Nineteenth-Century New Orleans in Literature

Home , Adrien Rouquette, Jean Saint Malo, Juliette Toussaint, Kate Chopin, Nathaniel Parker Willis

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

SOCIAL LIVES: NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW ORLEANS IN LITERATURE

A Dissertation in

English

Erica Stevens

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2016 ii

The dissertation of Erica Stevens was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Sean X. Goudie Associate Professor of English Committee Co-Chair

Christopher Castiglia Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Committee Co-Chair

Hester Blum Associate Professor of English

Jonathan Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English

Debra Hawhee Professor of English Head of the Department of English

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

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ABSTRACT

Social Lives: Nineteenth-Century New Orleans in Literature is about two major subjects: the idea of the social in the nineteenth century and New Orleans in literary imagination. These two subjects intersect for both obvious and less-obvious reasons. New Orleans is, of course, the nation’s depository and hub for fun, freedom, and cultural exchange. I argue that connotations of celebration, as in a “social event,” are not divorced from what we see as sociological interaction.

Thus, many of my readings of texts emphasize moments of excessive pleasure and desire, or meditations on collectivities in carnivalesque action. I pair a desire for Otherness in local-color writing with the discourse of “social equality,” or, for another example, antebellum quadroon balls with postbellum prognostications of large-scale racial “miscegenation.” In other words, I argue that New Orleans shows us how social order and sociality’s affects overlap and influence one another throughout the nineteenth century.

Social Lives contributes to the fields of aesthetics, transnationalism, and African-

American literature especially where they intersect with notions of publicity or collectivity. A large body of scholarship posits a pure form of (social) interaction as prior to and more real than any recognizable or named social order. My intervention involves exploring the way that nineteenth-century texts theorize the idea of the social before the professionalization of sociology. My dissertation finds that there are many more ways that the social takes formal shape at different scales of the local, regional, and global. Moreover, part of my interest is to emphasize

New Orleans’s importance to African-American literature—not a surprising claim but one, I argue, that has not been examined as a distinctly social issue, as opposed to the many studies of cultural traditions in the city. This new understanding of New Orleans’s social lives engages iv issues surrounding slavery and the “Negro Problem” in the nineteenth century, showing how

New Orleans helped writers to understand their aesthetic and political projects.

The “social” looks different in each of the project’s chapters in order to capture its mobility and ambiguity in reference to structure, relation, interaction, or entertainment. My archive challenges the narrative of “Americanization” as a contested and teleological process in the nineteenth century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Social Lives 1

Chapter 1: Contrast and the Creole 26

Chapter 2: Social Equality and Local Charm 97

Chapter 3: Charles Chesnutt and the Event 170

Chapter 4: Toward New Orleans 225

Coda: Get Down 279

Bibliography 284

List of Figures

1: The Statue on Display at the Dusseldorf Gallery in New York City 52

2: New Orleans Slave Auction, 1839 64

3: Davidson, B. Palmer, A Secret of the Vieux Carré 105

4: A Secret of the Vieux Carré 106

5: Cable’s Notes for an Unpublished Essay 108

6: Ulysses S. Grant as a Tobacco Grub 153

7: “The Carnival--'White and Black Join in its Masquerading” 153

8: Handbook of the Carnival (New Orleans: John W. Madden, 1874) 154

9: Harper’s Weekly: New Orleans Massacre, 1866 158

10: Cable Collection, Correspondence 283

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not be possible without a lively social life and a supportive group of collaborators. My committee pushed me to find my voice amongst critics and historians I’ve long admired. I am forever grateful to Sean Goudie, who knows when to be tough and when to be kind. He cared deeply for my work, and he cared enough about me to keep me working.

Christopher Castiglia, over four engaging seminars, taught me how to ask the right questions. He was always a pleasure to meet with, talk with, and socialize with. Hester Blum has encouraged me to trust my material. She gave me unforgettable advice about how to navigate archival trips and how to navigate the academic world as a woman. Jonathan Eburne reminded me to explore but to be exact in every word.

I have received a great deal of material support; this project wouldn’t have been possible without travel grants and a dissertation fellowship from the Center for American Literary Study, as well as the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. The support I received from the Research and Graduate Studies Organization at Pennsylvania State University was essential to writing this project. Debra Hawhee was a champion of mine in these regards, and I thank her for seeing my project as valuable.

This dissertation was always inspired by the frantic conversations I had with friends and colleagues. Some of my happiest times have been standing in circles with best friends and acquaintances (a relationship forever underrated, I say), all of us bursting with energy, laughter, and ideas. It was an honor to find a group of such intelligent and fun people, many of whom read drafts in stages I would only ever show to people I could really trust: Michelle Huang, Ryan

Marks, Jason Maxwell, Eric Vallee, Ting Chang, Juliette Hawkins, Colin Hogan. Lisa

McGunigal, Jace Gatzmeyer, Michah Donohue made up my official dissertation group, but, of viii course, we were true friends. My group at Penn State’s Counseling and Psychiatric Services were my anonymous support in the last year of writing. They were daring saviors, and they gave me my joy back. Such counseling could also always be found at Zeno’s, where I spent six years with the best staff and the best beers.

Susan Weeber has always affirmed me and has written me so many encouraging sentiments as she was writing an inspiringly smart dissertation. I can only tell her exactly what she told me: I don’t think I could have done it without her. Jacob Hughes described and summarized my dissertation for me before I ever wrote a word of it; he knew my social mobility was best described in a look of “weariness or scorn” and gave me courage to keep going. Sarah

Salter was my mentor since day one of graduate school. During our dog walks, she let me talk out every idea and generously made me think I was capable. She was my partner through ups and downs, through conferences, through drafts, through our fun life together.

Matt Weber, I fought for you and you fought for me, and now we’re just happy together, despite this whole continent between us. I thank Matt for showing me (and my family) his love and kindness. He was there for me in the final hours of writing, putting aside his own work to help me with mine. I’ve had fun in New Orleans with a lot of people, but I can’t wait to go back there again and again and again with him.

I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to my family, three beautiful and strong women.

Natalie and Lorna know that I could never love anyone as much as I love my sisters. I hope that in the coming years I’ll be able to help you as you’ve helped me these past years since I’ve left our Texas home. My mother, who has been through far too much, who gives far too much, I owe everything. She wrote in a birthday card some years ago, “I feel closer to you because of this ix independence you possess.” Thank you for your respect and for letting me go away to New

Orleans years ago (and for helping me stay there when I thought I couldn’t).

Because his girls miss him every day, I dedicate this dissertation to my father’s memory; his love of good times lives in these words and every single day it took to write them.

Introduction

“New Orleans like HooDoo is all over place and time.”1

– Ishmael Reed, “Shrovetide in Old New Orleans”

In 1804 Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne wrote to President James Madison, “I fear you will suppose that I am wanting in respect in calling your attention to the balls of New

Orleans; but I do assure you, Sir, that they occupy much of the public mind and from them have proceeded the greatest embarrassments, which have hitherto attended my administration.” 2

Frivolity, as well as Claiborne’s apology for speaking of such things, both point to the unexpected problem of fun in the acquisition of Louisiana. Claiborne’s “embarrassment,” or difficulty, refers to the nationally reported “War of the Quadrilles” in which French and

American music battled on the dance floors. A creole New Orleans editor complained that

Claiborne had attempted to “introduce dances with which we were unacquainted, which resulted in a battle, and broke up the public amusements for the whole season.”3 By publishing the schedule of dances in local newspapers, government officials who oversaw these balls hoped to create compromise and prevent any rowdy requests for patriotic songs. Claiborne’s “wanting in respect” for bringing this issue to Madison speaks to the ability for frivolity to cross over into the political—and its ability to remain frivolous. We could read Claiborne’s assumption about the silliness of reporting on ball-room skirmishes as a strategy of domination, making the frontier population seem unserious in treasuring nothing more than fun and mere amusements. If the

1 Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 25. What’s interesting about 2 Qtd in Ann Ostendorf, Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800-1860 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011), 75. 3 Qtd. in Ostendorf, Sounds American, 78. 2 creole people were patriotic, their attachments seemed not high-minded but troublingly embodied and wild. Not only did the annexation of Louisiana challenge national space, its social lives put the “location of culture” (to borrow Homi Bhabha’s term) in a liminal place that seemed like nothing but mere fun.4

George Washington Cable would recall New Orleans’s early ballroom culture in the first sentence of his novel The Grandissimes: “It was in the Théatre St. Philippe (they had laid a temporary floor over the parquette seats) in the city we now call New Orleans, in the month of

September, and in the year 1803.”5 Over the course of the novel, Cable satirizes the cultural clash and the hatred of the “tyrant” Claiborne. Against the more progressive-minded protagonist

Joseph Frowenfeld, a German-American newcomer to the city, the New Orleans society of creoles celebrate but also deny their colonial past. When Frowenfeld’s friend and kind of creole- life cicerone, Raoul, asks if he can display a painting in the window of Frowenfeld’s store, we read the following exchange:

“What is it?”

“Louisiana rif-using to hanter de h-Union!” replied the Creole, with an ecstasy

that threatened to burst forth in hip-hurrahs.

Joseph said nothing, but silently wondered at Louisiana’s anatomy.

“Gran’ subject’!” said the Creole.

“Allegorical,” replied the hard-pressed apothecary.6

Raoul hopes that Joseph might place the painting in the front window for “egshibbyshun” and

4 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). At the same time, diversion itself might be used as a tool to make the local population seem dangerous and unruly, linking pleasure to violence. One constant fear, as Charles Brockden Brown’s pamphlets on the possible acquisition of Louisiana express, was the possibility of revolution and rebellion, conducted through “the consummate arts of the French.” See Brown, An Address to the Government of the United States, on the Cession of Louisiana to the French, and Monroe’s Embassy; or, The Conduct of the Government, in Relation to Our Claims to the Navigation of the Mississippi. 5 Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1880), 1. 6 Cable, 145. 3 only sell the artwork once some inquiring customer demands it. Joseph disagrees with the plan and says, “you had better let me say plainly that it is for sale.”7 By 1879, when The Grandissimes appeared in Scribner’s, the vision of Louisiana’s political past was being read as “allegorical,” a myth for sale in a shop window owned by an enterprising Yankee.

My examples of Claiborne and The Grandissimes serve as an introduction to nineteenth- century social life in New Orleans and its representation. My project does not concern modern sociology or its historical development in any conventional sense. Émile Durkheim and Franz

Boaz, the “fathers” of sociology and cultural anthropology, respectively, did not assume these institutional positions until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I do not treat this professionalization as the only story to tell about concepts of the social and social theory— although Charles Darwin makes an appearance in the following pages as the virtual king of a

Mardi Gras parade. In nineteenth-century New Orleans, the idea of the social is local and contested, real and imaginary, or, as Raymond Williams suggests, general and abstract.

Williams’s definition of “society” in his Keywords has been less of a touchstone for literary critics than has his influential discussion of the word “culture.” Of culture, Williams argues that it is one of the most complicated words in the English language. Indeed, recent literary scholarship has wrestled with placing literature inside culture and, moreover, within the late- nineteenth-century shift from conceiving culture as civilized achievement (culture as “high culture”) to understanding cultures, in the plural. Of “society,” however, Williams often cites

“overlap” in its definitions, which he describes in this way: “Society is now clear in two main senses: as our most general term for the body of institutions and relationships within which a relatively large group of people live; and as our most abstract term for the condition in which

7 Cable, 146. 4 such institutions and relationships are formed.”8 Just as Williams’s account of culture shows how the new disciplinary standard still contains, is haunted by, older ways of acknowledging culture, so too is the social, as a “system of common life,” always overlapping with sociability, or

“being” social, as in fellowship with others. Starting his historical definition of society, Williams writes that we must “remember that the primary meaning of society was companionship or fellowship.”9 This definitional drag might initially seem less pressing to literary study than culture’s problem of hierarchy or progress.10 But in nineteenth-century New Orleans, these definitions Williams discussed were also inextricable from the active fellowship that “being social” describes. Therefore, in the following chapters, the definitions of “social” are not always the same—but the tension of overlapping accounts of what Williams might call the “general” (an aggregate or whole) and the “abstract” (interactive connections) are.

We can see this tension notably in the “rogue colonialism” of early Louisiana, or the actions of individuals acting in self-interest not contained by a planned imperial project. As many historians of early New Orleans have noted, imposed “social order” was complicated by daily operations. However, this “order/disorder” binary, one historian notes, is only “a figment of an eighteenth-century European worldview.”11 New Orleans was, so Shannon Lee Dawdy claims, an important site for testing Enlightenment thinking on developing concepts of society.12

Disorderliness, something bursting at the seams of a “general” society, was a foundational story of New Orleans, one that we see in Claiborne’s letter and mocked in Cable’s novel.

My focus on a specific place might seem to return the “social” to its meaning as a face-

8 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), 291. 9 Ibid., 291. 10 Queer theory could certainly show, with its antisocial theses, that in many ways the ideas of sociality are, indeed, related to cultural representations of (reproductive) success. 11 Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008), 11. 12 Ibid., 21. 5 to-face realm of the actual, but the very border between interaction and the ideas of interaction, its imaginary projections, is, I argue, the subject of inquiry for these New Orleans writers.

Further, as my epigraph above suggests, “New Orleans, like HooDoo, is all over space and time.” I argue that this is indeed true, in a particular and real way, and also in its mystical

HooDoo way—indeed, that dualism is a central belief of voodoo and conjuring. New Orleans is all over space and time because it travels so often, but perhaps not so easily, as a historical romantic setting—many of the texts I discuss in the following chapters will demonstrate just that.

It also extends beyond its own bounds as a cosmopolitan space as people travel toward and away from it, carrying hopes for and memories of the city with them (see my discussion of Martin

Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America). All this being true, then, what is “local” about interaction in New Orleans is hardly rooted, nor is it necessarily “real,” but it comes from recognizing the nature of the city’s porous borders.

In the following pages, the social is an idea with a history that is local—but even “local” means something much different than rooted, native, or limited in this Atlantic entrepot, this gateway, this creole city. At times, I use (and consider) New Orleans as a synecdoche for

Louisiana, and even for the entire Mississippi Valley of which it was an important stop for travelers, merchants, slaves, and even storms. It was, I argue, a city of relations, constituted by constantly shifting boundaries.13

My project has implications for a wider sense of the social in the nineteenth century, but it is first a study of New Orleans. My claim is that throughout the nineteenth century (and even into the twentieth) sociological interaction is entangled itself with connotations of the “social,” as

13 I am influenced by the meaning of “the location of culture,” which for Homi Bhabha is not a stable cartographic location but a liminal space. National culture emerges from the “interstices,” Bhabha argues. It is here that we find “the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (2). 6 a state of being social. Thus, the texts I examine emphasize moments of excessive pleasure, consider the nature of celebration, or meditate on collectivities in carnivalesque action. My chapters pair, for example, a desire for Otherness in local-color writing with the discourse of

“social equality,” or antebellum quadroon balls with postbellum prognostications of large-scale racial “miscegenation.” These arrangements matter because they show that concerns of social structure are not in easy relationship to sociability. It’s not always the case that the unruly rowdiness of a social life rebels against order, however. This critical truism is one I question more below. Especially working within myths of a permissive New Orleans, its writers explicitly questioned or reexamined this binary.

Again, I argue that social order, social interaction, sociality’s affects overlap and influence one another throughout the nineteenth century. New Orleans writers didn’t only concern themselves with the city’s creolized culture but tried to understand that culture within and against these definitional issues of the social. Later in the century, with the popularity of local-color fiction, the social would itself become a cultural object, determined by a measure of authenticity, a burden and a shine that New Orleans continues to carry.

While today’s historians have moved far from a singular focus on New England colonialism and have given New Orleans a central place in studies of the global south or the

Atlantic world, the city has yet to be fully understood as its own meaningful site for understanding structures of society. Almost every literary critic and historian of nineteenth- century New Orleans who tries to understand its complex colonial beginnings uses the issue of the city’s “exceptionalism” as part of his or her methodology.14 It is a peculiar city within a

14 Barbara Eckstein, in an entire chapter devoted to “The Claims for New Orleans’s Exceptionalism,” writes that “the interracialism and other boundary violations that emerge in the mongrel tales and informal histories that claim exceptional status for New Orleans are arguably the defining characteristic of the city’s folkways,” or, as she also calls it, the “city’s affect” and “place-tone.” Far from mindlessly celebrating these “mongrel tales” in a way that 7

South known for its “peculiar institution.” I, thus, shift attention away from the exception debate because it is overly informed by understanding the city through narrow concepts of culture. As will become apparent in chapter one, I argue instead that a parallel and appositional relationship is a key way of understanding New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Thus, the geopolitical and the spatial—but not just questions of the exceptional—are always part of New Orleans’s constantly developing sense of the social. The controversies over the social in the following chapters are tied to reconsiderations of space and form, the facts of New Orleans’s neighborhoods, its laws of segregation, and its bodies of water.

I intend to investigate New Orleans literature for its alternative structures of relation, or even forms of sociality that challenge the difference inherent in relation as such. Often, then, my arguments implicitly argue for an unrecognized place of, or a way of placing, New Orleans in a national literary scene or in national literary trends—not for its singularity, but for its proximity to a variety of discourses on art, sociability, pleasure, freedom, and environment.

A focus on “proximity,” too, accounts for the important spatio-temporal aspects of New

Orleans writing; from segregation to literary charm, closeness and place go hand-in-hand. As

Williams referenced, the idea of “society” as fellowship and as an object both imply a kind of

merely repeats their origins, Eckstein invokes these somewhat romantic conceptions of place in order to understand the way “literary texts have taken up these circulating claims [of exceptionalism].” Eckstein, Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3, 5. Beyond many important chapters and articles on early New Orleans multilingual and transnational culture, nineteenth-century literary scholars have recently turned to New Orleans for reasons related to its history of exceptionalism. Lloyd Pratt and Wai Chee Dimock have both approached Hurricane Katrina’s effect on understandings of national belonging and representation in ways that highlight the continued problem of singularity in the city. For Pratt, Hurricane Katrina does not represent an “example” of or an important “exception” to governmental response but instead constitutes an “Event,” something that challenges the very grounds of representation. Dimock’s argument has some of the same concerns, as she insists that we consider Katrina a global phenomenon. While many blame the U.S. government for not valuing the South, its regions, or its “black people,” Dimock argues that sovereignty, regardless of assessments about who and what deserves protection, is simply a weak concept and an incapable solution. Katrina shows us a need to think beyond the nation’s ability to be sovereign and to protect. Pratt, “New Orleans and its Storm: Exception, Example, or Event?” American Literary History 19.1 (2007), 251-265; Dimock, “World History According to Katrina” in States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009), 144. 8 cohesiveness. It is my understanding that the Caribbean and the Atlantic history of trade is not just about overcoming distance, but, inherently, also about understanding the benefits and problems of proximity. Proximity as nearness gives us a different order of connection and difference. Moreover, though many technologies of the nineteenth century made literally overcoming distance easier and, through printed text, made it imaginatively easier as well, this very change provoked questions not just of distance but also, indeed precisely, of proximity. For example, in chapter one I understand “contrast” as a social aesthetic form of discontinuity in proximity. I see this form appear across much Caribbean and postcolonial criticism, such as in

Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, his study of a “meta-archipelago” without “a boundary nor a center.”15

This project’s emergence out of the current academic whirl of both the formalist and sociological turns accounts for some of its differences from the most important work on nineteenth-century New Orleans and one of the most important still-often-cited works on transnational and hemispheric method, Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic

Performance. Roach’s sweeping subject matches his methodology as he traces “displaced transmissions” of culture and memory from Congo Square to contemporary Zulu Mardi Gras parades.16 Roach’s contributions to (and of) performance theory and circum-Atlantic methodology may best be summarized by his statement about cultural exchange: “The key to understanding how performances worked within a culture, recognizing that a fixed and unified culture exists only as a convenient but dangerous fiction, is to illuminate the process of

15 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 4. For Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s less optimistic interpretation, arguing that a “repeating island” is the very logic of British colonialism see DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai’I Press, 2007). 16 Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 28. 9 surrogation as it operated between the participating cultures.”17 With Roach’s focus on incomplete repetition, performance and ritual go hand-in-hand.18 Roach’s Cities of the Dead is so dynamic that it’s difficult to state a departure from his method and his beautifully endless invention of concepts—except, perhaps, that his devotion to performance and culture differs significantly from my attention to, instead, forms and the social. Roach’s focus on performance and surrogation reveals or posits a forever-empty core behind the “doomed search for originals.”19 Roach is profoundly interested in genealogies of “displaced transmission” and, thus, believes that “[t]exts may obscure what performance tends to reveal.” What performance reveals are the various routes that cultural displacement has taken or could have taken (“incomplete forgetting”).20 As Roach studies performance, he inevitably looks at events of collective behavior, the kinds of ritualized scenes that lead us to yet another definition of “social.” He, like

Victor Turner before him, unites sociology with social life and its events specifically. Events and performance theory make sense together in that, unlike “text,” which remains stable in Roach’s account, performance is the doing or unfolding of something in time and space.

While many of New Orleans’s greatest and most unique texts might be kinetic memories of dance or performances without clear origins, I find that it is just as important to think about why another New Orleans project is necessary for American literary study as it is to understand why and how the “social” continually found itself continually being redefined in New Orleans.

Rather than focusing on performance as Roach does, my readings focus more on form, as it writers understand its correspondences in text and the nineteenth-century world around them.

17 Orature, “kinesthetic imagination,” and written texts function in similar ways, Roach argues (11). This kind of fluidity is something I find a bit bumpier in the following chapters, as I investigate the problems and opportunities writers saw in translating the “social” world to the social relations within text, and then back again. 18 Roach, xi 19 Roach, 3. 20 Roach, 7. 10

The Social and Sociality

My study of New Orleans is not only a study of its myths and how those myths, like that of the tragic mulatta, were sustained. I try, as well, to refigure the causational use of historical context and information by following the many other options for the relationship between history or context and text, options beyond “agency, causality, and control.”21 These are options that I find in the written accounts of real and fictional New Orleanians.

There has recently been renewed interest in literary scholarship in new possibilities for studying sociology and literature. One such avenue follows a method of treating literature and texts themselves as social objects, tracing how words or texts are exchanged or read, as in Janice

Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) or Michael C. Cohen’s recent The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015) in which he argues: “Poems long occupied a complex position in the history of social life and sociality, I argue, and their roles in creating lived and imagined relations among people require an outlook that includes but is not limited to reading.”22

Like Cohen’s use of studying a text’s effect on some external social world, Richard Brodhead refers to a more cultural and class aspect of this external social world: “schemes of literary production [are] bound up with a distinct social audience: in its production each addresses and helps call together some particular social grouping.”23 These kinds of arguments show how

21 Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42.4 (2011), 581. One of the most impressive interventions along these lines comes from Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism in which she argues that the social real was not represented in realism but, rather, a process of change or flux; thus, Kaplan challenges the supposed stasis imposed by a realist concept of representation. See Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988). 22 Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015), 10. 23 Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 5. There is, also, another older “sociology of literature” that extends from studies of the novel specifically, and from Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic mode that only a novel can provide. Following this, Dorothy J. Hale notes that the novel has come to be regarded as “the most social of literary forms” (4). See Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). 11 literary texts engage with material practice.

Other engagements with sociology are outlined in James F. English’s introduction to a special collection of New Literary History on “New Sociologies of Literature,” where authors are devoted to other methods beyond using the social to “explain the ‘real’ meaning of the literary.”24 English explains that the rise of cultural studies and critique reduced the need to specify any specific method of approaching sociology and literature together—“because so many literary scholars were now, in this very basic sense of the term, sociologists of literature.”25 In some way, varieties of social conditions influenced and produced texts, but scholars are less than likely to refer to any kind of clear definition of the social or any tenant of sociology. We are, rather, English writes, in an “era of silent partnership” with sociology.26 Rather than writing this project to express my own commitment to some sociological approach, I investigate New

Orleans writers (and writers of New Orleans) for how they described the social (as in “society”) as it made contact with sociability (being social).

Next, I want to further delineate some common shorthand meanings and ambiguities of

“the social” across current Americanist literary criticism.27 By selecting for treatment critics in the paragraphs that follow, I do not mean to offer a critique of their uses of “social” as an

24 James F. English, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature’” New Literary History 41.2 (2010), xvi. 25 Ibid., viii. 26 Ibid., xii. 27 These are critics that are largely not interested in actual sociology or the historical development of sociology or its previous forms of ethnography. For the process of reform, see Christopher Castiglia, who argues that the antebellum years saw reform “target[ing] modes of sociality that were public, collective, nostalgic, pleasurable, and unproductive” (10). Peter Coviello also explains his debt to Dana Nelson’s National Manhood, which investigates a history of invented social authority, a guise for economic and racial authority (84). Nelson also posits a prior “social diversity” to the homogeneizing effects of whiteness: the “counterphobic ideal for the kinds of social diversity and disruption foregrounded in emergently radical democratic practices” (33). My work explores the various ways in which the “counterphobic” cannot exactly be applied to New Orleans. Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke UP, 2008); Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005); Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Man (Durham: Duke UP, 1998). 12 adjective, nor do I blame critics for relying on the concept’s ambiguity and flexibility, even when alternatives to privacy and the political are the subject of their work. Rather, I intend to suggest that describing the social throughout the nineteenth century is more difficult than any one critic’s definition. This will provide the groundwork for my suggestion that the social was a locally contested term in New Orleans that must be understood through the overlap between abstract interaction and the social as indicative of whatever affects might attach to fellowship or collectivity. I pose the issues that emerge in the following paragraphs to better understand the struggles with sociality and the social that writers of nineteenth-century New Orleans experienced.

Many of the critics discussed below contribute fantastically to ways of thinking about being-together. But I do want to limn a problem of social’s continued excessiveness in our thinking about texts, despite methodological interest in challenging an “undistorted transparency between text and context.”28 I want to briefly survey work by Ivy Wilson, Peter Coviello,

Elizabeth Dillon, Michael Warner and Nancy Bentley, all of whom discuss collectivity or social worlds, belonging, nationhood, and cultural difference in ways that have long influenced my own work. In their arguments I find that sentences where the political, the aesthetic, and the social swirl together often leave the “social” in some ambiguously defined excess, where the social is something championed for its being less deterministic and more democratic. Consider an important argument from Ivy Wilson (whose work and goals, in that critical juncture of politics and aesthetics, I am happy to be in company with) about the ways the African Americans thought about representation as an artistic and political project: “I use the term ‘political aesthetics’ in this study to signal how various art forms put into high relief the efficacy of affect

28 Coviello, 13. 13 to engender and sustain collectivities of social belonging.”29 Wilson’s argument here posits

“social belonging” as a kind of belief in the social as cohesion, as community. Viewing and/or interpreting art creates communities, especially in light of Wilson’s citation of Sterling Stuckey’s study of “retentions of African culture” against the severing of the past required to sustain

Orlando Patterson’s “social death.”30 The meaning of social is perhaps purposefully not defined throughout Wilson’s work, but it seems to work as a catchall, a “constellation” and a

“counterpublic” meant to “contest the meanings of citizenship and democracy.”31 A similar contest can be found in Peter Coviello’s Intimacy in America, wherein he argues that nationalism is sustained and celebrated through alternative forms of attachment and relation beyond (and as a complaint against) the state. Coviello’s focus on intimacy is different from my focus on proximity. Intimacy implies a kind of familiarity, despite space, whereas proximity puts spatial positioning first. In choosing intimacy, Coviello acknowledges that this is a “slippery” concept with a “lush abundance” of similar terms. Intimacy can be an “affective exchange” or a “kind of connection,” which means that intimacy both accounts for the structure of relation and its effects

(as affects). At times the concept of “social” is an empty stage upon which intimacy enters. After the theorization of intimacy, Coviello wants to explain, through an attention to “being-together,” the “complex process that culminates . . . the installation of ‘race’ at the very center of the distribution of social meaning in American life.”32 Intimacy, then, is a measure of the social, which itself is posited against identity construction. However, like Wilson’s “belonging,” the

“social meaning” here slides into intimacy, as opposed to publicity, and as an affectual form of

29 Wilson, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 7. To add to definitional confusion, Wilson then discusses a turn to “culture,” which presumably houses the “aesthetic.” It seems that, as Wilson elucidates what he means by aesthetics, that “collectivities of social belonging” might stand in for democracy. 30 Wilson, 126. 31 Wilson, 2. 32 Coviello, 28. 14 knowing—“attachment and affiliation”—rather than the kind of “stranger sociability” that

Michael Warner describes.

This measure of private intimacy and public strangeness has led to defining the “social” as a mediating category. Rather than belonging or attachment-as-affect that Wilson and Coviello provide as definitions of the social, Elizabeth Dillon provides a concept that anticipates Bruno

Latour’s distinction between intermediaries and mediators.33 Dillon argues that characterizations of Jurgen Habermas’s public sphere do not fully do justice to what is social about literature: that it “stands as an intermediary location that helps to generate the meaning of both the private and public domains.”34 Tellingly, Dillon’s use of “intermediary” marks the confusion of what a

“third space” actually does. For Dillon, this third category defines “the space of public sphere activity concerned with private subject production.”35

Thus, Dillon’s “open sociality” of literature is similar to Warner’s “counter-publics,” which function to revise what it means to be in public, rather than existing as an actual stable space. Social, in both accounts, is a process of counter-meaning and alternative self-production.

Definitions get more confusing, however, when Warner references something else called the social. He writes, “The public is a kind of social totality.” The public is a performative utterance,

Warner argues, or a “special kind of virtual social object, enabling a special mode of address.”

Thus, Warner assumes a “a social reality” that is local, as he cites Hannah Arendt on the matter

33 Dillon would go on to cite Latour in the essay on assemblage I myself discuss in chapter two. On the distinction between mediators and intermediaries, Latour argues, “As soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries but as mediators, they render the movement of the social visible to the reader” (128). 34 Elizabeth Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 6. 35 Dillon, 123. Dillon further identifies “closed sociality” as only a stage for private, ready-made identities. By contrast, “open sociality . . . is a view of politics that identifies public discourse as productive of private identity— which sees the moment of social and political recognition as creative of private identity rather than response to preexisting forms of subjectivity” (185). 15 or interaction.36 Herein, Warner represents a large body of scholarship where interaction is posited as prior and more real than any recognizable social order. This assumption largely reflects a basic sociological dualism of reality and representation figured by Georg Simmel: “A basic dualism . . . pervades the fundamental form of all sociation. The dualism consists in the fact that a relation, which is a fluctuating, constantly developing life-process, nevertheless receives a relatively stable external form.”37 Again, Warner argues this as part of a critique of misunderstandings of public sphere theory: the “ideal unity of the public sphere is best understood as an imaginary convergence point.” This formulation of social as interaction is often taken to be necessarily mediating, but I suggest that interaction can be just as “closed” as addresses of group stability can be mediating.

