Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable

RACE AND CULTURE IN NEW ORLEANS STORIES

RACE AND CULTURE IN NEW ORLEANS STORIES

KATE CHOPIN, GRACE KING, ALICE DUNBAR-NELSON, AND GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE

James Nagel

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2014

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Caslon

Cover illustration: Portrait of Betsy, François Fleischbeing, ca. 1837. Courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Acc. No. 1985.212

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Nagel, James.

     Race and culture in New Orleans stories : Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable / James Nagel.

         pages cm

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-0-8173-1338-8 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8173-8717-4 (e book)

1. American literature—Louisiana—New Orleans—History and criticism. 2. Chopin, Kate, 1850–1904—Criticism and interpretation. 3. King, Grace Elizabeth, 1852–1932—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore, 1875–1935—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Cable, George Washington, 1844–1925—Criticism and interpretation. 6. New Orleans (La.)—In literature. 7. Local color in literature. 8. Social structure in literature. 9. Social change in literature. 10. Social problems in literature. I. Title.

     PS267.N49N34  2013

     810.9′976335—dc23

2013019094

For Gwen

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Historical Context

1. George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days

2. Grace King and the Cultural Background of Balcony Stories

3. Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the New Orleans Story Cycle

4. Kate Chopin's Bayou Folk

Conclusion: The Literary Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Preface

This book began in the classroom, in a graduate seminar I taught on Realism and Naturalism in which we were discussing George Washington Cable's story Belles Demoiselles Plantation. In the process of dealing with the historical and racial aspects of the situation, a student asked how it could be that the mixed-race character owned a mansion in New Orleans and had sufficient financial resources to have lent $180,000 to his white relative over the years. Injin Charlie does not seem to work, and yet he is quite wealthy. Charles De Charleu, a white aristocrat with a plantation and seven beautiful daughters, seems impoverished in comparison. Why, the student asked, would the ancestor have married a Choctaw woman and then, without benefit of a divorce, a white woman in Paris? Would this be legal? Would the children from each of these marriages feel a kinship strong enough to warrant such enormous loans? These were reasonable inquiries, insightful, probing, significant, and I could not answer them with any degree of certainty.

This book, in a real sense, is an attempt to answer the questions raised on that day some four years ago in a seminar at the University of Georgia. It has taken me, rather late in my career, on a long and fascinating journey through time, geography, and cultural history, and along the way I have encountered French colonial history, the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition, the various flags that have flown over New Orleans, the complex racial stratification that guided social interaction in Louisiana, the Spanish introduction of the slave contract, the changing meanings of the word Creole, the founding of one of the great cities in the world, and the reason why many traditional Creoles would not cross Canal Street. It was a challenging and intriguing journey, and it brought to life for me a region of the United States unlike any other.

I found the artistic expression of these ideas in the short stories of four important writers who lived in New Orleans in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in American literary history that emphasized the Local-Color tradition of capturing the dialects, folkways, culture, and personalities of nearly every region of the United States. Although my own background is in northern Minnesota, originally another French settlement at the very origin of the Mississippi River, I found myself engrossed in the world at the other end of it, especially in the work of Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. What these writers shared was not only that many of their stories take place in New Orleans but that they had all lived there, absorbed Louisiana culture on the bustling streets of the French Quarter, and derived their understanding of the people and social values of the lower Mississippi during their years in the Crescent City. Grace King spent her life there, but Alice Dunbar-Nelson and George Washington Cable eventually moved north, as did Kate Chopin, residing the last two decades of her life in her native St. Louis. Nonetheless, she wrote exclusively of Louisiana and New Orleans, the richest setting of her experience and the locus for the work of the other writers as well. In the course of her lifetime, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Moore, married Paul Laurence Dunbar to become Alice Dunbar, and later married to become Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the manner in which she is consistently referred to in scholarship. I have followed that convention.

