"Quadroon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the real nature of the connection. I shall never forget how sorry I felt for her, nor my feelings at her humble apology, "You know, Mrs. Stowe, slave women cannot help themselves." She had two very pretty quadroon daughters, with her beautiful hair and eyes, interesting children, whom I had instructed in the family school with my children. Time would fail to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slave system in the history of various slaves who ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... for this experience. My travelling fund had melted away in the alembic of cafes, theatres, masquerades, and "quadroon" balls. Some of it had been deposited in that bank (faro) which returns ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... and how ill he was while he was there. He resigned in October, but before he resigned he had made another cause of dispute with Spain. The retiring Spanish governor, Callava, was accused of attempting to carry away papers which were necessary to establish the property rights of a quadroon family. The correspondence on the subject led to a series of misunderstandings, and General Jackson was soon convinced that villainy was afoot. The upshot of the dispute was that the American governor put the Spanish governor in jail; and when ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... declined, partly for the want of time to do justice to the patient, and aside from courtesy and equity to the surgeon who had the case in hand, mainly because I knew nothing about it—the best reason of all. The patient was an American quadroon, black nearly in complexion, of one-fourth white blood, from North Carolina. This, of ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... The lips meet with a double curve, and the throat is full and rounded. Her complexion is Indian; but a crimson hue, struggling through the brown upon her cheek, gives that pictured expression to her countenance which may be observed in the quadroon of the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Although the term "Negro ball" is applied to most of these gatherings, yet a majority of the attendants are often whites. Nearly all the Negro parties in the cities and towns of the Southern States are made up of quadroon and mulatto girls, and white men. These are democratic gatherings, where gentlemen, shopkeepers, and their clerks, all appear upon terms of perfect equality. And there is a degree of gentility and decorum in these companies ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... once. It belonged to one of Seraphina's maids, a pretty little quadroon—a favourite of hers—called La Chica. She had slipped out, and her twitter-like whispering reached me in the still solemnity of the quadrangle. She addressed Castro as "His Worship" at every second word, for the saturnine little man, in his unbrushed cloak and battered hat, was immensely respected ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... "the color line" in slavery days, from pure black up through mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, quinteroon, griffada, mustafee, mustee, and sang d'or—to white again; was not through white mothers—but white fathers; never too exclusive in their tastes. Even in slavery, the worst horrors were ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the taxable property was in the hands of free people of color. At the same time the lot of these people was one of endless humiliation. Among some of them irregular household establishments were regularly maintained by white men, and there were held the "quadroon balls" which in course of time gave the city a distinct notoriety. Above the people of this group, however, was a genuine aristocracy of free people of color who had a long tradition of freedom, being descended from the early colonists, and whose ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... young, small, and graceful, with a brown or rather gold-colored quadroon complexion, with the hands ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... can't have the same feelings as a European? Why, for hundreds and hundreds of years they've been an enslaved race, like our black people at home. We'd never think of calling even the fairest quadroon man a gentleman, though he might be wonderfully good ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... him,—parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs of old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had left behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his eccentric narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for his beautiful quadroon wife ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... beads. A good many persons of the pension had gone over to the Cheniere Caminada in Beaudelet's lugger to hear mass. Some young people were out under the wateroaks playing croquet. Mr. Pontellier's two children were there sturdy little fellows of four and five. A quadroon nurse followed them about with ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... Mr. Walker purchased a farm five or six miles from the city. He had no family, but made a housekeeper of one of his female slaves. Poor Cynthia! I knew her well. She was a quadroon, and one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. She was a native of St. Louis, and bore an irreproachable character for virtue and propriety of conduct. Mr. Walker bought her for the New Orleans market, and took her down with him on one of the trips that I made with him. Never shall I forget ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown
... competence. From this clause he inferred that her father intended to place her beyond the reach of harm, and beyond the possibility of ever being reduced to the degraded condition so often the lot of the quadroon at the South. He had not only given her freedom, but had provided for her conveyance beyond the pale of slavery. With these intentions, if she were in reality a slave, Mr. Faxon could find no fault. They were liberal in the extreme. ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... volatile colour and evanescent light. It is hardly possible to doubt that this is so when we look on these canvases, where, in all the stages of her repose, the night dozes and dreams upon our river—a creole in Nocturne 34, upon whose trembling eyelids the lustral moon is shining; a quadroon in Nocturne 17, who turns herself out of the light anhungered and set upon some feast of dark slumber. And for the sake of these gem-like pictures, whose blue serenities are comparable to the white perfections of Athenian marbles, we should have done well to yield ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... and a small quadroon boy, between four and five years of age, entered the room. There was something in his appearance remarkably beautiful and engaging. His black hair, fine as floss silk, hung in glossy curls about his round, dimpled face, while a pair of large dark eyes, full of fire and softness, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... figure of the great quadroon, with his short crisped locks, suggests a closer relationship to the race ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... father, Colonel Shaw, had retired from the army. Having been stationed at Kingstown, he had contracted a love for the island, and so stopped there. He went into the interior and bought an estate. Shortly afterwards he married my mother. She was a quadroon." