The author meant to drive a stake into the heart of slavery, but she also brought forth with Xarifa’s death a new entity marked by its own assumptions and limitations-the trope of the tragic mulatto. Child ends the story with these challenging sentences: “Reader, do you complain that I have written fiction? Believe me, scenes like these are of no unfrequent occurrence at the South.” In the politically contentious days of the mid-1800s, the noted writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child published a short story, The Quadroons, in which a girl named Xarifa discovers her mixed-race heritage, is sold into slavery, and commits suicide after being raped by her new owner.
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