My specific focus became a story cycle by each of them, a collection of interrelated short fiction with continuing characters, settings, and themes. In a sense, my interest was an outgrowth of a decade of research for an earlier book, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre, which discussed the long history of the genre and its popularity in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the course of my reading, I was delighted to find that this approach to literature was even more popular at the end of the nineteenth century in the heyday of the short stories that flooded the hundreds of new magazines that flourished with the expanding population of the country. Throughout this investigation, I have been aware that scholarly books share some common properties: they are essentially a formulation of tentative propositions representing the state of knowledge at a given point, a position awaiting new information, or a fresh interpretation of existing data. It is ever thus. Academic studies also are invariably the result of collaboration, interaction with previous scholars, colleagues, and students who have informed, challenged, inspired, and energized the thinking about a given subject. That is certainly the case with this study. After the enquiry began in the classroom, I have been aided in countless ways by the counsel of treasured colleagues who have guided my efforts and supplied me with valuable information. Although there have been far too many such contributions to attempt to acknowledge them all here, among those who have been especially helpful are Alfred Bendixen (Texas A&M University), Oliver Scheiding (University of Mainz), Gloria Cronin (Brigham Young University), and my colleagues at the University of Georgia, especially Hugh Ruppersburg, John Lowe, Hubert McAlexander, Mary Anne O'Neill, Robert Clark, Steven Florczyk, Nicole Camastra, and a host of graduate students who continue to inspire me virtually every day. Professors Donald Pizer (Tulane University) and Thomas Bonner (Louisiana State University) read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions for revision, and their generous comments are deeply appreciated. Over the last several years various research assistants have given generously of their time and energy to uncover obscure documents, previous scholarship, and photographs that have added to this study immeasurably. Among these are Katherine Barrow, Bradley Bazzle, and Kyli Lamar, all of whom will go on to write their own books. My life has been enriched by the generous assistance of all of these people and more.

Among earlier scholars of the story cycle, I have been especially aided by the work of Forrest L. Ingram, Rolf Lundén, J. Gerald Kennedy, Susan Garland Mann, and Robert M. Luscher, as well as by Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris. Our profession has been enlarged by their research. The contributions of Per Seyersted and Emily Toth to Chopin studies is beyond measure, and I have learned much from them. Arlin Turner's work on Cable established an intellectual platform upon which subsequent scholarship has rested, including the valuable studies by Louis Rubin and Alice Hall Petry, which have guided my own approach. No one has done more for understanding Alice Dunbar-Nelson than Gloria Hull, and I am indebted to her insight and wealth of knowledge. Robert Bush, David Kirby, and Helen Taylor informed my reading of Grace King, and they have made important contributions to the study of American literature. Everyone in the field owes an immense debt to Alfred Bendixen for his leadership of the American Literature Association, which has provided enormous stimulation and energy in literary studies through its international and regional conferences. The warm fellowship of that organization has demonstrated what is profoundly human about the Humanities. My editor at the University of Alabama Press, Dan Waterman, has provided cordial guidance and crucial support throughout the development of the manuscript. I am deeply indebted to the good judgment and cooperation of Jon Berry, project editor at the press, who resolved many important issues with grace and kindness. Finally, my wife, Gwen, has walked at my side through every step of this book and many others, and her knowledge, insight, and energy have been indispensable. I owe her more than I could ever express.

Introduction

The Historical Context

By the end of the nineteenth century, Realism flourished as a dominant force in American literature, depicting normative characters facing believable conflicts and speaking the vernacular of the various sections of the United States. Within that tradition, the Local-Color movement gave specificity to the regional representations of people and settings, capturing the underlying values and folkways of distinct locations throughout the nation and depicting the indigenous customs, conflicts, social strata, ethnic issues, and ways of life in virtually every geographic area. As the countries of national origin shifted from one place to another, so did the religions, languages, and traditions of a population that, having survived the vast upheaval of the Civil War, was embarked on a new adventure as an emerging nation that would quickly take its place as a powerful force in the Western world.

In fact, the Local-Color movement provided the most instructive and clarifying portrait of regional life in American literature, a vibrant and popular tradition in fiction that in a very few decades produced thousands of stories for roughly three-hundred new magazines that had recently appeared across the country. Before the Civil War there had been only a score of important literary periodicals, among them Harper's Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly. In the aftermath of the war, and with the continued westward expansion of the country, a host of vital new outlets for stories was launched, beginning with "the Galaxy in 1866, the Overland Monthly and Lippincott's Magazine in 1868, Appleton's Journal in 1869, and Scribner's Monthly in 1870."¹ Many of these publications quickly established sales of over a hundred thousand copies each month, and their foundation was in the new regional stories that were received with astonishing popularity. This interest was by no means restricted to the white, English-speaking audience. German immigrants could read fiction in the Cincinnati Republikaner and the Philadelphishe Zeitung. Scandinavians in Minneapolis were flooded with periodicals in virtually all of their languages. Japanese readers enjoyed the Ensei, begun in the 1890s, and new arrivals who were Spanish speakers could explore La Revista Hustrada de Nueva York. Pauline Hopkins edited a magazine for African Americans, the Colored American Magazine, although black writers such as Charles Chesnutt increasingly published in the Atlantic Monthly and other leading outlets.² America had become a truly multicultural society, and readers across the spectrum enjoyed the new emphasis on sectional literature.

