SOURCE: Richardson, Thomas. “Local Color in Louisiana.” In The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., pp. 199-208. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Richardson describes the work of the major local color writers of the New South.]

When the journalist Edward King visited New Orleans in early 1873 as representative of “The Great South” series for Scribner's, he discovered more for his Northern audience than he or his editors, J. G. Holland and R. W. Gilder, could have expected. “Louisiana to-day is Paradise Lost,” he wrote. “In twenty years it may be Paradise Regained. … It is the battle of race with race, of the picturesque and unjust civilization of the past with the prosaic and leveling civilization of the present.” King was perceptive, and the conflicts he described—past versus present, Creole versus American, black versus white, traditional versus progressive values—would help to stimulate a significant literary movement, what Warner Berthoff calls a “New Orleans renaissance in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.”

To King's famous discovery of George Washington Cable, whom King assisted in placing “'Sieur George” with Scribner's, one may add Grace King, Kate Chopin, Ruth McEnery Stuart, the Creole historian Charles Gayarré, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lafcadio Hearn, who lived and wrote in New Orleans from 1877 to 1887. These writers together produced a unique literature, considerably more complex than much other work of the local-color era. The books they wrote about Louisiana are not only numerous but impressive, including Cable's Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880), Hearn's Chita (1889), and Chopin's The Awakening.

The Louisiana writers owed much of their contemporary popularity to the quaint, quasi-foreign setting that Creole New Orleans and Acadian Louisiana offered a curious Northern public. Perhaps more than any other American locale, the bayou country with its rich French history and complicated social texture satisfied local-color impulses. The new national spirit after 1865, with its accompanying industrial and urban growth, stimulated a growing number of eager readers of emerging magazines both to celebrate sectional peculiarities and to escape from a world of growing complexity. As Americans looked back down the road not taken, the entire South was generally rediscovered as a field for fiction, for the vanished Old South had special appeal. Louisiana writers were especially successful, since the vanished community they portrayed was far removed from the reality of living in America. Louisiana, more than any other Southern state, and New Orleans, more than any other American city, worked to the writer's advantage. “After Louisiana,” Robert Penn Warren would say years later, “nothing has been real.”

Louisiana writers could immediately combine a tropical setting of magnolias, oleander, and ancient architecture with a social and economic cauldron. Because of its location at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was a city of all classes and customs, with a “polyglot variety” in its population—“Spanish, Creole, Acadian, Negro (with gradations of field hand and house servant, octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto), Italian, German, Yankee, Sicilian, mountain white and river tawny” (Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1918 [1965]). The flatboatman from Kentucky milled in New Orleans streets, as did the Creole aristocrat, Caribbean sailor, American entrepreneur, and a sizable number of gens de couleur libres. Outside New Orleans there were French Acadian settlements, transplanted to Louisiana swamps and prairies, with colorful dialects among farmers, trappers, and fishermen. Finally, there was the Mississippi River itself, traveled by steamboats and river rats, and bordered by Negro shacks, antebellum homes, and fields of sugarcane. For the writer interested in sectional peculiarities, here were riches indeed. Louisiana local colorists were also in possession of historical material far more racy and challenging than the Old South alone could afford. By the 1880s, writers had nearly two centuries of Creole history, yellow-fever epidemics, quadroon balls, duels, the Code Noir, and characters like Jean Lafitte to use as source and background. Not only did writers draw directly on Louisiana history and legend for their stories, they found it so fascinating and so much a source of pride that considerable energy went into writing history itself.

The cankerous secrets revealed in Louisiana history, combined with the tensions in the contemporary postwar culture, help explain why this local-color literature has extraordinary strength and significance. As Shirley Ann Grau suggests, the Creole heritage in New Orleans reveals “the decline of an aristocracy under the pressure of circumstances”; it also mirrors the pressures that wracked the South after 1865. The classic conflict in New Orleans culture between the Creoles (the white descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers) and the invading Americans after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, had been decided by the 1870s. By then, the Creole community was well past its zenith, though the city continued its polarization between the older, French-speaking Vieux Carré and the newer, more commercial American sections. The passing of the Creole community, its best values as well as its worst, afforded Louisiana local colorists appropriate themes of transience, defeat, and a tradition more authentic than history.

