The issue of the One Drop Rule is prevalent in both Pudd'nhead Wilsonand Iola Leroy.  Roxy, one of the main characters in Puddn'head Wilson, was considered a negro because she was one-sixteenth black.  "From Roxy's manner of speech, a stranger would have expected her to be black, but she was not.  Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show...To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody but the one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro.  She was a slave and saleable as such" (Twain, pp. 63-64).  Although Roxy appeared to be white, because of the black blood she possessed, she was raised as a negro.  So too was her son, Chambers.  When speaking of Chambers, Twain refers directly to the One Drop Rule when he writes, "[Roxy's] child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave and, by a fiction of law and custom, a negro" (Twain, p. 64).
    The atrocity which fell upon the Leroy family in Francis Harper's Iola Leroy was a result of the One Drop Rule as well.  Marie, Iola's mother, appeared to be white but was in the same situation as Roxy.  She had a drop of black blood in her veins.  When the owner of her plantation, Eugene Leroy, decided to marry her, he was greatly ridiculed by his cousin, Alfred Lorraine.  Lorraine says to Eugene, "'Don't you know that if she is as fair as a lily, beautiful as a houri, and chaste as ice, that still she is a negro...one drop of negro blood in her veins curses all the rest'" (Harper, p. 281).  Nevertheless, Eugene married Marie and the couple had three children, one of whom was Iola.  Eugene ended up dying and Lorraine seized the opportunity to make the identities of Marie and her children known.  He had the marrige declared illegal and Marie and her children were sold into slavery.  Iola was lucky enough to be taken out of the slave position she was put in and became a nurse for the Union soldiers of the Civil War.  When she was asked by the white docotor, Dr. Gresham, to be his wife, she refused saying, "Doctor, were I your wife, are there not peple who would caress me as a white woman who wold shrink from me in scorn if they knew I had one drop of negro blood in my viens?" (Harper, p. 419).  Iola was aware of the doctor's love for her, but she was also aware of the reality that ultimately, their marriage would not be socially acceptable because she was of African decent.
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