Ed Piacentino, Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto"

With its early publication date and its tragic portrait of slavery's atrocities and effects in the plantation space of the French West Indies, Victor Séjour's "The Mulatto," is an important literary text. Séjour depicts African bondage in Saint-Domingue, a subject that would become a major concern in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing. At nineteen, Séjour's parents sent him to Paris to further his education, pursue broader opportunities, and cultivate his talents. Assimilated into French society and the Parisian literary culture and living without the race-based constraints of his native New Orleans, Séjour passed the rest of his life in France, distinguishing himself as a dramatist. In "The Mulatto," his only short story, Séjour tapped into the subject of African bondage, possibly inspired by his father, Juan Francois Louis Séjour Marcou's Haitian experience and that of other free men of color and former slaves from the French West Indies.

In "The Mulatto," Séjour wrote of submission and rebellion in Saint-Domingue. He wrote in the language of his newly-adopted country, employed an embedded black slave narrator to recount the grim story-within-the-story, and published his fictional account in a Parisian anti-slavery journal sponsored by free men of color like himself.

1. See Yellin, who treats this icon of the kneeling supplicant slave in chains in Chapter One of her Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture and who notes that such figures helped to serve the purposes of the abolitionist movement (5).

2. Smith and Cohn reaffirm this claim, positing that the "New World, U. S., and southern cultures cannot be accurately delineated without reference to the similar influences of African American cultures across the borders of the southern United States" (4).

3. Though the precise time period of Séjour's story is not clearly designated and while the setting is Saint-Domingue (Haiti), it is impossible to determine with certainty, even from the context, if Antoine, the embedded narrator in "The Mulatto," is still enslaved. According to Dayan in 1791 about three-fourths of the 50,000 people in Cap Français were slaves and that throughout Saint-Domingue the population was overwhelmingly slaves (146).

4. Commenting on the Black Code and the kinds of punishment inflicted on slaves for acts against free persons in Saint-Domingue, Dayan notes: "Death for the slave who strikes his master, mistress, or the husband or his mistress. . . . Assault and battery against free persons are severely punished even by death if the person struck falls to the ground" (210).

Ed Piacentino, a professor of English at High Point University in North Carolina, has published widely on the literature and culture of the American South. His numerous essays and reviews appear in such journals as the Southern Literary Journal, Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, American Literature, Southern Studies, Studies in American Humor, American Quarterly, and Studies in Short Fiction. Professor Piacentino has authored or edited three books—T. S. Stribling: Pioneer Realist in Modern Southern Literature (1988); The Humor of the Old South, which he co-edited with M. Thomas Inge; and The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor (2006). He also serves as associate editor of Studies in American Humor. His current projects include an edition of the dialect letters of C. M. Haile, antebellum journalist and humorist and an anthology of antebellum southern humor, which he is co-editing with M. Thomas Inge.