add another cubit to the vital African American literary canon.... The work ... robs rather than adds luster to the whole" (New York Times Book Review 29 Oct. 2006). The novel's sins of omission and commission, which raised the ire of these critics, might be explained as consequences of the novel's conservative political agenda. However, I read these ideological aporia as a consequence of Collins's attempt to stitch a number of competing plot structures into a seamless narrative--an attempt that unfortunately obscures the text's most radical arguments.

The novel's opening scene initially evokes domestic space often found in 19th-century woman's fiction (Baym 10). The action begins in the dormitory room of a boarding school where Claire is packing away "books, papers, pens and drawing materials" (3). Eighteen-year-old Claire has just completed school and is preparing to leave the protective space of the female seminary where she has lived for the past six years. Her school days now over, Claire contemplates leaving the "happy ... love of her schoolmates and kind preceptress" to find her place in the "cold uncharitable world" (9, 3). When Claire's closest friend, Ella, enters the room unnoticed, she discovers Claire in tears. Unlike Ella, Claire has no happy home to return to and no wealthy parents to rely on for support. To support herself, Claire has accepted a position as governess for a southern plantation family.

A number of elements in this opening scene correspond to what Nina Baym theorized as the "overplot of nineteenth century woman's fiction" (23). Specifically, Claire is an orphan, who is losing the financial support of a benefactor and the emotional support of a surrogate family. The absence of Claire's biological parents propels her out into the world where her success must be the result of her own character and efforts. As Claire contemplates moving south, the domestic hierarchy of the antebellum plantation invades the domestic security of the New England seminary, and the momentum of a second narrative structure--the southern plantation novel--begins to assert its influence on the narrative.

The remainder of the action takes place on a southern plantation where an archetypal plantation family with its attachment of obedient, un-self-conscious slaves resides. In the southern setting, the narrative attention given to the plantation's patriarch, Col. Tracy, rivals the attention given to Claire. With the geographical shift to the plantation setting, the narrative must represent slaves, and it represents them in the same ways that slaves are represented in conventional southern plantation novels. Tremaine McDowell argues that plantation novels idealized slaves, "emphasizing most of all their undeviating loyalty" and giving them "no significant position in the plot of the novel" (57). The household slaves in Curse of Caste are similarly insignificant to the novel's plot. When slaves are involved in the action, it is simply to carry out assigned household duties. (2) Curiously, there is no mention at all of slaves who engage in field work on the Tracy plantation. Since Collins's title announces her concern with issues of race and slavery, the narrative's lack of attention to the plantation's enslaved characters gives the narrative a decidedly conservative valence, which may lead to mistaken conclusions about the text's political intent.

The novel's central character is Claire Neville, a beautiful, well-educated young lady as removed from the degradation of slavery as her private seminary education and New England upbringing have positioned her. Claire's constant anguish has nothing to do with race or slavery. Her angst is caused by her orphanhood--the only sign of disturbance on her otherwise bright horizon. Orphanhood, however, is a telltale sign that registers the novel's African Americanist and abolitionist literary influences. Parental absence is a familiar plot device in sentimental fiction, and unknown ancestry is a recurring motif in abolitionist fiction that foregrounds the mulatto figure. Consequently, Claire's obscure family background triggers a suspicion that Claire's orphanhood conceals an ominous racialized secret, which sets in motion a new set of narrative impulses and expectations.

At the outset, then, the narrative sets in motion a number of competing plot structures. The structures of woman's fiction and the southern plantation novel activate distinct narrative imperatives and interpretive expectations. In addition, Claire's unknown parentage activates imperatives and expectations specific to abolitionist fiction. These three plot formulas establish the narrative's momentum, and each plot, at various moments, dominates the narrative by suppressing the momentum of the other structures. What results is a structural contest that obscures the text's radical political agenda.

In spite of its narratological tug of war, The Curse of Caste makes several calculated ideological moves. It offers an allegorical reflection of the sectional conflicts raging between the North and South that led to the Civil War. The novel inscribes a revision of the "tragic mulatto" figure that anticipates contemporary critical race theory, and the text points to narrative resolutions with direct implications for Reconstruction politics. The novel's textual and contextual dimensions thus open fertile spaces for critical interpretation.

The idyllic southern plantation where Claire takes a position as governess can be read allegorically as the Confederacy itself. Just as the Confederacy severed itself from the Union to preserve white racial hierarchy, the plantation patriarch, Col. Tracy, disowned and attempted to murder his son, Richard, because Richard defied the South's racial hierarchy to marry his father's slave.