Cable's treatment of the Creoles has been variously criticized, but he, like Grace King and Gayarré, had roots in New Orleans. His stories, and theirs, develop a genuine attractiveness in the Creole culture—family, a sense of place, warm friendships, and personal dignity in the face of overwhelming odds. At the same time, the Louisiana literature generally avoids the shallow idealism so often found in local color. Cable saw the connections between the decline of the Creoles and their self-destructive racial pride, and his best work makes it clear that such racial arrogance has direct application to broader problems of Southern history, especially the black-white conflict after 1865. Although it is true that none of the other Louisiana local colorists matched Cable's awareness of the shadow in the Southern garden, the complexity of New Orleans' racial background is as important to the strength of the literature as is the Creole heritage.

Perhaps the most important Southern artist working in the late nineteenth century, George W. Cable (1844-1925) is now praised for his courageous essays on civil rights, such as The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890), as well as for his early fiction about New Orleans, especially Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880). Not a Creole himself, Cable nevertheless knew his subject well. He was born in New Orleans, grew up there, served as a Confederate soldier, and returned to work there until 1884, when he moved north. As a clerk in the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, he began to study the colonial history of Louisiana while writing sketches for the Picayune; and his stories followed, he later told F. L. Pattee, because “it seemed a pity for the stuff to go so to waste.” In his essay “My Politics,” Cable tells how his reading of the Code Noir caused him such “sheer indignation” that he wrote the story of Bras-Coupé, first submitted through Edward King to Scribner's as “Bibi,” but rejected because of its brutality. Later the story was incorporated as the foundation of The Grandissimes.

Cable's best stories from Old Creole Days illustrate his preoccupation with a doomed Creole community. Living in aged, ruined settings, his major characters often are isolated and self-destructive, yet their dignity in the face of defeat makes them attractive. In “'Sieur George,” where the achievement is in the relation of setting and character, the reader glimpses the decay of two old men who slip along the “cobwebbed iron” of the Vieux Carré and up “rotten staircases that seem vainly trying to clamber out of the rubbish.” “Belles Demoiselles Plantation” demonstrates the consequences of past sins on the De Charleu family, as an old Creole who “will not utterly go back on ties of blood” watches his mansion and seven beautiful daughters sink into the Mississippi. Old Jean-ah Poquelin, once an “opulent indigo planter,” now lives isolated in a horrible swamp in an ancient house “half in ruins.” He fails in his attempt to protect family secrets (his brother is a leper living on the grounds) from the callous Americans who are bent on developing his property, but his loyalty is more admirable than the materialism of his adversaries.

The Grandissimes, according to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., is “the first modern Southern novel,” because it attempts “to deal honestly with the complexity of Southern racial experience.” Like the best stories of Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes balances between sympathy for and judgment on New Orleans and the South, but it is stronger because it contains, as Cable says, “as plain a protest against the times in which it was written as against the earlier times in which its scenes were set.” Here, Cable examines the connections between the decline of the best values in the Creole community, its self-destructive pride, and the farreaching effects of its sins on the contemporary South. These themes achieve full significance in Cable's creation of Honoré Grandissime, a Creole who attempts to reconcile his sympathy for the Southern community, represented by his own family, with his judgment on its evils, especially slavery and racism. By setting his novel in New Orleans in 1803, Cable caught the conflict between Honoré's Creole family and the Americans. The arrogance of the Grandissimes is bearing dark fruit—especially “the length, the blackness” of the “shadow of the Ethiopian.” Honoré must deal with his literal shadow, a half-brother, who is a free man of color also named Honoré Grandissime, and his family's brutal treatment of blacks, especially Bras-Coupé, whose curse continues to blight their fortunes. Honoré is also responsible to those traditional family values embodied in his uncle Agricola Fusilier, described in the novel as “the aged high priest of a doomed civilization.”