The difficulty of defining how privacy and publicity function in social scenes is shown by these critics to be key to understanding how nineteenth-century authors debated and formally depicted the possibilities of crossing boundaries of race and gender, history and aesthetics. I take up similar issues in chapter two when I discuss the problem of private choice as an essential start to certain versions of what makes up a social life. However, issues of privacy and publicity are only one aspect of the social that I cover in the following chapters. I also touch on Wilson’s version of belonging and Coviello’s of attachment. Overall, though, I do so with an eye to a specific kind of mood of sociality, one of its association with pleasure and disorder, one that brings us back to Claiborne’s problems in 1804.

Finally, then, I turn to Nancy Bentley’s study of late-nineteenth-century mass culture.

Bentley relies on the “social” as part of a moment in literary culture’s reckoning with other forms

36 See Michael Warner, “The experience of social reality in modernity feels quite unlike that in societies organized by kinship, hereditary status, local affiliation, mediated political access, parochial nativity, or ritual” (89). Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). 37 Simmel, Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971), 351. 16 of representation and entertainment in “turbulent conjunction” or, simply, in a “crash.” Bentley’s treatment of art and popular culture is one that zooms in on their “unnerving” moment of meeting in close “proximity.”38 While Bentley is accounting for a specific time and epoch of understanding mass entertainment as distinct from literary publics, I want to suggest that early

New Orleans also offered a unique combination of “spectacle” and interaction in its brand of tourism. Thus, I take the “social” as a debated historical subject of direct intellectual and artistic inquiry in the nineteenth century, but one that took on particular stakes of citizenship, enslavement, imperialism, and equality when situated in New Orleans traditions and histories.

The scholars discussed above preserve a definition of the social that captures a heterogeneous, prior, and “active” real, often posed against a dead citizenry in some rigid or ideological order.39 When scholars name a “social real” or a “social act,” they do not mean to suggest a necessarily positive or festive affect.40 Again, in New Orleans, I suggest that, for better and for worse, this overlap is nearly unavoidable, so the writers in the following chapters show us. Again, it might seem like a misunderstanding of simply two different definitions of the

“social” to attach the idea of the relation or inter-subjectivity to festive scenes, serene manners, or ecstatic pleasure, but they collide and haunt one another in literature about New Orleans, as they do in the example of Claiborne’s apology for conflating frivolity and politics. A “social life” as an obtainable object is an anachronistic term for the nineteenth century, but “social lives” captures a diversity of experience, while also referencing the kind of aspirational quality of what

38 Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009), 2, 1. 39 Russ Castonovo, Necro citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham: Duke UP, 2001). 40 Consider Cynthia G. Franklin’s summary of the American Studies Association 2014 conference theme “Fun and Fury”: “Pleasure and humor—the critically acclaimed cousins of fun—have long been accorded serious attention, for, among other things, their productive transgressiveness and as key to surviving oppressive conditions that range from colonialism to homophobia. Given its associations with the ephemeral, with sports and games, with consumerism, with leisure, with purposelessness, fun has often been denigrated or dismissed.” See Franklin, “The Queer Art of Success: Lisa Duggan’s Fun and Fury,” American Quarterly 67.2 (2015), 296. 17 we today think of in having an active “social life.” Social Lives also speaks to a different way of living that’s not just about the “everyday” or the quotidian, but about lives constituted as celebratory collectivities.41

In titling this dissertation Social Lives, the idea of “social death” inevitably haunts every lively moment and every possibility of human connection. Again, throughout the following chapters, I oscillate and figure the relationship between an extremely broad definition of sociality, as interaction or connection, and scenes of sociability, what we are more colloquially familiar with as being “social,” or having a “social” life. Orlando Patterson’s thesis of slavery and “social death” is key here in that it actually points to the importance of maintaining such a wide definition. In a sense, Patterson’s claim that slaves were denied all forms of “social” relations, or denied recognition of them, means that they did not not have them. Patterson’s

“natal alienation” claim, in a way, exposes the very imaginary and contingent nature of the

“social,” such that it is not reality at all.42 Russ Castronovo explains that, considering the severing of communal ties in traditional stories of freedom, there is also an “unlikely convergence between social death and freedom.”43

Jared Sexton and Fred Moten, scholars of “afro-pessimism” and “black optimism” respectively, debate the ontological and epistemological aspects of Patterson’s “social death” and, further, what the afterlives of slavery mean for definitions of blackness. These arguments are complex and theoretical, but they derive energy from what Moten develops as the difference between “the fact of blackness” and experience, between the recognizably social and something

41 “At every instant, therefore, it’s trying to give a coloration, a form and intensity to something that never says what it is. That’s the art of living. The art of living is to eliminate psychology, to create, with oneself and others, individualities, being, relations, unnameable qualities [my emphasis]” (317). See Foucault, Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), trans. John Johnston, ed. Sylvére Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996). 42 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), 5-7. 43 Castonovo, Necro Citizenship, 49. 18 else whose absence defines experience itself.44 Sexton further tries to synthesize the difference between social life and social death, and I quote him at some length:

To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social

death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of

this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement . . .

Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black

social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living

death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is

no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the

codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people

and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common

with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world

system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but is lived

underground, in outer space.45

Sexton speaks to the tension between all assumptive arguments about the slippery and

“underground” of social life, whether or not one means slavery or the “afterlife” of slavery and social death. The long list of “codes” provides a useful list for synonyms for social order. The location of “black life” lends to a methodological optimism and gives an account of

“celebration” and “affirmation” as critical tools for studying anti-blackness and blackness; not surprisingly, and not without purpose in Sexton’s argument, these words conflate the broader sense of the “social” in “social death” and the accounts of black optimism/pessimism. There is a

44 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50.2 (2008), 177-218. 45 Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” in Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, ed. Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian (New York: Routledge, 2016), 69. 19 complex relationship between sociability, as an affect of festive enjoyment or affirmation, and the social, as interaction or order. Sexton only hints at the overlap with his language choice, but the importance of understanding this link is there in the very names “pessimism” and

“optimism,” between scenes of violence and scenes of celebration.

Amusement and Charm

“Literature (of a kind) and drinking rooms,” writes Abraham Oakey Hall in 1851, “touch noses in cosy friendship in New Orleans.”46 Social gatherings, of festive or somber or violent type, appear again and again throughout the following chapters. Unlike an “imagined community” where distance is crucial, a social gathering implies closeness (maybe even claustrophobically so).47 Proximity and social gathering, the idea of the group itself, was, in New Orleans, I argue, an issue distinct from private choice and public identity because of the ways that creole and

“rogue” colonial history challenged these very terms.

The “social” looks different in each of the following chapters in order to capture its mobile reference of structure, relation, interaction, or entertainment—in other words, its “untidy” aspects beyond individualism.48 Chapter one focuses on antebellum travel writing about New

46 Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1851), 19. 47 See Benedict Anderson, “This new synchronic novelty could arise historically only when substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people—if never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory. . . . For this sense of parallelism or simultaneity not merely to arise but also to have vast political consequences, it was necessary that the distance between the parallel groups be large” (192). Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006). See also Geoffrey Sanborn, “a party: a partitioned-off and subtly cohesive event.” This “social formation” allows its attendees to “draw on an ambient reservoir of animation that no one of them could have independently supplied” (15). Sanborn, “Turn it Up: Affects, Structures of Feeling, and Face-to-Face Education,” in Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, ed. Hester Blum (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016). 48 I am influenced by sociologist Michel Maffesoli, whose argument aims “describe and to analyse the social configurations that seem to go beyond individualism, in other words, the undefined mass, the faceless crowd and the tribalism consisting of a patchwork of small local entities” (9). Thus, Maffesoli investigates social life as an “aesthetic regime,” in the sense that it is shared, collective experience—whereas, “the principium individuationis is the very thing determining the whole political-economic and techno-structural organization that was inaugurated 20

Orleans, with Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Health Trip to the Tropics (1853) as its central text.

Selecting Willis’s text is the first of many purposefully counterintuitive choices of primary texts.

While one of my goals across this dissertation is to discuss unfamiliar and understudied texts by

African American and/or Francophone writers, another goal is to position them within a literary scene that is related to but not part of our current understanding of the two dominant genres of the century, Romanticism and Realism, and their associated writers.49 Moreover, attention to other genres such as belles-letters, regionalism, poetry, and novellas makes sense for a study of nineteenth-century “society” since, as was claimed by James Fenimore Cooper, “it would be indeed a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the way of a Roman de Société in this country.”50

In this first chapter I introduce the complexities of so-called Americanization and the difference between what I call “creole contrast” and creolization. I follow Willis’s travels in the

Caribbean and the U.S. South, arguing that European colonial history created an aesthetic of tropical contrast and amusement that worked as a specific form of mapping and domination.

Willis’s interest in the merely amusing—as an aesthetic and health project—gives us an

with the rise of the bourgeoisie” (64). Elizabeth Dillon argues something similar when she suggests that in a state governed by liberal economics, there are only pre-formed identities available within a “closed sociality.” Dillon further argues that literature is a place for “open sociality,” where “the moment of social and political recognition [is] creative of private identity rather than a response to preexisting forms of subjectivity” (185). For more on this problem, see my discussion of Leo Bersani in chapter two. Paul Sheehy is another important influence on my work and my thinking on group function, who accounts for an ontological status for groups and further argues that a group may “possess rights in virtue of the irreducibly collective needs of its members” and has the capacity for “collective reflection” (7). The basic debate, one I take up in chapter two and might similarly be applied to chapter three, is that “Interaction and intersubjectivity create something qualitatively different from its constituent parts” (69). Sheehy, too, argues that we often too quickly assume that “the domain of human interaction is firmly located in the material sphere” and, supposedly prior to groups, make groups only abstract entitites (13). See Sheehy, The Reality of Social Groups (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 49 Some recent work has been done to show the influence of the city on individual authors’ work. For example, Matt Sandler has recently claimed that Whitman gathered his interest in hetereogeneity, and his stylistic mode of representing it, from his time working as a reporter in New Orleans. Matt Sandler, “Kindred Darkness: Whitman in New Orleans,” in Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet, ed. Ivy Wilson (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014), 54-81. 50 Cooper, Home as Found (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1871), v. 21 opportunity to look aslant at the oft-cited and imagined riotous excesses of early New Orleans. I then argue that Creole American-nationalists in New Orleans and Francophone antislavery writers used and interacted with this same form of contrast. In this chapter, I argue that contrast is not only a form of New Orleans writing and landscape—but also, a priori, a crucial part of the very conceptual ground that allows forms to appear as distinct. The end of the chapter turns to two francophone writers, native of New Orleans and of France respectively, Adrien Rouquette, a frontier priest poet, and Louis-Armand Garreau, one of a few recorders of the Bras-Coupé

(meaning “arm cut off”) maroon/runaway slave killed in 1837. In putting these recorders of early

New Orleans together in the same chapter, I explore how the limiting scope of contrast explains nationalism in the midst of colonialist pasts.

Chapter two considers the postbellum conversation about black and white “social equality.” The rhetoric of “social equality” was the limit of all politics surrounding civil rights.

All white and black politicians, activists, and writers claimed their distance from the term, either denying that they were supporting any such plan or rightly claiming that the entire concept was an invention to distract from civil equality. My argument in this chapter is that the imaginary and ambiguous contours of “social equality” invited writers to consider new ways of thinking about the “social” beyond private choice or public space. Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St.

Rocque (1899), I argue, is a text that plays with the diminutive description often given to female

(or feminized) local-color writers, “charming,” in order to elicit a different kind of relationship to characters and objects. I also argue that New Orleans’s occupies a special place in local color writing of the period, not only because of its exoticized past but also because of its centrality in postbellum civil rights issues, culminating in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The history and aesthetic problems of New Orleans allowed Dunbar-Nelson to question what equality could 22 mean without regard to the private, but through a lens of collectivity and sociability. I seek to prove my point that Dunbar-Nelson responds to the issue of “social equality” not directly

(because, indeed, it was difficult to respond to such a slippery concept directly) but through her own unique understanding of how literary form and character could form readerly attachments out of a “complex play of distance and nearness.”51

Against the current consensus or underlying methodology of doing away with “social” as a kind of form or container, chapter three considers the “Event” as a narrative and historical theory. I consider the historical romance Paul Marchand, F.M.C., Charles Chesnutt’s 1921 novella about 1821 New Orleans and a main character who discovers, “to his horror,” that he is actually white.52 The use of the “Event” as a formal examination of temporal experience aligns with what Jennifer Fleissner argues about the historical romance in general, “the point is not simply to relive the past, but through the very thematization of it, at once to delimit it, to give it a particular space and place, so that it does not simply threaten to flood the present anew.”53 I argue that, in Paul Marchand, the only fiction he wrote in a setting before the Civil War,

Chesnutt formalizes history with his theory of the Event around Paul’s race reveal and counters the contemporary temporal nature of racial progress and timelines. In the novel’s melodramatic quadroon ball scene, Paul’s moment of “crashing” the party recalls a longer history of responses to social gathering and racial mixture in the poets of Les Cenelles.

My final chapter considers relation to New Orleans as prepositional, literally as a pre- position. This chapter eschews synchronous timelines to follow some of the interventions into

51 “Once criticism moves beyond the unpromising choice between a formalism that naively appropriates the text for present needs and a historicism cannily reinserting the text into a history both distant and unusable, text-reader relations emerge as a complex play of distance and nearness, detachment and immersion.” See Fredric V. Bogel, New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Google Book Search. 52 Matthew Wilson, Introduction to Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998), xvii. 53 Fleissner, “Historicism Blues,” 175. 23 temporality studies I make in chapter three. In this chapter I examine a nineteenth-century trope of “toward New Orleans” that defines place by positing it as a peripheral terminus. As chapter one considered the proximity of contrast, “toward” emphasizes a kind of affect-charged motion that, like “charm” in chapter two, suggests a desire for attachment that is not about ownership or stability. Martin Delany’s Blake: or, the Huts of America (1859-1862) and Lafcadio Hearn’s

Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1888) are two of many examples where an orientation toward

New Orleans helps to define future cultural and social possibilities; the former, a widespread slave revolt, and the latter, a hurricane and a process of destructive creolization. We can consider

“approaching” a subject as both a destructive and generative process, like the way Hearn himself writes of his own half-written Chita, “all tangled up; a half-suggested thing, like a subject partially dissected.”54

This final chapter was originally conceived as paying homage to the Louisiana German

Coast slave insurrection of 1811, the largest-scale slave rebellion in United States history. This event started thirty-five miles up the river from New Orleans, but the city was, at least it was reported, part of their rallying cry: “On to New Orleans!” These slaves were influenced by revolutionary thought that also spread “toward” New Orleans after the Haitian Revolution.

Throughout the nineteenth century, as now, there is a literature registering not just a pull of the tourist town but a kind of continuous and often terrifying movement toward it.55 These are the

54 Qtd in. Elizabeth Stevenson, The Grass Lark: A Study of Lafcadio Hearn (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 153. 55 See Junius Rodriguez’s discussion of the national importance of this rebellion: “Even contemporary obeservers deemed the insurrection as characteristically un-American in nature and viewed it as an anomaly than as a systematic concern of a slave-based society. Yet despite Louisiana’s peripheral role in national life of the early republic era, the 1811 slave revolt that occurred there ranks as one of the most foreboding episodes in United States history” (69). Led by a mulatto overseer, the revolt gathered participants—somewhere between 180 and 500—as it moved toward New Orleans, before they were intercepted by the U.S. army (70, 72). See Rodriguez, “”Rebellion on the River Road: The Ideology and Influence of Louisiana’s German Coast Slave Insurrection of 1811,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999), 65-88. 24 linguistic and geographic forms of New Orleans history, the kind that are lived in practice and similarly form its literature—because both exist in the realm of the collective, often festive, imagination.

Place and Time

I argue that one way to resolve or creatively move past and to creatively harness the historicist/formalist divide in literary criticism is through a focus on the local and social--when the local is conceived of as a social space, by which I mean a space that breaks apart universals without breaking apart conceptions of collectivity and wholeness, a social imaginary. Space is, finally, I argue, required for the kind of sociality I discuss in the following pages, for space and sociality create place in their image.56 Space, as has come to be commonplace, is privileged by critics as a kind of open and indefinable and indeterminate quality over place, which is determined by institutions and narratives; thus, “remapping” or redrawing boundaries of nations has been crucial to a commitment to deterritorialization. “Place,” however, is useful in the sense that, as Judith Madera argues, it “exceeds any private experience.”57 Geographers and sociologists of mobility consider place as such, as “created through the fusion of many body- ballets and time-space routines”—patterns that are themselves on the move, much like Joseph

Roach’s circum-Atlantic processes of surrogation.58

56 Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea summarize the work of Henri Lefebvre, who they say argues that space is not “an empty stage on which social life takes place, but [is] infused with power relations which constitute social life.” See Introduction to Trans-Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1-16. 57 Madera’s work is also important in the way she engages literature that “rejects the dominant dualism of space and place—namely, the supposition of an absolute space from which place can be particularized, and the primacy of space over place” (7). See Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2015). For more on deterritorialization, see Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011), 1-26. 58 Mia Arp Fallov, Anja Jørgensen, and Lisbeth B. Knudsen, “Mobile Forms of Belonging,” Mobilities 8.4 (2013), 469. 25

This project is about New Orleans as lived experience, as affect, as an imaginary source, as a series of details. Like the essays in Creole Subjects in Colonial Americas the following discussions of New Orleans and New Orleans styles of creolization deal “less with the actual cultural process of creolization . . . than with the idea of the creole (and of creolization) in the early Americas as an imperialist discourse of colonial difference.”59 The idea of the creole collides, I find, with ideas of the social, creating new imperatives for each definition. As Ishmael

Reed suggests in the above epigraph, New Orleans is “all over time and place.” Alongside Bruno

Latour’s claim that the “social is nowhere in particular,” I argue the flipside of this coin: that in

New Orleans, the social is all over place and time.60 It comes up in unexpected ways and in the work of unexpected authors, to tantalize with the exotic or to challenge with violence.

Place is not background but relational; thus, it does not do to claim New Orleans’s secret or unacknowledged centrality to American literature—though, my hope is, that some of that will undoubtedly happen, as its very name conjures all varieties of response from antebellum texts, despite the fact that it had virtually no English-language literary community, as diverse as Miss

Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), to Clotel (1853), to Walt Whitman’s live-oak growing in Louisiana or Creole woman in Franklin Evans (1842), or even Fanny Fern’s

Rose Clark (1856) wherein the narrator tells us, after the protagonist decides to search for her lost fraud of a husband, “Rose could not have told why, of all the Southern cities, she had selected New Orleans for her search for Vincent. Had you asked, she could have given no reason for the magnetism which and drawn her thither.”61

59 Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, Introduction to Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009). 60 Latour, Reassembling the Social, 107. 61 Fanny Fern, Rose Clark (New York: Mason Brothers, 1856), 203. 26

Chapter One: Contrast and the Creole

Writings about New Orleans in the antebellum period often delighted in considering how best to represent the city’s exceptional nature and its possible pleasures.1 For northern travelers and writers, New Orleans was a part of the plantation South, but within that large region, it was a cosmopolitan center with more in common with New York City than with any other southern city. In terms of finance, population, mobility, mercantilism, skilled labor, accommodations, and so-called urban vice, New Orleans was different from, for example, Savannah.2 Beyond these urban characteristics, what often made the city an object of fascination were its obvious connections to its rural peripheries. Transportation from the main neighborhoods of the city to the outlying parishes and plantations was both necessary and rather easy by way of the river and its bayous. Conflicting but cooperative economics were represented by the paths to and through the city, a hub that connected the new nation through the winding Mississippi River and spilled out into the Gulf, toward the Caribbean and, further, to cotton and sugar exchanges in Europe.3

Historian Thomas N. Ingersoll argues that “[e]arly national New Orleans was ‘strange’ mainly because it was a fast-growing city in a region where slavery usually worked against the

1 One might consider New Orleans a doubled exception, as I elucidate throughout this chapter, part of the U.S. South, the “internal other of American nationalization,” and, further unique within that imagined space that Jennifer Greeson summarizes in Our South: “As a physical setting, the Plantation South was disease-ridden, swampy, and inimical to animal and human development. As a social setting, it had been founded for colonial profit and thus developed into a cradle of iniquity, aristocracy, and luxury. As a source for characterization, it was home to a drunken, lascivious, lazy, gluttonous, and violent cast of degenerate planters.” See Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2010), 70. 2 The main difference between New Orleans and northern cities would be the latter’s dependence of the growth of industrialism, rather than the mercantilism that dominated New Orleans economics. For a defense of the complexity of smaller southern cities, many have critiqued the very standards of the “urban”: “dense settlement . . . [as well as] a specific mix of markets, government, and public space” (9). See Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, Introduction to Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era, ed. Slap and Towers (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015). 3 Critics now are very much in agreement about how capitalism and plantation slavery worked together despite protestations from pro-slavery intellectuals that emphasized paternalistic methods. 27 development of large cities.”⁠4 Antebellum writings about the city, usually travel pieces with some stated position on slavery frequently commented on such arrangements, from plantation to city, and, in a similar way, from streets packed with French cafes to streets with new English- style homes. Such jostling differences—being part of the Plantation South and part of the urbane, industrial North, and looking like both at the same time—made New Orleans an important but not-quite-representative American city. These overlapping aspects gave writers an opportunity to think about the meaning of difference and proximity in all varieties of relation: intimate, social, national, and, to use Laura Doyle’s term, “inter-imperial.”5

This chapter argues that the form of contrast was one that was imported to New Orleans by way of tropical colonialism. New Orleans has long been understood as a place of fascination and fear for the rest of the nation, functioning in some of the same ways that Haiti did for the early Republic and the antebellum nation.6 My examination of travel writing shows that this binary of fear and pleasure was complicated by contrast and that form’s collision with other ways of organizing difference and hybridity. In the last section of this chapter, I argue that

Francophone and creole writers also wrestled with contrast to create new understandings of national attachment. Contrast, I argue, further facilitated and helped to develop New Orleans’s

4 Thomas, N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999), 316. Walter Johnson’s evocative summary similarly captures the importance of the city’s particular urbanity: New Orleans was “the commercial emporium of the Midwest, the principal channel through which Southern cotton flowed to the global economy and foreign capital came into the United States, the largest slave market in North America, and the central artery of the continent’s white overseers’ flirtation with the perverse attractions of global racial domination” (2). See Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2013). 5 I find Laura Doyle’s idea of the “inter-imperial” important to the study of early and antebellum New Orleans, especially because this model follows from the necessary transnational, hemispheric, and circum-Atlantic lenses that have described the city’s unique place in history. Doyle hopes that her model will help to break the tendency of transnational studies that reify the nation while trying to move beyond it. See Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality,” Interventions 16:2 (2014), 159-196. See also New Orleans-based writer Andrei Codrescu’s observation, “New Orleans is imaginable, hospitable to the geography of desire that anyone can project imaginatively on it, finding the appropriate receptors without much difficulty” (215). See Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006). 6 28 early association with amusement.

Writers and visitors had the option to study different elements of the city for their cross- pollination, their continuities and correspondences, or by their juxtapositions. These forms of relation are the basis for most conversations about cultural exchange and creolization. Most often, antebellum writing did not how critics currently understand creolization: as a process of becoming, best captured by Édouard Glissant’s phrase “unstoppable conjunction.”7 Creolization was more like creoleness to the writers I discuss below; the antebellum idea of “creole” was not describing an “open-ended, non-prescriptive phenomena,” but, instead, a way of understanding parallels and overlaps, where difference could be maintained and enjoyed.8 Rather than reading to recover instances of “inter-ethnic fusion, hybridisation, merger, transculturation” as particular styles of cultural (or linguistic) change, I am interested in the ways and reasons why authors employed what I see to be the dominant form for regarding and writing New Orleans: contrast.9

Contrast describes a stable set of objects held in juxtaposition, much like the very form of creole considered as a national and imperial overlap, rather than describing a process of creolization. This aesthetic of contrast for understanding difference in New Orleans is best captured by what Nathaniel Parker Willis calls the city’s “racy and novel contiguity.”10 This

“racy and novel contiguity” was applied by Willis to the history, the layout, and the people of the city. In 1851 Abraham Oakey Hall, future mayor of New York, in his A Manhattaner in New

Orleans looks on at the faces attending a Louisiana plantation ball, “The complexion of the

7 Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), 30. See also Nicholas R. Spitzer’s argues that a “creole approach to American society sees it as constantly forming new cultural wholes, while accounting for the continuity of elements that remain distinct in local communities” (34). See Spitzer, “Monde Créole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures,” in Creolization as Cultural Creativity, ed. Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara (UP of Mississippi, 2011). 8 Martin Munro and Celia Britton, Introduction to American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South, ed. Munro and Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012), 5. 9 Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, Introduction to Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourese in Caribbean Culture (Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2002), xi. 10 Willis, Health Trip to the Tropics (New York: Scribner, 1853), 352. Subsequent citations will appear in-text. 29 rooms was decidedly French, and yet with a dash of American feature and manner just sufficient to suggest a contrast.”⁠11 My attention to these visitors does not only read against the grain to provide evidence of their mistaken use of rigid categories. They are, especially in the case of

Willis, writing to entice readers with a taste of the exotic in a way that can obscure the realities of colonialism while emphasizing the approachability of the unfamiliar.

Frances Trollope, who visited New Orleans in 1827, offers a panorama typical of travel writing about the city: “The large proportion of blacks seen in the streets, all labour being performed by them; the grace and beauty of the elegant Quadroons, the occasional groups of wild and savage looking Indians, the unwonted aspect of the vegetation, the huge and turbid river, with its low and slimy shore, all help to afford that species of amusement which proceeds from looking at what we never saw before.”12⁠ Trollope certainly represents here all the usual facets of tropicality—race, labor, beauty, savagery, and the “unwonted” landscape. Her list slides from people to environment, making neither the background for the other, but all part of a series of proximate objects in which the reader is invited to skim over the elements as they are obviously arranged—arranged without noted hierarchy but according to some exciting indeterminate relation. Relation itself is emphasized but interaction is erased or rendered unimportant. Trollope’s list does not reveal objects in oppositional or binaristic relation—she does not pitch the “wild and savage” Indians against the “elegant Quadroons,” but merely places them beside one another, highlighting their (often tantalizing) proximity. A similar structure can also be found emphasized in Swedish reformer Fredrika Bremer’s simpler description of the people at the market: “Here are English, Irish, Germans, French, Spaniards, Mexicans. Here are

11 Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of ‘Crescent City’ Life (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1851), 123. 12 Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), 4. 30 negroes and Indians.”⁠13 The double “here are” shows Bremer attempting to capture unordered abundance while enjoying the delimitations produced but not fully explained by contrast’s form.

Contrast is a form that freezes the objects regarded and suspends their interaction, and, thus, is meant to suspend any action of judgment. Thus, I argue, its intended effect (and affect) is one of amusement. Amusement is, of course, a-musement—it diverts (focused or deep) attention.

As literal disinterestedness, amusement has a connotation of condescension, especially since the ability to divert attention in any which way desired is indicative of mobility and privilege. Again, contrast as I use it here is the form employed by travel writers to explain difference, viewed side- by-side, touching but not overlapping or infusing. Any interaction is inferred by or invented by the observer or reader, creating an interactive sociality that requires a suspension of judgment first.14

I differentiate contrast from other common modes of writing or describing variety as unordered difference, or what is often called the “motley” in New Orleans. These other modes are, to name a few examples, ethnographic comparison (here versus home), taxonomy, or catalogue. In travel writing, contrast is like the rhetorical figure of parataxis, which lacks clear grammatical conjunctions of coordination or subordination. In some usages, contrast seems to emphasize binary opposition, but its use in tropical travel is usually appositional—following a similar logic inherent in creoleness, itself a master narrative invented in the Americas to describe a colonial relation of distant but domestic subjects. This is not to say that contrast itself doesn’t

13 Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, Trans. Mary Howitt, Vol. 3 (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1853), 15. 14 The diptych or triptych form of painting is a helpful theoretical case here for, as Gilles Deleuze argues, the triptych actually is about movement, just of a different “rhythm.” Deleuze speaks to the paradox of separate togetherness of the triptych, writing that this form “is indeed one way of going beyond ‘easel’ painting; the three canvasses remain separated, but they are no longer isolated; and the frame or borders of a painting no longer refer to the limitive unity of each, but to the distributive unity of the three” (60). But with any diptych structure, the knowledge and affect gained or felt in thinking with or depicting contrast is gained through the absence of narrative that would help the observer cross over the separate panels. See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (New York: Continuum, 2003). 31 collide with other forms or modes of describing difference, despite its organizational principle that keeps categories distinct and neat for aesthetic and/or political effect.

With much recent work on American literature that is transnational, a prefix that denotes

“across,” my focus on the suspension of movement in the contrast form may seem to go against the grain of scholarship questions the nation as an impenetrable unit. One major goal of thinking

“beyond the nation,” is to put “different national and extra-national histories and cultural formations into dialogue.”15 Sometimes such dialogue is manifest in the literature and sometimes it has to be revealed. Critics’ relative approaches, then, very much inform the goals of transnationalism and continue to support the assumption that “circulations and connectivities” are somehow a moral corrective to national division.16 Either way, transnational dialogue suggests a kind of interpenetration or mutual influence, as does a concept like “flow,” or the

“process of creolization.” If we hold this to be the transnational methodological assumption, contrast would be a national and, thus, a limiting or fixed form with reified borders. A strictly national contrast might rely on something like citizen and non-citizen, native and non-native.

Creole contrast, however, doesn’t necessarily require a binary logic (strictly a logic of two); instead, it has the logic of a diptych or triptych, with pieces that are wholly contained, touch, but do not exchange.17

Because New Orleans was a place of newcomers, visitors, and creoles, its literature reflected these transient—or, in the case of the creole, native non-native—populations. In the local context of the antebellum years, creole was contested but usually denoted a person of

15 Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, Introduction to Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Levander and Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008), 2. 16 Milette Shamir, “Review: 188. 17 Recent thought on migration and diaspora emphasizes multiplicity, not a logic of contrast, “Changes in the ways of theorizing migration, developments within ethnic relations and the contributions of cultural studies have produced a move away from the binary of strangers/host society to the study of diasporas, post-coloniality and transnationalism” (6). See Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea, Transnationalism and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000). 32

European or African descent born in Louisiana. Creoles of other European colonies were, however, distinguished as the “Foreign French.” However, from the perspective of empire seen from the metropole, creole meant something akin to the uncanny, the domesticated not-at-home.

