It is worth mentioning that George and Eliza are both said to be very light-skinned. This fact is significant in several ways. First, of course, the possibility of their "passing" as white or Latino people will be necessary to the plot in later chapters. Second (and the novel will recognize this but will not explore it in any depth) the fact that both of these characters, and several others of mixed race) are virtually "white" is ironic, given the argument that was advanced by proponents of slavery that Africans and people of African descent were somehow intended by God and / or by nature to be enslaved. However foolish and self-serving this argument may seem to us, it is one of the many proslavery arguments that Stowe must deal with in the novel, and one way of doing so is to show that many slaves could not be readily identified as to race. A third significance of George and Eliza's being light-skinned is one that we may consider racist: Since Stowe's intended audience was white, it may be that she believed readers would be more likely to sympathize or identify with people who resembled themselves, and thus that white readers would find it easier to see the beauty of the mixed-race Eliza than they might have found it to see the beauty of a dark-skinned African woman.
We may see yet a fourth kind of significance in this aspect of the characters George and Eliza. Eliza fears the loss of her little son, knowing that slavery can separate children from their mothers. But she herself was raised since she was a child by Mrs. Shelby. Her own mother must have been a slave from whom Eliza herself was separated in childhood. Furthermore, Eliza fears the immoral use that her child may be put to, should Haley resell him, and the narrator tells us that Mrs. Shelby has protected Eliza herself from the all-too-common fate of attractive young girls and women in slavery. Yet Eliza's own mother, whoever she was, must have suffered that fate herself, if a white man fathered the light-skinned Eliza. In fact, George and Eliza, like the other mixed-race characters in the novel, testify by their skin color to the immorality of a system that separates families, will not allow slaves to marry legally, and holds individual men and especially women hostage to the sexual and commercial wants of those who have power over them.
