You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This request comes from a gentleman whose wife is looking for the first romance she read. This one is a doozy:
“This would have been in the 1983-1987 timeframe. I think it had a purple
cover (but I don’t think Johanna Lindsey wrote it). I remember it being
quite racy for a girl my age…It may or may not have started off with a rich heiress trying to escape a
bad betrothal in the Caribbean to a much older man to pay off her father’s
debts. There was a pirate (with very green eyes) between the Carribbean and
France who took her virtue. Later, she was all the rage in Paris, and
Napolean’s attentions drove Josephine mad with jealousy. She left France
on a ship; other passengers included a Puritan couple from New England who
did not approve of her.The captain of the ship was the pirate. Or maybe the pirate captured her
ship? In either case, she wound up somewhere in Africa, traded as a white
slave into a harem. She was picked to be some sultan’s squeeze (he was
described as a Janissary), but our plucky heroine was with the pirate’s
child at this point. The fabulous Arab had his way (but only anally). She
gave birth, and was told the baby died during childbirth, but it was really
taken away & given to the Puritan couple. They were being held hostage by
the Janissary.Then, she wound up back in New Orleans, was called an octoroon and sold as a
slave. The green-eyed pirate rescued her and she was reunited with her son
(the missing baby). Then wound up in the Oregon territories. Or maybe not.
It’s all verrry fuzzy after all this time. “
Of course I Googled “octoroon” and am so pleased to make the acquaintance of one more piece of racist nomenclature. Good Lord. Anyone remember this book?
As long as we’re on the subject of geneology – I’d just like to say I’m looking forward to the day mom finally gets around to telling my very racist aunt that we’re actually Jewish, not “pure blooded Catholics” like she seems to think. (I know, we’re not really a “race” – and yet it’s the only religion where if your mother was Jewish you’re Jewish even if you don’t believe in God.)
Once she finds out, she’ll understand why her grandparents used to sneek down the basement on Friday nights to light candles.
It’s actually weird that this paticular aunt turned out to be racist. I guess because of the fact my great-grandparents on both the Pavlick & Vojtko sides (mom’s paternal & maternal sides) had to hide the fact they were Jewish and practice in secret grandma and grandpa Pavlick taught their kids that hating people based on color, ethnic group, religion, etc is all wrong in God’s eyes. All my other aunts and uncles are accepting of everyone. Just this one aunt is racist. (And didn’t really reveal it until Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson started dating.)
As for my dad’s side – well, my great-aunts were very, very proud of the fact that some of our ancestors back in the day married Native American women when their wives died and had children with them. They were ashamed so many of their nieces and nephews were smokers, however. And I know my great-uncle cut a few of his nieces out of his will because they had children out of wedlock.
Just shows you though that not everyone from way back when was a closed minded putz. And sometimes open minded people have close minded children.
(Oh, that racist aunt is also a democrat, whereas I’m a republican before anyone cracks any political jokes. LOL)
I love, love, love these conversations that go off-topic—proving once more that the bitchery isn’t just interested in sexy books and mantitty (not that there’s anything wrong with that); and, since we’re off-topic, I’m going to continue on that path: I’m sure I’m not the first to notice or comment on this, but I’ve always thought it was interesting from a social/cultural perspective that while there is a entire sub-genre of historical romance novels where a white heroine falls in love with a Native American (or part-Native American) hero, as far as I’m aware, there have been no historical romances where a white heroine falls in love with an African-American hero. I’m not referring to “miscegenation” novels from the 1960s like MANDINGO or FALCONHURST’S FANCY here, but historical romances written in the past three decades. Does anyone know of any historical romances where a white heroine and black hero achieve a HEA? How about the reverse—does anyone know of any historicals where an African-American heroine achieves an HEA with a white hero? I know Kathleen Eagle wrote at least one historical romance with a white hero and a Native American heroine.
(I’m sure there’s a dissertation for a Ph.D. in contemporary studies here. Feel free to use it!)