Next to Claire, the most skillfully developed character in the novel is Col. Tracy. In wealth, prestige, and power, Col. Tracy represents the Confederacy and articulates its values. Conversely, his son Richard embodies the menace of abolitionist ideas to plantation society. As Richard's daughter, Claire has the potential to mediate the conflict between father and son. However, Claire's mediating power lies untapped throughout the course of the narrative because no one is certain of Claire's kinship to the Tracy family. Claire's presence in the Tracy household stimulates anxiety, however. Everyone sees the estranged son's reflection in Claire's face. To explain Claire's mysterious resemblance to Richard, the narrative digresses from present to past to tell the plantation family's story.

Some 18 years earlier, Richard Tracy met Lina on board a steamer bound for their respective homes in New Orleans. Lina and her siblings were traveling home from a convent school in Canada, and Richard was traveling home from school in the North. Lina's beauty, "the fancied image of a poet's dream," captivated Richard (18). Collins relies on a well-established convention of abolitionist literature to describe Lina (Sollors 204). Lina's "dark flashing eyes ... profusion of curling black hair ... dark rich looking complexion ... dark brownish skin which we observe in the Spaniard and half-breed Indians" raises suspicion that Lina's appearance also hides a race secret (18-19).

Events later confirm that Lina is the progeny of miscegenation. In abolitionist fiction, a mulatto's patrilineage immediately raises the question of illegitimacy and the horrors of rape and commodification. In a swift narrative move, however, Collins clears damaging suspicions about Lina's father. Lina speaks fondly of her father, Hartly, whom, she says, "was always good and kind" (19). Lina's comment about her father quiets questions of her patrilineage, but it does not settle questions about her "legitimacy" because Lina does not mention her mother at all.

However, Richard sees only stunning beauty and nothing unsettling in the visible markers of Lina's hybridity. The possibility that Lina might have an enslaved mother does not trouble Richard, although that conclusion is a certainty to an attentive reader, both in Collins's day and our own. In sentimental language, Richard vows to make Lina his wife and to let "no power on earth" take her from him (20).

Richard's sentimental vulnerability to Lina's mulatto beauty does not signal a character weakness, however. Richard displays exceptional fortitude and conviction in verbal clashes with his father over the issue of slavery. The harsh debates between father and son echo the conflicts between antislavery abolitionists and proslavery adherents in antebellum America. Disputes between Richard and his father, like many disputes between anti- and proslavery forces in the nation, frequently end in victory for Col. Tracy's Confederate values. Initially, Col. Tracy indulges his son's abolitionist ideas and "trust[s] to time and the influence of southern principles and I society to effect the desired change" in his son's attitude (21). Ultimately, Col. Tracy loses patience with Richard and, like southern Democrats, resorts to aggression to silence his antislavery adversary.

During Richard's visit home, Col. Tracy learns of an opportunity to buy additional slave property from a nearby plantation. The property has belonged to old Hartly and includes "a beautiful quadroon, who ... has been educated at a Catholic school, in Canada, and believed herself [Hartly's] lawful child" (23). The quadroon included in Col. Tracy's purchase is, of course, the Lina whom Richard has vowed to marry. On hearing of his father's purchase, Richard remains steadfast in his vow to marry Lina, whom he now knows is Hartly's enslaved daughter. Richard enlists his ertswhile friend, Manville, to purchase Lina from his father. Clearly, the southern principles that Col. Tracy has trusted to mold Richard have had the opposite effect on him.

Richard and Lina found short-lived marital bliss far from New Orleans in a perfect cottage in the North. Hoping his absence would soften his father and peace might be possible between them, Richard traveled back to the family plantation in New Orleans. On Richard's return, however, hostilities between father and son escalate. Col. Tracy responds with rage when Richard confesses that he re-purchased and married Hartly's quadroon daughter. Col. Tracy's condemnation embodies the full range of southern proslavery ideology:" 'Our society is getting into a pretty state, when the sons of the best families stoop to marry their fathers' slaves. You have imbibed the pernicious sentiments of northern demagogues until they have encompassed your ruin. What is to become of our institution, if we take our slaves upon an equality with ourselves?' " (39). Col. Tracy's question names the unthinkable for a slave-owning patriarch. To contemplate equality between slaves and slave owners is tantamount to contemplating the end of southern society as Col. Tracy knows it.

