Embedded Files
Extract 1
Extract 1
“Her use of the word ‘nigger’ perhaps demands some explanation. Although a common expression among white writers of the time, particularly North Americans, the modern reader might find it shocking coming from Mrs. Seacole.”
Alexander, Z. and Dewjee, A. (eds.) (1984). Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. 2nd ed. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. (p3, Introduction).
Extract 2
Extract 2
400 days: A Bicentennial Tribute to Mary Seacole: Public Servant and Celebrity Westminster Cathedral London
Extract 3
Extract 3
“How does a woman with a recently unearthed family tree bearing three White grandparents and one White parent remain a ‘Black’ cultural icon?”
Alexander, Z. (2022). “Mary Seacole: my inalienable right to self-identify”, Black History Month Magazine.
Extract 4
Extract 4
“I have patiently waited over a quarter of a century for an opportunity to put right my 1980s Mary Seacole mea culpa. The latest biography, published in February 2022 provided the ideal penance in the form of a review. Through the efforts of a local Jamaican researcher, it was undisputedly proven that Seacole had 3 White grandparents, as well as a White father, and her European lineage could well go further back.
Despite presenting this powerful information as new, her 2022 biographer insists Seacole was “Black”, and berates her subject for frequently ‘underplaying the darkness of her skin’. Furthermore, and I quote again, ‘in white social settings Mary was clearly highly sensitive to her colour and racial difference and anxious to ingratiate herself and cross that exclusive boundary into acceptance by the colonial establishment. It is perhaps this aspiration that many of her admirers today find an unsettling negative in Mary’s personality, and it has, over the years, been cause for criticism.’
The endnote for this assertion is even more scandalous, pointing to the ‘evidence’ in the form of a book published in New York after WW1. A White man this time, recalls a party in Panama City attended by Seacole - a “queer, quaint, jolly, vain, self-important, old brown woman, long since gone ‘where the good darkeys go’. Said she, one day, to a lady: ‘If you could see me madam, under my dress, you would be surprised how white I am. It is exposure to the air that makes my face and hands so brown.’ She had forgotten her curly locks and Dark Continent features.”
SHAW Conference (2022) “Mary Seacole: skin-tone controversies in the twenty-first century, Ziggi Alexander CBE, Dominican-born community historian”.
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