The first time I read the word "mulatto" in a book there was no obvious context enabling my pre-teen mind to correctly define the term. Since the character so described was a shipmate of protagonist Captain Bravo, I assumed a mulatto was a specific job aboard ship It sounded rather romantic in its way; a variant of matelot; a spy-glass toting occupant of the crow's nest; perhaps a type of pirate.
The book, whose title I do not recall, was a swashbuckling adventure yarn where aspects of the South Seas and the West Indies merged into one perilous, treasure-laden coastline. Consequently, it wasn't surprising that a character's parentage should combine DNA from the Straits of Gibraltar and far-off Afrique shore.
This misapprehension continued well into my teens. Fortunately, "mulatto" usage is rare in modern writing and speech, so opportunities for my exposure as an ignoramus were few and far between. At least I never enquired of the guides on a school trip to Monticello exactly when Sally Hemmings felt the call of the running tide. That would've confused us all.
No doubt that same callow mind of mine would fail to parse the contemporary term "mixed race" today, simply assuming the character was some sort of shipwrecked decathlete who had fallen in with a gang of salty desperados on a desert island the size of an Olympic running track. This is why I don't read science-fiction: the nomenclature of space-time, human-alien hybridization is surely too much for my tiny brain to cope with.