Richard's rejection of his father's proposal to annul his marriage also constitutes a rejection. Richard's retort both repudiates his father's ideology and defends the ideal of social equality. In the bitter dispute between father and son that follows, the narrative metaphorically re-draws the battle lines between the North and South, and neither Col. Tracy nor Richard will surrender. The vitriolic argument between father and son resonates well beyond their plantation parlor. Like antebellum southern Democrats, who dominated national politics and whose interests were supported in legal statutes such as the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott verdict, Col. Tracy holds superior power. Col. Tracy clings tenaciously to slavery, the economic foundation of his wealth and power. Yet more than power is at stake in this confrontation. Inheritance is also at stake; for if one is claimed as family, one is positioned to inherit family wealth. The power of the slavocracy derived from economic wealth generated by slave labor, and Col. Tracy's patriarchal power flows from his wealth, also generated by slave labor. Just as in the decades before the Civil War, southern Democrats in Congress repeatedly won political compromises from the North with threats of disunion, Col. Tracy attempts to defeat Richard by threatening to sever him from the family and its wealth. (3) "I shall disinherit you," Col. Tracy inveigles: "'Not a penny of mine shall go to you or yours, and my doors shall ever be closed against you. Your mother and brother shall never acknowledge you as son and brother, and your name shall be as that of one who has slept a century in his tomb, uncared for and forgotten' "(41).

Richard's defiant reply, "I cannot forsake my wife," unleashes Col. Tracy's unrestrained aggression. Instantly Richard morphs from wayward son to traitor, enemy, and despoiler of his father's way of life. Moments later, Col. Tracy draws a pistol and shoots his son. This scene of family violence reenacts flashpoints of aggression that ushered the nation into the Civil War. Col. Tracy, the imperious slavocrat, clings desperately to slavery, the economic foundation of his wealth and power. Col. Tracy's attempted filicide is clearly a metaphor for the violent upheavals that preceded and precipitated the Civil War. Felled by a gunshot triggered by his own father's hand, Richard's wounding reprises the wounding of the body politic. On the floor "writhing in his own blood," Richard is a metonym for Bleeding Kansas and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. In 1856 Sumner suffered a brutal caning on the floor of the Senate at the hand of South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. Brooks was incensed over Sumner's denunciation of southern Democrats who supported the violence perpetrated by proslavery "Ruffians" in Kansas. (4) The narrative points an accusing finger at Col. Tracy and his fellow Confederates and exposes their callous disregard for humanity and their self-aggrandizing greed. Retribution for Col. Tracy's egotistical avarice should be swift and crushing, but the plantation patriarch, the plantation novel's hero, is not expendable. Collins seems more interested in reconciliation than retribution. Therefore, her narrative spares the Colonel any public reprisal for his attempted murder. Still, the narrative needs an agent capable of penetrating the insularity of a patriarch and a regime willing to sacrifice their sons on the altars of racial domination and crass materialism.

The agent who will mediate this familial national, and narrative crisis is Claire, the unclaimed "orphan" daughter of Richard and Lina. However, unaware of her kinship to the Tracys, Claire's mediative function cannot be activated. The Tracys' crisis began 18 years prior to Claire's arrival at their home; therefore, when Claire joins the Tracy household to serve as governess, she does not know the cause of the family's distress. The family's distress, however, is palpable. In ill health, Mrs. Tracy spends most of her time in bed mourning, like many a Confederate mother who sacrificed her son to war. Col. Tracy isolates himself in his library, "communing with his own sad thoughts" (58). 18 years of voluntary separation from their son while upholding dubious Confederate principles have emotionally depleted Col. and Mrs. Tracy. Alone in his library, Col. Tracy confesses, "Oh, Richard, my son! my son! my punishment is indeed greater than I can bear! A thousand times have I bitterly execrated that deed. My curse has recoiled upon my own head" (59). The entire plantation household is crumbling under the weight of Col. Tracy's tyrannical abuse of power. The domestic harmony of the plantation home is an early casualty of Col. Tracy's proslavery arrogance.

Mortally wounded, Richard functions also a metonym: for wounded Union soldiers. Bereaved over the loss of his wife, who died in childbirth during his convalescence and grievous over his expulsion/amputation from his family, Richard gives in to sorrow, and it paralyzes him. He retreats from the battlefront to neutral territory in France, where he is unable to mount any counterattack. Depressed and disinherited, Richard's potent voice in defense of social equality falls silent for the remainder of the narrative (although his return is imminent in the unfinished narrative's last scenes).