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... the Constitution cannot be strictly and literally construed. The opposition express great love for white blood. Will they let a mulatto vote half the time, a quadroon three-fourths, and an octoroon seven-eighths of the time? If not, why not? Will they enslave seven-eighths of a white man because one-eighth is not Caucasian? Is this democratic? Shall not the majority seven control the minority one? Out on ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... legislature, which possesses considerable power over its own territory. There were fifteen members present, and nearly as many different shades of complexion. There was the planter of aristocratic blood, and at his side was a deep mulatto, born in the same parish a slave. There was the quadroon, and the unmitigated hue and unmodified features of the negro. They sat together around a circular table, and conversed as freely as though they had been all of one color. There was no restraint, no uneasiness, as though the parties felt ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a very beautiful quadroon, whose story ran briefly thus: Owned by a Louisiana planter, he had refused permission for her to marry another of his slaves, known as David, because he had, sultan-like, set his own choice upon her. David, by intelligence, and a long stay in France, had attained the position ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... South has been noted for its beautiful Quadroon women. Bottles of ink, and reams of paper, have been used to portray the "finely-cut and well-moulded features," the "silken curls," the "dark and brilliant eyes," the "splendid forms," the "fascinating smiles," ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... more than simply "native;" and it is applied indiscriminately to everything native to the State—as Creole cane, Creole horse, Creole negro, or creole cow. Many confound its meaning with that of quadroon, and suppose it implies one of mixed blood, or one with whose blood mingles that of the African—than which no meaning is more foreign ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... T. Jack, put on a show in which mulatto women were billed as "a galaxy of Creole beauties." This show traveled about the country libeling the Creoles and doubtless causing many persons of that class which attended Sam T. Jack's shows, to believe that "Creole" means something like "quadroon." But when the show got to Baton Rouge the manager was waited upon by a committee of citizens who said certain things to him which caused him to give up his engagement there and cancel any other engagements he had ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... sixty years ago, no longer a subject of gossip. She was never pointed out by the denizens of the quarter as a character, nor her house as a "feature." It would have passed all Creole powers of guessing to divine what you could find worthy of inquiry concerning a retired quadroon woman; and not the least puzzled of all would have been the timid and restive Madame ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... the sons of her bachelor uncle, who had had a passion for Liza, one of his father's slaves, a tall, handsome quadroon, who rejected his suit and was in love with Jo, a fellow slave. To punish both, the young master had Jo tied up and lashed until he fainted, while Liza was held so that she must witness the torture, until insensibility came to her relief. This was done three times, when Jo was sold, and Liza herself ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... by-product of United States slavery, race prejudice. We are familiar enough with the limitations of the man of color in the South today. In the days of slavery, discriminations were just as severe, if not more so, against any man of black skin, whether slave, mulatto, freedman, quadroon, or octoroon. The slightest strain of black in a man's pedigree made him a "nigger." A freedman was better than a slave only in an economic way. Otherwise he had virtually no rights. He could not vote, marry a white, hold office, give testimony ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... have before me here his brochure, printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of "Enceladus," "Excelsior," "A Psalm of Life," "The Old Clock on the Stairs," "Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass," "Twilight," "Daybreak," "The Quadroon Girl," and "Torquemada,"—pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet's lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia's sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, published only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... at the plantation of William Reynolds, was committed one of those acts, which revolt human nature. Henry Golpin, the overseer, a Creole, and strongly suspected of being a quadroon, had for some time acted improperly towards Mrs Reynolds and daughters. A few days ago, a letter from WR was received from St. Louis, stating that he would return home at the latter end of the week; and Golpin, fearing that the ladies would complain of his conduct ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... features and complexion. In Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent. In America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race, distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer gives in his work on Mexico, ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... seraglio, but was unable to induce society to receive her in Tunis, where no woman, be she Moor, Turk, or European, will ever consent to treat a former slave as an equal, by virtue of a prejudice not unlike that which separates the Creole from the most perfectly disguised quadroon. There is an invincible repugnance there on that subject, which the Hemerlingue family found even in Paris, where the foreign colonies form little clubs overflowing with local susceptibilities and traditions. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... turn his hand to an infinite helpfulness in the small arts. These men were darker than Eugene, but they differed from him in this, that while he is a man of color, they were not. For in America the man of Aryan blood, however dark he may be, is always "off" color, while the lightest-hued quadroon is always on it. Which is not the only paradox connected with the descendants of Africans of which ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... had on his plantation a beautiful quadroon girl, named Ellen, whom he had bought in Richmond because she begged him to buy her when he had bought her mother, who had been recommended to him as a first-rate cook. They had been servants in what was called one of the first families of ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... person of mixed blood"; and again when he alludes to "the slave dialect," is the implication not unequivocal that this differed from the speech of the drawing-room? It is true that he found many of his studies in the Quadroon population, who spoke a patois that was partly French; but such was the "slave dialect" of the man of color who came into his English through a French strain, or perhaps only through a generation of close ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... father and my mother. Both of them put together didn't have half colored blood. He must have loved them a lot to work so hard to get them together. My father was half white, but his mother was a mulatto woman (Interpreter's comment—This should make him a quadroon)[TR: sentence lined out.]; and my mother's ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... come over you? Talking of the virtue of these quadroon girls! You have lived so long in the North and abroad, that you seem to have lost the cue of our Southern life. Don't you know that these beautiful girls have been the curse of our homes? You have no idea of the hearts which are wrung by ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... dramatic exigency, the "Quadroon Slave" has been produced. It may be classed as an argumentative drama; carried on with that stage logic which always makes the heroine get the best of it. The emancipation side of the question is supported by Julie, ably backed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... ladyship did the honours of the wine—ewer with the perfect quietude and ease of a well—bred woman. She was a most lovely clear skinned quadroon girl. She could not have been twenty; tall and beautifully shaped. Her long coal—black tresses were dressed high on her head, which was bound round with the everlasting Madras handkerchief, in which pale blue was the prevailing colour; but it was elegantly adjusted, and did not come down far ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... it is to eradicate bad habits, a gentleman told me that it being the custom when the Quadroon balls were given at New Orleans, for the police to search every person on entering, and taking away his Bowie-knife, the young man would resort to the following contrivance. The knives of a dozen, perhaps, were confided to one, who remained outside; the others entered, and being searched ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... a bewilderingly fine time with those ladies, the proudest old turkey in the theater was an old fellow whose Indian blood shows in his very behavior, and yet—ha, ha! I saw that same old man, at a quadroon ball a few years ago, walk up to the handsomest, best dressed man in the house, a man with a skin whiter than his own,—a perfect gentleman as to looks and manners,—and without a word slap him ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... head the list, fourteen in number. They comprised four housekeepers, one of whom however was but eight years old, three waiting boys, a cook, two washerwomen, two gardeners and a grass carrier, and included nominally Quadroon Lizette who after having been hired out for several years to Peter Douglass, the owner of a jobbing gang, was this ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... fondness of some weak being who has been enslaved by their personal attractions. There are many such. I have met them in the jardins of Paris; in the casinos of London; in the cafes of Havanna, and the "quadroon" balls of New Orleans—everywhere in the crowded haunts of the world. I have met them with an instinct of ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... into the deep, dark eyes, that shone with softest lustre from out the pale, olive face, set in a wealth of wavy jet-black hair. For Helen Torringley was, like himself, of mixed blood. Her mother, who had died in her infancy, was a South American quadroon, born in Lima, and all the burning, quick passions and hot temperament of her race were revealed in her daughter's every graceful gesture and inflexion ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... another's hand and whizzed through the figures, he scarcely took his eyes from her, and when, at about midnight, he succeeded in getting her apart for a promenade, he poured forth his soul to her in the picturesque English of the quadroon quarter of New Orleans. "An' now, to proof to you my lorv, Ma'm'selle Leelee"—he gesticulated vigorously as he spoke—"I am geeving you wan beau-u-tiful Christmas present—I am goin' to geev you—w'at you t'ink? My borgee!" With this he turned dramatically and faced her. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... come nearer believing it;"—and after further questioning he found, from the patient's observation, that her right genitals were almost invariably used for coitus. Bechlinger of Para, Brazil, describes a woman of twenty-five, a native of Martinique, whose father was French and mother a quadroon, who had a modified duplication of the lower body. There was a third leg attached to a continuation of the processus coceygeus of the sacrum, and in addition to well developed mammae regularly situated, there were two rudimentary ones close together above the pubes. There ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... citizen. The hawker whom you meet, and whose blue eyes and light hair indicate no trace of Oriental blood, may not be a churdo, or pash-ratt, or half-blood, or half-scrag, as a full Gipsy might contemptuously term him, but he may be, of his kind, a quadroon or octoroon, or he may have "gipsified," by marrying a Gipsy wife; and by the way be it said, such women make by far the best wives to be found among English itinerants, and the best suited for "a traveller." But in any case he has taken pains ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... now included in the volume Old Creole Days, is equally the product of a refined art. Here is shown the anguish of a quadroon mother who turns frantically from one to another for help to save her beautiful child, the ivory-tinted daughter of the South. When every one fails, the mother heart makes one grand sacrifice by which the end is gained, and she dies at the foot of the altar in an agony of remorse and love. The beautiful ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... previous day I had noticed that Rodney Prescott listened with marked attention to the captain's cousin, a Virginia lady, as she advanced a theory that Jeannette had negro blood in her veins. 'Those quadroon girls often have a certain kind of plebeian beauty like this pet of yours, Mrs. Corlyne,' she said, with a slight sniff of her high-bred, pointed nose. In vain I exclaimed, in vain I argued; the garrison ladies were ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... therefore, to form a battalion of his countrymen. Savary obtained the rank of captain, and was remarkably successful.[70] The new battalion was put under the command of Major Jean Daquin, also a native of Santo Domingo. Whether or not Major Daquin was a white man as Gayarre tells us, or a quadroon as other writers ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various |