New Orleans’s early years saw very little native English-language literary output, which meant its French poetry and serialized novels were mostly published in foreign-language newspapers, at home and abroad. When I discuss, at the end of this chapter, the work of authors in and/or from New Orleans, I add to current efforts to recover the multiplicity of creole and

Francophone responses to exile and nationalism. I find that a good number of these writers also employed the form of contrast but often quite differently than Anglo-American writers like

Willis. Many of these writers were diverse in the roots they had in or the routes they took to New

Orleans, but they were united in their attempt to preserve genres and styles that they believed inhered in their shared French language, even as a few of them started to publish in English, a concession or strategy often used to cement and celebrate shared whiteness. These (mostly) elite and educated poets, like Victor Séjour, author of the short story of rebellion “Le Mulâtre,” shuttled between New Orleans and Paris, where they could find more ready audiences for antislavery sentiments, or even just a larger French-reading audience. Creole-authored poetry appearing in the French-language New Orleans newspapers and sometimes in France, especially during the decade between 1840 and 1850, expressed contradictions, fruitful or frustrating for these authors, of multiple national attachment. Creole poets and writers knew they were, as Clint

Bruce puts it, “caught between continents.”⁠18 However, they didn’t often combat the homogenizing force of the American economic prowess and cultural/ethnic hegemony with some creolized disorderly diversity. They instead envisioned potential modes of place-attachment

18 Clint Bruce, “Caught between Continents: the Local and the Transatlantic in the French-Language Serial Fiction of New Orleans’ Le Courrier de la Louisiane, 1843-45” in Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction, ed. Patricia Okker (New York: Routledge, 2012). 33 through using strategic forms of contrast. Despite their desire to preserve the French language and a history of (often radical) French literature, many of these writers also composed patriotic poems about important United States events, ones that celebrated creole contributions to the early republic. Louis Allard’s “Les Anglais a la Louisiane,” for example, celebrates the defeat of the British by Andrew Jackson,⁠ a common rallying point for Creole-American patriotism.19

These antebellum writers did not exactly abandon the usefulness of contrast and amusement, but made them collide and meet with alternative accounts of difference and pleasure.20 I derive this notion of colliding forms from Caroline Levine’s Forms; Whole, Rhythm,

Hierarchy, Network wherein Levine argues that while “forms constrain” they also “overlap and intersect.”21 Therefore, our sense of the creole and of creolization in New Orleans must account for their collision. In doing so, we might temper those romantic underpinnings of transnational scholarship wherein certain versions of hybridity are championed.

New Orleans’s reputation as a tropical and dangerous elsewhere in the nineteenth century informs the kind of work historians do today to understand this discourse and then peek behind its veil: revealing the true make-up of populations there, stressing violence rather than uncritically celebrating (or even assuming) the relative freedom of the city’s black residents, and distancing their own inquiries from the usual stories of cultural clashes and disorderly licentiousness. Along with the important work being done to de-exoticize and de-eroticize New

Orleans’s past, I argue that the use of contrast challenges a hegemonic/resistant or

19 Allard owned plantation land that was later bequeathed to the city and is now New Orleans City Park. Louis Allard, Les Epaves, par un Louisianais (Paris: Hector Bossange, 1847). Another example of poetry on this same subject is Urbain David, Les Anglais a la Louisiane, en 1814 et 1815 (New Orleans: R. G. W. Jewell, 1845). See also Rien Fertel, Imagining the Creole City: The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 2014), especially the chapter on poet/priest Adrien Rouquette who stirred a congregation on the thirty-first anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans (31-48). 20 See Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge UP, 2004), 84-132 for her discussion of the French journal Revue de colonies and its engagement with Louisiana-born or –based writers. 21 Levine, Forms, 4, 16. 34 colonizer/colonized model for the United States and New Orleans, because it describes difference but not exact opposition.22 Such an approach seeks a deeper understanding of the critical impasse of understanding New Orleans’s imagined or real exceptionality within the

United States, not on the level of content alone but on the level of form. Statements about the arrangement of Louisiana and New Orleans are often cliché but they are subject of fascination for contemporary critics as they were for nineteenth-century travelers. “[W]hat seems to make

Louisiana exceptional makes it microcosmic,” writes one recent theorist of its space.23

“Forms are limiting and containing, yes,” writes Levine, “but in crucially different ways.” Levine maximizes form, focusing her study on the most macro of forms, those structures that usually seem to dictate or contain other forms: whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network. On such a scale I would suggest that contrast is a form that dictates the appearance and legibility of other forms. Further, contrast is social, but curiously so, as it describes an undetermined but proximate connection between two or more objects.

Further, I want to suggest that amusement allowed form to function correctly in the tropics. Amusement presumes distance from its object and, thus, formalizes experience as unadulterated by narrative, rhetoric, history, and politics. With the help of amusement, form can experienced purely, as an “almost mindless physicality.”24 Working together, then, contrast and amusement require distance and disconnection, but also, paradoxically, proximity and

22 Since the late 1990s the critical approach to colonialism and postcolonialism has been devoted to a similar project. As Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper explain, scholars should “attend more directly to the tendency of colonial regimes to draw a stark dichotomy of colonizer and colonized without themselves falling into such a Manichean conception.” New Orleans, as an important site for much current literary scholarship interested in alternative inter-imperial archives, is still presented as a kind of exception within the United States. My argument is that “exception” relies on a binaristic logic that doesn’t capture the variety of responses to uniqueness and difference. See Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Cooper and Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997), 3. 23 Richard Megraw, Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2008), 4. 24 George Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994), 4. Levine might be said to practice what Marjorie Levinson calls “normative new formalism,” an approach that sees “the aesthetic as a unique experiential, cognitive, affective, and ethical domain” (563). 35 enjoyment—all elements that made a foundation for a creole logic of empire expansion. The conjoined development of contrast and amusement has history as an imperial aesthetic. Liberty, as Edward Cahill has shown, might have been at the center of political and aesthetic controversies in parts of the early republic, but I argue that enjoyment was the aesthetic crisis at the center of national (and extra-national) understanding of inter-imperiality and its consequent overabundance.25 New Orleans’s urban growth throughout the nineteenth century continued to reveal the interlacing and ever-returning issues of empire and acquisition. The city’s attractions, its economic landscape and its people, forced observers to decide whether or not to see themselves “as active participants in the process of American colonization of foreign lands.”26

Because of the subject of this chapter, I am especially aware of my own motivations for juxtaposing the writers I discuss alongside the main focus of this chapter, Nathaniel Parker

Willis’s A Health Trip to the Tropics. As we’ll see in this antebellum editor’s hastily composed

(or, at least, composed in such a careful way as to appear hasty) sketches, the attempt at writing with an apolitical, or at least diverting, aesthetic often hides or disguises the operations of subordination and condescension. In discussing Willis’s literary style and his Health Trip with some attention, and letting this focus interweave with the work of other travelers and with local fiction writers, I do not only aim to measure their differences, but instead to let the form of contrast travel and converge across texts. I want to suggest that writers and residents of New

25 See Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012). Sarah Ahmed discusses the association of happiness with empire in the British context, which is important in the rest of this chapter, “empire itself becomes a sign of a British tendency toward happy diversity; toward mixing, loving, and cohabitating with others” (130). See Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke UP, 2010). 26 Borrowing from Homi K. Bhabha, Christopher Mark McBride further argues that, “Of course, none of these writers or their characters actively assumes the role of conqueror, but their attitudes, literary representations and visual descriptions of the islands and their inhabitants belie an underlying racial ambivalence, xenophobia, and desire for American colonial control” (3). In the case of Willis that I discuss below, the idea of “control” is further explored through the non-control of amusement. See McBride, The Colonizer Abroad: American Writers on Foreign Soil, 1846-1912 (New York: Routledge, 2004). 36

Orleans experienced both delimiting contrast and the transnational, trans-oceanic, or trans- tropical. For all historians’ interest in divorcing New Orleans from its exotic and un-American reputation, social realities and cultural influences both mattered, and they were simultaneously experienced.27 For example, the city was divided into three municipalities in the years of the city’s most rapid growth, from 1836 to 1852. These municipalities, each controlling its own economics and public works projects, represented the different interests of the Americans and the

Creoles. But the residents of these neighborhoods also worked in cooperation. Thus, I strive across this chapter and dissertation to understand the simultaneity of stable categories and their flowing together; or, the creole and creolization, a form of contrasting relation and a process, respectively.28

Tropical Form and Urban Abundance

Attitudes about New Orleans in the early nineteenth century borrowed from European discourse of tropicality and climactic determinism, the belief that environment influenced or

27 Ingersoll provides convincing evidence about the seemingly permissive slave culture of New Orleans, arguing that it was different as a result of urbanization, and not because of, as many claim, the cultural relationship with the Caribbean. The large population of mixed-raced people and free people of color in New Orleans has been, Ingersoll argues, wrongly attributed to continued inter-mixture between races, and a tolerance of this via colonial Caribbean culture. Ingersoll, reading baptismal records, finds that the overwhelming appearance of light skin in the mixed-race people of New Orleans was not the result of interracial liaisons but, instead, was caused by three related factors: immigration from the French colonies, intermarriage between free people of color, and this group’s avoidance of the slave class. All of these factors Ingersoll calls part of a desire for power in the social structure, not its link to a French culture. “New Orleans fell into a North American class of communities resembling coastal South Carolina far more than French Saint Domingue” (122). 28 “As opposed to the unilateral relationship with the Metropolis, the multidimensional nature of the diverse Caribbean. As opposed to the constraints of one language, the creation of self-expression” (165). See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (UP of Virginia, 1989). One interesting example of combining or comparing this kind of creaolization with a more stable creole identity can be found in Nicholas R. Spitzer, “Monde Creole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures,” Journal of American Folklore. In his study of rural Louisiana music, Spitzer states that we might be “tempted to label this sort of expression a ‘blurred genre’—between African and French cultures.” Then, he argues, “Yet for people participating in the culture at this time, I suggest it is a stable, though evolving, creolized form of musical performance whose elements are understood as wholly within the African French aesthetic of Creoles in rural south Louisiana” (58). 37 dictated human development and behavior.29 Tropicality encompasses both positive and negative attributes, fantasies about tropic spaces as full of healthy variety, and anxieties about them as degenerative of bodies and minds.30 Contrast’s history is, I suggest, tied to the idea of the tropics, marked with clarity in the formative accounts by Alexander von Humboldt, who “penetrates” the

South American continent but can “scarcely distinguish what most excites his admiration—the deep silence of those solitudes, the individual beauty and contrast of forms, or that vigor and freshness of vegetable life, which characterize the climate of the tropics.” Contrast allows for the

“vivid,” clarity of vision that is not sublime but still intense.

Recently the idea of the “American Tropics” has been expanded to include the Caribbean islands, parts of Central and South America, and the southeastern United States.31 While much of the U.S. South shares similar tropes of tropicality with New Orleans, the Louisiana city also exemplified a colonialist aesthetic that combined an urban, cosmopolitan sociality and natural landscapes’ lush virginity.32 Viewing the city’s cosmopolitan levee port scene, Willis noted

“cotton and sugar atmosphere of the climate” (354). Critics and historians generally agree that

New Orleans before the Civil War was a culturally Caribbean city with a “tripartite division” of

29 Denis Cosgrove argues that because the tropics was a discourse of the imagination and determined actual cosmographical and geographical space, we should consider the “interplay between tropical epistemologies and what we might call the ‘ontological tropics’” (198). It is not only that climatic determinism worked in one direction, with environment determining ethnography but that Europeans created a “mutually deterministic” system. See Cosgrove, “Tropic and Tropicality,” Tropical Visions in an Age, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 197-216. 30 Studies of the imposing epistemology that created such notions of tropicality have recently been complemented and challenged by studies like Monique Allewaert’s Ariel’s Ecology, in which bodies resist imperial discourse by materially fusing with the environment, rather than being supposedly determined by it as (non)subjects. “The tropics,” she argues, “produced a different materialist tradition in which the body (animal or vegetable) is invaded, rendered in parts and otherwise deranged.” See Monique Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (U of Minnesota P, 2013), 3. 31 Maria Cristina Fumagalli et al., Introduction to Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio, ed. Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, and Lesley Wylie (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013), 2. See also Jon Smith, “Hot Bodies and ‘Barbaric Tropics’: The U.S. South and New World Natures,” Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003), 104-120. 32 Ring argues about the antebellum period, “Comparisons between the U.S. South and the tropics (viewed as the Other) helped to set the region apart from the rest of the nation” (Problem South 61). 38 race where a class of “in-between” free people of color enjoyed some degree of freedom more than their U.S. counterparts. These more complex racial divisions were “nurtured by Louisiana’s

Spanish and French colonial rulers and then significantly reinvigorated by the migration of nearly 10,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution.”33⁠ With open borders to colonial pasts, and with almost-annual outbreaks of yellow fever, New Orleans was also subject to climactic fears and speculations around health and, relatedly, morality.34

A tropical city’s offerings for improved health were inherently risky, and in such a clime,

Willis complains in his Health Trip to the Tropics that the environment “has somewhat loosened my cough, but brain and limb seem saturated with utter helplessness” (22). David Arnold argues that the “symbolism of the tropics was deeply ambivalent,” and one key solution to ailments of self-dissolution was travel itself, the ability to visit a place briefly without “going native.”35

While Willis at times entertains the idea of tropical climate changing and determining bodies, he is more interested the tropics’ relation to refinement and leisure—but these discourses of health and pleasure do cross-pollinate. Just as degeneration and strength battled it out to be the defining bodily, mental, and cultural characteristic of New World spaces so too did the tropics’ uncivilized seductions and desires morph into genteel amusements in the growing mercantile world. Fears of racial mixing, leading to degeneration and loss of purity, were complemented by images of coexisting social utopias where difference and relations remained visible and

33 Angel Adams Parham, “Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans,” in American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South, ed. Martin Munro and Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012), 42. Emily Clark has 9,000 arriving in 1809 (39). 34 See Sara Klotz, “Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Contagious Race in The Mysteries of New Orleans” Mississippi Quarterly 65.2 (2012), 231-260 for a good overview. 35 Arnold, “Inventing Tropicality,” in The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, ed. Arnold (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 7. See Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014), 24-25. 39 pleasant.36 In her study of visual representations of the West Indies, Kay Dian Kriz argues that images “celebrating the social life of people of color” helped Britons to imagine the possibilities of prosperity and civilization far away from home, or, if they ventured, there waiting across the

Atlantic.37 Even for Britons who did not live in or travel to the tropics, the islands defined and encouraged refinement at home. For example: marrying metaphor and material, the genteel concept of refinement fit with the process of refining raw cane into sugar, and, subsequently

“disavowing the violence and coercion involved” in empire creation.

The main figure of social enjoyment was the leisured mulatto woman, the mulâtress, as the earliest French reports and images named her. She represented the Englightenment process, a former “savage” moving or aspiring toward civilization; but she could also represent the opposite, a more Romantic ideal whereby the “natural” might survive the over-refinement of modernity.38 In Kriz’s words, exoticism of the tropics allowed “the promise of refinement without relinquishing the baser pleasures of the flesh.”39 Moreover, recognition of this trick best worked “through the mechanism of wit.”40⁠

Willis approaches “a belle of a new color” he meets in Martinique in exactly this way, through his own wit and that wit’s reliance on contrast. His amusement comes from regarding her in the same way that he had enjoyed his infamous friendship with salonstress the Countess of

Blessington, author of Conversations of Lord Byron. Almost in the way that minstrel shows depicted stump speeches or elicited laughter at the black dandy, Willis knowingly writes of

36 See, for example, Arthuer de Gobineau’s 1853 The Inequality of Human Races. See also Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s explanation of the lack of “social production” in the colonies. She argues that we need to understand the creole’s stereotype as dependent on a separation of labor, with the colonies producing and the metropole consuming. 37 Kris, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 38 For these keywords and their origins, see Kevin Hutchings, Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850 (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009). 39 40 Kris, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement, 64, 66. 40

Mademoiselle Juliette’s fine manners and her dark skin. While he maintains formality in describing the privilege he receives in Juliette’s reception, he doesn’t hesitate in detailing her body: her “lustrous” shoulders, and the “picturesque” aspect of her jewelry’s “barbaric glitter” and her “lively gestures.” The belle, however, is not just amusing as a blend of civilization and savagery. With her own aloof and genteel presence, she practices her own distinterested amusement in the world around her. Willis describes her as she “laughed immoderately at some of the American distinctions between propriety and impropriety in female manners” (116). What this society woman offers Willis with her “love of fun” and their friendly exchange of souvenir trinkets is sociality itself, not intimacy or domination, but playful engagement with refinement and manners (113-116).

Herein begins a problem with myths about tropical “love of fun,” which was applied to both the mixed-race woman who represented sexual availability, and the creole women and men who allowed it or were seduced.41 Images of the United States’s “happy darky” and Southern nostalgia writing have their beginnings in the pastoral and picturesque images of sociability in the European colonies.42 Not unrelatedly, the entire South developed a reputation for fun, particularly around a plantation-cycle that allowed for a social structure of work and release. The creation of a fun-loving agricultural population helped others to imagine their own refined culture, not in opposition, but tangentially, obliquely related.

Thus, New Orleans developed its potential for tourism in the antebellum years—well

41 See Lisa Ze Winters writes on how the mulâtress stereotype “invites us to consider the sexual and racial economies central to the maintenance and reproduction of chattel slavery in the Americas” (4). Winters, The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2016). 42 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). “Songs, jokes, and dance transform wretched conditions into a conspicuous, and apparently convincing, display of contentment. As a result, this circumscribed recognition of black humanity itself becomes an exercise of violence” (35). 41 before any other U.S. city.43 Like cities only in Europe, it was deemed worthy to see as a city, but also full of “nature.” The lust for leisure travel and its availability to the middle class did generally grow in the antebellum years, even before the late century’s invention of mass tourism.44 If not about expanding knowledge and appreciation of European art, vacation travel was supposed to fulfill romantic assumptions of sublimity, adventure, and nature; hence the popularity of trips to Saratoga Springs, Niagara Falls, and Mammoth Cave. For the most part, though, “raw, young American cities” were deemed both too dangerous and bereft of anything striking that one might find in European cities.45 But New Orleans, in part because of its tropical associations, developed a reputation for exoticism and excitement by the 1830s, which in turn pushed the bounds of what American tourism could be. Tourists were coming as early pseudo- ethnographers, to see the different people of the world in a different climate and a different geological space. Regarding them as objects of nature, they were, thus, worthy of romantic tourism. Even the white creole ladies were regarded as tropical flora and fauna.

43 This is not to say that major cities didn’t have their own literature in popular city mysteries that functioned as virtual travel pamphlets and guides, visiting a city for a short leisure trip simply to see it as a city was not a common concept for other American cities. Additionally, many European visitors did organize their travels by visiting a variety of American cities, but the purpose of these trips was ostensibly evaluation of manners and often as part of a reform project, not first and foremost, leisure. 44 John Urry draws a distinction between tourists in terms of desired experiences as ‘romantic’ and ‘mass’ or ‘collective,’ where the romantic tourist gaze seeks a personal relationship with the object and, thus, “seeks ever-new objects” (44). This distinction is helpful to start with, but a few things could complicate these definitions. In the case of New Orleans, travelers wanted both: to see the things they’d read about (more of the same) but to have it framed as something unique, which the form of contrast could afford. Again, this speaks to the way that New Orleans travel writing (and much travel writing, really) worked with the same unsurprising materials but used a form of contrast to emphasize the romantic. What I mean is, the arrangement was what mattered, the framing, even if the objects on their own were “more of the same.” This, of course, elevates the observer as a master, as someone able to read their own amusement into objects regarding in proximity, without any clear links between them. This kind of revision is also important for thinking through the moment of pleasure that New Orleans captures, like a crossover of the situation Pierre Bourdieu describes as an “old morality” of “fear of pleasure” and a later “fear of not getting enough pleasure” (367). See Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 2002). Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984). 45 Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915, (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001), 5. Important for the kind of experience Willis has in New Orleans is what Cocks says about the commercial fantasies of urban tourism, “Urban tourism offered a model of selfhood deriving from the appreciation and vicarious possession of urban landscapes and a wide array of cultural products and experience, rather than self- possession and property ownership” (5). 42

While the city was understood as culturally or ethnically European, visitors often conflated or disregarded the difference between European and creole. The latter could simply be seen as a relic of European imperialism, where expansion meant acknowledging a physical gap between the metropole and the colony. With an “Empire for Liberty” in the United States, the creole concept was not useful in the same ways for republican union and the seamless expanse that inspired Manifest Destiny. Especially with the power of steam, travel up and down the

Mississippi River was much easier than travel across the Atlantic.46 Even if the South was sometimes figured as an “elsewhere,” it was at least an “internal” one (to borrow Jennifer

Greeson’s phrasing); and even if the continent was large, such expanse was, natural and continuous, just as Jefferson had imagined with his Louisiana Purchase.47 The division of the

North and the South was different in form compared to the metropole/periphery structure of

Europe and its colonies, even if some of the underlying assumptions about the relative place of consumption and production were analogous.

In 1845, B. M. Norman published an extensive and detailed guide to New Orleans for visitors coming out of “curiosity” or “necessity.”48 Willis quotes often from Norman’s guide, and at one point to demonstrate that all other rivers are “pouring their wealth into the main artery, the

Mississippi” (373). The products of southern plantations, then, were not the only goods shipped in and out of port. The whole of the Mississippi valley’s resources, Norman explains in the section Willis excerpts, “must flow through our Crescent City, to find an outlet into the greater world of commerce” (374). New Orleans’s growth was not different in many respects to other

46 Unlike much of the rest of the U.S. South, which did not provide much in the way of public resort, New Orleans boasted the necessary infrastructure of large hotels and rooms for rent for visitors. 47 Peter J. Kastor writes of the debate over the Purchase, “Although members of Congress had shown few reservations about the constitutionality of geographic expansion, imposing a government that would be able to handle subsequent migration and to govern small populations, they immediately expressed ambivalence about demographic expansion through the sudden, unnaturalized acquisition of foreign peoples” (47). See The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004). 48 Norman’s New Orleans and Environs (New Orleans: B. M. Norman, 1845). 43 port cities in the United States, except for the significant difference of its tropical, post-colonial character. Some historians have pointed out that the causes for the growth of a mixed-race class in both Saint-Domingue and in New Orleans might have been due to those cities’ growing economies, meaning more opportunities available for free people of color to work and form families.49

Similarly, by the mid-nineteenth century the Caribbean islands no longer seemed

Edenically underdeveloped but were more like globalized commercial wonderlands. Like the similarly bustling Havana and Saint Domingue, New Orleans fascinated because it was tropical and urban. The port and the plantation worked together, as Amar Wahab has argued about

British Trinidad, to create idyllic and civilizing contrast.50 Friedrich Gerstäcker, prolific writer of

New Orleans sketches and other many travels, witnessed changes in the city from the antebellum years through Reconstruction, and his 1847 collection of sketches exemplified the contiguous nature of the swampy plantations and the urban space:

New Orleans, the Queen of the South, the marketplace of countless plantations and farms

in all parts of the Union, the crossroads from the cold, northerly climate to the pleasant,

mild tropical world . . . ‘For how many centuries has this city existed?’ the foreign visitor

naturally wonders, quickly surveying with astonishment the wealth and splendor spread

out before him. ‘How much time did it take to build up this seven-mile-long sea of

houses, these enormous warehouses, these wharfs and levees?’ His astonishment

increases when he hears of the fantastic speed with which the city literally arose from the

49 See Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013), 46-47. This intervention is an addendum to the assumption that a larger mixed-race or free population was only the result of interracial sex. 50 Wahab, Colonial Inventions: Landscape, Power and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Rebecca Scott focuses on the ways that free people of color and slaves brokered and challenged the plantation/city divide, arguing that “families of color rooted in New Orleans sent tendrils out in the countryside, generating complex genealogies” (15). See Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2005). 44

mud and swamp.51

If the Louisiana Purchase was imperialism and if the influx of Americans and their mercantilism was a version of colonialism, then New Orleans’s inviting river and its already- creole population challenged both definitions; imperialism and colonialism had long been defined by spatial distance.52 Borrowed and reinvented forms were needed to negotiate this kind of expansion; contrast could capture a creole past but also looked forward to new kinds of boundedness or unity.

Willis the Conqueror and his Peculiar Eyes

Nathaniel Parker Willis helped to make urban tourism newly approachable and entertaining for the middle class. He is, thus, representative of a belles-lettres genre of American travel writing, one of the main ways other Americans grew to know New Orleans. Willis’s Health Trip to the

Tropics has not been discussed by critics beyond its being a footnoted example of similar medically motivated travels in the period.53 I have selected his text for the reasons that make it for reasons that show why someone like Willis would be attracted to New Orleans.

It’s difficult to argue that the tropics inspired or shifted his style in any clear way. My argument about tropical form in Willis’s Health Trip, then, is not about causation. Rather, to

51 From Pictures of the Mississippi: Light and Dark Sides of Transatlantic Life, qtd. in Gerstacker’s Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction, ed. and trans. Irene S. Di Maio (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006), 54. 52 Edward Said defines each as such, “the term ‘imperialism’ means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center rulings a distance territory; ‘colonialism’ . . . is the implanting of setttlements on distance territory.” See Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 9. 53 Even Willis’s biographers have little to say about the trip, despite the fact that it marks a major change in his health, his writing persona, and his personal life—which was all-too available to the public, partly on purpose. Willis took the trip with his father-in-law partly to escape a scandal in which he was called to testify in a contention divorce case as a man that had participated in the wife’s adultery. See Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston: Houghtin, Mifflin and Co., 1892), 321-22. A recent article on Willis’s quarantine in Europe proves the writer’s long concern with the overlapping discourses and aspects of writing and health, or writing and invalidism. See Kelly Bezio, “The Nineteenth-Century Quarantine Narrative,” Literature and Medicine 31:1 (2013), 63-90. For an example of a travelogue in a similar vein, though not with Willis’s patented silly style, see Richard Henry Dana Jr., To Cuba and Back (1859). 45 return to the arguments offered by Levine informing my definition of contrast, I read Willis’s

“literary forms not as epiphenomenal responses to social realities but as forms encountering other forms.”54 What’s interesting, however, about the collision of Willis’s definition of amusement with the contrasts of New Orleans is that they are collisions of the same basic form.

Willis didn’t merely import his brand of amusement but enjoyed finding a near-perfect match for it everywhere he went. But some excess knowledge would be produced out of this encounter.

I will offer background on Willis and his place in antebellum literary scene, then, to complicate our binary sense of the elasticity or the rigidness granted a writer’s aesthetic lens.

Willis was an uncompromisingly a-political writer of belles-lettres, so time has not been kind to his reputation, just as most contemporaries were hardly kind to him while he lived. More than any other American writer, he succeeded in publicizing himself to the point that he was one of the most talked-about, and mostly ridiculed, writers of the antebellum period. Ruth Hall (1854), the successful novel written by his sister Fanny Fern, lampoons Willis in the novel’s character

Apollo Hyacinth, the feminine and cruel editor of “The Irving Magazine.”55

Just as the main character of Willis’s only novel Paul Fane (1857) was said to have

“peculiar eyes,” Willis himself encouraged readers to develop idiosyncratic ways of looking at the world around them.56 Based in New York and later in D.C., Willis turned these U.S. cities into subjects like The Spectator’s London. In the most generous interpretations of his approach to travel and observation, Willis’s insistence on trifles, gossip, and personal impressions undid

54 Levine, Forms, 14. 55 Sandra Tomc argues that Willis’s affectations, especially his overly fussy clothing, were fundamental to his thinking about class and about leisure, “Construed as fundamentally empty, Willis’s imitative costumes were also construed as the repository of a mysterious unreadable fullness that endowed them with originary value.” See Tomc, “Restyling an Old World: Nathaniel Parker Willis and Metropolitan Fashion in the Antebellum United States,” Representations 85 (2004), 101. 56 In the novel, Paul is able to make his beloved fall in love with another man by painting him. She writes to Paul, “And so began, not my liking of him, but my understanding of him; for I found that he saw with your peculiar eyes, and thought and felt with (how shall I describe it?) your peculiar religion of appreciation” (331). N. Parker Willis, Paul Fane: Or, Parts of a Life Else Untold (New York: Scribner, 1857). 46 the seriousness of aristocratic travel and made stories from exclusive social circles available to the largest possible middle-class.

Often accused of being a dandy, Willis cultivated a writing persona and public personality of genteel playfulness and easy social mobility. Claiming throughout his work to hate nothing more than caste and position, he appropriated aristocracy’s pleasures by offered glimpses of luxury to the middle classes.57 Willis released the stronghold of inherited class privilege of the European type through his writing’s ephemeral nature and form. Letters from his travels abroad or other prolific sketches of life appeared in his own Home Journal and were later collected in books with amateurish titles like: Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, Hurry-Graphs,

Inklings of Adventure.58

Willis encouraged readers to develop their own personalities into commodities capable of easy circulation and was himself the subject of amusement.59 William Thackeray, whose sketches of Paris Willis published early in the novelist’s career, made these ideas explicit when he recounted the kind of pleasure Willis offered his readers and his public: “sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions, and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits; sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own

57 As such, Willis was a participating force in the creation of the middle class, thus, perhaps, the outpouring of laughter at his expense, a likely response by the true literary elite and those authors exploring the realities of writing and work, realities that Willis purposefully hid in developing his style of amateurism. For more on this culture, see Cocks, Doing the Town, who writes “The ideology of refinement legitimated the middle class’s claim to social authority and justified the new class hierarchy taking shape in the early nineteenth century without abrogating Americans’ endorsement of formal equality” (3). 58 It’s worth explaining further, perhaps, that Willis also explicitly voiced some complaint about this style, arguing that he (and other writers) would feel more assured to write novels, and be paid for them, if copyright law protected them. He also complained that his own style was limiting, as he writes to a friend, “I wish to heaven I could keep a journal and publish after I got home. This writing and sending off unrevised is the worst thing in the world for one’s reputation. However, I see a world of things that I cannot put into letters, and I feel every day that my mind is ripening and laying up material which I could get nowhere else” (qtd. in Beers 110). See Sandra Tomc, Industry and the Creative Mind: The Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790-1860 (U of Michigan P, 2012). 59 See Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina P, 2001), esp. 157. 47 expense—amusement at the immensity of N. P.’s blunders, amusement at the prodigiousness of his self-esteem; amusement always, with him or at him.” Additionally, speaking as a representative of England, where Willis spent a good amount of time gathering gossip over usually exclusive dinners, Thackeray pointed to a kind of postcolonial mimicry in Willis’s personality by calling him “Willis the Conquerer.”

Thackeray finds himself in awe of Willis’s vision as an outsider and a flirt. “We live in our own country and don’t know it: Willis walks into it, and dominates it at once . . . He sees things that are not given to us to see.”60 Both a “Conquerer” and a man with “peculiar eyes,”

Willis evokes Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of a “seeing man,” the protagonist of “anti-conquest” narratives, or “he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess.” Pratt defines anti- conquest, as “the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence as they assert European hegemony.”61 For Willis, such innocence was achieved through amusement and disinterested style. In Paul Fane Willis is similarly concerned with vision as it relates to peculiarity or personality, not vision as proper judgment. Paul Fane goes to England to become an artist and achieves approval from the upper classes, but such success does not satisfy him. Instead, Paul seeks an environment where individual freedom and aesthetic judgment go hand-in-hand, as he expresses near the end of the novel: “I am coming home, dearest mother, to be happy in American liberty—the liberty not only of sinking to where, by the laws of specific gravity, I belong, but of being looked at, after I get to that level, through one pair of eyes at a time [emphasis Willis’s].”62 Such vision allows each individual, not a nation or a caste, to carve out his own amusement. Unlike mass entertainments of later years, only a

60 William Makepeace Thackeray, Contributions to Punch, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903), 697. 61 Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 62 Willis, Paul Fane, 397-98. 48 peculiar individual can be properly amused.63 Proper amusement, thus, shaped social character.