I learned the word “octroon” (which is an odd word to know if you’re in Europe and English is your fourth language…) from some Barbara Cartland novel, about a girl somewhere in the West Indies who always thought she were “octroon”, but, luckily for her, it turned out she was pure-white, so the hero could wed her instead of just keeping her as his (dearly beloved, of course) mistress. Horrible book.
My family tree goes back to 1300-ish AD, and we’re officially still wondering where the family picked up the curly hair. I sincerely hope (at least) one of my fair ancestors married a dark african princess, but I can’t prove anything.
Other than the last book in Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose series? Stranger has a black hero in Catullus Graves and a white heroine. My hat’s off to Zoe for having the guts to make Catullus the hero of his own book, and not leaving him relegated to second banana status.
And I’m the proud descendant of a man who ran rum from Cuba to Florida during prohibition. And now that enough time has passed, we’re also “proud” of the fact that his brother-in-law was hanged for killing a Coast Guardsman when they tried to board him during a run. Fortunately, my grandfather wasn’t along for that trip. It’s the rascals that make a family history interesting, just like it’s the black sheep that make for great reading.
@DiscoDollyDeb
Geez, I stuck to my resolution for 6 months, and now look at me.
Suzanne Brockmann. Her early Navy Seals full length books, as opposed to her short Navy Seals, feature one of the best couples around—Sam and Alyssa. Sam is white and Alyssa is African American. These characters are too well drawn to have a full blown HEA, but they do marry. The settle down part, not so much.
There is an historical subplot in the book where Sam’s aunt marries an African American pilot from WWII.
Pubbed in 02, 03 around there, so I think these count.
Oops, I think that one’s Over the Edge. Her titles all kinda run together after a decade or so.
Hanged is correct, even in American English. People use it incorrectly all the time, and eventually it will likely go the way of the subjunctive, but as it stands you’re not supposed to use hung for people. Unless you’re talking about a guy who is, you know, hung. Thank you Mel Brooks.
I’m guessing they picked redhead because it was so distinctively non-Indian. Like, oh, well, if she’s a redhead then of course she couldn’t be Native American, never mind! Why, specifically, they settled on calling her German, I’m not sure.
Yep! I tend to think of my grandmother and her sisters as being “from the Oklahoma area” rather than just “from Oklahoma” because their dad was a bootlegger and ran moonshine under a load of old firewood in his wagon. They lived in that little spot where Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas all come together, so when things would get too hot to hold him in one state, he’d just load everyone up and they’d hop over the border to one of the other two. He kept the same load of firewood in that wagon until it rotted.
Things are hung, people are hanged. Every time I come across the inappropriate word, it trips me up and takes me out of the story, or news article, or whatever it is.
Also making me crazy lately: hate as a noun. Hate is a verb, hatred is the noun. Yes, some dictionaries allow for both, but they’re wrong.
The suthor of that 19th Century melodrama THE OCTOROON actually wrote two endings: in one, the heroine committs suicide; in the other the white man who loves her gets her to run away with him to England , where there are no laws against mixed marriages. I don’t know how they would determine which ending to use. Perhaps they used both and let the audience decide which one it preferred.
Capital punishment doesn’t exist here either, but I have a nagging feeling that our society has gone too far the other way. Here, if you kill someone and are given “life” in prison, (from what I understand from the news) you can get out of prison in about twelve years. Life in prison equals twelve years? I don’t get that! Then again, most of the perps in our prisons did the deed while drunk. Usually in a fight over the bottle.
And yeah, we do have harsher punishments for property crimes than we do for violence. It’s shameful.
Boucicault wrote two endings to his play because in New York he was afraid the audiences wouldn’t accept a HEA for a white man and a woman of mixed race, but in London they would. Basically, he was catering to the racist elements of the American audience.
