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• Monday, October 2, 2006 08:17 AM

  George Washington Cable

  Any discussion of the literature of New Orleans needs to include George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880). In this pair of uncompromising works, which were widely reviled in the South of their day, Cable tackles the issues of slavery and white supremacy head on. Even today – as is sometimes the case with Faulkner – many southern critics and Cable’s fellow New Orleanians have not found it within themselves to fully embrace Cable. His insistence upon the inclusion of the darker, more violent side of the Southern experience unsettles his fiction with difficult knots and contradictions. The story of the enslavement of the African royal prince Bras-Coupé, tucked into the center of The Grandissimes, illustrates, (as Jay Hubbell explains in his monumental The South in American Literature), “The rudiments of the internal division between loving and hating the South that identifies Faulkner’s Quentin Compson as the quintessential Southern imagination” (xix).

  Cable’s Grandissimes, a work that late nineteenth century tourists actually used in their tours of New Orleans because of its meticulous fidelity to place, is permeated with an obvious love for his native city. Mining the cultural humus that had accumulated over the city’s long and culturally varied history, Cable crafts a work that both celebrates, yet refuses to turn from the grim reality of its slave-tainted past. As some critics have noted, The Grandissimes represents the first significant attempt in literature by a native Southerner to grapple with this disturbing problem that has affected the region on every fundamental level. Slavery, Cable seems to be saying, is a sin that was produced collectively and must be similarly expiated. Mark Twain (a friend of Cable's) felt that he was the only writer in all the South, despite its post-war embrace of modern commercialism, who thought beyond its attachment to its feudal past – the only writer, in effect, who thought like a modern.

  Jean Marie Poquelin, (from the short story “Jean-ah-Poquelin” in Old Creole Days) is a formerly wealthy indigo planter from a New Orleans that, in the wake of the collapse of the slave-based economy, is now gone. (New Orleans has remade itself before). Jean lives in a brooding house at the edge of the city with a mute slave and the mystery of his half-brother, who, it is rumored, Jean has murdered. In an early instance of unchecked urban development, the city has been pressuring Jean to allow them to drain his poisonous marsh in order to put a road past his front gate. The land upon which the house stands, the levee of a draining canal from its plantation past, mirrors Jean’s fierce resistance to modern development: “The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers” (180). Here, Cable seems to say, is the last entrenchment of the sins of the South’s slave-holding past. It will not, both Jean and the land demand, be swept under the rug of progress.

  Compelling and confrontational works, and I highly recommend both of these New Orleans-related titles.

  —perryaka Read perryaka's other letters
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