Transgression is instantly formulated in terms of agency and movement, and indeed the motorcar and driving become powerful symbols of Bert’s will to occupy an insider status denied him. References to Bert not acting or speaking or behaving ‘like a nigger’ or, more tellingly, of not ‘knowing his place’, accumulate with the play’s unfolding. Bert’s transgressiveness is associated above all with his repeated challenge to Norwood’s prohibition to enter the house by the front door. Bert links his use of the front entrance to his claim to a white birthright: when accused by his brother William of using the front door “once too much”, Bert retorts: “Yes, like de white folks” (I, 16).
Mulatto, then, charts the white attempt to confine non-white characters, perceived as threats to the status quo, to spaces of impotence and disenfranchisement thus keeping them out of spaces of authority and entitlement. Flouting the paternal law and invasion of the liminal by crossing the threshold (the front entrance) become one and the same and lead to the fatal father-son confrontation, but not before Norwood makes one last effort to repel Bert’s challenge. Norwood does not simply order Bert never to use the front entrance again, he attempts definitively to displace him: “...get the hell off this place and stay off. Get the hell out of this county...Get out of this state...Get out of here now” (II: 1, 24). Bert’s crime, for which he brings down paternal and white society’s retribution is to occupy “the mid-point of transition of a status-sequence between two positions” (my italics). The paternal response is to attempt to displace him to a space occupied by his (black) brother, namely, to a where “actions and relationships ... do not flow from a recognized social status but originate outside it”.
It is no surprise, then, that the townsfolk’s intended punishment — the lynch- rope — is not to avenge Norwood’s murder but Bert’s crossing of a forbidden line: “They’ll probably hang him to that tree”, predicts with sadistic relish the undertaker to Cora, “‘cause they tell me he strutted right out the front gate past that tree after the murder” (II: 2, 29).