Cable continued to write about New Orleans and Louisiana throughout his long career, in Madame Delphine (1881), Dr. Sevier (1884), The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), and the Acadian novel Bonaventure (1888). In all, he would publish fourteen more novels and collections, and his last book, Lovers of Louisiana (1918), written seven years before his death, returns to his original themes and subject matter. Curiously, The Grandissimes, his first novel, is also his best. Not enough has been said about the polarization in the world Cable and others knew after 1865. During Reconstruction, tensions between past and present were expressed dogmatically by what C. Vann Woodward calls “the doomed generation,” those who remained loyal to the principles of the Old South, and another group who advocated the philosophy of the New South. Honoré Grandissime's dilemma mirrors Cable's own conflict as an artist working in the South after 1865. “As I watched the Great Reconstruction agony from its first day to its last,” Cable says, “I found my emotions deeply torn—with my sympathies ranged upon the pro-Southern side of the issue and my convictions drifting irresistibly toward the other.” In his career after The Grandissimes, Cable would be unable to reconcile his love for the South with his abhorrence of its evils. The result is a split in his life and art, social reform versus romantic escape. In his polemical essays, Cable the reformer and New South advocate assumes that the past can be redeemed in the present. In the pastoral Bonaventure and the romances beginning with The Cavalier (1901), he attempts escape through retrieval of an idyllic past, where the problems of racism are not present. Even in The Grandissimes, Honoré's dilemma shares importance with Cable's moral voice, represented by Joseph Frowenfeld, a character who exists outside the novel's major themes.

Grace Elizabeth King (1851-1932) has recently begun to receive the critical treatment she deserves, in part because of the appearance of Robert Bush's anthology, Grace King: A Selection of Her Writings (1973) and his Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983). Rescued from her traditional role as a lesser figure who sought to correct Cable's views on New Orleans, King is seen by Bush as a writer whose work was influenced by her feeling about Cable's popularity, her French education, her allegiance to her family during Reconstruction, and the Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884-1886, which brought outsiders like Richard Watson Gilder and Charles Dudley Warner to New Orleans. In her Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (1932), King recalls her 1885 interview with Gilder about Cable. Cable, she said, had “stabbed the city in the back … to please the Northern press,” proclaiming “his preference for colored people over white” and “quadroons over the Creoles.” Gilder had replied, “if Cable is so false to you, why do not some of you write better?” King was so motivated to answer Gilder's challenge that she climbed the attic stairs the next morning and began “Monsieur Motte.” King had deep personal feelings about the humiliation suffered by her family after the Civil War. She was not a Creole, but her aristocratic family had been intimate in circles that Cable knew mostly through observation and research. Like the Creoles, her education and background were exclusively French; like them, she had lost home and property to a new regime. Her “grand theme,” Bush says, was “defending the character of New Orleans and upholding … its traditions.” She naturally shared the anger of Creoles like Adrien Rouquette and Charles Gayarré toward Cable and his work.

However, “Monsieur Motte” and subsequent stories do not simply idealize the past; nor are they only important as “the defense of the Creoles.” Anne Jones has recently made the point that King's portrayal of women (both black and white) is her real subject. In addition, King's reading of French realists stimulated her irony and her choice of contemporary subject matter. While the quadroon Marcélite of “Monsieur Motte” assumes a fictitious white identity to support the education of her former master's child—a devotion that readers might conclude “was the deserved reward of benign treatment”—her role as a black woman (and the role of other women in the work) is treated with surprising complexity. King draws back from uncomfortable conclusions about the traditional roles of blacks and women, but Jones finds a “cognitive dissonance” in her work, a “rebellious opposite” to orthodoxy. Likewise, in her later novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard (1916), King does not merely portray affectionate black-white relationships in the return of the former slaves Jerry and Matilda as servants to their old master; instead, “she is the sympathetic and … melancholy interpreter of the sorrows of Jerry's family as she sees it disintegrate.”

King's cultivated friendship with Charles Dudley Warner led to the magazine publication of “Monsieur Motte” (1885) and to its expansion into a book (1888). As her stories continued to appear in magazines, she visited among friends in the Northern literary establishment and worked in Europe. Her collections of short stories, Tales of a Time and Place (1892) and Balcony Stories (1893), preceded a remarkable number of histories: a biography of Bienville (1892), for which she had done research in Paris; a textbook of Louisiana history (1893); New Orleans, the Place and the People (1895); De Soto and His Men in the Land of Florida (1898); Stories from Louisiana History (1905); and Creole Families of New Orleans (1921). King's final novel, La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), has received little attention. Until recently she has been remembered chiefly for Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (1932), a disappointing book because, as Bush says, “it brought out the polite side of Grace King the lady rather than the perceptive … writer at her best.”

