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He identifies as Black; she is multiracial and comfortable using the word “mulatto” to describe herself.

Ten years after, she has yet to finish her second book, which has bloomed into an elephantine “four-hundred-year history of mulatto people in fictional form” — what her husband Lenny calls a “mulatto ‘War and Peace.’”

Washington and other white people used the word mulatto for such mixed-race people.

Morton identified Voorhees as “mulatto,” which some historians say in the 19th century often meant a Black person with mixed ancestry, including Indigenous ancestry.

But in her conversation with her cousin, she learned that census records showed that one of their ancestors, Webster’s fourth great-grandmother, had shifted in the 1800s from identifying as “mulatto” to “White” and started passing.