Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
It seems wrong to take advantage of your generous forgetfulness of yourself. When you first told me you loved me, you did not know I was an octoroon, and a slave." "I knew your mother was a quadroon," he replied; "and as for the rest, no circumstance can degrade you, my Rose Royal." "But if your plan should not succeed, how ashamed you would feel to have us seized!" said she.
One smart-looking octoroon girl of eighteen years was about to be whipped by her mistress, but she had heard of the proclamation of emancipation and concluded that she had been whipped long enough, and snatched the cowhide from the mistress and whipped her. For this she was arrested, had a sham trial, and a sentence of nine years' imprisonment in the penitentiary.
The verjuice which old Rose had sprinkled over Peter and Cissie by calling them "he-nigger" and "she-nigger" somehow minimized them, animalized them in the old lawyer's imagination. Rose's speech was charged with such contempt for her own color that it placed the mulatto and the octoroon down with apes and rabbits.
But I was no happier for that. He had married a woman who was a slave owner. On my part, I had been made kindred to the slave blood by the marriage of my father. He wished for land, for wealth, and had taken a purse to marry an octoroon. Douglas had wished for land for his country and had paralleled the course of the slavocracy to get it.
The old man, the cat, the perfume of the weeds, soothed in Peter even the rawness of his hurt at Cissie. Indeed, in a way, the old manor became a sort of apology for the octoroon girl. The height and the reach of the piazza, exaggerated by the darkness, suggested a time when retinues of negroes passed through its dignified colonnades. Those black folk were a part of the place.
Yet the least drop of Spanish blood, if it be only of quadroon or octoroon, is sufficient to raise them from the rank of slaves, and entitle them to a suit of clothes boots, hat, cloak, spurs, long knife, and all complete, though coarse and dirty as may be, and to call themselves Españolos, and to hold property, if they can get any.
Cuban-English or Cuban-German blondes promenading with Negro officers in gorgeous uniforms; or octoroon beauties with hair in natural crimp, riding in carriages beside white husbands or lighting up an opera box with the splendor of their diamonds.
And this general assignment can be construed to include her. Her mother was a slave and that brings her within the law. We know precisely who her mother was, and all about it. You looked it up and my lawyer, Mr. Cable, looked it up. Her mother was the octoroon woman, Suzanne, owned by old Judge Marquette in New Orleans.
The mulatto became aware that his whole crusade had been undertaken in behalf of the octoroon. Everything the merchants said against negroes became accusations against Cissie in a sharp personal way. "A nigger is a nigger"; "A thief is a thief"; "She wouldn't quit stealing if I paid her a hundred a week." Every stroke had fallen squarely on Cissie's shoulders.
And as she took in the scene, a great terror stole into her eyes and her lips opened in a gasp. The octoroon had played her great coup. She had carried a lie to the pirate, hoping that his telling of the treasure to his fellows would precipitate such an assault upon Dolores that nothing could survive it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking