![]() ![]() ![]() They cannot legally marry under state laws against miscegenation. ![]() Horatio Green, a white man, purchases Clotel and takes her as a common-law wife. Currer, described as "a bright mulatto" (meaning light-skinned) gives birth to two "near white" daughters: Clotel and Althesa.Īfter the death of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters are sold as slaves. The book includes "several sub-plots" related to other slaves, religion and anti-slavery. Because the mother is a slave, according to partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662, her daughters are born into slavery. The narrative of Clotel plays with history by relating the "perilous antebellum adventures" of a young mixed-race slave Currer and her two light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. It tells not only its own story of grief, but speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes beside, which never see the light all the more bitter and dreadful, because no help can relieve, no sympathy can mitigate, and no hope can cheer. This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave. Home Clotel or, The President's Daughter Wikipedia: Plot summary ![]()
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