Historically, when the central elements of the humor traditions evolved into what became known as Local Colorism, the short story emerged as a dominant literary form. America had its own literary genre, and it was succeeding beyond anything that had come before. However complex and subtle the origins of this movement, the central streams of influence upon it are clearly the oral and written traditions of storytelling from almost every immigrant group to arrive on the continent. The sharing of tales across the dinner table was a common form of entertainment throughout the country. When these brief narratives were written down, they evolved into the yarn, a dramatized form that presumes a speaker, often a regionalized rustic who speaks in the vernacular, reciting a story to an unruly group gathered about him. The fun often derives more from the manner of telling than from the tale told. These yarns, prevalent throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, were wildly popular entertainment enjoyed by a broad spectrum of Americans.

Implicit in humor stories was the assumption of class condescension, that the narrator and the readership were more sophisticated, better educated, and more worldly wise than the ungrammatical and unwashed characters of the tale. However, other comic forms used common folk to tell the tale in their own dialect. Down East humor, deriving from Maine and the rest of New England, featured ironic understatement from laconic speakers using their regional language. Often they seemed not to understand there was anything funny in the portrait of ridiculous characters (the overdressed Yankee peddler, the long-suffering, rustic husband) engaged in absurd events, told in a clipped, restrained, ungrammatical speech. When outsiders appeared in such tales, sometimes as frame narrators, they were normally urban and educated, superior in assumptions but naïve about the world they were visiting, as the plot often reveals. Some tales were told by a crackerbox philosopher such as Jack Downing, introduced in the 1830s by Seba Smith. The humorous events are small and contained in this method, and the amusement is generally verbal rather than physical.

In contrast, in the even more popular Southwestern humor, the comic effects are based on hyperbole, implausible events, irony, and outrageous characters. These tall tales presented frontiersmen, great hunters, legendary fighters, or a ring-tailed roarer engaged in wrestling bears or crocodiles. Thomas Bangs Thorpe's The Big Bear of Arkansas falls in this tradition as does Davy Crockett's Bear Hunting in Tennessee. Some tales featured athletes jumping the Mississippi River or prevailing in nature against impossible odds. Often an Eastern, educated frame narrator introduced the scene, set the stage, and turned over the telling to a local character, speaking in dialect, who spun out an improbable tale. Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County exemplifies this genre. In Twain's story the urban narrator ultimately becomes the victim of the joke for listening, helplessly, to an interminable shaggy dog story. Bret Harte's The Outcasts of Poker Flat is told by a speaker with knowledge of the classics who nonetheless describes simple characters, even prostitutes, with great sympathy and understanding. James Kirke Paulding's Nimrod's Wildfire Tall Talk also exemplifies the tradition. Although some of these humorous tales seemed hastily constructed, they contributed much to literary history, especially in the implementation of a highly localized setting and the use of vernacular speech in the construction of a tale. The appeal of the humor traditions helped to inspire the growth of the magazine in America, a phenomenon that defined the literature culture of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Short fiction had burst into view in these popular new periodicals, driven in part by the new concept of syndication, and the American public was fascinated to read about people from a broad range of traditions and ethnicities. The common folk generated broad interest in the superficial aspects of their lives as well as in the deeper conflicts that sprang from unique historical, social, and religious traditions.

Of all the regions of the country, New England furnished the settings for the most popular early works in the movement, particularly in the stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Their fiction depicted agrarian scenes in sometimes sentimental terms, but they could also write about gripping issues of life and death and searing moral dilemmas that served as the climactic moments of their fiction. Although the New England Local Colorists tended to be women writers, male authors played an equally important role in creating stories located in the rest of the country. Mark Twain and Bret Harte set many of their early works in California, which flourished after the discovery of gold in the 1840s. Owen Wister dealt with Wyoming, while Charles Chesnutt wrote about North Carolina, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Grace King, and George Washington Cable about Louisiana, and Margaret Deland about Pennsylvania. Hamlin Garland depicted the upper Midwest, whereas Edward Eggleston and Maurice Thompson worked with settings in Indiana. Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote two volumes of stories about Michigan before she moved south and addressed a new set of localized issues. For his part, Philander Deming featured upstate New York in his Adirondack Stories.