One of Grace King's most significant friendships was with the Creole historian Charles Gayarré (1805-1895), an elder statesman in Louisiana society after 1865. Judge Gayarré is probably best known for his impressive History of Louisiana, but he is also remembered as an important representative of the culture which had to face tremendous social change in the years following the war. From a distinguished family, Gayarré was a well-traveled lawyer-planter whose political career before 1860 had included election to the United States Senate (a term cut short by illness in the 1830s) and service to Louisiana in a variety of important state offices. During the local-color era, he remained a well-known public figure, but one without power or privilege. He had lost his large personal fortune in the war, for he invested about ＄500,000 in the Confederate cause. Like other elderly aristocratic Southerners, he found the economic and spiritual climate after 1865 devastating.

With his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne, Gayarré has been described as the last of the literary cavaliers, but his historical work is professionally done. He wrote a history in French, Histoire de la Louisiana (1846-1847), and the Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848). His best work, however, is the multivolume History of Louisiana. The French Domination (2 vols., 1854) covered the years to 1769, The Spanish Domination (1854) to 1803, The American Domination (1866) to 1816, with a supplement sketching the history from 1816 to 1861. His political and historical novels, The School for Politics (1854), Fernando de Lemos (1872), and Aubert Dubayet (1882), are lightly regarded, but his articles written for magazines and newspapers after the war are rewarding. Hubbell especially praises “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Régime,” which describes Gayarré's childhood on the plantation of his grandfather Etienne de Boré. Gayarré reacted even more strongly than King to Cable's portrayal of the Creoles in The Grandissimes. Angry that Cable became respected as the formal authority on Louisiana culture while his own credentials were overlooked, Gayarré published a lecture, The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance (1885), which is perhaps the best definition of the adverse Creole reaction to Cable.

Even among specialists in Afro-American literature the memory of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) has grown dim. But in her day, Dunbar-Nelson was recognized as a worthy colleague of Charles W. Chesnutt. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans, a descendant of the proud colony of free Negroes in New Orleans which numbered no less than eighteen thousand at the beginning of the Civil War, she was educated through college in her hometown. In 1878 she married Paul Laurence Dunbar and never returned to the South. She and Dunbar separated by mutual consent in 1902, and after Dunbar's death she remarried. From 1902 until 1920 in Wilmington, Delaware, she headed a high school English department. From 1924 until 1928 she was a parole worker and teacher at a state industrial school for girls near Wilmington. She died in a Philadelphia hospital, still nationally prominent among Negroes, if only because of her connection with Dunbar and her associations with the Republican party.

Dunbar-Nelson wrote short stories, of which two collections appeared, Violets and Other Tales (1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (1899). Her fictive world is distinctly Creole. The characters she shapes speak French or, when they must, a broken English, and they live in or near New Orleans. Yet, rarely are they black. Racially typical of her protagonists are an aging violinist who loses his position in the orchestra of the New Orleans opera and a young girl who fortunately discovers before it is too late that nunneries are not for her. Dunbar-Nelson's nearest approach to the social protest that might be expected of her is a somewhat oblique indication of her approval of the conduct of some Negro stevedores who are involved as scabs in a strike. Romantic love, not always ending happily, and the Gallic culture in her native state are her two main themes. Of them she speaks sympathetically and gracefully, even though in muted tones and with a voice quickly permitted to cease once she no longer lived in the land of her childhood.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), the literary sojourner who lived in New Orleans from 1877 to 1887, estimated Cable more highly than Gayarré had. He was drawn to Louisiana, in part, by his impressions of “Jean-ah Poquelin,” and he praised Cable's work in “The Scenes of Cable's Romances.” As Lewis Simpson has suggested, the central problem in dealing with Hearn is his “literary and spiritual identity,” for his ten years in New Orleans was only one stop in an international career that later carried him to the West Indies, New York, and, especially, Japan. Hearn had been born on a Greek island, and he had grown up in Ireland and France before being sent to America. In New Orleans Hearn found a culture more suitable to his interests than that of Cincinnati, where he had lived from 1869 to 1877.

Hearn's letters to his Cincinnati friends reveal a great deal of the sensuous appeal he found in the local color of New Orleans, as do his articles sent back to the Cincinnati Commercial. However, without money or employment, Hearn's first months in New Orleans were starving ones, and he was in desperate circumstances when he was hired by the Item. Yet his employment by the Item, and his later work for the Times-Democrat, were doubly fortunate, for the papers not only gave Hearn the means to live, they offered a flexible and creative outlet for his work. In a column called “The Foreign Press,” in editorials, and in later collections, Hearn was able to offer his cultivated New Orleans readers translations from Gautier, Flaubert, and others, as well as a variety of exotic stories, collected as Stray Leaves from Strange Literature (1884) and Some Chinese Ghosts (1887). He also immersed himself in New Orleans culture; in his columns and in Northern magazines, he published a variety of local legends, street scenes, character sketches, and Creole songs. These are well represented in Creole Sketches (1924) and in The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1949). Further documentation of the New Orleans culture he found so charming are the famous recipes he assembled in La Cuisine Créole (1885) and his “Gombo Zhèbes” (1885), a dictionary of Creole proverbs.