When Willis finds his much-sought-after quadroon women at the New Orleans Sunday market where they are selling their wares or doing the shopping for home, he decides that they

“looked capable of being thought beautiful, at least by one person at a time [my emphasis]”

(367). In this way, the non-standard beauty, the picturesqueness, of American quadroon of New

Orleans seemed to offer a space for aesthetic contemplation whereby the basic contours of the myth were always the same, but one’s approach to her could be unique and heterogeneous. Such aesthetic judgment had long been a kind of self-cultivation that resulted in moral betterment,⁠ but into this equation Willis inserted amusement, which, as its definition suggests, was diverting and dispassionate.64

In one of his many essay collections, Fun-Jottings, Willis summarizes the opaque aspect of amusement and his own style: “We do not expect the world to receive our smiles with the instant sympathy and trust which we expect for our tears. A smile may pardonably be thought a caprice of one’s own. We write, therefore, with correspondent carelessness or digressiveness.”65

Instead of the conventional response that tears elicit, Willis’s carefully chosen details produce for the reader a more incongruous, slipshod response. As we’ll see below, this opaque yet sociable relationship between reader and text characterized Willis’s account of tropical well-being and tropical aesthetics.

Before he met with contrast in the tropics, Willis theorized the relationship all writers

63 Again, this version of amusement should not be confused with the mass distractions of the late-nineteenth century. Amusement importantly allowed for individual escape, and, thus, aesthetic contemplation. On late century literature and amusement see Nancy Bentley, Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2009). 64 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, in a discussion of sentimental literature, argues that the dominant aesthetic theory of mid-nineteenth century, that of Kant and Schiller, combined with Scottish enlightenment thought, and, thus, aesthetic judgment becomes less about adhering to “lawfulness and morality” but about cultivating the free liberal subject in relation to those rules, in a “space of analysis and negotiation” (504-505). Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Literature 76.3 (2004): 495-523. 65 Willis, Fun-Jottings; or, Laughs I have Taken a Pen to (New York: Scribner, 1853), v. 49 have with the form of contrast. In a passage from Dashes at Life, Willis writes, “And he—if contrast is (as who will deny that has followed after the impossible spirit of contentment, till hope is dead within him)—if contrast is, I say, the only bliss in life—then does he, the scholar in the crowd live with a most excellent wisdom.” Of course, the trite idea that one must experience pain to know joy is invoked here, but “the scholar in the crowd” finds his bliss in the vibrations of contemplating contrast itself, not in the balanced measurement of each “side.” In this anecdote

Willis hears a merry Christmas party outside his writing office and reflects: “Now kindled to rapture with some new form of beauty, and now disgusted to loathing with some new-developed and unredeemable baseness in his fellow man. What contrast is there like this? Who knows so well as the scholar the true sweetness of surprise? the delightful and only spice of this otherwise contemptible life—novel sensation?”66⁠ Here, Willis enjoys a “formal feeling” but the feeling is not caused directly by the form—but through the ability of contrast to zoom out even further to view forms as forms.67

That travel writers like Willis would be looking for contrasts in their depictions of place is not surprising given the popularity of the picturesque, an ill-defined genre but one that was decidedly a response to both encroaching industrialism at home and idyllic colonialism abroad.68

Willis was raised on the romantic poets but probably had most in common with William Hazlitt, the essayist and influencer of those British poets, whose collection Table-Talk undoubtedly

66 Willis, Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil (New York: J. S. Redfield: 1847), 293. 67 Dillon, “Sentimental Aesthetics,” 499. Willis seems to echo the larger idea that, as Ted Underwood puts it, “literature had a unique ability to render discontinuity imaginable and meaningful” (4). See Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2013). Underwood discusses contrast’s function in the romantic sense of the historical, “achieved . . . not by reducing different eras to some commons standard, but by dramatizing the vertiginous gulfs between eras, and then claiming vertigo itself as a source of meaning” (4). 68 Many thought of picturesque as a kind of mediator, or a third option, between the beautiful and the sublime. Suggesting the importance of proximity in the mode, John Ruskin explained that the “essence of picturesque character has been already defined to be a sublimity not inherent in the nature of the thing, but caused by something external to it; as the ruggedness of a cottage roof possesses something of a mountain aspect, not belonging to the cottage as such” (16). See Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 23 (Philadelphia: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh, 1891). 50 influenced Willis’s loose, gossipy style. Willis’s love of the “peculiar” shares in the first sentence of Hazlitt’s “On The Picturesque and Ideal”: “the picturesque is that which stands out and catches the attention by some striking peculiarity.”69 Hazlitt continues, revealing the fact that peculiarity relies on a logic of contrast, “the picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of discrimination or contrast; the ideal on harmony and continuity of effect.” Additionally, the picturesque creates a tone of “gaiety and extravagance” and encourages the viewer to find enjoyment in the artistic rendering rather than any direct encounter with the art’s subject. Thus, the official first theorist of the picturesque, William Gilpin, uses amusement often to describe the picturesque. The viewer should not expect “more from picturesque travel, than a rational, and agreeable amusement. Yet even this may be of some use in an age teeming with licentious pleasure; and may in this light at least be considered as having a moral tendency.”70 As I’ve described by way of Kriz, the tropics seemed to need amusement, a looking away that also defined pleasure. This is not the only encounter, between supposed disorder and imposed order worth examining. Rather, something is produced out of the idea of the picturesque peculiarity when it converges with other versions of hybridity and harmony.

Krista A. Thompson argues that the European version of the picturesque was not merely imported to the Caribbean. Instead, she argues that a reciprocal recognition developed so that the picturesque “signified a landscape made into the fantastic vision of the tropics.”71 Picturesque ideals literally shaped space as it became open to tourism, whereas some of those same ideals

69 Hazlitt, Table-Talk (London: Thomas Davison, 1821), 272. 70 Gilpin, “On Picturesque Travel” in Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), 47. Elisa Tamarkin argues that the goals of exposing artifice in picturesque painting isn’t necessarily the same as exhibiting the artist’s mastery. The “heterogeneous aesthetic” of the picturesque might lead to a kind of widening of the frame where one might “acknowledge conflicting perspectives at once” because the form of contrast has the potential to avoid totalization. See Tamarkin, “Melville in Pictures” in New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge UP, 2014), 179. 71 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 21. 51 had informed the operations of plantations in the late eighteenth century. After emancipation and especially in the late nineteenth century, the visual economy of the tropics began to trump actual output of sugar. “Deeming the sugarless societies tropically picturesque inscribed them with new commercial value,” Thompson argues.72 Antebellum tourism of these areas, however, saw tropical amusement tied more tightly to commercial success and its panoramas.

Willis, conscious of inheriting the picturesque from Europe’s colonial and aesthetic past, pushes the very purpose of the mode to its extreme. Picturesque scenes transform into figurative pictures, or picture-objects. In St. Thomas Willis sees an old man, “the blackest of negroes with the whitest of beards,” being jostled by a Sunday crowd outside church (56). This crowd, he writes, exhibits a “popular unconsciousness of his [the old man’s] extraordinary beauty.” Calling this disregard “brutal and unnatural,” he concludes, “if he could have been framed, and hung up, in a drawing room, I would have given $5000 for him, to re-sell to somebody who could afford to own him as a picture” (56). Willis is amused instead of horrified at the man being “hung up.”

Wanting to purchase but not own the picture-man himself, Willis wants to participate in the economy of circulating commodities. Like his own fantasy of personality’s ability to transcend class, his fantasy here is of mobility, not authenticity or ownership.

A similar incident occurs when Willis is in New Orleans, breakfasting at his hotel. He is struck by the “superiority” in the face of one of his fellow guests and soon finds out that the man has recently purchased Hiram Powers’s statue of the Greek Slave [fig. 1]. After all the paeans and tears the statue had inspired on its tours around the country, Willis’s intense sensory experience comes from being in the purchaser’s presence: “the feeling which it stirred made an event of my seeing him, for which I am inclined to give New Orleans, whose citizen he is, the tribute of such mention of the matter as I find coming to the tip of my quill” (388-89). The most

72 Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics, 23. 52 wondrous experience is, Willis explains, being in the company of someone able to make the dollar so meaningful. “Why,” he writes, “it seemed to me like seeing a potentate who had exercised a rare kind of power. It was better than seeing a king” (389). Willis’s aesthetic experience of commerce speaks to his representativeness as a liberal-minded social climber. But his making the experience so playfully literal—turning the picturesque into a picture that would make a scene of a black body back into a black body for sale—turns a European mode of beauty into a social and economic system.

Figure 1: The Statue on Display at the Dusseldorf Gallery in New York City While these passages reify tropical scenes, they are additionally populated by audiences with their own “peculiar eyes.” Willis marks various forms of attention and inattention all around 53 him, effectively making of his health trip an education on aesthetic appreciation. The “Alligator” class, the boatmen of the Mississippi, who haunt the New Orleans levee seem “unaccountably attentive” of strangers and of Willis when he’s stopped to “gaze” on at something, too attentive himself (383). Of the entire tropics, Willis makes the observation: “To feel nobody’s eye, and be as unconscious of observation as a bird, seems to be a universal result of the Southern habits; as, to be nervously exclusive and social only by effort, seems to be a result of the Northern” (105).

Searching out “social” manners in the South—here, meaning the islands—conflates a kind of sociological observation with the more active sense of being “social.” The utopian of the tropics for Willis is a social utopia, in the sense of interactive fellowship.

Of the comparison Willis draws between South and North, however, he brushes it aside:

“It is a very pretty dinner-table topic, as it stands—and so I leave it” (105). Laughing off both etiology and the political ramifications of his observation, Willis ironically makes more serious investigations of cultural comparison the stuff of dinner tables. Another example of this dismissal of the comparative mode comes when Willis, from inside his St. Thomas hotel room, describes hearing a terrible noise outside and discovers that the shrieking is coming from a woman mourning her drowned newborn baby. While such horror would have been accompanied by a “hush, or an undervoiced interchange of feeling” at home, in St. Thomas “it made a clamor, pitched at the highest possible key. Turn over the philosophy of the difference, at your leisure”

(63).

Much of Willis’s Health Trip is given over to his travels in the southern United States, including a few letters from Kentucky and its Mammoth Caves. Of New Orleans, he writes five letters, but makes no special claims for its importance amidst the rest of his travels, except by way of the reputation it already has. New Orleans’s place alongside Cuba, Haiti, and Kentucky 54 carves out a regional and hemispheric geography of proximate relationships, not hierarchical ones. In this sense, I invoke Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s “repeating island,” a post-colonial response to the idea that a colony could reduplicate the metropole’s ideology. This structure of the “meta- archipelago” emphasizes both proximity and change, as each repetition marks a difference and a

“step toward nothingness” from an absent center with no originary island. But New Orelans was also defined by its meeting with the Mississippi River. The river emphasizes continuity, flow, and accumulation—the kinds of processual change where repetition doesn’t easily figure. The repeating island and the river are, of course, geographic or spatial forms that took on social and cultural powers of control. Their meeting in New Orleans in formal contrast produces a complexity that challenges the causational theories of form—and, importantly, then, so too did its advertisement of the various aesthetically charged scenes of slavery look like social events.

If the rest of the nation saw New Orleans as diseased and “un-American,” others saw it as representative of a grand imperial future.73 Joseph Holt Ingraham comments in 1835, “If the market at New-Orleans represents that city, so truly does New-Orleans represent every other city and nation upon earth.”74 Timothy Flint agrees, “The position for a commercial city is unrivalled,

I believe, by any one in the world. . . . its position far surpasses that of New York itself.”75 Most often, New Orleans was literarily represented as the center of the slave trade, domestically and internationally—consider that it is the setting for the middle section of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the site of almost-rebellion in Blake, and is embodied in Zoe (a “transatlantic body in flux”) of The

73 As one 1858 New York Times article states, “New Orleans is, unquestionably, the most un-American city in our whole Confederacy.”qtd. in Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006), 9 74 Ingraham, The South-West, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), 73. 75 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Co., 1826), 31. 55

Octoroon.76 When antislavery activists dared to consider the horrifying interdependence of the

North and the South—such considerations then ended with strategic condemnations of the region—they used New Orleans’s overlapping tropical plantocracy and urban merchants, or its colonial past and its economic future, as indicative of a morally savage slippage. In New Orleans more than anywhere else in the U.S. South, fears of racially inflected contamination were sparked by repeated outbreaks of yellow fever and the supposedly related threat of slave insurrection. Both were attributed to the city’s vulnerability, its openness to foreign (especially

Caribbean) trade and immigration.77 Most infamously, disgust and pity were bestowed, respectively, upon the city’s luxurious creoles and quadroons, two figures used by abolitionists against whom they could craft the ideal of the middle-class domestic home and family.

Before I delve more deeply into the significance of the clashing forms on the city’s slavery, I want to summarize some of the other ways in which contrast was the spatial reality of

New Orleans. Proximity, that essential part of contrast, was a lived experience as people crowded into the relatively small city. Climate and topography influenced the layout of the city and the sense of cultural and population fluidity. With the continual risk of flooding, “various racial and ethnic groups migrating into the city were forced to settle together in densely packed neighborhoods, thus encouraging close contact and intermingling.”78 Popular accounts of intermingling jostled with the other story often told about the city’s inhabitants: the contest between national cultures. From 1836 to 1852, New Orleans was divided into three separate municipalities in order to cater to language differences and to allow incoming Americans a way

76 Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 37. 77 For yellow fever and the fear of insurrection see Ari Kelman, “New Orleans’s Phantom Slave Insurrection of 1853,” in The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space, ed. Andrew C. Isenberg (Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2006). See also Von Reizenstein’s Mysteries of New Orleans (1854-55) in which the yellow fever is conflated with the coming of a black Messiah at the end of the novel. See also Sarah Klotz, “Black, White and Yellow Fever,” 231-260. 78 Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 27. 56 around business and legal regulations. Kevin Fox Gotham explains that the city’s municipal separation actually further supported some of the most visible ethnic and cultural confusion, and, additionally, allowed the free black class to slip through the cracks of administrative power. Such governmental “decentralization . . . made it difficult to create and maintain an organized legal system for reinforcing racial segregation.”79 These three municipalities, two French creole and the other Anglo-American, have been made into a story of creole resistance and the stubborn persistence of their culture.80 The neighborhood division has before been interpreted as creole resistance to a process of Americanization, a typical story of divisions meeting a more powerful totality. However, the teleology of Americanization strictly as tending toward homogenization doesn’t quite make sense considering the wants and needs and particular attachments of the varied but often cohesive Creole population—attachments I’ll discuss in the last section of this chapter. American politicians and merchants desired the carving up of the city when they sought legislative approval from the state, thus allowing them to gain full control over their financial

81 matters. The incoming Americans treated the city as a frontier of commerce first and foremost, rather than as a place to settle; thus, Americans began to control space by asserting mobility and impermanence, letting the creoles keep their claims to the local.

The Mississippi River created for seasonal work for merchants, clerks of various means, and dockworkers in a way that the Western frontier couldn’t until the boom of train travel.

79 Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 27. 80 In “A Matter of Prejudice” Kate Chopin describes a haughty woman who, for the first time, finds herself “very far out” in the American sector’s “new and splendid growth . . . like a strange city to old madame.”Kate Chopin, A Night in Arcadie (Chicago: Way & Williams, 1897), 166. 81 Tregle, Creole New Orleans, 156-57. “What remains beyond dispute is that the 1836 division of the city changed forever the nature of the long contest between the competing populations. Bitterness and rancor would continue for many years in the future, but there was never again that anxious sense that the outcome of a great struggle was hanging in the balance. The creoles had clearly lost” (157). In truth, the carving up of the city set the stage for a racial integration beyond ethnic disputes, when the city reintegrated in 1852, this legislation came with a homogenization of the black community and the shift in the rights of free people of color, when, starting in 1852, any slave manumitted was required to leave the state within the year (Bell 87). See Carolyn Cossé Belle, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1997). 57

Historian Ari Kelman notes that importing to the city’s busy levee scene reached its peak in 1840 and didn’t fall in numbers until the start of the Civil War.82 The panoramic levee scene inspired travelers to rapturously list all they could see. Unlike the staging of contrast, these lists represented abundance and accumulation, what Walter Johnson calls the “racial-commercial sublime.” Johnson argues that the implied “comparisons” made in lists like Trollope’s and others

“hint at the fascination and apprehension these writers felt on the levee, in the presence of slavery.”83 Calling this mix of emotions the “steamboat sublime,” Johnson captures a national,

Mississippi Valley focus, a different geographic form that collided with the repeating island form of the tropics in New Orleans.84

One striking example of Johnson’s “racial-commercial sublime” comes from the oft-cited poem by Col. James R. Creecy, contained in a collection of his travels published in 1860. Before providing the poem, Creecy writes, “With what astonishment did I, for the first time, view the magnificent levee . . . covered with active human beings of all nations and colors, and boxes, bales, bags, hogsheads, pipes, barrels, kegs of goods, wares and merchandise from all ends of the earth. Thousands of bales of cotton, tierces of sugar, molasses; quantities of flour, pork, lard, grain, and other provisions; leads, furs, &c., from the rich and extensive rivers above.” Creecy’s poem similarly beckons tourists to a scene of the recent past, as the poem is set in 1829:

Have you ever been in New Orleans? If not you’d better go, It’s a nation of a queer place; day and night a show! Frenchmen, Spaniards, West Indians, Creoles, Mustees, Yankees, Kentuckians, Tennesseans, lawyers and trustees,

82 Ari Kelman, A River and its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006), 62. 83 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 83, 82. Eric Lott also offers a crucial account of ambivalence in his account of minstrelsy’s “racial aversion” and “racial desire” (6). See Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1993). 84 For more on the “vulnerability of man and his lightly concealed terror before the immensity of tropical nature” (51), see Lesley Wylie, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the Novela de la Selva (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2009), 49-53. 58

Clergymen, priests, friars, nuns, women of all stains; Negroes in purple and fine linen, and slaves in rags and chains. Ships, arks, steamboats, robbers, pirates, alligators, Assassins, gamblers, drunkards, and cotton speculators; Sailors, soldiers, pretty girls, and ugly fortune-tellers; Pimps, imps, shrimps, and all sorts of dirty fellows; White men with black wives, et vice versa too. A progeny of all colors—an infernal motley crew!85

Descriptions of such an “infernal motley crew” were, Joseph Roach argues, “characteristic of

Anglo-American responses to the teeming human and material panoply of the circum-Atlantic cityscape.”86 Visitors regarded the city with a “sense of burdensome superabundance,” as they approached an “excess of difference.” These encounters were, as Roach indicates, informed by a particular circum-Atlantic epistemology and reality: “There are too many incommensurate objects, species, mixtures, and colors, the propinquity of which the entrepot of New Orleans makes continuously visible.”87 Roach’s focus throughout his study of the circum-Atlantic is overabundance and variety. The “circum” or “trans” frame serves to show flow and processes in multiple directions.88 However, as surely as New Orleans was a city of flow, of goods and slaves, and a city of diasporic belonging, it was also an “entrepot,” a stop, and a rupture. The form of contrast, of course, highlights the sense of “propinquity.”

In his poem, Creecy’s phrase “a nation of a queer place” captures the strange sense that a city of so many lavish and perverse connections could also be singular. Calling New Orleans a nation might simply refer to the idea of aggregation, rather than a geopolitical nation, but both

85 Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces (Washington: Thomas McGill, 1860), 11-12. 86 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 185-86. 87 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 186. 88 The “circum” form, however, might be an interesting and particular case under the larger umbrella of the “transnational” or “transoceanic,” in that it emphasizes not just the movements across but has something in common with the actual shape of eighteenth-century slave trade, which is elsewhere described as more rigid. Christopher L. Miller argues that the triangle of the slave trade was a “figure of dominance itself” that literalized metaphors of colonial familial relationships (299). See Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 59 meanings are significant, especially considering that the poem was likely written just as the

Confederacy was forming.”89 Creecy’s phrase emphasizes the noun “nation,” but that nation is not an aggregate of the plural. He does not, in other words, describe “nation of queer subjects” or even a “nation of queer places.” Rather, the nation is made out of something already spatially whole, if “queer.” “Nation,” thus, loses its significance, its being place, and becomes a mere descriptor. In the poem, “nation” is a noun that functions like an adjective. While Roach and others focus on Creecy’s typical use of catalogue and superabundance, his lines of poetry and his

“nation of a queer place” a reckoning with form.

Willis’s arrival at the New Orleans’s St. Louis Hotel in May 1852 was announced in the

Times-Picayune, not only in the “Arrivals at Principal Hotels” section, but also on the newspaper’s front page. The front-page item reads, “We trust he may have opportunities of seeing something of the style of life in New Orleans among the old and the new population, and on the plantations. New and rich themes will be developed for his graceful and flowing pen.”90

Staying in the city for only a few days, Willis was the kind of traveler that went to the city to satisfy his expectations of exotic charms.

Willis’s lodgings, the St. Louis Hotel, was one of the two famous hotels in the city, built in the 1830s as the Creole answer to the American-funded St. Charles Hotel. Both hotels contained space for a city exchange, slave auctions, and lavish balls. The St. Louis, with its interior grand rotunda, provided an infamous setting for all these activities, making each a socially significant affair. Despite the fact that the hotel originally opened as a Creole-French establishment, Willis finds the St. Louis’s bar-room to be the perfect representation of English

89 Barbara Eckstein argues that Creecy’s poem “ironically invites his readers on the eve of the Civil War to know more about the city and its sins against U.S. values by immersing themselves in the carnival of everyday New Orleans life.” Barbara Eckstein, Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (New York Routledge, 2006), 13. 90 New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 15 1852, pg. 1. 60 culture: “The julep and sherry-cobbler are fairly naturalized in London, but we see no sign in

Paris, of these bubbles on the counter-current from the New World” (347).91 From his hotel, he walks across the street to a French cafe and emphasizes the excitement of the watering-holes’ contrast, “To have such marked exponents of the two countries as a bar-room and a cafe, on opposite sides of a street, each the best of its kind and each in full national operation, and noisy exclusively with its own language, seemed to me a racy and novel contiguity” (351-52).

This imagined proximity of nationalities in New Orleans recalls Willis’s earlier description in Health Trip of touring different islands of the West Indies all within a day’s time.

While an escape to Saratoga Springs might offer relaxation, socializing, or sublimity in these early days of tourism, these domestic vacation spots couldn’t provide the kinds of amusing and picturesque contrast that island colonies could. Willis determines what is uniquely beneficial in tropical travel: in the West Indies, “the entire novelty of climate and vegetation, and the close neighborhood of so many varieties of government and manners—Danish, Spanish, French,

English, and African islands, all within a summer day succession of visits—amount to a delightful and salutary self-forgetfulness. They [invalid-travelers] are amused out of themselves, and return to find that the body has taken advantage of the mind’s absence to put the nerves to their proper work” (262). It is not simply the “varieties of government and manners” that offer healing amusement, but their “close neighborhood.”92

Touring the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the expectation would be to provide some glimpse at post-slavery and slavery, respectively. The Spectator opens its review of Willis’s

91 The originally French-owned St. Louis was built almost as soon as the American-run St. Charles Hotel began construction. For more on the importance of these hotels during Reconstruction, see chapter two. 92 The idea that the invalid needs to be “amused” out of his illness suggests, so Martha Schoolman argues, the overlapping meanings of “consumption” in health trips like Willis’s. Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies, 35. Schoolman explains that this consuming connection to the Caribbean was an ethical problem for anti-slavery activists who, in turn, boycotted its plantation products. 61

Health Trip by lamenting, however, that Willis does not provide any such in-depth account: “A visit to the West Indian Islands up to so late a period of 1852-53 might have furnished useful information as to their social and economic condition; upon which subject the knowledge attainable is really scanty notwithstanding its importance.”93 Such information about “the results of slavery or emancipation” might have been “of a very instructive kind,” but, as expected,

“instruction is not [Willis’s] forte.” The reviewer is astonished that Willis writes of “the music and the mass” in Havana rather than “the secret slave-trade or the condition of the plantation slaves.”

These critiques are somewhat surprising. Willis’s Health Trip is, undoubtedly, misted by its writer’s “self-satisfied, gay, insouciant air,” but portraits of enslaved and emancipated life are hardly few and far between. Willis does not provide any new learned overall assessment of some larger sense of life or “social condition” in the islands. He refrains from larger conclusions and from recognizing patterns of change, even from balancing what he might have heard before traveling with what he sees before him. Again, even an anthropological comparison of manners he calls a mere “pretty dinner-table topic.” In the West Indies, he avoids all such information explicitly: “While my friend was inquiring into the statistics of sugar, I took a ramble through the village of huts which the plantation sustains” (57). In a chilling portrait of plantation life, Willis describes the slaves in literally curious positions. Once again, his attention is on the subject of

(in)attention itself. In the corner of one of the rooms sits a young woman, “as entirely unmoved by a stranger’s presence and observation as if she had been a statue of black marble” (57). Willis describes being more in awe, however, of an older man who sits “immovable” while an army of ants crawls all over his diseased foot. In the following paragraph Willis describes a few other

“black and happy ignoramuses,” returning to the subject of health. In these especially

93 September 2, 1854 The Spectator 933. 62 objectifying accounts, we see how literally Willis makes them into statues and, the man with the ants, into a “cheese with its maggots.” Regarding these observations, Willis decides that the climate, while often prodigious, “is a climate capable of simplifying matters as well” (59).

Happiness is, for Willis, connected to a lack of consciousness—thus, the very many statues that populate his reified picturesque. Finally, he observes that some workers “all looking considerably happier than any white people I ever saw on their way to a place of amusement”

(59).

Willis’s accounts of “slavery and emancipation” are not instructional, but they are elucidating in other ways not calculable through an abolitionist or apologist point of view.

Constantly referring to contrast and inattention in his scenes, Willis meditates on the meaning of amusement and sociality—concepts nurtured in the colonial tropics, as discussed above. Willis’s final letter from his trip and from New Orleans gives an account of a slave auction in the St.

Louis Hotel’s gallery. Willis wanders into the drinking saloon to find it lively with people. “I was amused with the usual contrast [my emphasis], as I went in, the architectural sublimities commonly reserved for places of sacred resort . . . enclosing a throng so careless and lively”

(391). Willis had perhaps seen the popular image of this very scene before, since his trip follows in the footsteps of James Silk Buckingham, a British journalist who recounted his experience of the “tenacity” of slave supporters in The Slave States of America (1842). Buckingham’s description of the St. Louis Hotel’s sacred architecture and the bustling auction below allowed him to make the analogy to the beauty of freedom and the stain of slavery. Compared to slave sales he had seen in the West Indies, Buckingham decides that seeing them in America was far worse; a slave auction “appeared, indeed, more revolting here, in contrast with the republican 63 institutions of America.”94 Because this tableau inspired such a statement, it’s clear why

Buckingham would choose this scene out of all his travels for which to commission a drawing.

Here, of course, the use of contrast here is more focused on binaristic contradiction; this assessment shows how such reasoning was often built into evaluations of American liberty, even noticeable by foreign travelers like Buckingham. However, Buckingham also notes that the St.

Louis Hotel auctions take place in English and French, and the drawing of the auction highlights the multicultural sociality of these scenes, showing women, children, and sailors all gathered, but mostly in casual poses (see the central figure reclining at the bottom) or completely inattentive

[fig. 2]. The light from the cupola is also diverted, drawing the eye just slightly away from the center, only to make that center feel less-directly highlighted, though significant for that fact.

One little girl is shown spinning a hoop, representing the playfulness described in a 1858

Illustrated London News piece about the St. Charles Hotel where the journalist saw “southern planters, and their wives and daughters, escaping the monotony of their cotton and sugar plantations” to engage in a “life of constant publicity and gaiety.”95 To illustrate contrast itself, the picturesque mode of the askew, not the opposed, is essential.

94 Buckingham, The Slave States of America, vol. 1 (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1842), 335. 95 Charles MacKay, Life and Liberty in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 265. This is also a scene that Walt Whitman recalls in his later writing, reminiscing on his short time working for the Crescent and living in the city, “And what splendid and roomy and leisurely bar-rooms! particularly the grand ones of the St. Charles and St. Louis. Bargains, auctions, appointments, business conferences, &c., were generally held in the space or recesses of these bar-rooms.” Whitman, “New Orleans in 1848” in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, vol. 3 (New York: Putnam’s, 1902), 211. 64

Figure 2: New Orleans Slave Auction, 1839 Willis also emphasizes disinterestedness and inattention in what appears before him.

Willis himself is not only removed from the scene but finds a reciprocated a-musement around him. Multiple times throughout Willis’s sketches he makes apologies for not having the capacity or the time to render a picturesque scene, or he constructs moments that are picturesque precisely at the moment others ignore them (as in the case of the man he would have “hung up” as a picture). He writes of entering the first floor of the hotel to the auction, “I find it takes new eyes to be surprised at very thought-stirring scenes, sometimes; but, to give a strong instance of what people may get so used to as to give over looking at it with any particular curiosity, I will describe what was set out upon two tables on the opposite sides of the bar-room of my hotel”

(380). On one table, Willis sees some cold lunch items, and, on the other, “half a dozen pretty and nicely dressed negresses” waiting to be sold at auction (381). The young girls on top of the table appear as if they feel “wholly unnoticed,” and look around the rotunda’s scene with 65

“amused interest” (381). They seem “bashful,” “dropping their eyes” and “stealing furtive glances” (392). Their attitude resembles that of The Greek Slave statue, whose form and downward gaze, Eve Sedgwick argues, “dramatizes forced display and coerced consent, in the tense struggle of the dignified carriage with the shamed, averted glance.”96

Everything in Willis’s depiction aims to show distracted and diverted attention, or amusement in various forms, some as obvious as the little girl spinning her hoop. According to

Willis the girls at auction feel themselves unnoticed, just as they are mostly of little interest to the majority of the auction’s attendees. Everyone is barely looking on, and this atmosphere is partly what seems to draw Willis’s own attention away from the actual event of the auction block, the central symbol of literature about slavery. Proceedings happen “too rapidly . . . for any very critical observation” because Willis write that he is “deficient . . . in the practised alacrity of the market” (393). Like wanting to hang the man up in a picture so someone else could own him, or just wanting to be in proximity to the purchaser of The Greek Slave, Willis, puts himself in a parallel but not interactive relationship to slavery.

