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Various terms
Quadroon is someone of one-quarter black ancestry or of one-quarter white ancestry. A quadroon has a biracial (mulatto) parent (black and white) and one white or black parent.
Octoroon means a person of fourth-generation black ancestry. Genetically, it means one-eighth black. Typically an Octoroon has one great-grandparent who is of full African descent and seven great-grandparents who are not.
Quintroon is a rarely used term that means a person of fifth-generation black ancestry. A quintroon has one parent who is an octoroon and one white parent. Hexadecaroon meaning one-sixteenth black, is an even less common term for the same ethnic mix. Mestee was also used for a person with less than one-eighth black ancestry.
These words are mainly derived from Latin roots: quadroon is borrowed from Spanish cuarterón (ultimately from Latin quartus "fourth"), and octoroon is modeled on this, from Latin octo "eight" (or equivalently Greek okto). Quintus is Latin "fifth", but quintroon does not follow the same logic; it refers to the generation rather than the racial proportion. The alternative hexadecaroon, from Greek hexadeka "sixteen", expresses this proportion directly.
Problems with these terms
These designations usually refer to the number of full-blooded black ancestors (one black grandparent for quadroon, one black great-grandparent for octoroon, etc). However, the same genetic makeup can come from other combinations. An Octoroon could have four quadroon great-grandparents, or two mulatto (half-black) great-grandparents. Also two parents of one genetic makeup, will have children of the same makeup. (ie. two quadroon parents will have quadroon children.)
All of these designations are faulty, in that they assume the pertinent recent black ancestors are of one hundred percent sub-Saharan African descent. But a quadroon's black great grandparents may have some non-black ancestors, or their white great-grandparents may themselves be octoroon.
Regardless of the relative genetic contributions, any bi-racial (or multi-racial) person with black and white ancestry is broadly considered "mulatto." Persons that are more than half black are considered mulatto, or black. Technically all these terms are correct in the inverse; a person with 3 black and one white grandparents should be a quadroon, but more likely he would be considered mulatto, or simply black.
Defining an individual mathematically is inherently reductive, and these terms derived from the slave trade which treated these people as chattel. As such, calling someone a mulatto, quadroon or octoroon can be a grave insult. The terms are better used in the abstract for studies of genetics, anthropology, sociology and population data, as in censuses.
Culture and law
This racial classification differed somewhat from the "one-drop rule" current in most of the United States, in that it recognized a higher social status for black-descended people by degree of majority white ancestry. Nevertheless, people of minority black ancestry in these cultures were still heavily discriminated against and often subject to slavery. In antebellum America, any child born to an enslaved woman was a slave, owned by his mother's master.
In the United States, the Jim Crow laws generally followed the one-drop rule; hence the case of Homer Plessy, a Louisiana man of one-eighth black ancestry who was prevented from sitting in a railroad car reserved for whites.
By the later 20th century, these terms had almost totally faded from use, being generally considered obsolete.
In literature
- The Quadroon - a novel by Thomas Mayne Reid, written in 1856.
- The Octoroon, a play by Dion Boucicault adapted from Reid's The Quadroon, was first performed at New York City’s Winter Garden on December 12, 1859. The play describes the turmoil that is brought upon Zoe, the octoroon, as her dreams are torn away from her because of the one-drop rule.
- Pontellier's nurse, from the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, is a quadroon.
- Charles Bon's first wife/mistress, from the novel Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, is an octoroon.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe published in 1852, describes Eliza and her son Henry as quadroons. Henry's father is described as a mulatto.
See also
