"Over in the vacant lots was Jasper, young, coal-black and of magnificent build, sitting on a wheelbarrow in the pelting sun--at work, supposedly, whereas he was in fact only preparing for it by taking an hour's rest. In front of Wilson's porch stood Roxy," also a slave at work, though since fifteen of Roxy's great-great-grandparents were "white," her "blackness" does not show. In this passage the narrator describes her and her child's status as "negro" and "slave" as "a fiction of law and custom."
The Barrett Collection, UVA PS 1317 .A1 1894