Willis finally indulges in a reverie that emphasizes the moral quandary of reflecting on contrast itself. He doesn’t go as far as Buckingham in moralizing on the disjunction between the liberal excitement of the motley American scene and the capitalist nightmare of slavery. His final lines merely suspend the contrast of the “two tables” where the auctions products were on display: “But I looked down, from the gallery above, upon the two bare tables, later in the day, and indulged reverie over the contrasted disposal of the respected viands—the stomach’s digestion of what had been spread upon one, and Fate’s digestion of what had been spread upon the other” (393). Is he equating the “two tables”? If so, how? Any such equivalence, Roach argues worked to remind spectators that slaves could easily be reduced to objects. Additionally,

96 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 81. 66 such tantalizing proximity (what Roach calls “a fiercely laminating adhesion of bodies and objects”) informed all of consumer culture and liberal sociability (“homosocial violence”).

Roach writes, “The centrality of naked flesh signifies the abundant availability of all commodities: everything can be put up for sale, and everything can be examined and handled even by those who are ‘just looking.’”97 In Willis’s evocative terms of “contrasted disposal” he uses contrast in such a way not to mean difference but marks the impossibility of deciding where similarity and difference meet or end, when “contrasted” comes to mean equivalence, especially in the repetition of Willis’s sentence structure. Willis opened his sketch of the slave auction under the rotunda “amused with the usual contrast,” providing a more familiar opposition of the sacred and the profane, but in the “contrasted disposal” the idea of contrast as a good measure of difference has been suspended.

In forcing equivalence between lunch items and slaves, Willis reduces the slaves to mere objects, and Willis’s role as a writer-observer of arrangements around him and/or as crafter of those contrasts becomes disturbingly muddied. At the beginning of the sketch, Willis writes that he is anticipating the moment “when the destiny of these other warm dishes was to be decided.”

One could read his equivalence of the “warm dishes” with the cold lunch provided as a critique of the very kinds of propinquity a slave society forced one to look upon, but Willis allows readers to enter into further amusing parallel relationships with the text. “Fate’s digestion” and the “destiny of these other warm dishes,” however, fully divorces Willis’s complicit looking from the scene of the auction, and abstracts slavery itself to the realm of the non-human. The form of the contrast helps Willis avoid direct critique, helps to disguise his attentive involvement, but it still provides a space for moral reflection or “reverie,” if not decision. As we saw this way of not-deciding but merely oscillating relate to health and leisure, reverie was

97 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 174. 67 indeed not just a privilege of Willis’s but part of his entire concept of luxury and circulation.

As Willis and others have claimed about the streets of the French Quarter, the slave auction, the municipalities, the city/plantation logic, many aspects of antebellum New Orleans urban life relied on logics of propinquity and contrast. Many visitors and outsides found such patterns to be best represented by its most famous residents, the Creoles and the quadroons. I’ve suggested that contrast form stems from a long history of the colonialism and New World creoles. This is why the meaning of “creole” can so easily slip into meaning “mixed race.” While historians have sought to clarify and recover the specific local usage of the term “creole,” meaning someone born in Louisiana without regard to race or even free status, that did not stop the word’s collision and conflation with a variety of other categorizations. Such feminized and symbolic images of the elusive Creole woman and the alluring quadroon were, Emily Clark argues, part of a repressive strategy to make conquering new lands and peoples seem easy and seductive.98 The welcoming quadroon was mirrored by the “tragic mulatta” figure in abolitionist fiction. Either way, Harriet Martineau, not immune to such gawking herself, points out in the epigraph to her chapter on New Orleans in Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), “Though every body cried ‘Shame!’ and ‘Shocking!’ yet every body visited them.”99 Pre-circulated images of the mixed-race women of New Orleans determined the ways that the city performed itself for its viewers, creating a feedback loop of tourism that Martineau hints already existed in the 1830s.

Without the same abolitionist concerns Martineau brought to the city, Willis still confirms the attitude in her epigraph. Doing so, he shows that sympathy for this class worked within the

98 Clark also argues that one of the earliest and most popular travel sources about this “class” of women was been written by Thomas Ashe in his Travels in American Performed in 1806 who possibly never visited New Orleans but, regardless, borrowed heavily from Moreau de Saint-Méry’s text on Haiti (Strange History of the American Quadroon 92). 99 Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 2 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 120. Martineau is quoting from Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee. 68 agendas of pro-slavery southerners, as well as abolitionists. “I must confess,” Willis writes, “to have had my sympathies somewhat excited for this class, by conversation with Southern gentlemen, who spoke of their condition, of course, with no Northern prejudice” (366). What brand of Northern “prejudice” to which Willis refers is difficult to pinpoint. Broadly, he seems to be siding with proslavery against the Northern, and, thus, abolitionist view that would equate the mixed-race women with the horrors of slavery. Willis is either referring to a Northern prejudice against the institution of slavery, and, thus, all Southern custom and belief (and Willis, in turn, finds himself indifferent or accepting of it); or, Willis could be referring to attitudes against the over-refined and over-sexualized quadroon.

Very few visitors to New Orleans distinguished between Francophone/Creole or

Anglophone people of color, nor were they interested in disaggregating the relationship between lightness of skin color and freedom. These kinds of assumptions, of course, made contrast possible by making categories stable.100 Willis’s inability to elaborate, or lack of interest in doing so, on the ethnicity or the free status of the women he sees at the market speaks to the contradictory and incomplete information available to him before and during his visit.101 Willis sees these women shopping and assumes they are slaves shopping for their masters’ Sunday supper. He is, however, confused by their appearance, going so far as to call some of them

“ugly,” likely enthusiastic to find some peculiarity with which to distinguish his account from the usual myths about quadroons’ beauty. Again, these are the women that he thinks are beautiful only when appreciated “at least by one person at a time” (367). But there were, to his surprise,

100 Frederika Bremer is one of the few to call the women selling at the market “black Creoles,” or, she elaborates, “natives, who have the French animation and gaiety.” Bremer does not infer their freedom, but their French language seems to imply freedom very obliquely. Bremer, The Home of the New World, 15. 101 In 1860, 50 percent of black residents in New Orleans were free. And according to the 1850 census 81 percent of all free people of color in New Orleans were “mulattos” and 19 percent were “black.” See David Rankin, “Forgotten People: Free People of Color in New Orleans, 1850-1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1976), 56- 57. 69 such “various shades of complexion” that he wanted a “cicerone” to help him find the women that he assumed should have been recognizable to him.

Here, confusion over race, freedom, and nativity led many writers and readers to conflate or at least imbricate the creole and the quadroon. This imbrication happened as the result of a contrast logic, where they converged but remained tantalizingly and discernably separate. They became glued together in national fiction because of their imaginary “quarantine” in New

Orleans.102 Many critics explain that the “tragic mulatta” is a sexual fantasy that contains threats to the national order. Moreau de Saint-Méry, the most famous early observer of Haitian populations, argued infamously “the entire being of a mulatto woman is given up to love.”103 In antebellum New Orleans, the white creole woman took on many of these same tropical characteristics. Willis, after observing these creole ladies at the opera, writes, “The magnolia-like indolence of their pale but still passionate-looking sweetness, shows a perfecting touch (for love, at least,) given to the blood of a race, by the climate” (361). More and more, the contest over the identity of Creole became a fear of “being aligned too closely with former slaves or with colonialism in the New World.”104 Thus, it wasn’t just that because the creole and the quadroon could share the same climate and end up with similar pleasure-loving attributes, but the effect of such proximity created an amusing relation. Further illustrating this overlap is Joseph Holt

Ingraham’s anecdote of a Northern father who was outraged by news that his son wanted to marry a “Creole,” thinking that such a designation was the same as “Mulatto.”105 In clarifying that “Creole” simply means “native,” entering into the taxonomic realm, Ingraham cannot fully

102 Clark, Strange History, 197. 103 Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, A Civilization That Perished: The Last Years of White Colonial Rule in Haiti, (Philadelphia, published by the author, 1797-1798), translated, abridged, and edited by Ivor D. Spencer, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 81-82. 104 Barbara Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996), xv. 105 Ingraham, The South-West, 119. 70 erase the way that the famed women of color in New Orleans, the quadroons, often were positioned to allow transgressive racial desire to be expressed through those in tantalizing proximity. Marrying a white creole woman could offer close to the same excitement as marrying a mulatto.

Again, Willis is hardly a reliable scholar of any real social structure in the city, and like most visitors to New Orleans, he admits to following guides as sources for his knowledge. As much as Willis focuses on the practice of looking—one should note the alarming perspective that he adopts as he looks down on the “two tables” from above—he does not ever claim looking as a path to knowledge but as a strategic avoidance of it. However, his confusions and the ways he stages the contiguous groups show how forcefully the idea of ethnic contest between the

Americans and the Creoles survived despite shared economic opportunities, and political cooperation and consolidation. Robert C. Reinders, along with others, argues that by 1850, any real (economic or political) tension between the Americans and Creoles was all but dissolved

(see more on this tension in the next section), and intermarriage between white elites was quite common, but travel writers and local writers continued to turn fixate on their ethnic battles as constituting a mutually appreciated cultural myth.106

Writers like Willis, and even abolitionists guarding themselves against the charms of

New Orleans, crafted scenes of contrast based on their own epistemological assumptions about the coherence of nations, despite their close proximity in space and time. “New-Orleans!” traveler Ingraham writes, “the play-thing of monarchs. ‘Swapped,’ as boys swap their penknives.”107 Ingraham’s further comments on the cultural division of the city show an idealized empire in the city’s ballrooms. After expressing surprise at such a continued rivalry, his

106 Reinders, The End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (Gretna, Louisiana: Firebird Press, 1998), 11. 107 Ingraham, The South-West, 74. 71 companion assures him that he is mistaken, that the divided ballroom is the result of “universal unanimity of feeling among the parties.” All that separates them now is language, and this separation, the French guide suggests to Ingraham, is for the better: “were they indiscriminately mingled, the result would be a confusion like that of Babel, or a constrained stiffness and reserve, the natural consequence of mutual inability to converse,—instead of that regularity and cheerful harmony which now reign throughout the crowded hall.”108 Ingraham’s anecdote of the ballroom partakes of the fantasy of two nations neither cooperating, confounding, or mongrelizing, but otherwise contrasting. This image speaks more specifically to how the cultural clash idea worked with economic cooperation and consolidation for white Anglos and creoles.

Willis describes this arrangement evocatively when he writes of the “two halves of the city”:

“Here are two halves of a city, as distinct, up to the very dividing edge, as the half of a pine- apple fitted to the half of a pine-apple cheese—one as thoroughly Yankee as granite-fronted and big-windowed new books-stores . . . while the other is as old-fashioned and conservatively

French” (358). This view of New Orleans allows Ingraham and Willis to enjoy the fruits of an idealized empire; there is neither confusion nor the disappearance (genocide) of a subordinate people. Joseph Roach argues that New Orleans’s performances offered ‘the historic opportunity to accept or reject an alternative to the bloody frontier of conquest and forced assimilation: the paradigm of creolized interculture on the Caribbean model—a plural frontier of multiple encounters.”109

Even New Orleans newspapers marveled at the possibilities and pleasures of coexistence relationship, as the Times-Picayune, the English paper to answer the French (and then bilingual)

Bee, did in 1843 discussing the feast at the opening of a new restaurant, which excelled in Creole

108 Ibid., 121, 122. 109 Roach, Cities of the Dead, 182. 72 cuisine—turtle soup and broiled capons with oyster sauce—but included Anglo roast beef, to the amused shock of the reporter: “But the beef, the roast beef—we plant yourself upon that—was roast beef. We would not do violence to the feelings of any one; we mean no personal offense; but we cannot suppress this acknowledgement—that we have eaten roast beef in Louisiana!”110

As an American celebrating the champion Anglophone tastes, the journalist’s enjoyment also comes from, as indicated in the original italics, the contrast of the roast beef and Louisiana. This was a mode of domination that wasn’t about conquering and erasing, but about settling, about preserving the ambivalence in being both conquered (as in Americans that are best represented as overly British roast beef eaters) and conquerers of a supposedly coherent creole culture.111

Thus, nostalgia for the “Creole” way of life began earlier than its strategic redefinition in the violent Reconstruction years. From the years following the Louisiana Purchase onward, the former colonists’ capacities for republican self-government was up for debate. Andy Doolen summarizes, “The slave insurrection in Louisiana’s former sister colony of Saint-Domingue stigmatized Louisiana as a space of exception, too saturated with slaves, many of them with

Caribbean roots, for safe national incorporation. . . . Made to share the exceptional, inferior status of slaves and free persons of color, these former colonial subjects were deemed unsuited for inclusion in republican society without more instruction and maturity.”112 Violent white supremacy eventually led to a nativism that put the Creoles in league with the Anglo-American citizens against the growing number of new immigrants workers and freedmen.113

Before then, Mardi Gras gave reason both for Anglo visitors and for journalists for the

110 New Orleans Times Picayune, November 15, 1843, pg. 2. 111 See Edward Watts, “Settler Postcolonialism as a Reading Strategy,” American Literary History 22.2 (2010), 459- 470. 112 Andy Doolen, Territories of Empire: U.S. Writing from the Louisiana Purchase to Mexican Independence (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), 22. 113 See Sandra Frink, “Strangers are Flocking Here: Identity and Anonymity in New Orleans, 1810-1860,” American Nineteenth Century History 11.2 (2010), 155-181. 73

French-language newspapers to debate the social and political changes in the city as amusing. An

English visitor describes carnival in 1846, “The strangeness of the scene was not a little heightened by the blending of negroes, quadroons, and mulattos in the crowd; and we were amused by observing the ludicrous surprise, mixed with contempt, of several unmasked, stiff, grave Anglo-Americans from the north, who were witnessing, for the first time, what seemed to be so much mummery and tom-foolery.”114⁠ The contest and contrast between the “authentic” carnival and the Anglo-Americans created a space for both the insider and outsider to enjoy.

Rather than a sense of inclusiveness that actually disguised exclusiveness, Mardi Gras offered opportunities for displays of exclusiveness that actually allowed (some) outsiders to integrate into the city through understanding the amusement of “us versus them.” Kevin Fox Gotham provides a number of examples from French and English language newspapers, both expressing the same concern, that “The good old Creole customs are rapidly falling into disuse,” and

“people enjoy themselves more soberly.”115⁠ With machinations similar to the Lost Cause of the late-nineteenth century South, nostalgia for always-disappearing carnival customs kept them preserved and powerful. Mardi Gras in this postcolonial, national combination was a kind of enjoyment that proffered not just a carnivalesque inversion of top and bottom but a new understanding of insiders and outsiders.

The form of contrast embraced a very specific kind of “interculture,” one that staged relation but not interaction or “mingling” (the other common word used to describe New Orleans populations which might refer not just to social proximity but blood mixture). Further, the form of contrast helps to uncover an alternative interest in New Orleans, one beyond the desire/fear binary outsiders found in the revolutionary minded free people of color or the possibilities of

114 Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to North America, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1855), 113. 115 These two quotations are form the New Orleans Daily Delta (1856) and the New Orleans Bee (1853), qtd. in Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 29. 74 slavery’s riches and conflagrations.116 Contrast did not rely necessarily on the city’s exception from the rest of the nation but on the persisting internal contrasts that made for a specifically

American way of thinking, one that didn’t consider creolization as a process but as aesthetically pleasing cultural appositions, not oppositions. Such a positioning offered a new frame for viewing the tropical in and beside New Orleans. Both were worldly places with “paracolonial” connections to Europe and its (former) colonies. Thus, the “paracolonial” helps explain the aesthetic form of contrast, whereby the individual tourist and reader can meditate over the pleasurable tension of two cultures, in a reverie like Willis’s when he looks over the two tables.117

“Then let our Country be Louisiana!”: Alternative Attachments

The form of suspended contrast was not unique to those writing with an outsider’s, or nervously excited and ambivalent, perspective. I argue that contrast was a form mutually enjoyed and employed by newcomers and natives to New Orleans—or if not natives, those writers of a

Francophone, inter-imperial background. Much has been made by historians and literary scholars—the few interested in early Louisiana literature—in the past over the cultural clash between the Anglo-American spirit of consumerism and the elitist, resistant Creole culture.

These truisms and claims match the fantasies of later nineteenth-century writers. After the Civil

War, French allegiance in the antebellum years was emphasized and exaggerated to distance this creole class from previously enslaved people.

However, historian Peter J. Kastor argues that antebellum Louisianans were not so much

117 On paracolonialism as a concept that “exceeds” other terms for relationships of expansion and empire, see Sean X. Goudie’s discussion of the United States’s relationship to, and enjoyment of, the West Indies. See Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006), 11-12. 75 worried at all about giving up allegiance to France—but more about the English-speaking administration ignoring their local power and language. Many of the creole residents, white and black, both free and enslaved, were often interested and enthusiastic about the economic expansion that would come from the new nation. Moreover, historian Eberhard L. Faber argues that the “conflict paradigm . . . presents a top-down, elite picture of New Orleans society” where the privileged fought over ideals at the expense of “the majority of actual ‘creoles.’” Such a mode of cultural conflict also, Faber points out, confuses the cultural with the economic, presumably something more material—this view that we should keep the issues distinct, however, is one I find incorrect, especially in light of the final story I discuss below, a slave narrative written by a citizen of both France and New Orleans.118 I argue that the struggle over different senses of the local, the national, and the colonial contributed to dueling senses of the social, sometimes disguised as the merely cultural or amusing.

There are two sides to the story of conquest of Louisiana by the United States. The sale was in some ways as advantageous to France, and to Louisiana natives, as purchasing it was to the United States. Such a scope helps us to understand the Louisiana Purchase through an “inter- imperial” model, rather than only the first important step in the United States’ empire-building.

In the contingent moment of transfer from Spain back to France in 1800, Jefferson hints at the risk of France taking New Orleans from the Spanish: “The day that France takes possession of

New Orleans . . . we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”119 Additionally, the role of the Haitian Revolution in the cession of Louisiana would linger in the U.S.

118 Faber, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America (Princeton: Princeton UP), 217. 119 Qtd. in Peter S. Onuf, “Prologue: Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood,” in Empires of the Imagination, 29. Onuf suggests that Jefferson was overstating the risk here as a rhetorical threat to France, but it also hints at the eventual Anglocentrism of the nation at the expense of a continued and stronger French alliance. 76 imagination.120

Kastor makes the point that the labels “French” and “American” in antebellum Louisiana were always applied strategically, “as a means to make sense of the upheavals unleashed by the

Louisiana Purchase or to sort out the troublesome concept of nationalism.”121 Kastor argues that residents of Louisiana simply didn’t have strong ties one way or another to their French identity, and they especially had not been loyal to their Spanish authorities.122 Because the people in

Louisiana were joined by shared language, they had less need for the kind of national identity that was struggling to develop in the United States, for those political principles that the U.S. would adopt as the core of its nationalism.123 Instead, the feeling of creole localism was evident even during the Spanish administration: “They [the Louisianans] might resent policies that excluded them from full membership in the Spanish empire, yet the Francophone population eventually invested tremendous energy in denying any real Spanish influence on local culture.”124

The local people of Louisiana conceived of nation and empire, attachment and mobility, in ways derived from their local circumstances. This focus on locality does not mean, however, that they were merely provincial, though Governor Claiborne might have implied so with his description of their eager dancing. Many creoles were ready for alliance with the United States and its goals of expansion, both spatial and commercial. And for the United Sates and its worried citizens, the need to repress a variety of French problems—revolution, race, religion, language— was no match for the benefits to be gained from incorporating the two (or more) white

120 See Laurent Dubois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” in Empires of Imagination, 93-116. 121 Kastor, 240. 122 Ibid., 244. 123 Ibid., 245. 124 Ibid., 244.

77 populations. This benefit continued throughout the century, as white populations consolidated by highlighting their own pleasurable contrasts, the tragic or foolish creole and the Joseph

Frowenfeld’s of progressive nationalism.

As will be discussed in later chapters, New Orleans became a popular subject in the context of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction imagination for a number of reasons, as race melodramas and regionalism became popular genres. This postbellum literature often emphasized cultural and political clashes of the antebellum years in order to romanticize the Lost

Cause of the entire South, or in order to criticize that very nostalgia. Governor Claiborne, appointed as the first governor of the new territory, became an enemy in George Washington

Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), an enemy likely borrowed from Cable’s popular source,

Charles Gayarré’s History of Louisiana (1866): “Claiborne was at the same time the Governor, the intendant and the supreme judge of Louisiana. There could not be under the sun a more perfect despotism.”125 This anti-American sentiment was invented through nostalgia for an imagined French-speaking elite creole existence that actually helped to solidify whiteness and nativity in a postbellum world, but it also helped to soothe the wounds of Civil War and

Reconstruction occupation, playing out the original “American Domination” over again. The invention of the Creole myth needed a friendly enemy, as I’ve already argued regarding the early years of Mardi Gras. In turn, making more of the contest between white populations came at the expense of the shifting, often worsening, daily lives of Indian and black populations who were at the mercy of these imposed rigid national contrasts.

While the cultural clash was a key theme of nineteenth-century writings, many local writers composed patriotic works that emphasized a unique, locally based attachment to

American freedom. The failed rebellion of 1768 by creoles against Spanish occupation became a

125 Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The American Domination (New York: William J. Widdleton, 1866), 4 78 popular topic for antebellum Louisiana literature, not, I argue, because of antagonism against

Americanization or nostalgia for French rule, but because these writers wanted to contribute their own sense of nationalism through local spirit and history. The topic was celebrated in poetry, in a novel by Louis-Armand Garreau published in France, and in a play, the 1836 English-language

The Martyr Patriots; or, Louisiana in 1769. In The Martyr Patriots, a young patriot repeatedly speaks of possible “slavery” under tyrant Spain and renounces loyalty to France.

Frenchmen will now disown us;

Spaniards we can never be, nor Englishmen;

But shall we be without a name? Of what

Nation will ye call yourselves? Old Europe

Has not a name to fit ye. Then let our

Country be Louisiana! Let’s be Americans!126

Here, we see that the story of struggle against “Americanization,” usually thought of as increasing homogenization of economics, classes, and racial categories had its predecessor in the transfer of Louisiana to Spain, following the Treaty of Paris. Historian Shannon Lee Dawdy takes the spirit of revolt expressed in the poem seriously, explaining that the early tavern life of drinking and gambling went hand-in-hand with the desire for free trade that locals had enjoyed under French rule: “The reputation of New Orleans as a wild town where the rule of law was weak attracted just the right sort of people to keep trade favorable.” Dawdy expands from this idea, arguing for the power of “disorder,” or “rogue colonialism,” rather than distrusting the accounts that seem to impose that sense of the savage or lowly upon colonies: “Complaints of

126 T. Wharton Collens, “The Martyr Patriots; or, Louisiana in 1769,” in The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State, ed. Thomas M’Caleb (New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894), 432. 79 disorder reflect the difficulty of ruling over great distances and over diverse peoples.”127

However, we might also note the playful idea of “Then let our / Country be Louisiana! Let’s be

Americans!” Like Creecy’s “nation of a queer place,” the idea of a country being contained within Louisiana, or Louisiana being a country imagined a new configuration: a nation within a nation, or, the absolute equation of being American with having allegiance to a different kind of country.

Another popular patriotic topic was the defeat of the British at New Orleans in 1815, an event that was celebrated annually in the city. We can understand the importance of this event for New Orleanians not simply just because it happened there but because it symbolized a new postcolonial situation; a new relationship to Britian would emerge out of the U.S.’s desire to trade freely with France. New partnerships reconfigured colonial pasts and were celebrated in poetry.

Creole priest poet Peré Adrien Rouquette delivered an oration at the St. Louis Cathedral’s mass on the 1846 anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s victory. His speech captured his doubled patriotism, his feeling “d’un Coeur Louisianais, d’un Coeur patriote.”128 Rouquette, like his brother Dominique and many of the early Louisiana poets, was educated in France and returned there often. Rien Fertel sees Rouquette’s position as indicative of an “identity crisis,” a kind of perpetual “self-exile” that further made him depart from the “cosmopolitan bustle and its burgeoning immigrant population” of New Orleans to a heavily wooded parish just above Lake

Pontchartrain.129 There, he ministered to Choctaws, even adopting (or being granted) the name

Chahta-Ima, which meant “Choctaw-Leader” according to a 1907 collection of Southern literature edited by Joel Chandler Harris, but the name is probably best translated “he who

127 Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008), 226. 128 qtd. in Fertel, Imagining the Creole City, 31. 129 Ibid., 33. 80 resembles a Choctaw,” or even the simpler if more ambiguous, “like a Choctaw.”130

If Rouquette was in “crisis,” it was not over a broad or general sense of nationhood and attachment; he was more concerned about urbanization and immigration, and he had more in common with the concerns of New England nature writers, especially considering the subject of

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 Evangeline.131 Fertel writes that the “in-betweenness” of the creole could be a problem at home; not sharing in language was certainly a problem for municipal decisions, hence the city’s official division, but Rouquette never writes of feeling particularly concerned with any kind of ethnic or cultural prejudice in terms of nation. His constant longing to be alone, to be in the woods, was a reaction to the urbanization of both New

Orleans and Paris, two cities he was constantly called to study and publish. Adrien’s brother

Dominique, another poet, also found issue with New Orleans’s public environment. As Fertel translates one of his editorials, he despises staying in the city: “Whither shall I direct my flight?

To France? To California? God knows. But I must live anywhere but here.”132 The problem of any sense of “in-betweenness” was not the Creole versus American sense that was a nostalgic manufacture of a mutually enjoyed touristic function. Instead, the Rouquettes fought against visitors like Willis and champions of Southern urbanization like J.D.B DeBow who wanted to see the growing city as leading the South’s future.

Many of these francophone writers, while not always radical about racial or ethnic equality in their views, had a variety of alliances across races, ethnicities, and home countries.

Beyond the creole of color poets that made up a small coterie of educators and radical thinkers, those poets of Les Cenelles who I discuss in chapter three, many Louisiana writers were devoted

130 Ibid., 33. 131 Rouquette brags that Longfellow praised his brother Dominique’s verse. Adrien also sent his own verse to Emerson and Thoreau, whom he greatly admired. See Fertel, 45. 132 Fertel, 46. 81 to the same traditions of French romanticism and French radicalism. Arguing for a distinct language-based literary tradition in the city, a few of them published newspapers with literary pieces appearing the same way they did in French newspapers in the feuitillion format. Many of them were not Louisiana creoles, but émigrés from France. Within Charles Testut’s Portraits

Littéraires de la Nouvelle Orléans (1851), of the “fifty-six journalists and writers” he mentions

“only thirteen were native born.”133 Writers with this more global francophone view, meaning those with purviews in contrast to the Rouquettes’ commitment to the Louisiana forest, remained committed to writing in French and to finding a French audience. Creole writers like Charles

Gayarré, the historian who wrote through much of the nineteenth century and contributed greatly to the nostalgic white Creole myth, however, knew the importance of writing in English. Adrien

Rouquette would eventually start publishing in English and found some popularity outside of

Louisiana.

This Rouquette attached himself to a tradition of naturalism already entrenched in

American literature, but he was not forgetful of a possible French audience. His La Nouvelle

Atala (1879) updated François-René de Chateubriand’s popular romance of the Mississippi by adding his name to the tradition he found also in, as he names them in his preface, Brown,

Cooper and Irving. Lafcadio Hearn, writer of the “Gateway to the Tropics” in postbellum New

Orleans, would review Rouquette’s long poem, arguing that there was only a “remote kinship between the romanticism of the French and the Louisiana author.” Instead, Louisiana was an

American frontier.134 Dominique Rouquette, in an unpublished manuscript, brings this sense of

Louisiana to France, when he visits the home of the beloved poet and songwriter of the people,

133 Reinders, End of an Era, 215. 134 See the “Extrait du New Orleans Daily City Item, February 25th, 1879,” otherwise titled “A Louisiana Idyl,” one of Hearn’s first publications in the city. La Nouvelle Atala; ou, La Fille de l’Esprit Legende Indienne par Chahta- Ima 126. 82

Pierre-Jean de Béranger, a voice of the French Revolution and, as Whitman called him, “the

French Poet of Freedom.”135 After meeting the poet in person, Rouquette compares the him to

President Zackary Taylor, “Béranger is just as good looking as old Zack with the same frank, open and engaging countenance of our beloved and lamented ‘Rough and Ready.’” Proud of his frontier experience, feeling himself American and French at the same time, redefining a sense of

“home,’ Rouquette writes, “The amiable old songster questioned us on our bear and deer hunting and sports in general in Louisiana. We felt then quite at home.”136 He is at home in France as a creole who can bring his American identity along.

In Adrien Rouquette’s work we do not find easily recognizable political principles.

Today, Rouquette might be most famous for publishing a pamphlet attacking George

Washington Cable’s popularity and his allegiance to Northern editors and taste. In 1880 the anonymous Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book; or, A Grandissime

Ascension lampooned Cable’s dialect writing as racial madness, the result of a voodoo spell.

Rouquette had been a staunch Unionist and had opposed secession throughout the Civil War.

Being generally sympathetic to anti-slavery causes, he even contributed to Republican publications during Reconstruction. Perhaps it was the realities of Reconstruction that revealed or intensified his feelings of white supremacy displayed in this pamplet. Or, as Lawrence N.

Powell suggests, perhaps Cable had just gone too far: “Only Creole injured pride can explain

Rouquette’s clumsy outburst.”137 Rouquette’s hatred of the “Northern press” and its lauding of

135 Qtd. in Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, Yale UP, 1988), 142. 136 “François Dominique Rouquette papers, 1839-1852,” Louisiana Research Collection 508, Vol. 6: Writings, 1847-1852 137 Cable, The New Orleans of George Washington Cable: The 1887 Census Office Report, ed. Lawrence N. Powell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008), 32 fn. 20. Thomas F. Haddox argues that although Rouquette was an “unlikely candidate” for such an attack, his anger might have stemmed from a sense of Cable’s anti-Catholicism. Haddox, Fears and Fascinations: Representing Catholicism in the American South (New York: Fodham UP, 2005), 36. 83

Cable seems unexpectedly harsh, unless one considers just how delicate the creole concept was after Reconstruction.138

Local outrage expressed in the press and in the literary community over Cable’s The

Grandissimes caused the author to be virtually chased out of New Orleans. In the novel Cable depicted early nineteenth-century creoles as people of complex and mixed genealogies, completely refuting the myth of their pure whiteness his contemporaries were trying to celebrate.