I learned the about quadroons and octoroons watching the miniseries North and South (Patrick Swazey one, not the BBC one). I’ve come across it as well in a few romance novels. I had no idea that mulatto was considered a racist or inappropriate phrase – I realize “mixed race” or “bi-racial” is more common, but I always thought mulatto was just another way of describing someone who was of mixed heritage – but it sounds here as though using that word is akin to using the “n” word. I love my mother, but she is definitely an old-school racist when it comes to miscegenation – and any children of said unions, and while she’s certainly not overly vocal about it to anyone, I grew up hearing her views.
🙂 Thank you, kkw and Suze, for the additional information re: hung and hanged. I think the distinction is still pretty generally observed in British English, so that there is no immediate prospect of ‘hanged’ disappearing here.
On the other hand, kkw, the subjunctive remains in much better shape in American English than in British English. It is now rarely seen in BE except in stock collocations.
I just remembered another old mixed-race story. The old movie musical “Show Boat”. I haven’t seen it in years, but I’m pretty sure one of the female leads was mixed race, but passed herself off as a white woman, married to a white man. Somehow the police find out she’s not “pure white” and come to arrest her. Her husband cuts the palms of their hands and mixes their blood, so he has “black blood” in him too. At least, I think that’s how it went. I haven’t seen it since Jr. High, but that scene made a big impression on me.
I wonder if a person with one black great-great-grandparent is a ‘sedecroon’. I don’t know the Latin for ‘one thirty-second’ offhand, so I can’t take it back another generation. How silly it all is!
Abbie – yes, in Showboat Julie is “passing” as white – later on her white hubby cuts her hand and sucks on the wound – he now has black blood in him and while he is no longer in legal trouble for being w/a black woman, he and she must leave the showboat. (sadly, later on you find he’s left her and she’s a boozy singer in a dance hall)
I remember the book! Though I doubt if I could have dredged up the title.
On the topic of the familiarity of quadroon/octoroon, etc, perhaps some of you will recognize “mulatto” from this:
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto—an albino
A mosquito—my libido
@Nicola O. – Yay!! Nirvana reference **claps hands**
Being from the South, I also have heard all of these terms in conversation, mainly from older members of society. But, then again, I’ve also heard these terms in places other than the South as well. Indeed, there are many racist people all over the U.S.- the South just gets the worst of the blame because the racism tends to be more overt and have violent consequences.
I, too, am glad these words are fading from the common vernacular, but it is really important that we do not forget them, particularly with the current push to “edit” classics, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and remove the N-Word from it. Yes, the use of this word is wrong, but rewriting history in this way smacks of a level of hubris I don’t even want to contemplate. Pretty soon the Holocaust won’t get anymore than the paragraph it has already been whittled down to in history text books now, simply because it was horrific and it makes people just too “uncomfortable”. I am seriously contemplating homeschooling my children in history and literature because this trend disturbs me to say the least!
I’m shocked that this was anybody’s introduction to the word “octoroon.” I’m a Jersey gal, and I was introduced to the word in fourth grade as part of a Supreme Court Cases unit.
Plessy vs. Fergusen, anyone? Plessy was 1/8th African American, and he’s often referred to as an “octoroon” in the history books.
Also, I totally agree with whoever pointed out Kate Chopin’s Desiree’s Baby. That’s probably one of the best/worst examples of fear of miscegenation in literature.
Not strictly speaking a romance novel, but the Puerto Rican folk tales and legends collected by Cayetano Coll y Toste in the late nineteenth century, and retold for children in the late twentieth, include a story about a mixed-race couple filled with such epic WTF-ery that I always thought of it as a proto-telenovela instead of oral tradition.
