Roberta's selfish son, Tate, gets no love from Chris Myers ("An
Octoroon").
For a year he has been in love with an
octoroon, a nice girl and all of that and almost white.
Grace's motivation to 'adopt Mary' is inspired by a photograph in a newspaper of two fair-skinned Aboriginal girls dressed in white lace-collared dresses and a caption that read, 'These
octoroons and quadroons have been rescued from shameful circumstances and generously taken into the homes of Christian families' (p.8).
The olive-skinned Conch ita, the first of the American wives to produce a child, is repeatedly described as black and rumored to be a "West Indian
octoroon" (234).
With the Klan riding high, the sheet-heads would have called him an "
octoroon." He was first deemed "white" by the press, but when they learned he was listed on official documents as Hispanic (his mother is from Peru), the media coined the term "White Hispanic." One fellow claimed to have searched the computer archives of the entire history of a major newspaper, and learned the paper had never printed the term "White Hispanic" until this case.
Set in New Orleans at the "far end of Chartres Street in the Vieux Carre," "Thank You" tracks a group of believers and skeptics who visit a Creole spiritualist, the
octoroon Mother DuClos, "a small grizzled woman with a hunched back, robed in white like an angel.
A wildly-popular performance poet known simply as "
Octoroon" when she wasn't known as "The Voice of Katrina." Against a pillar stood--or should I say, posed--the lovely April March.
In 1934 an article in the influential Australian Women's Weekly gave voice to the fears of women's organizations at plans to bring "
octoroon girls" to city institutions where they would be free to "mingle" without their racial origins being clear, creating the possibility several generations down of "a black child appear[ing] in a white family." However, a representative of a Victorian Aboriginal support group defended the plan, arguing that the children deserved the "chance to grow up among other white children" Adoption was only possible, however, if their racial identity was not divulged.
(8) Some critics have suggested that other dramas are designed to resonate on both sides of the Atlantic: Scott Boltwood hears American racial echoes in the class conflict of The Colleen Bawn, while Katy Chiles argues that there is an Irish villain in the Louisiana of The
Octoroon. (9) The
Octoroon is a particularly clear example of Boucicault's transatlanticism, demonstrating his command of differing tastes across the Atlantic, as he rewrote the New York ending to please London audiences.
That same year, popular culture got into the act with The
Octoroon, a play at New York City's Winter Garden Theater.
with confidence in his ability to understand the past and tell the story of Sutpen." (28) According to him, Henry's reason for murdering Bon was the latter's intended bigamy, since he already has an
octoroon wife and a son in New Orleans, kept secret.
Called also an
octoroon. As a girl, thought that was some bird.