Even though Cable was born and raised in New Orleans and had fought for the Confederacy, his fellow citizens did not consider him one of them, one of the ancien regime.139 Rouquette’s pamphlet depicts Aboo and Caboo, their similar names referencing the two brothers of the The

Grandissimes, both named Honoré Grandissime, one a f.m.c. and the other white. Rouquette’s

Aboo and Caboo are two old Creoles who discover a mysterious text, which they try to decipher, but struggle with its language. At the end, a “chorus of frogs” sings out, satirizing Cable’s study of African-American language and religious practices. This fear of a loss of distinctions drove much writing the late nineteenth century, and spawned the fallacious concept of “social equality,” which I will discuss further in the next chapter. Cable seemed to advocate, with his dialect language, a “beautiful palengensia, heretofore undreamed of,--which will consummate all

138 Rouquette, Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book or A Grandissime Ascension, ed. E. Junius (pseud.) (Mingo City [New Orleans]: Great Pub. House of Sam Slick Allspice, 1880), 18. 139 A contemporary review of Rouquette’s “little squib” appears in Catholic World and is largely sympathetic to Cable, presumably not knowing that “E. Junius” was Rouquette, a Catholic priest. The reviewer, does, however, admit that Cable’s Anglo-Saxonism might be a problem, “Mr. Cable . . . as we believe, a native of Louisiana, is not a Creole, and he apparently wrote from the point of view of one who believes in the English-American—or, to use a cant phrase, the Anglo-Saxon—element to be the normal American element. Hence, in spite of what looks like a real sympathy with the scenes and characters he describes, he has been unable to avoid a somewhat patronizing and superior air, which is undoubtedly Anglo-Saxon, and which seems to have given offence where, as is likely, no offence was intended” (857-58). March 1881. Vol. 32. Gavin Jones provides a good summary of the reaction to Cable’s use of African culture in The Grandissimes, “While the white-Creole community of New Orleans was interpreting Cable’s depiction of its ‘africanized’ speech as a satire upon its cultural separateness, Cable was describing a process in which this same community was, if not consciously adopting the spoken forms of African- American satire, then unwittingly absorbing the linguistic and artistic qualities of blackness that surrounded it” (125- 26). See Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999). 84 fusion and confusion,--making all diverse colors intermarry and blend into one sole and mongrel color.”140 Rouquette found reason to make his attack literary and fictional, since he was a writer of romantic poetry and had tried to define a specific Louisiana contribution to antebellum national literature built on the French poets he admired and on the American natural world. The wise old Creole Caboo tells the younger poet Aboo that he must ignore anything Cable, the

“romancer,” writers and deal only in the “actual,” as he references the beauty of the woods. The terrible sound of the frogs conflated the future of literary language with racial mixture, the result of Voodoo’s “powerful gris-gris”: “Never before were verbs, nouns and adjectives so multitudinously disallied, tied together, whipped into forced union . . . It’s the tumultuous stampede of a startled drove of words toppling, pell-mell, in a wild confusion.”141 Rouquette reacted as many southern writers did, to “counteract visions of the bloody, traitorous, and backward South,” wanted to maintain a version of creole that relied on contrast and national categories, however much overlapping, still intact, not in “wild confusion.”142 Such “wild confusion” was significant post-Civil War issue. In ideal visions of plurality, even if people

“mingled,” their influences would come from association, not from complete erasure of distinction into chaos and African patois. Cable had turned Rouquette’s beloved understanding of language and identity into a mish-mash of dialects and profited off of them.

Unlike the Rouquettes, who used contrast as a way to understand home and language, the author I discuss below was more attentive to a global sense of a creole colonial past and, thus, included slavery in his literary purview. Louis-Armand Garreau did not just consider the relationship of New Orleans to France and the United States, but to all varieties of what could be

140 Rouquette, Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo, 19. 141 Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo, 18. 142 K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2014), 125. 85 considered the “Foreign French,” a term used to differentiate New Orleans-born whites and New

Orleans-born slaves from the French colonies. In other words, those that were creole in Haiti were not creoles in Louisiana, though their identity as former colonial subjects and their language might have been shared. Garreau’s biography shows some of these complications and explains some of the concerns of his story of slave rebellion, his version of “Bras Coupé.”

A number of European colonial myths shared a popular figure: a singularly heroic and/or terrifying guerilla maroon who loses his limbs or body parts in his journey to lead revolt or threaten order, usually with the aid of some religious spell. From Three-Fingered Jack of Jamaica to Haiti’s Makandal to the mythology surrounding Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s mutilated body— the history of colonial slavery was a history of disconnected parts. Stories of these slaves and rebellion leaders circulated equally as anti-slavery arguments and as entertaining pantomimes meant to expel outlawry from the system of plantation slavery.143 New Orleans had its own contribution to the pantheon: Bras-Coupé. The story of Bras-Coupé is familiar to most scholars of the nineteenth-century as the central event of George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes, hinted at in the first chapters of the novel and finally recounted at a party to the novel’s

American outsider. Bras-Coupé, which means Arm-Cut-Off, is a maroon slave in all versions of the story who inspired fear throughout New Orleans, creating a myth of terror like many similar stories of marooned slaves with missing appendages coming from the Caribbean in the eighteenth century. Based on a slave named Squire that newspapers reported on in 1837, Bras-

Coupé’s legend also hearkens back to another, earlier famous maroon, Jean Saint Malo, or Juan

San Malo, who was killed in 1784. Since the action of Cable’s The Grandissimes takes place in

1803, the legend of Bras-Coupe is, within the novel, moved backwards and conflates him with

143 Bryan Wagner’s full treatment of the Bras-Coupe legend and history shows that it was central in creating a police force and a sense of the law. See Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009). 86

San Malo, whose song “The Dirge of St. Malo” Cable included in Creole Slave Songs.144

These temporally overlapping stories of maroon and limbless slaves circulated within the colonial world of contrast and amusement. Thus, their tone was always strangely celebratory.

Garreau’s version of Bras-Coupe’s story was published in France in 1856 and tells the story of this slave’s reign of terror and capture in the 1830s. Louis-Armand Garreau was a white antislavery writer who moved to New Orleans in 1841 and was born in France, the son of a creole from Martinique. His version is rather short—it does not contain the backstory and mysticism of

Bras-Coupé’s self-purported royal birth. The circumstances in Garreau’s version are much more grim, much more intertwined with maroonage options in Louisiana. The story begins when Jim’s wife (Jim will later become Bras-Coupe), another slave, is beaten by a grocer who demands more money from her. She is returned to her plantation and is tortured and killed by her owner for the behavior. In anger, Jim flees to the swampy forests until is caught, shot in the arm, and brought to New Orleans—only to mysteriously escape again. After that, he has over forty deaths attributed to him until a Spaniard trader finally kills him in the forest. It is important to note that many of these stories emphasize the fact that the maroon rebel is often killed by someone on the

“inside,” in this case by one who had traded with Jim. In stories of Jamaica’s Three-Fingered

Jack, a fellow slave is converted from obeah beliefs by Christian reward in order to kill Jack. In yet other versions, maroons are captured by an impulse to return to the inside. Both Bras-Coupe of The Grandissimes and Makandal of Haiti are discovered when they return to dance the calinda drunkenly with other slaves.

144 Originally published in The Century in 1886, Cable follows this song with the following commentary, “It would be curious, did the limits of these pages allow, to turn from such an outcry of wild mourning as this, and contrast with it the clownish flippancy with which the great events are sung, upon whose issue from time to time the fate of the whole land—society, government, the fireside, the lives of thousands—hung in agonies of suspense” (815). Jones argues that this moment of “suspense” is indicative of Cable’s inability to penetrate or understand tone, or the African “counterlanguage” (120). See also Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line, 65. 87

I am suggesting that Garreau’s version of the story is a specific Louisiana story, in that he wants to reference but revise this long history of similar European stories that use a logic of disconnection and festivity. While the Rouquettes had global and alternatively national goals of citizenship, Garreau was not Louisiana creole, but one of the “Foreign French.” Some of

Garreau’s last writing appears in Louisiana’s black Republican newspaper, alongside contributors with whom he often collaborated and taught in schools. Unable to publish his stories in Louisiana because of their radical content about local slavery, he returned to France after nine years to print stories about mixed-race heroines and maroons in his own literary newspaper. He then went back to Louisiana where he was conscripted into the Confederate army and died soon after. Garreau had to publish in France to escape the laws forbidding the publication of antislavery opinion in New Orleans, but as his translator Sarah Jessica Johnson writes, “ironically,

Louisiana was where he found refuge from persecutions he faced in France for his writing.”145

For Garreau, contrast best helps reveal what Laura Doyle calls the “interlaced layers of empire-

146 allusive cultural histories,” not just a statically national version of contrast.

It is tempting to compare Garreau’s “Story of Bras Coupe” to Victor Séjour’s “Le

Mulatre,” another story of revenge written in Louisiana and published in France, but I argue that they importantly draw on different traditions. Séjour’s story is one that takes part in the anxiety of inheritance and mixed-race identity, focusing on psychology and patricide, while Garreau’s story is one of terror that focuses on the sociological and theatrical entertainment. The Bras-

Coupé story participates in a history of plays, pantomimes, pamphlets, and newspaper advertisements where marronage and rebellion are often imagined as a kind of terrible celebration. But Garreau excises these elements of saturnalia from his story.

145 Louis-Arman Garreau, “Bras-Coupé,” Transition 117 (2015), 24. Subsequent citations from Garreau’s story will be cited in-text. 146 Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality.” 88

The many stories about maimed runaways all offer a symbolic absence in place of their missing body parts. All versions of Bras-Coupé, like versions of Three-Fingered Jack before him, circulated through a symbology of missing limbs. Together, they create a version of transnationalism that is not about flow and fluidity, but about understanding connections of colonialism through severing and disjunction. James J. Pancrazio argues that the missing limb acts as a fetish, “an absence that produces excess, which becomes a model for a paradoxical notion of identity as an absent presence.”147 William Pietz further explains that the very idea of the fetish emerged in discourse at the same time stories about Haiti’s Makandal, whose arm was severed in a sugar mill accident, began to circulate in French and English in the mid-eighteenth century. The fetish, Pietz argues, acquired meaning out of “the abrupt encounter of radically heterogeneous worlds.”148

Srinivas Aravamudan, among others, has compared the historical realities of maroon life with myopic retellings that focus on one terrible, limbless leader.149 Even Three-Fingered Jack,

Jamaica’s bandit supposedly feared by whites and slaves alike, never operated alone; maroon communities, interconnected if not stable communities, disprove most of these stories of the lone rebel. Still, Garreau borrows from the powerful trope of the singular outlaw. However, he hints at the multiple layers of fear inspired by Bras-Coupé, the first being that he might bring together some kind of widespread slave rebellion. Garreau describes the creation of a lone terror but first emphasizes the community’s point of view: “It was first feared that he would encourage other slaves to join him and form a redoubtable band of runaways, but he did none of this. He took an

147 Pancrazio, The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell UP, 2004), 152. 148 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES 9 (1985), 6. Both Wagner and Barbara Ladd agree that Makandal is a likely source for all versions of the Bras-Coupe story. 149 See Aravamudan, Introduction to Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview, 2005). 89 aversion to the human species and wanted no other being with him, neither man nor woman, white nor black. He treated everyone he came across as an enemy, and his name became, by the end of a few months, the terror of the land” (“Bras-Coupe” 34).

Despite this positioning of Bras-Coupe’s heroic isolation, Garreau’s story does explore the cooperation with and manipulation of maroon populations in terms of trade and smuggling, the kind of disorder that was made possible by the willingness of outlaws to forge these kinds of alliances. The beginning of Garreau’s story is set in a tavern/grocery where the initial conflict between the Irish owner and Bras-Coupé’s wife occurs. “The Irishman, named Hinclay,”

Garreau writes in the second sentence of his story, “did a good deal of business with the negroes of the neighboring plantations, to whom he sold—at great profit (and in secret)—tafia, whiskey, brandy, as well as (in the light of day) ham, oil, fruit, seeds, and so on” (“Bras-Coupé” 25). If

Garreau emphasizes Bras-Coupé’s eventual isolation over the historical truth of cooperation amongst maroons and others, his allegory still relies on the interconnected dependence of early

Louisiana plantation economies on alternative arrangements between slaves, grocers, tavern- keepers, small-scale planters, and hunters.

During his initial marronage, Jim conspires with a Spaniard named Jacoppo Bermudez

(who sometimes speaks in French) who brings him weapons and gunpowder; in return, the

Spaniard receives a bounty of hunted game from Jim. After going to New Orleans and learning of the reward for Jim’s head, Jacoppo kills Jim with his rifle, but when he brings the head to authorities, he finds that the prize bounty has been lowered. “They profited from his action, but now that Bras-Coupé was no longer a threat, they found that fear had priced the value of the negro a bit too high” (“Bras-Coupé” 39). Thus, the story ends not with some of the celebratory upheaval seen throughout both pro- and anti-slavery portrayals of other Caribbean outlaws but, 90 instead, with denouement. The Spaniard receives a small fraction of the promised money, and the owner of the plantation Monsieur D— simply returns to his former abusive ways. The final line of the story reads, “As soon as word spread of Bras-Coupe’s death, Monsieur D— returned to his plantation, but he was no more humane than before towards his unhappy slaves” (“Bras-

Coupé” 39). In short, Garreau’s story doesn’t reassure or restore any sense of order the way that the performance of maroon pantomimes were meant to do.

Garreau’s Jim is shot in the head without much fanfare, except a final moment, where he

“leapt up, as if propelled by an invisible force” (“Bras-Coupé” 38). No new order is ushered in, even as it is at the end of Bras-Coupé story in The Grandissimes, where a wounded Bras-Coupé blesses a white child and says he is “going to Africa.” At the end of an English version of the

Haitian Makandal story (reprinted in New York), people of every caste gather around to see him burned alive; when he momentarily escapes again, “All the negroes immediately cried out, a miracle!”150 Such scenes of group celebrations proliferate in these stories. The end of Act I of

Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack: A Serio-Pantomime is a “Negro Ball” where all dance and sing at the elimination of terror from their plantation:

Jack he did good Captain wound—

Shoot him shoulder, hurt him back—

If by Quashee Jack be found,

Then good bye, Three-fingered Jack.

CHORUS: Now we dance, &c.151

Most stories of Three-Fingered Jack end with celebration that order has been restored, or, in

150 “Account of a remarkable Conspiracy formed by a Negro in the Island of St. Domingo,” New-York Magazine, 485. For more on this text, see the text prepared by Duncan Faherty, Ed White, and Toni Wall Jaudon at http://common-place.org. 151 William Burdett, The Life and Exploits of Three-Finger’d Jack, The Terror of Jamaica (Sommers Town: A. Neil, 1801), 60. 91 some later versions, with the audience’s knowledge and glee that slavery in the colonies has been abolished. In any event, the group celebration and the social aspects of slavery, highlighted for whatever purpose, went hand-in-hand with marronage. We see this, of course, in Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), where she offers a defense of both marronage and religious enthusiasm.

Cable’s telling of Bras-Coupé’s story matches a theme found in that of Makandal’s, where the escaped slave precipitates his own capture by drunkenly returning to dance the calinda.152 Coming to claim his wife, Bras-Coupé leaps into the ring of dancers. “Ill starred Bras-

Coupe,” writes Cable, “He was in that extra-hazardous and irresponsible condition of mind and body known in the undignified present as ‘drunk again.’”153 Bras-Coupé’s dancing is described as exhibiting “saturnalian antics” when he shows up and pushes aside the other dancers. “All that had gone before was tame and sluggish; and as he finally leaped, with tinkling heels [he is wearing bells on his moccasins], clean over his bewildered partner’s head, the multitude howled with rapture.” The popularity of the trope of the returned sociable slave even resurfaces in the

Southern-nostalgia diary of Frances Fearn, published 1910. This diary describes a young woman’s experience as a “refugee” from her Louisiana plantation during the Civil War. Her opening anecdote and framing of plantation life tells of a runaway slave who returns to the plantation, knife in hand, begging “only le’ me go to the ball to-night!” When the plantation owners agree to let him attend, the other slaves attack and beat him for “shirking” his work.154

This kind of overlap between the desire for celebration and marronage connectivity creates a continuum of understanding the very act of flight, whereby the maroon is always on- the-move. We can read against Fearn’s desire to show the ridiculousness for a drunken good time

152 See Ladd, 67. 153 Cable, The Grandissimes, 248. 154 Frances Hewitt Fearn, ed. Rosalie Urquhart, Diary of a Refugee (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1910), 8. 92 in her use of the “undignified present” against a long history of carnival and saturnalia, slave plantation celebrations that coincided with European holidays. These celebrations, from West

Indian Jonkunnu to North Carolina’s John Canoe, and I would add the maroon/dance pairing, offer “exposure” as rebellion. Robert Dirks explains these operations best in his study of

Jamaican plantations’ Christmas celebrations. These celebrations intensified and exposed the everyday, they did not transform it or flip it as many understandings of carnival would have it.

Such social relations explain how “revelry [burst] into a typically somber series of agro- industrial routines.”155 This commingling of rebellion and celebration, and especially their spontaneous bursting, is an alternative history of pleasure, whereby the holiday isn’t necessarily just a safety-valve for the status-quo. We see in Cable’s use of “saturnalian antics” and the idea of intensification (against all “tame and sluggish”) the idea that release was not the contrast between the sanctioned and the space opened up in it for rebellion, but a different kind of difference, that of intensification. This reveals a story of pleasure that is not about contrast that inhered in the Anglo-Creole idea of carnival and the carnivalesque, but in an older European,

Creole, and African history of carnival and Christmas celebrations in tune with the realities of plantation life and what Dirks calls its “florescence” in plantation fetes. “The Saturnalia [was] part of an ecological system,” argues Dirks.156 This view of carnival merriment importantly sees the event as one of shared social system between master and slave, rather than pleasurable and reassuring proximity of two different cultures.157

Garreau’s story lacks the European-colonial version of sociality and celebration found in these other maroon stories, where celebration emerges as shared culture. But his “Bras-Coupe”

155 Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1987), xi. 156 Ibid., xii. 157 Dirks writes, “the masters were involved as deeply as the slaves in the saturnalia; in a way, it was as much a white saturnalia as it was a black one” (x). 93 also lacks the psychological trauma or sentiment of other antislavery modes. With its disappointing reward and “unhappy slaves” at the end, Garreau’s contribution to the literary tradition of marronage offers a specifically Louisianian perspective back to the original European site of the dismembered colonial narratives as he publishes “Bras-Coupé” in France. Why does

Garreau eliminate the history of saturnalia and its attachment to frantic flight, the kind where

Cable describes, “The amusement had reached its height”? My suggestion is that, writing from a

Louisiana perspective, from its not-quite colonial situation, and from an already well-entrenched sense of Louisiana as a scene of contrasting nations, Garreau was interested in the specificities of plantation slavery in New Orleans, what Johnson says is “the multi-ethnic, multilingual, immigrant-saturated city and its environs.” (“Bras Coupé” 23).

Garreau strategically uses the characters of the Irish grocer, the Creole-French planter, and the Spanish hunter to explore the way that diversity and difference in Louisiana was consistently based on contrasting nationalities, the same form we see in the New Orleans travel narratives, but do not see in the Caribbean tradition of maroon slave rebels. Rather than the intensification of glorious or terrifying saturnalias, Garreau writes of the competition and economics in a plantation frontier, or how the complexities of empire informed the loosely connected maroon communities of New Orleans. In the initial scene in the tavern, Garreau has

Jim plead with Hinclay to accept ten dollars as a down payment instead of twenty owed for the grocery items his pregnant wife pilfered. Hinclay refuses every alternative offer, knowing that

Elsie will be beaten when he complains to the planter Monsieur D--. Garreau alludes to the revolutionary possibilities of cooperation amongst slaves, the kind of community that existed in the eighteenth century communities, where maroon life of the borderlands and hinterlands was 94

“fluid, adaptive, and pragmatic.”158

By removing amusement and saturnalia altogether from his story, Garreau eschews both the sentimental mode of the United States and the pantomime-inflected, amusing European colonial mode. Against the national characters, the Irishman and the Spaniard, he makes his

“Bras-Coupe” part of a transatlantic tradition, but in a new way that emphasizes just how national contrast had come to support violence in his temporary home of Louisiana. As in the case of Willis, the operations of amusement and pleasure—or their conspicuous absence— deserve inquiry for questions of politics and rebellion.

Conclusion: Exceptionalism or Contrast

Reduction, simplification, taxonomy are now easy (or easier, at least, after decades of good scholarship) for critics to point out as strategies of ethnocentric control or tools to soothe imperial anxiety. More difficult now might be to understand scenes of interaction and reciprocity, of continuing to understand the multiple ways in which power inheres as relation.

Early postcolonial work that celebrates resistance has been critiqued for relying on this a view of power as alienable; succeeding this view, work like that by Saidiya Hartman has followed

Michel Foucault’s thinking about power as subjection, power’s promise of becoming a free subject. Moreover, as George Boulukos has surveyed, recent works on British culture undo the idea of dominance as monolithic and the assumption that British writers and readers successfully repressed or distanced their relationship to slavery (and that only critics today can see their disavowals and reliance).159 Colonial peripheries, both voices from them and written accounts of encounter, actively shaped modern identities—and not only by haunting the subterranean or

158 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York UP, 2014), 184. 159 George Boulukos provides an account of the various revisions to the “repressive hypothesis” in colonial thought in “Review: Slavery and the Culture of Taste,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 67.3 (2012), 397-401. 95 marginal aspects of texts, but, importantly, through active and present engagement that worked to close the real and imagined distance between the colonies and the metropole.160

As much as scholars wrestle with the seeming nation-apart of the U.S. South—for example, Matthew Pratt Guterl’s description of how the plantocracy fashioned themselves as such, as a global cosmopolitan class eschewing nation—engagement with New Orleans was often a question of attachment itself, in aesthetics, pleasure, and geopolitics.161 The idea of nationhood serving imperialism is imbedded in the very form of the amusing contrast, in the juxtaposition of two or more countries side-by-side in close proximity.

It is difficult not to rely on the attraction/disavowal aspects of repression in national expansion and incorporation, especially when New Orleans is so often, explicitly or not, the city carved out as an “exception” within the South, and, then again, within the nation. If New Orleans makes unique contributions to dominant culture, then we, as scholars and citizens, still tend to inscribe it as a space elsewhere. Writing after Hurricane Katrina, and worried about the way even positive assessments of New Orleans’s singularity work to exclude it from national protection,

Jennifer Lightweis-Goff argues, “It does no harm to New Orleans to imagine it as part of the

Atlantic world, the African diaspora, or the Caribbean littoral, but it does great harm to consider those features as alienating New Orleans from the rest of the United States.”162 Thus, she takes issue with even Barbara Eckstein’s nuanced approach to the city’s singularity, in which Eckstein

160 For example, Lynn Festa argues that the sentimental mode was essential to this engagement, “In an era in which imperial reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp, sentimental fiction created the tropes that enabled readers to reel the world home in their minds” (2). Festa’s argument still relies on a kind of insecurity in the encounter with the “wide, wide world.” She argues that the sentimental text “[preserved] a continuously narrated self in a world whose local attachments were being unmoored by exposure to different cultures and peoples” (3). Yet, she still emphasizes engagement, exposure, and exchange over repression. See Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). 161 Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholder in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2008). 162 Lightweis-Goff, “‘Peculiar and Characteristic’: New Orleans’s Exceptionalism from Olmsted to the Deluge,” American Literature 86.1 (2014), 162. 96 claims that neither the city’s colonial history nor its strategic location on the Mississippi alone made it an exceptional city. Rather, Eckstein argues, the particular combination of all such characteristics accounts for the city’s singularity and its ability to invite its visitors and its readers to respond to its unique “sense of place.”⁠ 163

Too often, the question that any number of critics and historians raise about New

Orleans’s exceptionalism is informed by a yes-or-no binary, one that is unsuited for the complications of the city’s literature and shifting investments in understanding its forms of attachment and difference. Contrast more accurately captures the grammar through which writers thought about the city’s exceptional nature and their attachments—not in a yes-or-no fashion, but by contemplating proximity and novelty, the amusement found in, as that 1835 traveler called it, a “just sufficient” contrast.

163 Eckstein uses Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia here. See Eckstein, Sustaining New Orelans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. 97

Chapter Two: Social Equality and Local Charm

“His history is like the Mardi Gras of the city of New Orleans, beautiful and mysterious and wonderful, but with a serious thought underlying it all.” – Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana”1

After the Civil War, “social equality” was used as a term of opprobrium and obfuscation: it meant that those pushing for civil rights were secretly advocating advantages and policies that would violate private choice and erase distinctions. Opponents of Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights

Bill did not agree that providing equal, or shared, accommodations fell under the jurisdiction of national law, and they used accusations of “social equality” to argue their point.2 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, pro-civil rights activists insisted that “social equality” was a distraction from real issues, that it was folly, “the sheerest nonsense,” purposeful misunderstanding—but this awareness did not prevent constant debate in newspapers, on legislative floors, and throughout fiction of the 1870s and into the twentieth century. Alonzo

Ransier, a black representative from South Carolina, used the common phrase “the bugbear of

‘social equality’” (originally used in The Christian Recorder in in the early 1870s) in his defense of civil rights legislation in 1874, “The bugbear of ‘social equality’ is used by enemies of political and civic equality for the colored man in place of argument. There is not an intelligent white man or black man who does not know that it is the sheerest nonsense.”3 “Social equality” was, indeed, a usefully ambiguous term that circulated not as argument but often as a straw-man or as slippery-slope exaggeration of the law’s power to regulate a strange arena between personal choice and public life. I argue that social equality’s rhetorical circulation also signaled a gap in

1 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000), 41. 2 See Pamela Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011), 64-66. 3 Qtd. in Christopher R. Green, Equal Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the Constitution: The Original Sense of the Privileges or Immunities Clause (New York: Routledge, 2015), 210. 98 knowledge about what the “social” might mean in a post-slavery nation. While congressmen and journalists fighting first and foremost for civil right distanced themselves from “social rights,” and even built their own political projects of uplift around that disavowal, I want to suggest that fiction, especially local color writing, responded to the very concept of “social” (seemingly) suddenly up for debate. If politicians on both side couldn’t agree on how exactly civil rights did or did not violate private choice, they also refused to acknowledge alternative paths to equality through other versions of sociality.

Those against civil rights used the idea of social equality to stoke fears of a society without distinctions and a consequent loss of individual choice. However, individual choice often remained the common ground for argument on both sides, as W.E.B. Du Bois demonstrates when he looks back on Black Reconstruction in America (1935): “And while social rights could not be a matter of legislation, they, on the other hand, must not be denied through legislation, but remain a matter of free individual choice.”4 If the law could challenge personal preferences, then the slipperiest slope of social equality rhetoric ended with acceptable or even mandated intermarriage. Such mongering so successfully dominated the concept of social equality that neither side of the debate for black civil rights would admit that interpersonal relations should or could be legislated. Behavior and human relations, then, were off the table. Thus, much of the rhetoric of early civil rights was careful to delineate and define what kinds of spaces should count as private and which public. This debate culminated with the Plessy v. Ferguson case and its challenge to Louisiana segregation. The court case that maintained the legality of segregation began in New Orleans, where the staged protest on a streetcar was funded and organized by the

Comité des Citoyens, a group of the city’s prosperous free men of color and their white allies.

4 Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2013), 170. 99

In this chapter, I will discuss the history of this group and Louisiana’s unique constitutional language of “public rights,” alongside national debates over the concept of social equality. Many critics focus on the most extreme version of this debate, on the kernel of fear over intermarriage and its representation on race melodramas of the period. I want to instead pay attention to the usefulness of the distraction of “social equality” as such, not just its barely buried and most motivations and most extreme accusations.5 I suggest that the very ambiguity of “social equality” inspired the fiction from the late century in a way that has not been previously regarded by critics. Consequently, the disappearance of the “social” into categories of private choice and civil rights is a useful context for thinking about realism, and, more specifically, regionalism or local color. Before “separate but equal,” how did authors imagine being-together and proximity?

How were they inspired to consider what forms of interaction were available when proximity itself was an issue? A representative of Kentucky, an opponent to the Civil Rights Bill in 1874, explains the problem of definition: “You may say that these are not social relations provided for in this bill; but, sir, if I am compelled to sit side by side with him in the theater, the stage coach, and the railroad car, to eat with him at the same table at the hotels, and my child to be educated at the same schools with his child—if these are not social relations, I do not understand them.”6

“If these are not social relations, I do not understand them” is a powerful but confusing double

5 Hannah Rosén points to the fact that the words miscegenation, amalgamation, and social equality all circulated in similar ways: “Rhetoric surrounding the Civil War-era neologism ‘miscegenation’ and its companion terms ‘amalgamation’ and ‘social equality’ entailed the persistent conflation of the political empowerment of black men with ‘race mixing,’ particularly the idea that enfranchised black men would seek social interaction, marriage, and sex with white women” (136). I have no doubt about how powerful the fear of miscegenation was, or how effectively that fear was employed, and how important it was to understanding the slippage of civil rights into private society. However, I also agree with Amber D. Moulton who argues that “the real power of interracialism lies not in interracial marriages, per se, but in the much broader canvas of interracial socializing, friendship, dating, sex, and cooperation that is the hallmark of an equal society.” See Rosén, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009). Moulton, The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015). 6 Congressional Record: Containing the Proceeding and Debates of the Forty-Third Congress, First Session, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874), 406. 100 negative. The ambiguity of the term “social equality” rested on (willfully) not understanding the social. Conservative statements emphasized how proximity, or shared space, implied status; however, it’s unclear whether or not “social relations” emerge from the assumed status implied in shared space or simply in the sharing of space.

For many African-American writers and intellectuals, “social equality” contradicted their embrace of individual or familial progress and uplift. Charles Chesnutt was especially concerned with these issues and contradictions in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-

Line. In his “Uncle Wellington’s Wives” Chesnutt revealed a complex disdain for the overly optimistic speeches about instant uplift in the North. In this story the title character attends one such speech on life in the North and is inspired to leave his wife behind and chase dreams of gentility, including finding a new white wife. “The period was the hopeful one,” the narrator tells us, with irony. But as Uncle Wellington listens to the lecturer, the narrator explains that the rapt listener had already long “indulged in occasional day-dreams of an ideal state of social equality.”

Only after hearing the distinguished mulatto professor did he have a “name to the forms his imagination had bodied forth.”7 Before choosing the path of intermarriage, what were Uncle

Wellington’s imagined forms of equality? What room was there for such hope after the failures of Reconstruction?

With these questions in mind, I investigate how one local-color writer, Alice Dunbar-

Nelson (1875-1935), conceived of the social group, the aggregate, the mob, the throng as a way to engage the “forms” made and destroyed by the “bugbear” of social equality. If contrast mapped New Orleans in juxtaposed national bits, I am interested in the late-nineteenth century writing that considered the whole, or the realities of group existence. Many New Orleans authors

7 Chesnutt, The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1967), 204, 206-207. 101 who outright denied championing social equality, Dunbar-Nelson included, were interested in social, or collective, transformation through aesthetic engagement, of the kind Christopher

Castiglia and Russ Castronovo suggest can offer an alternative to self-mastery aesthetics.8

Dunbar-Nelson, I argue, writes against individual choice in a way that challenges our sense of local color’s exoticism. Throughout my readings of her short stories, I employ some current theories of sociology and sociological writing in order to elucidate how ideas of relation shifted under the regime of social equality. Bruno Latour (most familiar to literary critics now) claims that there is no such thing as “the social,” that it should not and cannot be a category (of influence) distinct from, for example, the “legal” or the “economic.” Latour’s work has been useful for literary critics interested in moving beyond weak methods of contextualization, and likewise for historically minded critics who want more exact or more thoughtful movement across borders of text and world. “Social equality” challenges these methods by changing the stakes of contextualization and causation. In the fiction of the late nineteenth century, in the related genres of realism and local color, the social was often the subject.