Isabelle, the maiden Tracy daughter, emerges as another victim of the divided plantation house. Belle's beautiful but often angry visage and uncivil manners slip the attention of the family, but they literally antagonize Claire. As Claire began her duties among the Tracys, she is chilled by Belle's "cold, haughty glance, which seemed to scintillate hatred ..." (11). To the other characters, Belle and Claire look alike, but Claire's feminine virtue eclipses Belle's disorderly "white" femininity. Claire's slave ancestry intensifies the contrast between Belle and herself, and it subverts the prevailing myths of defiled black womanhood and civilized "white" female refinement (Peterson 20-21; Young 29-30). Col. Tracy's domineering lack of restraint reproduced itself in the least appropriate place--the disposition of his daughter, Belle. The bond between Belle and Col. Tracy is stronger than the bond between the patriarch and his other children. Born shortly after Richard's expulsion from the family, Belle assuages the Colonel's loss of Richard. Col. Tracy has "idolized" Belle "and right royally did the little beauty queen it over her father's heart" (47). A war casualty herself, Mrs. Tracy cannot exercise her civilizing influence on Belle. (5) The "white" mother's dysfunction translates into the daughter's disorder. Mother, daughter, father, and son each provide cautionary examples of the external war's devastation on the home front.

The household's distress eventually plunges Claire into distress. Everyone's shocked recognition of someone else in her face brings Claire to a life-threatening emotional breakdown. Everyone in the household--knowing slaves excepted--mobilizes to solve the mystery of Claire's resemblance to Richard, the disinherited son. Once the whites solve the mystery of Claire's identity, however, Claire may be exposed as a racial imposter.

While the search for clues to Claire's true identity ensues, the abolitionist impulse of the narrative forecasts that Claire's ultimate exposure will result in her expulsion from the Tracy household. At the same time, the novel also builds a radical counter-impulse, the promise that Claire's exposure as a black and white woman will not lead to rejection and reversal but to reclamation and inclusion in the white Tracy family. The novel's subtitle, "or the Slave Bride," is an ambiguous reference to the slave mother's marriage and to her daughter's marriage potential. The novel's missing conclusion, however, sustains this ambiguity.

In the antebellum South, marriage was not a birthright of enslaved women. Formerly enslaved blacks and free(d) blacks in the North regarded the denial of legal marriage to the enslaved an especially perverse feature of slavery. (6) By coupling the terms slave and bride, Collins undermines an oxymoronic cliche in 19th-century discourse. Furthermore, she carefully constructs a white identity for Claire, one designed not to erase her slave ancestry but to co-exist with it. This move requires Collins to reject the "one drop" rule that would have negated Claire's white identity--the only identity she knows. Designing co-existing black and white identities for Claire gave Collins space to explore the ideological boundary of race. With dual racial identities Claire "calls into question the hierarchically arranged system of racial dualism," according to Werner Sollors (235). (7)

Claire's unknown slave ancestry creates most of the narrative tension. If her white identity totally erased her slave/black identity, Claire would lose much of her political, moral and narrative force. Implicitly, Collins urges her readers to imagine the radical possibility in which an individual inhabits both black and white racial identities--simultaneously--without suffering inherent biological or social defects from either. Since modern criticism, Nerad argues, "minimizes the subversive work of [passing] novels," modern readers might find the conceptualization of co-existing racial identities difficult to entertain (815). (8) Since she inhabits dual (and dueling) racial identities, Claire is uniquely positioned to resolve the Tracys' and, by extension, the nation's racial distress. Though repeatedly, and indefinitely, deferred, Claire's ultimate unmasking could also unmask (antebellum) America's racial conundrum since Claire's ambiguous racial identities also embody the legal fictions of race tightly woven into (antebellum) America's social fabric.

A bolitionist fiction found its strongest antislavery argument in the ambiguous racial identity of the figure of the mulatto. Miscegenation gave abolitionists a potent indictment against slave owners and a cogent argument in favor of abolition. However, racial hybridity made a less effective argument for racial equality precisely because the mulatto reinscribed racial hierarchy by suggesting that persons of mixed race may be more tragic and more deserving of pity than individuals of predominantly black ancestry. Virtually all abolitionist fiction attributed the mulatto figure's noble character and heroic behavior to his or her "white" blood (Sollors 224). Critic Sterling Brown was one of the first to point out that such hybrid heroes and heroines revealed that abolitionist fiction was itself infected with racialist assumptions (Sollors 230).

