JC
USA Today reviews The March, a newly released novel by E.L. Doctorow that explores slavery in the south circa 1864. It will discuss racism, war, the taboo of children born out of slave and master relations, etc. One character born of these such relations is Pearl. It sounds like she will definitely fall perfectly into a tragic mullato role here.

Among the most memorable of those fictional creations in The March is Pearl Jameson, a pale-skinned slave girl whose father is her owner. Through her, Doctorow conveys all the twisted emotional/sexual wounds that slavery introduced to the Southern psyche, black and white.

Pearl’s white half-brothers, the two sons of the plantation, lust like animals for their biracial half-sister. The boys’ mother can’t stand this living, breathing proof of her husband’s infidelity, the other slaves resent Pearl, and her father abandons her to Sherman’s army. Toughened from birth because of her difficult life, Pearl has a survivor’s relentlessness.