In current scholarship about regionalism and local color, critics see many writers responding to or working alongside the instutionalization of professional sociology and finding or rediscovering their own “literary value” to supplement science and ethnography. As Tom Lutz has argued, the “literary artist” carved out a specific perspective: “Only the literary artist can write from both the inside and the outside,” imagined regional writers.9 Lutz traces a history of literary study developing an “ethos of representational inclusiveness, of the widest possible

8 Castiglia and Castronovo, “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” American Literature 76.3 (2004), 423-435. 9 Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004), 30. If we follow Lutz’s argument, the claims of synthesizing the disciplines, of mediating by existing “inside” and “outside,” we can see the similarities to some definitions of the social I trace in the introduction, like Elizabeth Dillon’s “open sociality,” Michael Warner’s “counter-publics,” or Latour’s “mediators.” 102 affiliation,” as a result of late-nineteenth century “scramble for cultural authority” within the middle class.10 I, however, want to argue that “social equality” worked against this strain of thinking about human interaction and cultural history that we’ve usually read as the primary context of regionalist writing, sociological thought based on Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism or on Franz Boas’s anti-teleological anthropology.11

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction shows us that literary charm was designed to cross boundaries between text and its readers. This boundary crossing was not an act of authority on the part of the writer or reader, however, and, thus, it was unlike the “inside and outside” of other

“cross-cultural encounter[s]” in local color fiction. It worked against the knowingness of the reader, or what Lutz has argued is a pact made between the author and the reader, where they meet together as cosmopolitans to admire or judge the subjects of any local-color sketch. The charm of a text offered alternatives to the private and public dichotomy as the only venue for the defining the “social.” In her collection The Goodness of St. Rocque, first published as a companion volume to her husband Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Poems of Cabin and Field in 1898,

Dunbar-Nelson develops an aesthetic that both fulfills expectations for the local color genre but also imagines a sociality that willingly gives up personal choice but was still grounded in the specificities of place and history.

Reconstructing Buildings

10 Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas, 3, 32. 11 “Any historical investigation will show that sociology began as the effort to apply natural science methods to the social world and only late [sic] became less dependent on its natural science sources. . . . The early sociologists were not interested in a sociology that looked like the natural sciences but in a natural science about society” (42-43). See Daniel Breslau, “The American Spencerians: Theorizing a New Science,” in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007). 103

The falseness of the “social equality” question was wholly due to its white supremacist invention, but the goal of legislating race relations beyond basic rights of citizenship and eligibility for holding office was not wholly abandoned after the Civil War. The 1868 Louisiana

Constitution became one of the most radical of the southern United States, even legislating against segregated schools. Its second article of its Bill of Rights read, “All persons without regard to race, color, or previous condition . . . are citizens of this State. . . . They shall enjoy the same civil, political, and public rights and privileges, and be subject to the same pains and penalties.”12 They may not have meant “social equality” exactly, but this phrase “public rights” was a unique and significant new contribution. “Public rights” responded to past legislation on interaction and manners, previously enacted to keep free people of color subservient to whites.

The importance of New Orleans to social equality is not only historical or contextual, though I will return to more of these details below. I find that the social’s imaginative twists and turns, and its problems of ethical proximity, are written in the literary style of local-color authors

George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and especially Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Of the many characteristics or expectations of regionalism, one of the most important was the depiction of social custom, the ways of life that represented and made a place unique. These scenes in fiction usually turned characters into merely quaint background. However, I want to argue that these

New Orleans authors used these scenes not only to fulfill ethnographic literary requirements but also as part of a complex response to the folly of social equality, and, often, as a way to think about collective existence. It wasn’t only that any argument about social equality had to be hidden in some encoded fiction. Rather, we should understand that the work pro-civil rights activists did to critique or halt conversations about “social equality” meant that writers of fiction

12 Constitution adopted by the State Constitutional Conventions of the state of Louisiana, March 7, 1868 (New Orleans: Republican Office, 1868), 3. 104 responded by imagining wholly new configurations of attachment, of being-together that might not even look like “social equality” as usually conceived. If oppressors made “social equality” into a “bugaboo” (Joel Chandler Harris’s term for it) or even supernatural chimera akin to voodoo, its mystery also conjured up new visions of the social from and against its very characterization as nonsense. The reality of the collective existence, threatening or expanding private lives, was also made visible in the Reconstruction mobs and Mardi Gras celebrations (a

“town gone mad with folly,” writes Dunbar-Nelson) that materially and symbolically threatened the success of civic rights and “public rights.”13

If New Orleans invited strange colonial attachments before the Civil War, it had become a space of horrifying occupation in the violent years of Reconstruction, only to regain its exoticism with the help of George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn in the 1880s. The St.

Louis Hotel, the setting for Nathaniel Parker Willis’s wonder at the city’s most opulent slave auction, continued to symbolize and dictate social configurations in the city. In 1874 the hotel building was sold to the state government and became the site of the legislature. The

“carpetbagger” Republican government sat under the very same dome where planters and their families had celebrated their control of industry and slave bodies. Under threat of mob violence led by angry Democrats, the former hotel also became a fortress, where the governor and the rest of the Republican government had to barricade themselves in for months during that same year the hotel became the statehouse. Subsequent reports of their trash and waste piling up in the hotel during their virtual imprisonment led to the abandonment of the ruined building and the removal of the state government to Baton Rouge. In a peculiar souvenir pamphlet containing a story

13 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1899), 184. Subsequent citations to this edition provided in-text. 105 called “The Secret of the Vieux Carre,” a story unfolds about this ruined building, and a secret treasure hidden within its famous dome [fig. 1 and fig. 2].14

Figure 3: Davidson, B. Palmer, A Secret of the Vieux Carré, St. Louis Hotel Vertical File, Louisiana Research Library,

Tulane University

14 The building was finally sold in 1915 and demolished in 1917, putting the date of this pamphlet possibly some time around those dates, especially considering one illustration’s similarity to a 1917 photograph of the destroyed “giant egg” of the rotunda. 106

Figure 4: A Secret of the Vieux Carré

George Washington Cable, the most popular writer from the city during that period, made the buildings of New Orleans central to his local-color project.15 Cable’s buildings allowed readers to act as tourists and allowed tourists to act as eager readers, but Cable also knew that spaces, tourist or not, dictated modes of interaction and proximity. Describing the architecture of the city and its mysterious passages meant that tourists would come to see just those spots, as

Mark Twain and others did, with Cable’s writings as their guide. In “The ‘Haunted House’ in

Royal Street,” originally published in 1888 in Century magazine, Cable describes one mansion’s pre- and post-Civil War uses. The first section describes a locally infamous story of excessively cruel slave torture at the hands of the creole Madam Lalaurie. The second half takes place in the

15 Coleman’s guide notes the streets and buildings according to Cable’s characters and descriptions. See W.H. Coleman, Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885). 107 same building, which, during Reconstruction, had become an integrated school. Like the actual

St. Louis Hotel, Cable uses Reconstruction to show the overlapping occupation of formerly violent buildings as influencing the terms of the social equality debate. Cable’s narrator ensures readers that there was no “enforcement of private social companionship . . . daily discipline did not require any two pupils to be social, but only every one to be civil, and civil to all.”16

However, there is a kind of supernatural force that extends a different force on interaction between the girls at the school. Ghosts of the past appear whenever one student is cruel to another: “at times it chanced to be just in the midst of one of these ebullitions of scorn, grief and resentful tears that noiselessly and majestically the great doors of the reception rooms, untouched by visible hands, would slowly swing open, and the hushed girls would call to mind Madame

Lalaurie.” Cable’s narrator might deny any legal mandate of the girls’ “private social companionship”—a term that appears elsewhere in Cable’s oeuvre, even in outlines for unpublished work [fig. 3]—but he will not deny the power of space and proximity, especially as they relate to city history.17 Supporting integration means sharing a roof, and if the law won’t dictate “private social companionship,” a roof’s past lives, somehow, will.

16 Cable, Strange True Stories of Louisiana (New York: Scribner’s, 1889), 222. 17 Louisiana Research Collection 2-104-4 108

Figure 5: Cable’s Notes for an Unpublished Essay (no date) Cable tells us that the school was desegregated by a White League mob after two raids in

1874 and 1877, linking to the school to real street battles in the city. The same mob that storms the school threatens the former hotel to unseat the so-called carpetbaggers. In Cable’s story, the cityscape presents a terrifying version of N. P. Willis’s joyful and romantic proximity: “In sight of the belvedere of the ‘haunted house,’ eight squares away up Royal street, in the State House, the de facto government was shut up under close military siege by the de jure government.”18

18 Cable, Strange True Stories of Louisiana, 231. Susan Gillman argues that the problem with Cable’s novel The Grandissimes is that he was unable or unwilling to make connections between slavery and his own present: “the potential link between the Bras Coupe story and that of Honore, f.m.c. is never made, just as the gap between past and present remains unbridged” (38). Following this diagnosis of Cable’s hesitant politics, one could read the haunting presence of slavery as a kind of cop-out or obscuring, as a way to not engage the real continuities between the Madame Lalaurie tortures and the White League’s racism. See Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003). 109

In 1884 the building was sold again after sitting in ruin for a decade and changed names from the St. Louis to the Hotel Royal, as it appears in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Anarchy Alley.”

In this sketch from her first collection Violets and Other Tales (1894), Dunbar-Nelson describes

Exchange Alley, a street that runs parallel to the hotel. This den of “Latinism” is where, Dunbar-

Nelson writes, “poverty and opulence . . . jostle side by side, and brush each others’ elbows in terms of equality as they do nowhere else.”19 Contiguity and “jostling” still have their descriptive power for shaping place and people together as they did for Willis, but Dunbar-Nelson reflects on spatial arrangement’s ability to formalize thought, as well: “With the first stepping across

Customhouse street, the place widens architecturally, and the atmosphere, too, sees impregnated with a sort of mental freedom, conducive to dangerous theorizing and broody reflections on the inequality of the classes.” The whole sketch is a feat of description and arrangement, a kind of aesthetic experiment of how best to make “anarchy” something readable or at least sensible. Her interest lies in how to capture the idea of the “throng” while the spatial features of the city dictate formalized thinking of contrast and inequality. The sketch ends with that hotel “dome” presenting itself as a historical form: “It is so unlike the ordinary world, this bit of Bohemia, that one feels a personal grievance when the marble entrance and great, green dome become positive, solid, architectural facts, standing in all the grim solemnity of the main entrance of the Hotel

Royal on St. Louis Street, ending, with a sudden return to aristocracy, this stamping ground for anarchy.”20

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was active in African-American women’s groups after she moved to Delaware, but in this sketch and later New Orleans short stories we see her particularly

19 The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, vol. 1, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), 57. 20 Ibid., 62. 110 interested in a mode of being-together that differs from stable community of social reform.21

John Ernest encourages turning to literature for ways to refigure African-American identity and community, to appreciate the “fractal” representation of a community in “process,” “an entity both as stable and as constantly changing as a river.”22 As Samira Kawash argues, “Social justice cannot be individual justice, cannot, that is, be a justice that begins from the autonomy and priority of the individual.”23 Despite the evils of “social equality” and its success in squashing radical Reconstruction, it also offered some the opportunity to conceive of justice from a new starting point, from the starting point of a New Orleans style of social life.

Against Social Equality

Of all the repression and oppression the rhetoric of “social equality” caused, one was making the

“social” disappear as a category worth discussing. It was easy to see that “social” began to mean nothing but a private right to racism. As late as 1923, W. E. B. Du Bois found tragic humor in the ridiculous elasticity of the concept, when he published “On Being Crazy” in The Crisis. The sketch contains a number of conversations like the following, when a black traveler converses with a white hotel clerk: “‘We don’t keep niggers,’ he said, ‘we don’t want social equality.’

21 The black women’s club movement of the late century was part of a united belief that women “not the titular patriarchs of the race, held the keys to social progress” (84). See Audrey Thomas McCluskey, “ ‘Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives’: The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919, ed. Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York UP, 2006). See also Nikki L. Brown, “War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies, and Southern African American Women,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem. 22 Ernest, “The Art of Chaos: Community and African American Literary Traditions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 35. 23 Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 213. Kawash goes on, “Beginning from the community, rather from the individual, there is no place for the refusal of responsibility in the name of the innocent bystander” (214). Further, Kawash adds that this form of justice is based on “not knowing,” which helps us to see how literature, with its “charms” of the social, might provide this alternative form of justice, “Justice cannot be based on a right determined in advance but must proceed from the condition of not knowing, of confronting the limits of certainty and control” (214). 111

Neither do I, I replied gently, I want a bed.”24 Here, abstract social equality is opposed to a material reality of wanting the same access to entertainment and accommodations.

Republicans pushing for integration and voting rights used a civil/social distinction to preserve the right for any man to choose his own company in his own home. This distinction was not just appeasement but, overall, became the basis for much of the civil rights debate.

Attempting to establish civil rights, every supporter disavowed or actively worked against any concept of social equality, and emphasized the idea of choice in the social order. Thus, many turned to questions of class and respectability. Nell Irvin Painter argues that, on the other side, the idea of any social equality “seemed ludicrous to whites who [had long] conflated race with class.”25 Little has been written about this political issue’s overlap with the fiction of the time period. I want to suggest that social equality’s definitional problems and rhetorical confusions can help us to understand the various imaginative approaches to the social in late-nineteenth century writing and, further, to reexamine local-color writing not for its accurate representations of social life but for a more complex investigation of its meaning.

Largely, accusations of desiring equality were a mere distraction, especially when their slippery slope logic turned the equality defined by proximity into a guarantee of intermixture or miscegenation. Because the term was one that allowed the imagination to run wild, it made sense for black Americans to continually avoid it, call it out as a distraction, or argue against wanting any such equality. The idea that “social equality” meant miscegenation is only one extreme version of the opposition to civil rights. This was certainly part of the “bugbear,” and led directly to lynch mobs and inventions of black sexual aggression, but the accusations of social equality

24 “On Being Crazy,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995), 376. This story ends with the traveler having to convince a white father that he does not actually want to marry his daughter. 25 Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002), 123. 112 covered all varieties of racist protestations. As Nick Bromell succinctly puts it, the debate was simply about white people’s belief that they shouldn’t have to see black people.26 Kenneth

Warren has examined the abstract presence of such spatial concerns in Henry James’s novels, where “public social interactions” are “versions of private intimacy.”27 Many argued against these kinds of equations, as did the author of an 1874 editorial in the Weekly Louisianian: “We do not believe that there is any such thing as social equality. Because a party of men sit together at a church, theatre, concert, circus or other place of public character, it does not necessarily follow that they are socially equal.”28 There are two ways to read these kinds of denials. The first is that they were simply necessary refutations. Second, however, is the idea that to actually embrace social equality would mean letting go of the ideas of uplift and progress, or the desire to express black Americans’ capacity for individual improvement. A 1921 piece in The Christian

Advocate evidences this latter point. The author laments that while “many colored leaders tell us honestly that they care nothing for social equality . . . many colored leaders are agitating for this one thing.” Against such a plan, the author advocates “cooperat[ing] with Christian Negroes for the uplift of the race.”29 If distinctions were erased, strategies of cooperation and uplift wouldn’t make sense.

Michele Birnbaum helpfully explains another tricky facet of arguments against social equality. While some were more obvious about their aversion to seeing or being proximate to black people, some lamented the intimacy proximity that was lost after the Civil War.

Sympathetic intimacy was supposed to be better than legislation because it did involve choice and, thus, true affection. Birnbaum points out that Grace King, one of the most popular late-

26 Bromell, The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 48. 27 Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), 22. 28 Weekly Louisianan May 4, 1874. 29 Edwin D. Mouzon, “Tulsa’s Race Riot and the Teachings of Jesus,” The Christian Advocate 96 (1921), 912. 113 century New Orleans writers, displays exactly the healing and nostalgic power of social inequality in her Monsieur Motte (1888), in which a young girl and her faithful servant (her mother’s former slave) find a way to live together as family. King writes in her journals that, after emancipation, black and white women “started on their separate journeys the roads of which were as hard to one as the other. Never to meet on the old footing save surreptitiously.”30

Against such lamentations, Douglass deftly observed that this mode of affection was only a continuation of slavery’s arrangements: in those years, he writes, “we had a great deal of

‘society’ with white people, but not the least bit of ‘equality.’”31

Truly, the problem was often discussed as a problem of presence, a problem that could exceed individual choice. Frederick Douglass’s 1883 speech on the subject of the Civil Rights

Bill attempts to assuage this problem. He argues that presence and proximity does not necessarily lead to social equality, that it didn’t even lead to any form of interaction:

No man in Europe would ever dream that because he has a right to ride on a railway, or

stop at a hotel, he therefore has the right to enter into social relations with anybody. . . . .

When a colored man is in the same room or in the same carriage with white people, as a

servant, there is no talk of social equality, but if he is there as a man and a gentleman, he

is an offence. What makes the difference? It is not color, for his color is unchanged. The

whole essence of the thing is a studied purpose to degrade and stamp out the liberties of a

race. . . . Equality, social equality, is a matter between individuals. It is a reciprocal

understanding. I don’t think when I ride with an educated polished rascal, that he is

30 Grace King, To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2004), 7. See Michele Birnbaum, Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), 47-49. 31 Qtd. in Weekly Louisianian March 6, 1876. 114

thereby made my equal, or when I ride with a numbskull that it makes me his equal, or

makes him my equal.32

Problems of space and proximity abounded, since the idea of private feeling was impossible to legislate—and, again, perhaps the only way to do that work properly would be to meet with historical ghosts.

My point is not that there is a missing social space or sphere, but that any thought of a social existence during the age of “social equality” was constantly coopted by and overdetermined by debates about space: the home, the theatre, the school, the street, the train. Yet, debates and legislation over social equality continually revealed that the private and the public couldn’t account for interaction not exactly based on choice or based on something that configured relation itself differently. Even though Du Bois was quick to expose the madness at the heart of abstracting social equality—at the end of “On Being Crazy” both the white and the black man decide they must be crazy—, as a sociologist he was interested in other versions of social life, intra-racial and interracial. He understands, in Souls of Black Folk, the necessity of something in between King’s sympathy model and Douglass’s individualist rejection of sociality:

In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look

frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social

cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and

speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social

32 Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 693. 115

amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and

streetcars.33

While Du Bois might seem to desire similar friendly relations to those King does, as both focus on fixing the estrangement of the races, he is not merely nostalgic. Nor does he deny the need for legislation, despite other actions “meaning more.” What he argues is that one or the other is not enough, and proximity itself remains necessary, the very kernel of the problem with segregation.

More striking is his statement on the problem of sociality after slavery: “nothing has come to replace that finer sympathy and love between some masters and house servants which the most radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years has caused almost completely to disappear.”34 One need not read this as a lament for the lost love of slavery’s forced intimacy. For Du Bois, the problem is that “nothing has come to replace” such damaging social order. With the end of slavery came the end of a certain kind of sympathy—but no other form of enjoying proximate, if not intimate, relations had yet replaced it. I want to suggest that

Dunbar-Nelson and others responded to the need for a mode of relation that could replace the options of intimacy and estrangement.

The idea of calling for civility and for the maintenance of social distinctions can seem like a concession, exemplifying the kind of politics that gave the period the name The Age of

Accommodation. However, the response of class snobbery and respectability was not just accommodation but a complex tactic with new logics of its own used against white fears of a topsy-turvy world or a completely indistinguishable mass of violence and racial miscegenation.

Thus, Du Bois would argue, in the same essay quoted above, that the color line forces “the better class of blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.” Dunbar-Nelson similarly

33 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1904), 185. 34 Ibid., 185. 116 critiqued the “spectacle” of interracial sociality in a 1927 essay: “the women of our race must realize that there is no progress in sobbing with joy over the spectacle of two or three ordinary

Southern white women sitting down to talk with several very high class black women over the race problem.”35 Part of Dunbar-Nelson’s argument here is also a familiar one in issues of social equality, one that forces a response of gentility and class distinctions to combat the view of homogenous blackness. The “ordinary Southern white women” should not be applauded for her offering her company to a “very high class black women.” Tweaking Warren’s argument about segregation, Walter Benn Michaels argues that Jim Crow laws were less about keeping the low rabble from the elite, but more about keeping white elite from black elite.36 While Warren and

Michaels are focused on how the dominant discourse made these exclusions based on class- based logic, much late-century writing by African-Americans also bears out Michael’s claim, including activist Anna Julia Cooper’s argument about the resulting forced association that results from segregation: “What the dark man wants then is to live his own life, in his own world, with his own chosen companions.” Personal choice remains key to her refutation: “I do not, and cannot be made to associate with all dark persons, simply on the ground that I am dark.”37 One

Reconstruction congressman, a former slave from Louisiana, lamented that segregation means he, a respectable man with a family, has to share a railroad car with “drunkards, gamblers, and criminals.” The passage of a civil rights bill, he argued, “will place the colored people in a position where their identification with any party will be a matter of choice and not of necessity.”38

35 Dunbar-Nelson, An Alice Dunbar-Nelson Reader, ed. Ruby Ora Williams (UP of America, 1979), 122. 36 Michaels, “Jim Crow Henry James?” The Henry James Review 16.3 (1995), 186-91. 37 Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper, ed. Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 103, 101. 38 Qtd. in Black Congressmen During Reconstruction: A Documentary Sourcebook, ed. Stephen Middleton (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2002), 156, 150. 117

Again, one way to read these kinds of responses is as a strategy of simple rebuttal, to fight well within the agreed-upon terms to preserve individual choice, an inability to realize that, as Samira Kawash claims, “Social justice cannot be individual justice.” At the same time, as we’ve seen, many of these same authors knew the entire argument was a cover for keeping control, and, that, to a certain extent, developing arguments meant to appeal to the hearts and concerns of respectable white people wouldn’t work.

In Reconstruction New Orleans, universal suffrage and a new concept of social life had auspicious beginnings despite violent retaliation. These ideas were backed by a close-knit community of free men of color and a powerful organ of literary and political thought in the daily black newspaper. Rather than shoring up this reputation as their own unique property, those previously free men of the Comité des Citoyens had always seen themselves as a distinct and elite class, though not an exclusive one. Historian Rebecca Scott argues that the idea of “public rights” in the 1868 state constitution was a unique contribution made by New Orleans’s former class of free people of color. Scott explains that they came by this phrasing because of the long local history of insult and indignity experienced by this elite black class. Despite the fact that the creoles of color were now relying on a system of honor that could potentially oppress black people, because it had, their push for “public rights” was “part of a well-established, cosmopolitan tradition of anticaste activism in Louisiana.” Scott suggests that the drafters of this constitution specifically recalled and responded to an 1806 law in Louisiana required that “Free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor to presume to conceive themselves equal to the white, but on the contrary that they ought to yield to them in every 118 occasion, and never speak or answer to them, but with respect.”39 Thus, Scott traces this beginning in New Orleans to the Plessy v. Ferguson case as a “creative line of vernacular political thought.”40 If Louisiana’s antebellum laws had dictated behavior and interaction between races, there was a potential that “public rights” might similarly correct everyday civilities and attitudes, those aspects of interaction thought ungovernable by all opponents of

“social equality.”

Because of their strong sense of community, these people of color were looked at with suspicion by Northern abolitionists leaders throughout the decades of Reconstruction, causing profound misunderstandings about which local groups supported immediate universal suffrage and for what reasons. Thus, the cohesiveness of a local and distinct black creole leadership eventually lost out to the more conservative, white Republican Party. The Reconstruction Acts of

1867 took control of state governments. This meant taking representative positions from locals and opening up opportunities for insidious division in the black community. Even the creole black-run newspaper, the Tribune, had its national funding cut so that the more conservative

Republican paper became the official organ of the party.41 There was an overall struggle against the “Americanization of black New Orleans” that began post-Civil War when President Lincoln advocated selective enfranchisement for those black citizens that could demonstrate a level of intelligence. While it might have in some ways behooved elite free people of color to accept these terms, their main organ and the first African-American daily newspaper, the Tribune fiercely denied that they wanted to accept anything less than universal suffrage for all. White

39 Scott argues further that the other influence in thinking of “public rights” comes from a European and Haitian history of anti-aristocratic and anticolonial egalitarianism. See Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge,” Michigan Law Review 106.5 (2008). 40 Scott, “Public Rights,” 777-78. 41 Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992), 249. 119

Republicans and many English-speaking African Americans who were not familiar with the community-based life of many of the creole organizers, found the creole Louisiana methods and influences suspect. Still, writers of the Tribune maintained, “the idea of having the freedmen cut away from the creoles will not work.”42 By invoking “public rights,” by pushing for immediate equality, or “an entirely new social and racial order,” these creole leaders were paradoxically smeared as ultra exclusive. It was the high-mindedness of the ideals regarding universality—no doubt, many have argued, of French influence—that were offensive to many despite their inherent inclusiveness. As Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell explain, “The reluctance of most black creoles to adopt Victorian behavior or to accept the norms of the American color line struck some black Americans as a denial of racial solidarity.”43

Still, the writers and editors of the Tribune were adamant about denying that bugbear of social equality, or at least what it had come to signify. The debate was in many columns throughout the 1870s and they used some of the same argumentative moves described in paragraphs above: “We are, as much as our contemporary [the Times-Picayune], in favor of free and voluntary associations.” In this 1867 editorial, however, the writer goes on, “We stated why we do not admit pro-slavery men to be friendly to us. . . . . if you wish to show a real friendship for the race you formerly oppressed, join with us in claiming for the colored man the civil and political rights enjoyed by yourselves.”44 The denial of “social equality,” a concept that might have truly fit with the idea of immediate suffrage for all, was still twinned with a strong statement about re-characterizing notions of sociality and friendship.

Journalist and historian Rodolph Desdunes consistently argued his perspective as a leader and intellectual of a different kind. As on of the founders of the Comité des Citoyens, Desdunes

42 Qtd. in Logsdon and Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans,” 247. 43 Logsdon and Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans,” 231, 237. 44 New Orleans Tribune December 21, 1867. 120 had his own son attempt the same protest in 1892 that Homer Plessy would eventually take to court.45 Even after the Plessy decision, Desdunes continued pushing for a specific New Orleans identity and contribution to the national conversation about rights. “The Latin Negro,” he argues,

“differs radically from the Anglo-Saxon in aspiration and method,” Desdunes writes in a 1907 pamphlet titled “A Few Words to Dr. DuBois ‘With Malice Toward None.’” He continues, defending the educated Southern “Latin Negro,” “One hopes, the other doubts. . . . One aspires to equality, the other to identity.” While Desdunes agreed with many of Du Bois’s opinions, he wanted to refine them, going so far as to criticize Du Bois’s love of Toussaint L’Ouveture, whom

Desdunes called the “Booker T. Washington of Haiti.”46 Emphasizing the importance of locality and specificity, it made sense for Desdunes to support Dessalines and to revere the spectre of the assassinated Haitian leader’s fragmented and scattered body.47

Desdunes and other local leaders helped to create a particular brand of New Orleans plan for change, one that united a long history of his particular class with alternative epistemologies and religious practices like creolized versions of Catholicism and voodooism, and even spiritualism. As Bell has explored, Afro-Creole protest and intellectual history of “Liberté,

Egalité, Fraternité” was greatly influenced by religious and spirtitualist practices. Many of the

Reconstruction leaders who fought in street battles to defend their new rights were also involved in a circle of spiritualists who led séances in the Treme neighborhood. These séances were part of a larger national craze, of course, but it certainly makes sense that this time of fraught race

45 Daniel Desdunes was arrested but his case never went to court because he was on a train bound out of state. Rodolph Desdunes is perhaps best remembered for his important historical work in Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire (1911) and provides sketches of many black literary figures of early nineteenth-century New Orleans. 46 See Charles E. O’Neill, S.J., Foreword to Rodolph Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973), xviii. 47 Shirley Thompson argues that this pamphlet actually “constitutes a curious retreat from Creole of color activism for ‘public rights,’ activism that presaged the Du Boisian political program” (271) with a new approach of “patience.” It seems, however, that by 1907 context for available “public rights” would have radically changed. See Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2099). 121 relations would inspire organizers to turn to alternative forms of interaction, even interaction with ghosts like Madame Lalaurie in Cable’s “Haunted House.” Séance host Henry Rey contacted ghosts for explicit political purpose. He spoke to conservative white leaders whose communication was apology, and slain Afro-Creole leaders sent words of encouragement.48

New spaces for and forms of relation that emerged against tarnished versions of social equality would necessarily take on wildly different character, like the séances at Rey’s home, or, as I’ll argue below, as an aesthetic of charm and the “throng” in New Orleans. The following discussion about Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, may seem to have little to do with “social equality” as a political debate. It would be an assumption of

“context” to say that her work’s publication engages at all, directly or not, with the Plessy case.

But the “social” was being redefined in two different ways at this time, in debates about equality and in the emergence of culture. Perhaps it is Bruno Latour’s work that has reminded scholars to do more careful tracing of the social and to understand stronger ties between text and world. Rita

Felski’s provocation of “Context Stinks” is, in a way, actually a call for more purposeful and more exact descriptions of linkage, simply a better version of context such that background and foreground, or “container versus contained,” become rather useless concepts.49 Those methods are good reminders for our own methods, but they become more complicated when the subject at hand is imaginative literature’s engagement with concepts of the social. Those connections might be purposefully suggestive, like the lines drawn between the diverse inhabitants of the Haunted

House on Royal Street or in the pre- and post-Civil War St. Louis Hotel.

The Social Charm of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

48 See Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1997), 215-221. 49 Felski, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42.2 (2011), 589. 122

In literary study, the “social” still stands as some kind of “real,” either an outside-of-the-text, or something more inevitably more complex than any representation could account for, and, thus, more authentic or accurate than politics and identity categories. This sense derives from an assumption that interaction is ontologically prior to stasis, reification, or, most importantly, abstract representation. Even Bruno Latour’s work to debunk the existence of the “social” focuses on description, assuming that closeness to detail will get scientists closer to the real.