As best as I remember it: The story starts with the oldest son of a (sugar cane) plantation owner returning to his childhood home after spending years in Spain completing his education. The boy promptly meets and falls in love with a green eyed girl who is the granddaughter (I think?) of his old nurse…who is a slave, and thus the girl is also a slave, although light skinned. Boy and girl shyly court, and boy goes to the old nurse and tells her he is in love. Nurse becomes tearful and hysterical. The boy thinks she is worried about her granddaughter’s virtue, and to reassure her goes to his father and says he wants to get married. Father also becomes tearful and hysterical, and after some “you can’t forbid our love” dialogue breaks down and says that his old sins are being punished by being visited on his children….that is, he was in love/lust with one of his slaves, the mother of the green eyed girl, so the hero/heroine are actually brother and sister.
Boy is appropriately shocked and squicked out by this and vows to keep away from the girl, but goes into a green and yellow melancholy so much that his mother asks him what the matter is. Boy reveals the problem, and the mother laughs and says that sometimes telling the truth about old sins sets people free. The mother (the plantation owner’s wife) explains that as a young bride she was extremely jealous of her husband’s attentions to a slave girl, and determined to avenge herself, not on the innocent slave who (she admits with considerable intellectual honesty) didn’t have much choice in the matter, but on the husband who betrayed her. She gets her revenge by spending a protracted visit at a neighboring plantation, owned by a friend, having an affair with him, and making sure that she is pregnant before returning to her husband. Thus (she explains to her son) she tries to ensure that her husband’s lands will secretly pass to another man’s child. So in fact the boy and girl are NOT brother and sister, and therefore all she has to do is admit the truth and everything will be rosy.
Boy objects (reasonably) that his mother’s husband will kill her if he finds out that she deliberately cuckolded him, but she insists that her love for her son (and his beloved) is greater than her fear. Finally boy goes to the man who he was raised thinking of as his father, and makes him promise not to hurt the mother before hearing any revelations, and tells the plantation owner the whole story.
The plantation owner (who has apparently become less of a cheating rapey asshat over the years) is thrilled that his past affairs haven’‘t accidentally ignited an incestuous passion, and rather amused and touched at his wife being so jealous. He says that since he loves the boy as his son he will be happy to have him marry the girl who is actually his daughter, but that the young couple will have to go off to Spain “where people care less about African blood.” (And the whole, you know, possible incest thing which would be a big question mark in the neighborhood, unless the mother is prepared to brand herself as an adulteress and her son as a bastard.)
So the former slave and the son of the adulterous affair between the plantation owner and his best friend get married and move to Spain where they live happily ever after (presumably still supported by the girl’s slave relatives who are cutting sugar cane in the Caribbean).
I ran across this story sometime late in high school or early in college (I was already reading in Spanish) and what struck me most was not just how noble everybody gets in the end to satisfy the demands of a HEA, but how on earth anyone thought this was a nice little bedtime story for kiddies. Sounds like it has all the elements of a great novel though. Anyone want to take up the challenge and write it?
Sorry, but I had to go back to this! Yikes! and ARGH!
Hear, hear! Deliberate, retrospective revision of the past is a crime against scholarship, and in cases like this, a crime against society, too, because it invents a history that never was. It is hard enough to get history ‘right’ to start with, because there are so many angles, many of them hard for us to understand or even to perceive, but the first rule is not to add, subtract or change to try to ‘improve’ the story. We should always try to be as truthful and honest as we can possibly be in such matters.
George Orwell’s 1984 deals in part with the issue of the redaction of history as a tool of political manipulation, but maybe it isn’t read much any more.
@Rebecca—there’s an old Irish folk song with a similar theme. The daughter of the town philanderer is lamenting the fact that every boy who comes to court her is sent away because he is, in fact, her father’s child and thus her half-sibling. Her mother smiles and tells her to marry whom she pleases because the philanderer is not her father.
LOL! There is also a Caribbean version (or maybe more than one). This one was recorded, fairly early in his career, by Peter Tosh, in a ska / early reggae / rock-steady rhythm (or riddim):
SHAME AND SCANDAL IN THE FAMILY
In Trinidad there was a family
And much confusion, as you will see
It was a mama and a papa and a boy who was grown
And he wanted to marry, have a wife of his own.