The most important work to spring from Hearn's Louisiana experience is Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889), his first book of fiction. As Arlin Turner points out in the introduction to his recent edition, the book drew from Hearn's several vacation experiences at Grande Isle, from the variety of trips Hearn had made among the islands of the Gulf Coast, and from his reading of Herbert Spencer. Hearn had heard from Cable the story of a child saved from the complete destruction of L'Ile Dernière, a resort much like Grande Isle, in the hurricane of August 10, 1856, and he had read newspaper accounts of the event. Chita has three parts, “The Legend of L'Ile Dernière,” a powerful description of the gathering storm, climaxed by the tide flooding the island and sweeping the hotel away; “Out of the Sea's Strength,” which tells of the girl's rescue; and “The Shadow of the Tide,” which brings the girl's real father, a wealthy Creole doctor, to the island ten years later. The first section, describing the awesome power of the sea, is so well done that Lewis Leary thinks it deserves a place beside “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Chita has also been praised by Beongcheon Yu in An Ape of Gods (1964) as Hearn's “mastery of the … local color technique,” especially regarding “primitive folkways” and “the exotic rhythm of outlandish dialects, especially Creole and Spanish.”

Like Hearn, Cable used various dialects—Creole, German, Negro, Acadian—in his early fiction to capture accurate pictures of Louisiana; Grace King did not, since she sought realism in contemporary subject matter. Perhaps she was wise, for the dialect writing of the local-color era, more quaint than realistic, quickly became dated. Ruth McEnery Stuart (1852-1917), one of the most popular and prolific of the dialect writers of the 1890s, has, to some extent, been victimized by it. In twenty books and more than eighty magazine stories, Stuart used dialect to portray life as she remembered it in Louisiana and Arkansas. She grew up in a country home near New Orleans, married A. O. Stuart, a wealthy Arkansas planter, in 1879, and was widowed in 1883. Like Grace King, she was friendly with Charles Dudley Warner; and it was through him that she launched a successful writing career, moving to New York in 1888.

From her first magazine stories of the late 1880s and her first novels, The Story of Babette (1894) and Arlotta's Intended (1894), Stuart moved quickly to the subject matter that made her popular—her portrayal of rural whites in Arkansas and her pictures of Southern blacks. Her books about the Arkansas farmers include Sonny (1896), one of the best representatives of dialect fiction during the local-color movement, and In Simpkinsville (1897), a collection focusing on the themes of courtship and marriage. Humorous treatments of marriage are also at the center of her fiction about blacks, as in A Golden Wedding and Other Tales (1893) and Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches (1898). Although Joel Chandler Harris told Stuart, “You have got nearer the heart of the Negro than any of us,” her treatment of blacks is generally idealized—faithful, smiling, sentimental. Her best book, Napoleon Jackson: The Gentleman of the Plush Rocker (1902), at least acknowledges the serious undercurrent in black-white relations after 1865.

Warner Berthoff says, correctly, that Louisiana local color has kept its “savor better than the work of any other regional school in late nineteenth-century American writing.” In part, our continued reading of this surprising number of books reflects the reason for their popularity in their own era. The Louisiana culture the local colorists portray makes interesting reading. The French background, especially the decline of the Creole aristocracy, tells a story that “runs the gamut from sublime romance to smelly sordidness.” More important, however, we continue to sense an unusual complexity in these works, a complexity not found in more idealized local color. Such strength springs directly from the tensions in Louisiana culture. Anne Jones finds in New Orleans after 1865 a commingling “of conflicts and resolutions that made [it] almost a perfect city for a writer.” What Edward King really discovered in the Paradise Lost of 1873 Louisiana was the well-spring of a literary movement that would do considerably more than dominate the market-place for over thirty years. The best books written in and about Louisiana during the local-color era—Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes, Chita, The Pleasant Ways of St. Medard, The Awakening—comprise a significant literature, well worth our attention a century later.