Most recent criticism of the mulatto trope underscores Brown's critique. Karen Sanchez-Eppler agrees that antebellum readers "valued the light-skinned body precisely because of its ability to mask the alien African blackness that the fictional mulatto [was] nevertheless purported to represent" (104). These critiques expose abolitionist writers' and readers' acceptance of racialism: "the belief in racial superiority, inferiority and purity based on the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics, just like physical characteristics are biological properties that differentiate races" (Tyson 360). As a result, the word tragic in the label tragic mulatto took on additional meaning in the twentieth century, signifying the racialism of 19th-century US writers and readers in addition to the demise of the mulatto character. More recently, however, critics have revisited the tragic mulatto trope in the light of critical race theory and found that the mulatto figure can still be read as a subversive construct in spite of its unfortunate reinscription of racialism (Sollors 234; Nerad 815, 837). (9) For example, Hazel Carby shows that the mulatta in Frances E. W. Harper's novel Iola Leroy "allowed Harper to use the literary conventions of women's fiction ... to express the relationship between white privilege and black lack of privilege" (89).

The tension between systemic privilege, which was the entitlement of white women, and systemic exploitation, the entitlement of slave women, heightens Claire's role in the narrative and intensifies the narrative's suspense and irony. Claire is heir to both privilege and commodification. As an octoroon both identifying and identified as "white," Claire is a Trojan horse who has infiltrated the patriarchal family's "white" fortress. She has been given the family's affection and respect, to which she, legally defined as octoroon, is not entitled. In spite of her beauty and virtue, Claire also embodies multiple generations of miscegenation, an offense excoriated by the planter aristocracy she has infiltrated. The pending collision of the tragic mulatto trope with the plot of woman's fiction brings hidden aspects of Claire's paradoxical position into sharper focus.

Baym finds that "woman's domestic fiction" inscribed variations of the tale of a young woman deprived of all support who has to win her own way in the world (11). Baym also theorized that the heroine's initial displacement (in this case, Claire's orphanhood) was the result of social corruption, and the heroine's ultimate triumph (in this case Claire's acceptance into the Tracy family) was the result of the reconstruction of a beneficent social order (Carby 73). Baym's analysis, however, cannot fully account for the dramatic reversal waiting for Claire once her octoroon identity is revealed because, as Carby points out, Baym's analysis ignores race (73). Race, when read as nonwhite, overdetermines the domestic heroine's fate and undermines the restorative impulse of woman's fiction. As a result, in The Curse of Caste the sentimental plot must yield to the dictates of the abolitionist plot.

According to the conventional abolitionist plot, when Claire's octoroon identity is disclosed, she will be subjected to condemnation, and her physical presence will be redefined as grotesque (Peterson 20-21). Claire is immune to this degradation as long as she is perceived to be exclusively "white." Furthermore, the immediate presumption of Claire's degeneracy and the subsequent withdrawal of Claire's social and economic privileges are understood in the conventions of the plantation novel and of woman's fiction as purging society from corruption and restoring social order (Baym 12). The mandate to restore social order dictated by plantation and woman's fiction also dictates the mulatto's demise. Society cannot regain its "order" if it embraces the scandal that the mulatto character embodies. Clearly, the expectations set in motion by the conventions of the plantation novel and of woman's fiction conflict with Collins's narrative aim. However, Collins's unprecedented revisioning appears also to conflict with the impulse of abolitionist fiction.

Collins attempts to eliminate her mulatta's tragic demise and to initiate an interracial reconciliation in which the "white" family embraces its hybrid kin. This gesture is unprecedented in abolitionist fiction precisely because the success of such an interracial reconciliation turns on a radical ideological shift in which the "white" family dismisses racial hierarchy and embraces a hybrid individual as kin. Collins, in effect, deconstructs the fiction of racial hierarchy (Nerad). (10) Most antebellum and abolitionist fiction written by African Americans and by whites enforced a rigid racial boundary between blacks and whites and endorsed the mulatto's return to a black racial identity when his/her black ancestry is discovered (Nerad; Sollors; Sanchez-Eppler 98). Whether or not Collins was the first to attempt this revision, she clearly intends it. Claire recuperates from the brain fever " 'brought on ... by unusual excitement, and excessive strain on the mental faculties' " that afflicted her (86). In the final available scene (which was not designed to be the concluding scene of the novel), Claire's recovery is nearly complete. Resting comfortably, Claire anticipates a happy father-son-and-daughter reunion: "Then she thought of Col. Tracy's manner towards her, so full of remorseful tenderness, and wondered if she was indeed his grandchild.... She recalled her conversation with the dying Manville, and she murmured softly, 'My poor father was cruelly wronged, and my delicate young mother hastened to a premature grave. ... I do wish father would come. I think Col. Tracy would forgive him'" (108, 109). Deprived of Collins's conclusion, however, the American literary imagination remained faithful to the cliched abolitionist convention of identity reversal and descent into slavery for racially hybrid characters through most of the twentieth century (Yarborough 46-47; Sollors 226).