He found a young girl who suited him nice
And went to his papa to ask his advice
His papa said, “Son, I have to say no.
The girl is your sister, but your mama don’t know.”
He weep and he cry and the summer came down
And soon the best cook in the islands he found
He went to his papa to name the day
His papa shook his head and to him he did say,
“You can’t marry that girl. I have to say no
That girl is your sister, but your mama don’t know.”
He went to his mama, these thoughts in his head
And told his mama what his papa had said.
His mama, she laughed, she said, “Go, man, go!
Your daddy ain’t your daddy, but your daddy don’t know!”
Ha! I like those incest-but-not tales you all just posted. Up ‘til now I’ve been more familiar with the tragic thanks-to-slavery-and-parental-confusion-you-just-accidentally-married-one-of-your-brothers-and-were-raped-by-another tales (see Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins).
o my. this is my first time to the site and happened to read this post. though i couldn’t tell you the name of it, i also have had this book emblazoned on my brain since i was very young.
@Virginia Llorca, Just curious – what do you think we should be talking about?
Whether44: Whether to ask 44 questions or just one – that’s always my dillemma 🙂
@Carrie S. Nice to know y’all are waiting on my next word.
Maybe we could discuss how absolutely heroic a male can appear to be without being considered a doormat, or how many different ways you can describe male ejaculation in a romantic and/or cute way, instead of whether or not Americans should or should not pay reparations to descendants of former slaves.
Yeah, I know. Here we go again. . .
Damn, I love a good ellipsis.
I just finished reading “The White Bone” by Barbara Gowdy. Brought me to tears several times. Wonderful, beautiful book.
@Virginia Llorca, re what to talk about: I think the name of the website, “Smart Bitches, Trashy Novels”, suggests that we can do both. That’s the great thing about this site, to me, anyway.
@Carrie, you have hit the nail on the head:
I love that a discussion of race and reparations can grow out of a HABO for Wicked Loving Lies!
What fun would any discussion be if no one ever rang in for the other viewpoint? Gosh, you guys. You are always striving to put me back in my place. It hurts so bad. Please try to forgive my waywardness and let me have one more chance to follow your guidelines.
Score! I went to my local goodwill today, and what would be there for $.72 with tax? Wicked Loving Lies.
Spamword: must82
Must admit 82 is my birth year!
I totally read this too. I think there was plenty of “forced seduction” between the pirate and the heroine in the beginning, and I remember the Napoleon thing and the back-door-with-baby part (that was an eye opener at age 15…) What a memory trip!
Its a bit like three or four bad books smashed together isn’t it? Gotta love the Old Skool. I would have sworn it was Beatrice Small (sounds so very similar to some of her sagas), but the Amazon description for Wicked Loving Lies is right-on. I guess I have read Rosemary Rogers after all 🙂
@Virginia Llorca: far from trying to put you in your place, I’m suggesting that there’s a place for everything here – hot heroes, gross/cute/sexy terms for bodily fluids, crazy captions for guys farting blue flames, and historical analysis of race relation in the Old South. That’s quite a combo to treasure! Just because there’s a conversation re. race doesn’t mean we can’t also discuss the other stuff, and vice versa.
@Rebecca-great story! C.S. Harris is working a similar plot line in her Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries.
@Rebecca-great story! C.S. Harris is working a similar plot line in her Sebastian St. Cyr mystery series.
@Carrie S. Nice to read a calmly worded reply with which I am unable to argue or snidely comment on a single point. I totally agree that the parts where we wander off topic can be the most interesting sometimes, and I guess it is my “delivery” or style that has caused me to recieve so much negative feedback. Also, some topics sometimes hit sensitive spots, I guess. But, thanks, Carrie.
There is also Katie MacAlister’s Silver Dragon Series. Granted, Gabriel is half Australian Aborigine rather than African American, but still… Definitely a sexy black (or should I say silver) dragon hero.