BEVERLEY ORMEROD NOAKES
The ‘Brown Skin Gal’ in Fact and Fiction

Around the figure of the ‘brown skin gal’ — the Caribbean woman of mixed race — float many associations, some flattering, some detrimental. Several of them are implicit in the innocent words of a popular song of the 1950s:

Brown skin gal, stay home and mind baby …
I’m going away in a sailing boat
And if I don’t come back
Stay home and mind baby.

This refrain takes certain things for granted: the brown girl’s sexual desirability, her volatility and inclination towards pleasure, and her possible fate as a deserted mother. It draws, no doubt unconsciously, upon aspects of two literary stereotypes: the ‘sensual mulatto’ and the ‘tragic mulatto’, both related to uncertainties about mulatto identity and assumptions about the role of the coloured woman in Caribbean social history.

This essay is primarily concerned with the fortunes of the ‘brown skin gal’ in Jamaica and the French Caribbean during the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries, but it also touches on the development of Caribbean stereotypes of ‘brownness’ and makes some comparisons between their literary representation and social fact. The brown individual in the Caribbean arose from the sexual exploitation of black slave women by European men during the slave trade and the plantation era. The first mulattos were, like their mothers, primarily destined for the canefields, but as time went by (and further degrees of race mixing took place) lighter-skinned slaves tended to be favoured with less arduous work, often in the Great House. This granting of special privileges, perceived as unfair by less fortunate workers, together with the fact that female slaves were more likely than males to benefit from white favours, must have contributed to the contradictory pattern of admiration and resentment that is apparent in many early accounts of the brown woman.

The term ‘mulatto’ is itself an uncertain one, having gradually shifted from its original meaning of half-black, half-white. In Jamaica, it indicates ‘loosely, any person with light-brown or yellowish skin’, and is said to be ‘among negroes, not a favourable term’ (Dictionary of Jamaican English). In the French-speaking Caribbean, however, mulâtre is a social marker designating a light-skinned person usually of the middle class or, in the case of the grands mulâtres, of the upper class. This usage arose in Haiti, the country where mulattos first gained political and socio-economic power. Even before the Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, free coloureds there had become a large, wealthy, and sometimes landowning group. After the Revolution, mulattos took over the prestigious positions formerly occupied by the French. Hence the principal female deity of the vaudou religion, Ezili or Erzulie, powerful goddess of love and beauty, is portrayed by painters as a brown-skinned woman. She is, in fact, the archetypal ‘sensual mulatto’, discreetly sharing her favours between the gods of war and of the sea. With her taste for luxury and riches, she also represents the impossible social aspirations of the black peasantry, whose small gifts regularly adorn her shrines.