In The Curse of Caste, Collins asserts that racial identity can be multiple and synchronic--a conception not theorized until critical race theory's emergence in the 1970s (Tyson 370). The degeneracy presumed inherent in African ancestry has not deformed Claire in any way. Despite undeniable slave ancestry, Claire's inner virtue is unimpeachable and manifests itself in irresistible physical beauty. Collins explores the mulatta figure's racial ambiguity and redefines it as "white." At the same time, Collins restores Claire's slave ancestry through her mother. Collins's narrative maneuvers allow Claire to retain the "white" identity that she has lived and the privileges that "white" identity guarantees her. (11) Moreover, as if to protect Claire's white identity from a black racialized destabilization, Collins fails to provide a community of blacks either enslaved or free(d) that Claire can identify with. True to the plantation novel tradition, Collins's slaves never emerge from their subaltern spaces to present a desirable fraternity for Claire to join.

By contrast, the patriarchal family is near ruin and inhabiting a Gothic plantation saturated with gloom. The patriarch's decision to discard a member of the family in the effort to preserve the fiction of "white" racial superiority has produced the family's disorder. Collins, however, seems intent on restoration and reconciliation, not revenge and retribution. Therefore, the patriarchal family's disunion sets the stage for a reunion and, more importantly, for the reconciliation that Claire envisions. As the narrative moves toward its conclusion, the Tracy household is waiting for Richard to return, and a French suitor is considering Claire's hand in marriage. It appears that this tale will not end tragically. Claire's octoroon racial identity will be exposed and embraced. The remorseful plantation patriarch is poised to claim Claire as his long lost granddaughter.

The plausibility of an interracial reconciliation hinges on the radical proposition that Col. and Mrs. Tracy claim Claire as their biracial granddaughter. Had Collins lived and completed her novel she might have successfully dramatized the radical politics of racial identity assigned not by social doctrine and legal classification but by the individual's lived experience and self-perception. This conceptualization anticipates precisely conceptions of racial identity advanced by contemporary critical race theorists. Philosopher Charles Mills's description of the metaphysics of race captures "the weirdness and paradoxical character of race [that is] both real and unreal, not (inherently) physical yet 'metaphysical', simultaneously...." As Mills continues, "Race is a structure of 'Being' brought into existence by social and political forces ... [which] through the creation of white supremacy then shape human beings, their life-worlds, their cognitions, their reasoning, their sense of reality" (Mills, "Philosophy"). Mills's metaphysics of race also describe the paradoxical locations that Claire inhabits. For the duration of the narrative, however, Claire remains secure in the exclusive whiteness of her identity. It is the reader who thoroughly apprehends the racial paradox that Claire embodies. It is the reader whose complicity with racial hierarchy is challenged by the preservation of Claire's white identity. It is the reader who has to manage his or her own socially shaped racial interpretations and expectations for narrative (and racial) closure. By leaving Claire's whiteness intact while restoring her blackness, The Curse of Caste offers a radical counter-narrative to the prevailing 19th-century racialist narrative that regarded blackness as a genetic trait that determined inferiority, reduced the capacity to reason, and precluded moral perfectibility (Mills, Racial Contract 71). In effect, Collins is placing the burden of racial reconciliation on the backs of her readers.

Collins's readers now inhabit the position of the Tracy family, who also shoulder the burden for family and, allegorically, national reconciliation. Reconciliation depends on the "white" family members' dismissing the fiction of race (invented for their benefit) and acknowledging their kinship ties to their enslaved and formerly enslaved family members and their descendants. Such reconciliation, too, is a radical gesture--one with the potential to weaken racial hierarchy and quicken its eventual collapse. (Of course, this resolution does not address the intractable problems of inheritance and redistribution of wealth.) A less radical ending might allow the plantation family to accept Claire as kin, yet conspire to keep her slave ancestry concealed. Ending the novel with concealment seems illogical and unlikely, however, given the strong argument for racial equality the narrative asserts through Richard's rhetoric and through Claire's co-equal racial identities.

