gemini072
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 Posted: Tue 19 Feb 2008 00:25 Post subject: the Bluish Tinge |
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Neither Black nor White Yet Both
Chapter 5
The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign
p 143
Sir Walter Murph comments, in Eugene Sue's immensely popular novel Les Mysteres de Paris(1843ff), on the American Mulatto woman Cecily's charm: It would require a Creole's pitiless eye to detect the sang mele(someone 7 generations removed from a pure Negre' ancestor) in the imperceptible dark shade that lightly colors the crown of that Mulatto woman's rosy fingernails; our fairest Northern beauties do not own a more transparent complexion, nor a whiter skin.
The Irish-American Dion Boucicault's play the Octoroon(1859) is set on the Louisiana plantation Terrebonne. The fair-skinned title heroine Zoe describes herself as ineligible for matrimony with her white cousin George Peyton because she feels separated from him by a gulf that she does not only ascribe to the curse of Cain and to the "one drop" of blood but that she also explains to George in the following way:
ZOE: ...George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a bluish tinge?
GEORGE: Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark.
Boucicualt's Zoe interprets these and other signs as "dark, fatal" marks that point to her slave descent and cause her to feel racial shame (and, as we saw, regard herself as cursed and unclean). She has thus accepted a racial hierarchy within her own constitution.
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In Thomas Dixon's novel The Sins of the Father(1912), the foundling Helen is told by her beloved Tom's father that she is descended from blacks. She is startled and horrified:
She stopped suddenly and lifted her hand, staring with wildly dilated eyes at the nails finely shaped fingers to find if the telltale marks of negro blood were there which she has seen on Cleo's. Finding none, the horror in her eyes slowly softened into a look of despairing tenderness.
For some authors the sign is permanent, indelible, ineffaceable. According to others, it can be covered, erased, deleted, or otherwise removed; thus Mark Twain let's his character always wear gloves. In Edith Pope's Colcorton(1944), a Florida version of Jame's Aspern Papers, the white writer Clement Johnson has fingernails that are "the whitened colour of their moons"; Johnson instinctively suspects that the heroine Abby Clanghearne is partly black. Abby, who has been living in the Florida family homestead Colcorton yet passing for white all her life, recalls how she reacted after finding out her true ancestry:
She remembered the frights she had had when she thought folks looked at her kind of queer. Many's the day she had nearly scrubbed her skin off fancying it was getting black; and the times she had studied her fingernails, and that once - she was young then and right foolish - she had bruised them with a stone to make white marks come that she could play like they was moons; and how she had baked her brains to a frazzle going bareheaded so as to bleach her hair. |
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