grif

plural grifs

1. alternativedatedhistoricalAlternative form of griffe (“person of mixed (black and white) race”).

   His colour is nearly that of a grif or cobb, the produce of a mulatto and negro.

   1807, François Raymond J. de Pons, Travels in South America, during ... 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804. Transl, page 249

   3 more examples

   […] in the inventory of the estate of Jean Decuir in 1771, she was listed as one of 3 mulatto children of a grif mother.

   1992, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century, LSU Press, →ISBN, page 263

   Lisette also had two older daughters: Magdaleine, born in 1749; and Francoise, born in 1753 and variously identified as a grif or mulatto.

   2012, Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500-1900, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 82

   [This] author of one of the most detailed contemporary discussions about the prophetess and the Trou Coffy insurgency, was the first on record to refer to the prophetess as a “grif,” meaning someone born to one black and one mulatto parent.

   2017, Terry Rey, The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 50