Conversely, closing the narrative with the deconstruction of the social and legal basis for racial hierarchy would be a radical move for a 19th-century writer. It should be noted, however, that Collins produced The Curse of Caste during the climax and end of the Civil War with the abolition of slavery on the horizon. Anticipating abolition, Collins points the way forward for a nation beginning to reconstruct itself. In The Curse of Caste and in her essay "Intelligent Women" Collins expressed optimism about African Americans' prospects for freedom, citizenship, and equality: "In this, the dawn of the colored man's 'golden era,' when the dark cloud, which for ages has enveloped in darkness the destiny of our race, is rapidly revealing its "silver lining" to many an anxious and expectant heart; and the time is coming ... when the black man will have only to assert his equality with the white, to have it fully and cordially awarded to him" ("Intelligent" 124-25).

Emancipation could be legally mandated, but equality, Collins understands, must be "awarded." The Curse of Caste seems keenly aware that without a drastic alteration in prevailing notions of racial hierarchy, the depredations of racial caste would survive emancipation. Indeed, US history confirms that the fiction of race prevailed--proving stubbornly difficult for Americans to defeat. In Race and Reunion, David Blight chronicles the evolution whereby "white" Americans' desire to reunify the divided national "house" after the Civil War eclipsed their duty to reconcile with unclaimed kin: "At the moment of greatest opportunity to reinvent the American republic, the inexorable drive for reunion locked arms with a white supremacist vision ... [and resulted in] a re-subjugation of many of those people whom the War had freed from centuries of bondage" (4-5). Had Collins lived to complete her novel, she might have turned an antebellum romance into a master narrative charting a precise course whereby the US could finally put its founding principles into practice. The absence of Collins's actual conclusion, however, reduces all projections about her intended conclusion to seductive speculations.

In light of historical reality, then, perhaps a politically moderate conclusion for The Curse of Caste should also be considered. Therefore, imagine a tearful family reunion followed by an immediate departure to France for Claire and Count Sayvord, where they would be legally married and where, like the rare surviving multiracial couple in abolitionist fiction, they could escape America's curse of caste.

Works Cited

Andrews, William L., and Mitch Kachun, eds. The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.

Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.

Birkerts, Sven. "Emancipation Days." Review of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride. 29 Oct. 2006. The New York Times Book Review. 15 Nov. 2006. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/books/review/Birkerts.t.html>

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, the President's Daughter. 1853. Boston: Bedford/St, Martins, 2000.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Clinton, Catherine, ed. Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Collins, Julia C. The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride. 1865. Andrews and Kachun 3-111.

--. "Intelligent Women." 4 June 1865. Andrews and Kachun 124-26.

Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Embry, James C. Letter. Christian Recorder 24 Dec. 1870: n.p.

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--. "Philosophy and Race: The Whiteness of Being." The Philosophy Colloquium. Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI. 17 Nov. 2006.

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Notes

(1.) Johnson's extensive analysis of ads placed in the Information Wanted column of the Christian Recorder, 1861-1880, illustrates the magnitude of the effort that blacks made to locate lost kin during and after the Civil War and the critical role that AME ministers and the Christian Recorder played in this nationwide effort: "Since most freed people could neither read nor write, the ads were intended to be read aloud and heard.... The Recorders editor encouraged freed men and women to have the Recorder read to them by a minister of any denomination ..." (19).

(2.) Juno, black nurse and surrogate mother to the protagonist, is Collins's only exception to a conventional portrayal of enslaved characters. Juno plays an important role in the action. However, Juno simply obeys instructions and never takes the initiative to shape events in the lives of whites, whom she calls "master" and "mistress" although she is, apparently, free and lives in a northern state that has abolished slavery.

(3.) Both anti- and pro-slavery radicals advocated for disunion. William Lloyd Garrison printed the slogan "No Union with Slaveholders" on the masthead of The Liberator, and Garrison's contemporaries recoiled when Garrison publicly burned a copy of the US constitution. Elite southerners and southern legislators conspired to withdraw from the Union in their annual commercial conventions held in southern capitals during the 1850s. However, as early as 1820, Congressmen considered the significance of disunion. John Quincy Adams pondered the implications of disunion in a journal entry written February 24, 1820: "Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable; if practicable, by what means it may be affected. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union as now constituted would be necessary; and the dissolution must be upon a point involving slavery and no other. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation" (qtd. in Sanborn 118).

