“Tell Me Whom You Love”: ‘Mixed’ Marriage & Racial Mutability

Indian peddlers and seamen who migrated to the United States during the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century frame Rina Banerjee’s Viola, from New Orleans (2017) (fig.1). The Bengali men who initially made this journey established themselves by supplying American consumers with “Oriental” wares—silks, curios, perfumes, and rugs.¹ The Viola sculpture gestures toward personal relationships the men forged. It takes its inspiration from “mixed” marriages between Bengali peddlers in segregated southern cities and African American women. The phenomenon and the art it inspired invite reflections on the unstable character of racial designations. They spark questions about the meanings of interracial intimacies made public through marriage in a society that used race classifications to structure inequality.

Banerjee’s work reflects on one relationship—the union of twenty-two-year-old Viola Ida Lewis, a woman of African descent, and Joseph Abdin (figs. 2 and 3). The couple married in 1906, two years after the forty-five-year-old Bengali native reached the United States.² Banerjee’s imagined Viola is awkward. The figure appears to have been rendered grotesque by her associations with immigrants. Tokens of her connections—a Yoruba mask, Indian rakes and silks, cowrie shells, and Italian glass horns extending like elephant tusks—are attached to her. Indeed, they constitute her body as if to display the profound impact of “making home for aliens” on her identity. The ungainly form makes one wonder whether the relationships she developed were so unnatural that sustaining them deformed her.

The work’s long title expands and complicates Viola’s identity. While acknowledging New Orleans as her home, it peremptorily declares her “African.” The label is perhaps an ancestral justification for the mask that represents her face (fig. 4). Yet, it also seems to explain her alliances. As a timeless African, the Mississippi native might comfortably relate to the immigrants she engaged. The narrative alludes to possible memories of slavery as it describes Viola’s empathy for Bengali men transported to American shores. Surely, she was mindful of their suffering, “how they been also starved, fled from servitude and colonial dangers, ships like dungeons.”

Artistic interpretations of Viola’s identity provide bases for broader reflections on the racial landscape she faced. Sources documenting her identity illuminate “racial disguises” Banerjee references and constructs. They reveal efforts to define Viola and her family in the context of marriages that “told” of their intimate associations. Against the backdrop of Banerjee’s imagination, the identities embedded in historical records give another perspective on the Creole saying, “Tell me whom you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Racial change accompanied Viola and Joseph’s marriage. By 1910, they had a young son and infant daughter, and Joseph, a peddler of “Oriental Goods” in New Orleans, was the named head of Viola’s extended family. Her mother Sophie, a possible step-sister with four children, and a grand-niece were part of the household. Viola and Joseph’s racial identities fused under this living arrangement. The census enumerator designated him “Mulatto,” along with everyone else in the household, except Sophie, who was labeled “Black” (fig. 5). The census taker documented Joseph’s birthplace as “India-Hindi,” but the bureau’s forms contained no coherent way to match his origins with official definitions of “color or race.” Enumerators had the option of listing individuals as “Other,” but Joseph’s relationships perhaps sufficed as grounds for numbering him among “persons having some proportion or perceptible trace of negro blood.” The family’s neighbor Sing Lee, a seller of “Chinese goods” who was also married to a Mulatto woman, avoided the transformation Joseph experienced. Concerted government efforts to block, regulate, and monitor immigration from China made “Chinese” a discrete “color or race” that census takers could document.³

“Mixed” marriage did not alter the official power of “Negro blood” in Viola’s veins. Government constructs changed her racial status. Viola was Black in 1900, when she lived with two sisters and her mother—also Black—in a household headed by her White, German-born step-father, Ato Broninlman (fig. 6). The census would have counted her as Black even if Broninlman had been her biological father because the label signified “negro or negro descent.” (emphasis added) Blood quanta and appearance did not matter.⁴ The stability of her mother’s racial classification across census counts highlights the importance of perception. The census enumerator in 1910 made the decision that nothing other than “Negro blood” could account for her appearance. The transformation of Viola’s racial designation and the persistence of her mother’s classification signal variable ways that race categories invent identities they purport to merely document.

Although Viola and Joseph remained married until Joseph died in 1938, at times spatial distance accompanied the constructions of racial difference that shaped the social milieu they inhabited. In 1930, Joseph, no longer a peddler or head of his family household, presided over a home of Bengali men. Like him, three lodgers in the house he rented were married and identified as perfume salesmen. This arrangement could have been solely for business purposes, as Viola lived with two of the couple’s children in a nearby neighborhood. Her rented home was on a street located just two blocks from his street. She was head of the family household and reported being married.

Changes in the spouses’ racial identities at this time were concrete; however, the basis for Joseph’s designation is unclear. He and Viola no longer occupied the same census racial group as they had done in 1910. He had become White, a category he shared with his lodgers. The new classification sharply distinguished him from his predominantly Negro neighbors. It was also at odds with changes that accompanied government prohibitions on Indian immigration and the 1923 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, which ruled that East Indians were not “free white persons” eligible for citizenship. In keeping with the legal determination that constituted the population as racially different from White American citizens, the Census Bureau created “Hindu” as a race category. Accordingly, there was no basis for making Joseph White. In contrast, the change in Viola’s classification conformed to hardening notions of difference and hierarchy that facilitated Jim Crow discrimination against people of African descent. The removal of the Mulatto category from the census made her and the Abdin children Negroes (figs. 7, 8, 9).⁵ The “one-drop” rule again prevailed. Black African ancestry was the factor that mattered to the state and perhaps to Banerjee in crafting “racial disguises.”

In the spring of 1940, a census taker again assigned the “Negro” designation to Viola and her adult sons. However, the young men’s identities changed in the fall of that year, when they registered for the World War II draft. The older son, Ali Joseph Abdin, who was officially determined to possess a “Light” complexion, followed his father into the White race, at least for military purposes. On the same day, his “Dark brown” younger brother, John Adams Abdin, registered his race as White and Indian.⁶ The brothers’ new classifications, codified by military registrars, marked the continuation of racial mazes Viola, Joseph and untold immigrants and native-born Americans have confronted on a social and political landscape defined and scarred by precarious structures of human difference and rank.

Banerjee’s construction is an apt symbol of the convoluted social networks Viola Lewis Abdin navigated in her lifetime. The Viola statue has parachuted to a landing on a sandy foundation. Its instability does not result from the fact that the muse “welcomed and married immigrants from far.” American racial taxonomies rendered the terrain unstable for Viola, Joseph, and their children.