"Suddenly and shockingly black": the atavistic child in turn-into-the-twentieth-century American fiction.(Critical essay)

From: African American Review | Date: March 22, 2007| Author: | Copyright information

From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are signs of black ancestry. These writers thus follow the common understanding of racial interbreeding as tending toward, in Stephen Jay Gould's parlance, "a 'blending' or smooth mixture and dilution of traits" (24). The "natural grandson of a Southern lady, in whose family his mother had been a slave," Harper writes, "the blood of a proud ...

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