“An Unlovely Woman”: Bessie Head’s Mulatta (Re)Vision

Abstract

From Lydia Maria Child onwards, the American mulatto character in general and the female character in particular is ravishingly beautiful. Indeed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber writes that “There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain.”¹ Ferber went on to imagine yet another beautiful mulatta in her 1926 novel Show Boat. For antebellum authors, the tragic mulatta’s beauty—a white standard of beauty—was in keeping with the sentimental tradition and a means of reaching white audiences. In her discussion of mulatta iconography, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explores the postbellum Harlem Renaissance reclamation of the mulatta as the New Negro woman. Reading Nella Larsen’s mulatta heroines alongside the mulatta paintings of Archibald Motley, Sherrard-Johnson reiterates “the popular notion of [the mulatta’s] exotic, sexual allure.”² Motley’s 1920s paintings of mixed race women, particularly his octoroon series, are a useful visual register of the American mulatta in the popular imagination (see figure 2.1).

Tragedy is agreat loss foretold but not avoided. Bessie heard the foretelling and probably felt it physically. “It will kill me,” she used to say. What was “it”? What wasgoing to kill her? And why did she knowingly leave it unclear?

—Tom Holzinger, “Conversations and Consternations with B Head”