The Squatter and the Don

“[Darrell] staggered out of the room and did not return until the following week, when Mary had left for Washington, accompanied by Letitia, her colored servant (called Tisha), who was devotedly attached to her.”

The narrator criticizes white Northerners who, while opposing slavery, still enacted racist policies. This image of a Black servant who is “devotedly attached” to her white employer is a version of the pro-slavery trope that argued that Black enslaved people were frequently so attached to white women enslavers that they would prefer bondage over freedom. The way Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton characterizes Mrs. Darrell as a sympathetic sentimental figure makes this criticism mild in the novel.

“There are some enactments so obviously intended to favor one class of citizens against another class, that to call them laws is an insult to law, but such as they are, we must submit to them.”

The idea that laws did apply differently to different “classes” (here used as a euphemism for races) of people was culturally available in the 1872 timeline of the narrative and federal law by the 1885 publication of the novel. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed access to public accommodations regardless of race. Favoring one “class” over another thus plays with the novel’s conceit of asking its reader to use 1885 knowledge and values to understand the tragedy of the events of 1872-1875 as portrayed in the text.