Can Quadroon Balls Represent Acquiescence or Resistance?

This chapter seeks to reconcile the persistent myth of the self-directed quadroon—women possessing one fourth black and three fourths white “blood”—finding love and quasi-marriage at a glamorous and respectable quadroon ball with the known history of the sexual exploitation of black women, both slave and free. White men frequently engaged in sexual relationships with women of color, including free women of color, in pre-Civil War Louisiana, yet fictionalized representations of the balls distort and obscure important realities about race, sex, and power in the nineteenth century. White men exercised sexual access to women of color in a variety of blurred and overlapping forms, including slavery, domestic servitude, prostitution, and other relationships, all of which could be placed under the rubric of what Louisiana law termed concubinage.