The old Confederacy became an area of special interest after the Civil War, and the Nation ran a series titled The South as it is that was so popular other Northern magazines quickly followed with similar coverage. After Augustus Baldwin Longstreet published Georgia Scenes in 1835 as part of the Southwest Humor tradition, featuring uncouth backwoods folk, the region emerged as the focus of interest across the nation.³ After the war, it quickly became a literary center, with Mary Murfree writing about Tennessee, Thomas Nelson Page about Virginia, James Lane Allen about Kentucky, Sherwood Bonner about Mississippi, and a host of authors, including Ruth McEnery Stuart, about Louisiana, in many ways the richest locus of complex ethnic, religious, and racial cultures in the country.

A multitude of factors merge to explain why the New Orleans area should have occasioned such a wealth of literature. As Louis D. Rubin Jr. has indicated, these writers had before them almost two hundred years of Louisiana history and life, under five flags, two contrasting modes of civilization, with myriad gradations of caste, class, and race. Here were poverty and wealth, old loyalties and old hatreds, several varieties of lost cause, a provincial but thoroughly urban metropolis dependent for its livelihood upon a vast agricultural region around it; here were the Old World and the New, with their competing institutions and loyalties, Latin, Catholic Church and an Anglo-Saxon Protestant Establishment.⁴ Beyond the general situation within the state, the Crescent City itself, as Arlin Turner maintains, offered much in that as "the most European city in the United States, it exhibited as no other city did the new world alongside the old world transplanted. It was bilingual; and besides French other languages of continental Europe clashed on its sidewalks, its banquettes. There were also varieties of patois compounded of half a dozen tongues. The Creoles, tracing their lineage to the best blood in France and Spain, maintained a proud aloofness, frequenting the opera and the theater, reading the newest books from Paris, and having no more than necessary to do with the pushing, commercial Américains."⁵ The fictional portrayal of such a culture, flourishing in a robust and newly revitalized city in which there were still newspapers published in French and German,⁶ was a perfect subject for the aesthetic of a burgeoning Local-Color fictional tradition, and writers after the war did not delay in utilizing it.

New Orleans and its surrounding bayous served as a complex setting because of its diverse population, its ownership by three different countries, its amalgam of languages and customs, its French legal system, ethnic codes, music and literature, marriage and courtship practices, and a legacy of slavery and racial stratification quite unlike any other area of the country. Indeed, in this sense, the literature of Louisiana fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially in the work of those writers most closely identified with New Orleans (Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson), cannot be fully understood without a grasp of the social and historical context from which it emerged.

Prior to the arrival of European adventurers in the sixteenth century, the southern Mississippi River region was home to a spectrum of Native American peoples, among them the Atakapa, the Bayougoula of the Choctaw nation, the Natchez, and the Natchitoches, and many of these names survive in locations throughout the area. At the same time, in the North, the French established New France, surrounding the upper and central Mississippi, a vast area incorporating much of Canada and the Midwest. In due course the expansion of the empire reached first to the Caribbean, where Santa Domingo was its most successful colony, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. In 1682 Robert Cavelier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi River area for France and named it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV, and in 1699 Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville established the first permanent settlement near Biloxi, Mississippi. The French thus claimed land on both ends of the river from its origin in northern Minnesota to its mouth in New Orleans. The settlement of Natchitoches, which figures prominently in the work of Kate Chopin, was founded in 1714 to promote trade with the peoples of the Texas area and to deter further encroachment of the Spanish empire into the region. French settlers quickly came in significant numbers along with the Germans, who clung to the Mississippi shores in what was called the German Coast. In the early seventeenth century, slaves were brought from the Caribbean and Africa, and they arrived with their native languages and cultural traditions, including voodoo, stirring music, and sexually explicit dances, all of which gradually merged into the local social fabric. Over time, the French lost their territories to the east of the Mississippi in what Americans called the French and Indian War, but it retained its dominance over the New Orleans area, which was inherently Francophile. However, the war had weakened France's position as a major power in the West, and in 1763 it ceded Louisiana to Spain.

