Sacatra was a term used in the French Colony of Saint-Domingue to describe the descendant of one black and one griffe parent,1 a person whose ancestry is 7⁄8 black and 1⁄8 white. It was one of the many terms used in the colony's racial caste system to measure one's black blood.2
The etymology of sacatra is uncertain; Félix Rodríguez González linked it to Spanish sacar 'take out' and atrás 'behind';3 thus, a sacatra is a slave who is not kept in the house or at the front as a lighter-skinned servant might be.
In fiction
- In the 1989 novel The Dancing Other, French author Suzanne Dracius mentions her main character finding "true friendship with a cheery sacatra girl with soft, caramel skin."4
- Nalo Hopkinson's 2004 speculative fiction novel The Salt Roads begins with Georgine, an enslaved girl who gets pregnant by a white man, denying that her child is going to be "just mulatto. I’m griffonne, my mother was sacatra. The baby will be marabou."5
References
References
- "Sacatra". Wordnik.
- "The Kingdom of This World". msu.edu. Retrieved 2017-03-28.
- Gonzáles, Félix Rodríguez (26 June 2017). Spanish Loanwords in the English Language: A Tendency towards Hegemony Reversal. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. ISBN 9783110890617 – via Google Books.
- "Nancy Naomi Carlson and Catherine Maigret Kellogg translating Suzanne Dracius". Drunken Boat. Retrieved 2017-04-08.
- Hopkinson, Nalo (2004). The Salt Roads. New York: Warner US. p. 2. ISBN 978-0446677134.