Neither black nor white yet both may be nothing more than a
cliché. It does appear with some frequency in interracial litera-
ture, and is one recurrence among many that give that literature
a special quality. The tracing of similar such recurring features is the sub-
ject of this book. By "interracial literature" I mean, on the following
pages, works in all genres that represent love and family relations involv-
ing black-white couples, biracial individuals, their descendants, and their
larger kin -- to all of whom the phrasing may be applied, be it as couples,
as individuals, or as larger family units. I find the term "interracial"
preferable to some others. ¹ Although it may be understood as inadver-
tently strengthening a biological concept of "race" that it promises to
transcend -- and I do not wish to employ it in the sense that would
emphasize the "racial" more than the "inter-" (or the "bi-") -- this may, in
any case, be a lesser semantic burden to bear than the heavy historical
load that weighs down much of the problematic vocabulary applied to
interracial relations and that will be subjected to some etymological and
semantic scrutiny: it includes not only such words as "Mulatto," "misce-
genation," "mixed race," and "hybrid," but also, for that matter, "black"
and "white." One has only to remember Joel Williamson's remarkable
statement, "There are, essentially, no such things as 'black' people or
'white' people." ² Despite their histories and inaccuracies, such terms may
be unavoidable and even useful and helpful at times, as they have also
been adopted and reappropriated for a variety of reasons, including their
specificity, their ability to redefine a negative term from the past into one
positively and defiantly adopted in the present, or simply the absence of
better terms. ³

An interracial focus, however, might serve specific ends. Since there
are no "races" nor widely agreed upon definitions of "race," understand-
ing the cultural operations which make them seem natural or self-evident
categories may be desirable. ⁴ Instead of only looking at interracial rela-
tions as those interactions that are often prohibited between people from
"different races," we might also regard intermarriage bans -- and the

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