(4.) Sanborn, an affluent Boston abolitionist, gives a particularly vivid account of clashes between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas territory in The Life and Letters of John Brown. Sanborn quotes an early Kansas historian who wrote: "... there is no law but force, no rule but violence in the Territory of Kansas. A veritable reign of terror was inaugurated. Marauders were prowling about in whose eyes nothing was sacred that stood in the way of their passions. The opposing factions into whose hands the question of slavery or no slavery for Kansas had fallen, hunted each other like wolves. Pistol-shots and sword-slits were the prevailing style of argument" (253).

(5.) In the nineteenth century, an interlocking dynamic determined black and white women's public images. Peterson notes that black women's bodies and feminine capacities were represented as degraded, abnormal, unruly, and grotesque. By contrast white women's bodies were to be effaced and hidden in the private domestic sphere, where they would develop purity of mind and soul (20-21). Young's analysis of the civilizing influence of the White Mother, Ophelia, on the unruly black female, Topsy, in Uncle Tom's Cabin interrogates the tacit dimensions of the dynamic. However, in 1865 Collins disrupted the prevailing dynamic through physical resemblances and personality differences between the characters Claire and Belle.

(6.) Since slave marriage lacked legal validity, owners could dissolve such unions at any time. Therefore, "legal marriage, perhaps like no other institution, symbolized freedom for the postwar black community," Shaffer writes. Furthermore, according to Shaffer, "... the black middle class ... embraced legal marriage as a way to prove African American rectitude ..." (68). In Clotel, for example, Brown thematizes the pernicious effects of the denial of legal marriage to enslaved women. Brown's comments embed Johnson's. "Marriage is, indeed, the first and most important institution of human existence--the foundation of all civilisation and culture--the root of church and state.... If this be a true picture of the vast influence for good of the institution of marriage, what must be the moral degradation of the people to whom marriage is denied?" (84)

(7.) According to Sollors, "the literary representation of biracial characters ... does not constitute an avoidance of more serious issues, but the most direct head-on engagement with 'race.'... Most especially the representation of biracial characters was likely to call into question the hierarchically arranged system of racial dualism, and the formulaic dismissal of the Tragic Mulatto could help to protect beliefs in essential racial differences" (235).

(8.) Nerad contends that contemporary scholars have difficulty recognizing racial passing as "a form of performative trespass and an aggressive challenge to the ideological construct of race" (814-15).

(9.) Critical race theory, which originated in the writing of NYU law professors Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, builds on the theory of social constructionism and explains that "race and races are products of social thought and social relations." Contrary to 19th-century racialism, critical race theory asserts that notions of race or races "correspond to no biological or genetic reality. Race ... is a category society invents, manipulates and retires when convenient" (Delgado and Stefancic 7). Collins's manipulation of Claire's racial identities reflects this conceptualization (even if not self-consciously on Collins's part).

(10.) Nerad discusses a number of texts by "white" authors that permit "racially" hybrid characters who are legally classified as "black" to enact a "white" racial identity. However, the earliest text that Nerad discusses, The Romance of the Republic, by Lydia Maria Child, was published in 1867, two years after The Curse of Caste. Nerad also explores William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty, which did not appear until 1891. Frances Harper's fictions about the Civil War, "Minnie's Sacrifice" (1869) and Iola Leroy (1892), were both published after The Curse of Caste and follow the abolitionist convention of reversing the individual's racial identity from "white" to "black" on discovery of his or her slave ancestry.

(11.) In conventional interpretations of the phenomenon of passing, Claire's self-identification as "white" implies an evacuation of blackness. Curiously, Collins does not allow any ambivalence about her racial identity to register in Claim's consciousness even as she contemplates her father to be Richard, whose bride was a quadroon slave. Mrs. Tracy in Chapter 15 confides Richard and Lina's story to Claire. Claire's pending self-discovery is continually delayed and never resolved because the narrative and the novelist come to premature ends.

Veta Smith Tucker is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University. She teaches American and African American literature and researches the lives of 19thcentury African American women and their participation in the Abolitionist and Underground Railroad Movements.