The Spanish interregnum (1763–1803) changed local society less than might have been expected, in part because French-speaking immigrants continued swarming into the territory, including the Acadians, who had been driven out of Nova Scotia by the British. Of course, Spanish-speaking immigrants arrived with increased frequency, expanding the reach of their empire, and territorial law and governance were temporarily changed, but the language of the area remained French for the vast preponderance of the population. The slave trade expanded dramatically during this period, so much so that the African population quickly became the majority. Most importantly, perhaps, the Spanish introduced the concept of coartación allowing for slaves to contract to purchase their manumission, greatly increasing the number of free people of color.⁷ The French had earlier freed slaves who had served in the militia in various Indian wars, including two complete units of mixed-race soldiers in 1757.⁸ Some owners, Governor Bienville among them, freed his slaves after twenty-six years of service, which he was allowed to do because he no longer needed the permission of government officials.⁹ Other legal modifications also had an impact: under Spanish law slaves could own property, serve in the militia, and enjoy some of the other rights of free people, and life became easier for them during this period.¹⁰

However, after four decades, Napoleon purchased the territory back from Spain and quickly reestablished French law and culture throughout the area, only to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803, a maneuver deeply resented by the local Creole citizenry, those white, wealthy, French and Spanish settlers who had been born in America. As Kjell Ekstrom has explained, "Creole is a term applied, especially in the former Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonies of America, Africa, and the East Indies, to natives of pure European blood (sangre azul), distinguished from immigrants themselves born in Europe, and from the offspring of mixed blood, as mulattoes, quadroons, Eurasians and the like."¹¹ The term Creole is used consistently in this sense by George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and Grace King.¹² In fact, Cable wrote a book on the subject, The Creoles of Louisiana, which Scribner's brought out in 1884.¹³ King used the term in the same way in A History of Louisiana in 1893, New Orleans: The Place and the People in 1895, and the later Creole Families of New Orleans in 1921.¹⁴ On the other hand, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, writing an extensive essay on People of Color in Louisiana in the Journal of Negro History in 1916, used the term to refer exclusively to persons with some portion of African blood who were born in the United States.¹⁵ By then, the term had come to mean racial mixture, not purity. The revision of the concept may derive from the fact that, as the nineteenth century progressed, an increasing number of children had both wealthy white fathers and quadroon mothers; since, under the Napoleonic Code, the children carried their father's name, they identified with his position in society and adopted the epithet he used. In any event, by the twentieth century, the general understanding of Creole had changed to include people of mixed race in Louisiana.

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, however, people called Creoles were pure white, and the fact that they had been born in America, which distinguished them from French and Spanish immigrants, was the basis of their claim to land rights, which formed the core of their wealth.¹⁶ The term indicated, in a sense, a new ethnic category, one with implications for racial identity, social stratification, property rights, and religious orientation.¹⁷ The concept allowed Louisianans of colonial backgrounds to differentiate themselves from more recent immigrants from Europe, who represented a lower social segment of the population. With the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States, the official language of Louisiana suddenly became English, the currency the dollar, and the politics American democracy, although the territory clung tenaciously to the Napoleonic Code as the system of law. In the immediate years that followed, the slave rebellion in Haiti led to the influx of thousands of French-speaking new arrivals, some of them white plantation owners, many of them free people of color who had prospered on the island. Spanish-speaking people flooded into the region from Cuba even after the Louisiana Purchase, and Irish, Polish, and American businessmen arrived seeking opportunity in a burgeoning economy. Aiding this effort, Louisiana formally became a state in 1812, and its new status only increased the rapid change of the lower Mississippi.

The focal point for much of this social upheaval was New Orleans, founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and named for the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France. After 1803, spurred in part by vibrant financial activity brought by the American emphasis on free enterprise, the local economy grew rapidly, making the Crescent City one of the wealthiest in the country. Of course social mobility was a concept anathema to the traditional Creole elite, who, following European traditions, depended upon birthrights and landed income as the underpinning of positions of wealth and stature.

Thus, rather early in the nineteenth century, New Orleans aristocrats were behind in adapting to the new realities, clinging to an elegant past with silk gloves. They continued to think of Paris as their cultural axis, and they could afford to import fine wine, expensive clothing, and other luxuries from the Continent. In accord with their European background, they valued the arts and supported them lavishly. For example, the French Opera House, built in 1859, was the largest in America, and it featured imported French companies in major performances that attracted vast audiences from every level of society. The city was a major success, a marvel of multiethnic culture that was more complex in its origins and interactions than any other metropolitan population in America.

At the inception of the Civil War in 1861, Louisiana joined the Confederacy, in part because its economy was dependent in large measure on slavery for the growing of sugar and cotton crops. New Orleans was of strategic importance in that it controlled shipping on the Mississippi River and, equally important, to European destinations through its extensive port, one of the largest and most active in the world. As a result, Union forces quickly moved on the city, which could not resist the threat of a bombardment, and federal troops took command of the city in April of 1862. At the conclusion of the war, Union forces remained in Louisiana to protect the interests of the newly freed slaves, especially their ability to attend the numerous Freedmen's Bureau schools that the North had established to educate