Latour’s method has helped literary critics frustrated with knee-jerk or improperly explored ways of placing literary texts in historical context. Still, many literary critics of the public sphere or intimacy politics seem to treasure an idea of sociality that is based on some aspect of the real that they see missing in the social order. Interaction itself has become the purest and least hegemonic form to many literary critics influenced by new sociological theory.50

I would suggest that Dunbar-Nelson’s use of charm and detail challenges us to consider new relations between the social and the cultural; or, the supposedly real/mobile and the representative. Social equality was the most over-written issue of the era, and those debates went on longer than has perhaps been granted by critics, as Dunbar-Nelson herself expressed exhaustion with it. I find that her writing engages with correspondences, sameness, and detail as a way to counter an era that was on one hand, determined socially and culturally by modes of difference. I thus rely on a few different definitions of “charm,” but this term comes mainly from contemporary appreciation of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories themselves. Her sketches are certainly

“charming” in the sense that the local-color genre demanded, but I argue that Dunbar-Nelson

50 Much of this scholarship can be traced back to or summarized by a focus on the local in the work of Hannah Arendt and her arguments about intersubjectivity as constitutive of identity. See Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: Shocken Books, 1994), 358. See also Judith Butler’s summary of a history of “abstract universality as violent” in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham UP, 2005). Butler argues that, “When a universal precept cannot, for social reasons, be appropriated or when—indeed, for social reasons—it must be refused, the universal precept itself becomes a site of contest, a theme and an object of democratic debate” (6). In my discussion of Dunbar-Nelson, I trace out a kind of abstraction that is not parallel to universality or questions of universalism. 123 also let play the idea that New Orleans had its own particular history of charm, both in terms of its eroticized pull and in its Catholic-voodoo religious practices.

The idea of the “charming” as an aesthetic category is perhaps most famously described by Immanuel Kant who denigrates “charm” as an element of pleasure that doesn’t involve self- control or does not let one practice their own aesthetic judgment. Charm denies agency, which, for Kant, is required for the “beautiful.” “A judgment of taste is therefore pure,” Kant writes,

“only so far as no merely empirical satisfaction is mingled with its determining ground. This always happens, however, if charm or emotion has any share in the judgment by which something is to be declared to be beautiful.”51 This theory of “charm” starting with Kant leads us to object-oriented theorist Graham Harman who discusses “charm” as an umbrella term of rapture in both humor and tragedy. “Charm,” Harman argues, arises from seeing an object’s (or a character’s) sincerity. By sincerity, Harman does not mean to import any ethical gloss but instead to describe a kind of intentionality, a perfect and almost automatic practice of simply being what one is. One can, of course, see how easily the idea of “sincerity” and “charm” work in local-color writing to create a tone of condescension. Imposing the extra real or the authentic on others can, following Harman’s definition of “charm,” make them “[seem] less free than we are” because they are so sincere, so complete.52 Harman explains the (literal) mechanics of both comedy and tragedy, that they highlight sincerity, sincerity “in the sense that I really am doing right now whatever it is that I am doing.” Since Harman is interested in a philosophy of things he finds that objects are fascinating because they are sincere, and that’s where our attention goes when it’s not comical or tragic. “If the comical is what unearths sincerity and exposes it to scorn,” Harman writes, “then its opposite form can only be that which exposes sincerity to our fascinated

51 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 108. 52 Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 135. 124 attention. Instead of laying bare someone’s hopeless style of dancing so that we might laugh at it, it brings this style before us contagiously, as a kind of magnetic force that realigns our nervous system.”53 Charm, Harman argues, “limits and fixes our vision,” and he admits that this mode, like it can for local-color, can slip into (and has always enabled) a kind of Orientalism. His point, however, is to rechannel the work of fascination, to explain its presence in all objects: “objects themselves are a perpetual Orient.”54 Harman’s final critique is launched at our arrogance about our own freedom and the non-freedom of objects. He points out that people often aspire toward objects: “While none of us wishes to be a slave, scapegoat, tool, or object of ridicule, we would rather be charmed and charming than be free.”55 Like Elizabeth Dillon whose work on obi and assemblage I’ll discuss below, Harman sees a kind of delusion and a too-arrogant assumption in the exalted freedom of the subject and the missed opportunities in not fully appreciating sincere objects.

These aspects of charm have their parallel in the “charm” of local color.56 An 1884 review of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor describes the book as offering “charm in every

53 Harman, 137. Harman adopts Henri Bergson’s theory of humor, that comedy arises from a “kind of rigidity or mechanism,” a kind of unstoppable repetition (130). 54 Ibid., 140. 55 Ibid., 141. 56 Finally, though this aspect of “charm” muddies the definitional waters even further, I want to suggest that Dunbar- Nelson’s reputation as a social charmer certainly comes into play, and many of her female characters have this same unconscious ability. Perhaps the most famous anecdote of her life is how Paul Laurence Dunbar saw her poetry and picture in the Boston Monthly Review in 1895, fell in love, and courted her in letters until they eloped in 1898. The idea of a woman’s brilliant social skills and desirability gets easily caught up in class distinctions, respectability, and colorism. Dunbar-Nelson was not immune to privately confessing her own feelings about lower-class blacks, which she felt was reciprocated. In her “Brass Ankles Speaks,” she laments her position: “the ‘yaller niggers,’ the ‘Brass Ankles’ must bear the hatred of their own and the prejudice of the white race.” This ostracizing means that “the few lighter persons in the community drew together; we were literally thrown upon each other, whether we liked it or not.” Forced association is again the problem, but from a different perspective than the “social equality” question, though all the same factors of race play into the different result. Gloria Hull calls the essay an “outspoken denunciation of darker skinned black people’s prejudice against light-skinned blacks” because of Dunbar-Nelson’s description of the cruelties she received from early childhood and on. See Introduction to The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, vol. 1, ed. Gloria T. Hull (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxxv. 125 page.”57⁠ Against the grain of late nineteenth century aesthetics, many critics of regionalism have recently tried to unmoor the genre from interpretations based on locality, arguing that their purpose was never knowledge of place, or that their considerations of place tried aimed to achieve a certain (expected) version of authenticity. Feminist reconsiderations of the genre have seen female writers challenging heteronormative and urban-centered representation, or challenging the idea of “region” itself.58 At the same time, critics, following Richard Brodhead especially, reached a general consensus about the touristic and ethnographic gaze of metropolitan and non-native writers and readers. Even more recently, critics have discussed these magazine writers as aesthetic innovators, interested more in experimentation and culture than in representative politics or desiring any kind of change for the sometimes-pitiful lives they described.59 Thus, any account of a far-away setting was specifically cultivated to achieve authenticity by certain standards while at the same time fulfilling aesthetic standards.

Summarizing this move away from using place and its history as a useful interpretative points for reading realism, Brad Evans argues that local color writing “became, in the 1890s and early

1900s, not so much about the local as about the color, not so much about regional places ethnographically defined as about the stylistic flair set off by the disassociation of the aesthetic object from its anthropological origins.”60 Evans describes a doubled dislocation inherent in the

57 qtd. in Kate McCullough, Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885-1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1999), 17. 58 See Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: U of Illionis P, 2003). 59 Carrie Tirado Bramen does argue that a returned focus on place will help us see the way writers interested in the “interconnectedness” of metropolitan centers and rural margins revealed political projects criticizing the effects of modernization on harsh rural life and toil. See The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard UP, 2000), 147-151. 60 Evans, Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 115. To the extent that a literary piece is also a cultural object, as Evans argues, the “episode” or the sketch also is a “form of writing that approaches—and frequently collapses into—that other great emblem of circulation, the commodity itself.” See Matthew Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form After the Constitution (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), 124. 126 local-color sketch: the presentation of people and scenes frozen and removed from context, and the placement of that account in a circulating magazine.

Managing difference meant making particularities into commodities, available for easy circulation. Or, as Bryan Wagner summarizes, expectations “made local colors intelligible by making them functionally interchangeable.”61 Once a place was detached, it was interchangeable, like the museum collectibles Bill Brown describes in Sarah Orne Jewett’s home.62 Showing how the local color sketch was conceived and read as a mere glimpse or scrap of culture, critics end up shying away from some versions of exoticism or the crucial half of it, the interest. If the goal of local color was a disinterested aesthetic and cultural appreciation for the supposedly less- civilized, this narrative fails to account for the attractions and pulls of place and character. This is exactly the ambivalence, however, that we can find in Dunbar-Nelson’s local color sketches, especially in the work of “charm” as attraction, and its related aesthetic of the “charming.”

Throughout The Goodness of St. Rocque charm relies less on a pose of disinterest and, instead, on a loss of control in one’s interest. Charm relies on a reader’s being affected by something that is, indeed, an object.63

Certainly, critical attention to regionalism’s aesthetics, rather than any commitment to reliable rendering of place, is an accurate approach when one considers the genre as a whole and its range of authors, their subjects and their investments: from the Tennessee mountains or the coast of Maine observed by vacationers (Mary Noailles Murfee and Sarah Orne Jewett), the Wild

West dispatches (Bret Harte), or the urban and ruined city viewed by super-locals (George

Washington Cable). But New Orleans offered, had long offered, its own version of

61 Wagner, “Helen Hunt Jackson’s Errant Local Color,” Arizona Quarterly 58.4 (2002), 2. 62 Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 81. 63 Another important formulation comes from Jane Bennett’s concept of enchantment, which she sees as a combination of charm and disturbance. See Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 95. 127 cosmopolitanism and, at the same time, swampy rural backwardness. These combinations became fraught post-Reconstruction. This is not to say that New Orleans was no longer global or cosmopolitan in these years, but the Civil War and Reconstruction had changed the national perspective we saw in Willis’s and other travelers’ writings. In an 1879 travel narrative, an experienced boatman proclaims, “Rising steadily, though slowly, from the effects of the civil war, her position as a port insures a glorious future.”64 If the river can be kept passable, he argues, then the Mississippi will be a lower-cost option than train travel and export. The increased building of railroads across the country decreased reliance on the natural waterways and turned New Orleans’s urbanity into an artifact ready for touristic consumption. The 1884

World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition held in the city suggested that it was still a

“cosmopolitan and international metropolis of industrial growth and abundance.” It was the “first large-scale public display of local artifacts, foods, and traditions and customs to a worldwide audience,” and helped to cement New Orleans’s popularity for local-color, as Cable was just finishing his already touring with Twain. Expositions of this kind could be said to inspire all local color and regionalism of the last two decades of the century.”65

The dislocation and circulation of place in local-color writing can help us turn back to a better understanding of place from the perspective of New Orleans. The writers of local color fiction used New Orleans as material because it was already so detachable. As Elizabeth

Ammons argues about Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque, “Place does not hold the book together. But place, in the case of the New Orleans that Dunbar-Nelson creates, is itself a

64 Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, Four Months in a Sneak-Box: A Boat Voyage of 2600 Miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and along the Gulf of Mexico (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1879), 198. 65 Gotham, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York UP, 2007), 55. 128 conglomerate.”66 That form of relation had been well-established in the antebellum period, as

Jennifer Greeson points out about the U.S. South generally, as belonging to the rest of the nation, as an object of interest and curiosity, rather than truly or just a part of it.67 New Orleans was, of course, one of the most popular settings for local color writing—perhaps for obvious reasons. It simply offered abundant and diverse material, as I will elaborate on below. For this reason, I want to suggest that New Orleans sketches did represent a special case, both exceptional and exemplifying, in the overarching genre of local color.

While I am concerned with the demands of the local-color genre as a whole, I see these authors as variously interested in and invested in what New Orleans meant and how it crafted not just a meaning of culture but also of social life and place. This means that I am going a bit against the critical vein that sees the local-color craze as a response to or part of the rise of a

“culture concept.” As Evans explains, the late century was a moment “before cultures,” a moment of contest about the two overlapping senses of studying groups of people: accepting plurality and or following a linear line of civilization. Many scholars trace regionalist writers’ ambivalence about their roles as reporters and sketch artists as an indication of the genre’s ability to critique itself and intervene in the rigid expectations set by magazine culture and literary culture more broadly. This ambivalence about one’s role and about the concept of the region itself is, Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse argue, what differentiates regionalism from local color.68 While this distinction is useful, I find the term local color particularly important for describing the New Orleans authors who definitely relied on the term’s suggestion of a kind of

66 Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 65. 67 Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010). 68 For regionalism’s as an active agent in change, see Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001), 3. Fetterly and Pryse argue that regionalist writers “reveal regions themselves to be discursive constructions” and that “literary regionalism uncovers the ideology of local color” (Writing Out of Place 4). 129 background of excess detail and the notion of color, tropical and various, itself. Variety and exuberance, especially in terms of race and ethnicity, had been, of course, long characteristic of

New Orleans.

The ambivalence I want to examine in the work of Dunbar-Nelson is not the same kind of self-awareness that we see in Kate Chopin’s ironic inclusion of sketch artists, out-of-towners, and city elites in her collections Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie. In both “La Belle Zoraïde” and “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” the two popular stories Thomas L. Morgan discusses,

Chopin’s “framing strategy offers a scathing critique of sentimentalism and sympathy in regional writing.”69 Chopin doubts her own ability to represent others ethically and/or clearly. Dunbar-

Nelson’s ambivalence, instead, is about readers’ tendency to attach to the small details that make a character or a place delectable, pitiable, or exotic.

I read Dunbar-Nelson’s sketches as texts of desire—not least of all because so many of her stories, like Chopin’s, are about failed love and even queer feminine desires. Claudia Tate has argued that the “racial protocol for African-American canon formation has marginalized desire as a critical category of black textuality by demanding stories about racial politics.” Tate’s interest in desire is not only psycho-sexual but embraces many varieties of “striving.” She writes,

“Whether in the text or the world, we seldom recognize the surplus of desire associated with black subjectivity.” This idea of “surplus” is key, I argue, to the feminine detail of Dunbar-

Nelson’s writing and local color in general, where all detail is found as a meaningful but charming “excess.”70 I not only find these theories appropriate to her work, as many have for

69 Morgan, “Criticizing Local Color,” 154. Morgan argues that “While Chopin does not always engage the political components of her subject matter in her work, when she does, she does so indirectly; she is cognizant that her short fiction needed to conform to editorial expectations” (144). See Morgan, “Criticizing Local Color: Innovative Conformity in Kate Chopin’s Short Fiction,” Arizona Quarterly 70.1 (2014), 135-171. 70 Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 5, 10. Shane Vogel similarly writes of the “surplus intimacy” of the Harlem dance floor (137), and the importance of consciousness of these alternative and excessive socialities. See Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, 130 studying women’s regionalism in general, but also helpful in rescuing Dunbar-Nelson’s work from, what Evans has observed, a rather “boring” strain of criticism, which presumably has to do with the very authenticity and representation that critics of local color have scrutinized and left behind.71

Dunbar-Nelson, I want to argue, recognized that connection and attention required different modes of striving, not just upward, not just within and across double-consciousness, but across spaces and across text to reader. Further, she relied on the history of the pull of New

Orleans, the kinds of attraction and attention it inspired, to negotiate her aesthetic as a social practice. By a social aesthetic I mean a way of creating place that wasn’t about direct representation or about the singular power of individual choice. Charm would always intervene in the process of individual judgment, the “pure” judgment of beauty, as Kant would have it.72

In her early career Dunbar-Nelson wanted to be free from pressure to address political problems in her writing, a desire she shared with her husband Paul Dunbar. Thus, as an African-

American woman, she negotiated a complex set of expectations for her fiction. Reviewers and readers found Dunbar-Nelson’s stories “charming,” as they were supposed to be, since William

Dean Howells encouraged American writers to focus on the “smiling aspects of life.”73 She was praised for having matched George Washington Cable’s “charm of description.”⁠74 Paul Dunbar

Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009). One should also recall the importance of “striving” to Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk where he describes the twoness of “unreconciled strivings” and the “striving toward that vaster ideal” of equality (11). 71 Evans further makes the point that we should consider Dunbar-Nelson’s aesthetic innovations: “her fictional recreation of the racial ambiguity of the carnival, coming out as it did in the same years as the Manichaeanization of race in the United States with Plessy v. Ferguson, was remarkably sharp and . . . suggested her engagement with the development of the short story as the preeminent genre for stylistic experimentation” (Before Cultures 141). 72 “A judgment of taste is therefore pure, only so far as no merely empirical satisfaction is mingled with its determining ground. This always happens, however, if charm or emotion has any share in the judgment by which something is to be declared to be beautiful” (108). Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 73 Howells, “Dostoyevsky and the More Smiling Aspects of Life,” Harper’s 73 (1886): 641-42. 74 qtd. in Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 50. 131 encouraged his soon-to-be-wife, writing to her, “your ‘Little Miss Sophie’ is as graceful, poignant, and charming as anything Grace King ever wrote. Everything you have written shows remarkable thought behind that—talent.”75 Paul seems to anticipate the wiser literary critics, believing the “talent” to be a veneer of the “graceful, poignant, and charming”—often burned himself by the condescension latent in the word talent, especially when his dialect writing was seen as the best example of his poetic skills.

Dunbar-Nelson embraced putting experimental aesthetics in front of politics of representation. She writes quite clearly about this in an 1895 letter to Paul Dunbar, “I haven’t much liking for those writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro into their stories, Its [sic] too much like a quinine pill in jelly.”76 She strove to maintain a distance from the “racial realism” that Paul Dunbar felt as a pressure to speak and write in an “authentic” African-American voice.77 Dunbar-Nelson went so far as to claim dislike for writers who would “wedge the Negro problem and social equality into their stories.” Instead, she writes, that her method involved trying to craft “simple human beings, not .

. . types of a race or an idea,” and then she would try to be “on friendly terms with them.”78 This element of the “friendly,” not “issue,” version of the social has led critics to argue that Dunbar-

Nelson imbeds racial politics into her fiction with careful “indirection and subtlety,” elements of signifyin(g) more broadly.79 Dunbar-Nelson shared this approach to her fiction with Kate

75 Qtd. in James Nagel, Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories: Kate Chopin, Grace King, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and George Washington Cable (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2014), 96. 76 ARM to PLD, May 7, 1895, in The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History, vol. 1, ed. Eugene Wesley Metcalf (Irvine: U of California P, 1973), 38. 77 For Dunbar and Howells’s conflict see Gene Andrew Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). 78 qtd. in Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 66. 79 Fetterly and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 283. Kristina Brooks also argues that Dunbar-Nelson offers clues meant for insiders. Only knowledge about particular streets and neighborhoods in New Orleans would allow readers to decode racial identities and tensions. One has to imagine, however, that Dunbar-Nelson conceived of both, or all 132

Chopin, who wrote in her private journals, “the height of art is to conceal art.”80 While Chopin was hardly concerned with the “Negro Problem,” she was similarly frustrated with the expectation that political movements dominated realist genres. Thus, both of these writers participated in a reinvention and expansion of women’s writing, both writers finding ways to eschew sentimentality and didacticism. In the case of Chopin, this approach is often and easily critiqued; even if she respects the dignity and representation of her Acadian characters, she is not interested in the problems of their circumstances or the labors and economics of their lives.81 Or, it is clear that the aesthetic freedom and marital freedom of Edna Pontellier of The Awakening comes at the expense of and with aid of black “alien hands.”82

When Dunbar-Nelson complains of the “wedging” in of the “Negro problem and social equality,” her complaint is not just about subject matter but the also about the action of

“wedging.” This statement could mean that she wants to keep the political separate from art; or, I would suggest, it means that she wants to envision new ways for them to exist as one, or in a new kind of relation, without the aggression of “wedging.” She elsewhere complains of the “necessity of cramming and forcing oneself” into writing dialect just because one is black and Southern.83

This of course, speaks to a particular ideal of fiction where literature exists somehow apart from or in a special relationship to history and real events—but it also imagines a particular kind of

“striving” as an alternative, a more social relation within a context where private and public, friendly and “social equality” continued to halt change. Thus, then, much of this work would kinds, of readers, insiders and outsiders alike. See Brooks, “Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place,” MELUS 23.2 (1998): 3-26. 80 Chopin, Kate Chopin’s Private Papers, ed. Emily Toth, Per Seyersted (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998), 92. 81 As Laura Wexler explains of Chopin, she “wanted to believe that her own personal freedom was an avatar of social progress.” Chopin “preferred to figure the problem of social conflict through the sexual and gender issues of private life” (281). See Wexler, “The Fair Ensemble: Kate Chopin in St. Louis in 1904,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Wexler (Durham: Duke UP, 2006). 82 Michele A. Birnbaum, “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race,” American Literature 66.2 (1994), 301-323. 83 Qtd. in Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 66. 133 happen on the level of style, where here words could provide appropriate disorienting distance for the charm to work on a reader’s attention and attachment. How, Dunbar-Nelson seems to ask, could one write an entertaining and important story without engaging in the dominant aesthetic mode of New Orleans, the erotics of simultaneous disinterest and interest?

Dunbar-Nelson’s short stories and sketches are often celebrated for resisting rigid

Southern codes of race and their attendant character types. However, these interpretations often fail to account for the sketches continued use of familiar and touristic New Orleans clichés and, thus, ignore the ways that relation through desire and connection could challenge a reader’s typical response to these clichés. Ammons contends that, in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, questions of “who—the obsessive American question—is ‘black’ and who is ‘white,’ we often cannot say, and are usually not invited to ask.”84 Even if Dunbar-Nelson purposefully obfuscates the racial and ethnic identities of her characters, her stories still provide enigmatic hints for readers’ enjoyment and provide them with familiar “unfamiliar” settings. If a reader can’t fully grasp any single detail’s exact import, if a reader isn’t a local insider, they aren’t kept from enjoying the clues the author has sprinkled throughout. As they remain only enigmatic hints then the details function as excess or gilding, the very material of local color.

Maintaining detail as one of the fundamental pleasures of reading, I consider how such a focus changes the engagement with the kind of social issues Dunbar-Nelsons addresses. Dorri

Beam argues that women writers of the late nineteenth century have yet to be fully explored in their non-sentimental, non-domestic novels of “highly wrought” style, where “marriage is the antagonist rather than the goal.” Beam suggests that writers interested in this mode wanted to

84 Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 66. 134

“promote an equivalence between literary and social experiments.”85 Alice Dunbar-Nelson is just one such writer that deserves distinction within the broader genre of “charming” writers. Naomi

Schor, feminist theorist on the aesthetic history of the detail, argues, “at moments of aesthetic mutation the detail becomes a means not only of effecting change, but of understanding it.” That the detail shines forth in regionalism and realism is not accidental, for detail always forces the question, “can there be representation without particularization?”86

One more aspect of “charm” needs to be discussed before I turn to particular stories in

The Goodness of St. Rocque—the physical and religious charms of Catholicism and voodoo, or gris-gris. Dunbar-Nelson, perhaps more than any other writer of nineteenth-century New

Orleans, engages hybridity and difference as a continual “process” rather than through modes of

Creole or tropical contrast. Glissant and Homi Bhabha both theorize creolization and hybridity as flowing into ever-new combinations in an effort to correct the imperial demand of a colonizer/colonized binary. This way of describing an unstable negotiation combats the “sense of polarity and dividedness that marked Creole identity.”87⁠ As the title of Dunbar-Nelson’s collection suggests, Goodness of St. Rocque is filled with elements of Catholicism, one of the

85 Dorri Beam, Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 5, 9. Fittingly, Beam focuses on the flower imagery employed by many of these women writers, and with her first book titled Violets and Other Tales, Dunbar-Nelson would be easy to class among them. Beam describes these writers’ engagement with the category of the social also on the level of style, arguing that style “opens . . . a space of fantasy not as a space apart, but as a space from which to reengage the social from a new vantage point” (128). Because these writers are looking from different vantage points, the mimetic representation of social issues wouldn’t make sense to begin with. 86 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 25, 27. 87 Richard D. E. Burton describes creolization in the Caribbean as both “continuity” and “creativity” (5). Moreover, Burton argues that slave society in Jamaica “was a continuum of overlapping and competing cultural forms, all of them creole or creolized” (6). Therefore, too, he argues that “cultural opposition in the Caribbean [is] double-edged to the extent that an (Afro-)Creole culture cannot, by dint of its very creoleness, get entirely outside the dominant system in order to resist it . . . and so tends unconsciously to reproduce its underlying structures even as it consciously challenges its visible dominance” (8). See Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). However, Judith Madera argues, the consensus surrounding the creolization process of flow is a concept developed is useful to critics and historians, but Dunbar-Nelson would still have been more familiar with the idea that to be creole was to feel, transgress, and overlap boundaries. See Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Duke UP, 2015), 204. 135

“Latin” aspects of the city that early travelers were often struck by. In the first and title story,

Catholicism combines with other West Indian religious practices, where the elements of each become inseparable and blurred, revealing each religion’s receptiveness to change and conjunction African religious traditions were maintained early in the Louisiana colony, as well.

Gris-gris charms were popular and widespread, Lawrence N. Powell points out, “in the town’s swampy environs as early as the 1720s.”88 These religious practices, like those used by obeah practitioners in Jamaica, were a form of resistance.89 These practices in New Orleans really only entered the popular white imagination during Reconstruction, as the entire nation turned to the southern city’s unrest and violence. Accounts of curious slave practices all seemed to all return to the same few sources while arguing that they were recalling practices at Congo Square witnessed first-hand (discussed more in the conclusion of this chapter). During Reconstruction, creole spiritualists, like Henry Rey discussed above, were accused of practicing black-magic versions of voodoo, when they were instead participating in the more general international craze of mediums and mesmerism.90 White supremacists successfully used their St. John’s Eve accounts of white women being lured to the bayou to suppress the “black and tan” legislature, and legends of miscegenation and magic had fully entered the racist imagination.91 One 1895

88 Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2012), 266. 89 For examples of conjure used against and understood by slave owners, see Marli F. Weiner and Maxie Hough, Sex, Sickness, and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South (Urbana: U of Illionis P, 2012), 179-181. See also Daniel E. Walker who argues that, “When not attempting to violently overthrow the regimes of oppression that chained them to the New World plantation societies, the religious activities of slaves buttressed their collective psyche against the dehumanization efforts of the slave regime. In regions dominated by Catholicism, slaves syncretized African deities with those of the church in order to preserve a religious focus that spoke directly to their needs” (16). See Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004). Moreover, Walker argues, complementing if not challenging some African-Americanist historians who focus more on the survival of pure African forms, that a process of exchange among communities on plantations was constant, shifting, and continual (8). 90 See Bell, Revolution, 187. 91 See Michelle Y. Gordon, “‘Midnight scenes and orgies’: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy,” American Quarterly 64.4 (2012), 767-786. As Gordon explains, these narratives could be seen as establishing the grounds for the sexual panic that lead to the lynching of 136 novel The Yellow Rose of New Orleans is so fiercely against miscegenation that a mixed woman is exiled by her white husband and is hated by an evil Voodoo practitioner for attempting to pass.92

It makes sense, then, that Elizabeth Dillon discusses Jamaican obi and object agency in a forum on enchantment. While obi and voodoo are not the same religious practices, and mainly derive from Jamaican and Haitian religion respectively, they are both part of dynamic processes of African diaspora and creolization in the New World. The similarity that matters the most to the following readings is that these diasporic religions often incorporate objects in ways that challenge but sometimes cooperate with Christian epistemological systems of thought and objecthood.93 Dillon emphasizes the fact that an obi fetish, a collection of objects—often hair, bones, cloth—is not a thing but is a “practice of assemblage.”94 Such assembling, she argues, revealed or created the “plasticity and boundary dissolution between objects and bodies, animate and inanimate entities.”95 As such, Dillon aligns obeah with Latour’s idea of “reassembling the social” in that this religious practice “asks us to make sense of unfamiliar—unrealistic, even— relations between and among objects and subjects.”96 Alice Dunbar-Nelson uses the charm of an object to introduce her collection, even the title, just a naming convention but a significant one, emphasizes the importance of the title story and its plot about nouvenas and charms, The

Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories. The balance of the religious charm and the charm of a

black men. Gordon argues, however, that the voodoo descriptions themselves did not inspire particular backlash because they actually offered an alternative solution by “authenticating” anti-black legislation. 92 McNeill, Nevada [A.S.M., pseud.], The Yellow Rose of New Orleans: A Novel (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1895). 93 For more on these religions as “disasporan religions,” see Margarite Fernández Olmos, Introduction to Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, ed. Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1997), 1-11. For discussion of allusions to particular voodoo and folk practices in The Goodness of St. Rocque, see Ammon, Conflicting Stories, 64-65. 94 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Obi, Assemblage, Enchantment,” J19 1.1 (2013), 173. 95 Ibid., 175. 96 Ibid., 176. 137 sketch was the way that Dunbar-Nelson sought to display the possibilities of social relations: those between reader and text, and between people not confined by the spatial logics of private/public that informed the tired debates about segregation and social equality. Again,

Dillon argues that obi practices and reading for “enchantment” helps us to “assemble a new set of relations that does not insist on divisions between agential subjects and inanimate objects.”

Such strategies make sense for fiction, especially the local-color sketch, where characters were hardly meant to offer the same kind of identification, sympathy, or psychological fullness or reality a novel’s characters tended to inspire. In Louisiana, these charms were often called

“wanga,” or the practice of “throwing” or “making wanga.” J. L. Dillard provides some linguistic history of this word, arguing that in both Haitian Creole and its use in Louisiana, ouanga or wanga means “a charm.”97 Through a combination of objects, wanga is the practice of using charms meant to “heal, protect, or otherwise remedy undesirably social situations.”98 Most famously, “wanga” is a love spell, as it is in “The Goodness of St. Rocque,” the title story.99

Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Goodness of St. Rocque” is about the dark-eyed Manuela winning back Theophile from a blonde girl with whom they attend mass and parties. The love triangle hints at the relationships between intimacy, race, and creolization. When Manuela senses that her

97 J. L. Dillard, Lexicon of Black English (New York: Seabury Press, 1977), 128. 98 Karen McCarthy Brown, “Making Wanga: Reality Constructions and the Magical Manipulation of Power,” in Religion and Healing in America, ed. Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 181. Brown helpfully explains that wanga “are simultaneously representations of troubled relationship and the means for solving the problems they represent” (180). 99 A poem “Throwing the Wanga: St. John’s Eve” appears in the somewhat popular war poet’s Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis’s short A Christmas Masque of Saint Roch (1896), a play with choruses of dead children and people in this church where, as a note provides, was of mixed attendance. Dunbar-Nelson would have likely been familiar with this work by the wife of a Confederate general, but the overlapping themes are striking and telling of the late- century religious cultural synchronies. It’s not surprising that a story of the Saint Roch church, built after an entire parish was saved from a mid-century yellow fever epidemic, would have a story of a woman making a curse on “Zizi, Creole Zizi” who stole away her husband: “‘Ole Mis’, whar is de glory o’ de freedom I is foun’? / De ole man he is lef’ me fer de young eyes o’ Zizi!’” (52-53). See Davis, A Christmas Masque of St. Roch: Pére Dagobert and Throwing the Wanga (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1896).

138 loved one is straying, she seeks advice from a “wizened yellow woman” who tells her to pray to

St. Rocque, but also gives the young girl a “lil’ charm fo’ to ween him back” after she reads

Manuela’s cards (9). The charm is literally little, like the details of place that pile up to create a charming effect. As the title story offering a “charm” for the rest of the collection, “The

Goodness of St. Rocque” invites attraction and attention, not further disinterest as an approach to knowledge. Unlike museum objects removed from context and enjoyed as amusement, as

“material objects not in culture but for culture, for an apprehension of culture,” Dunbar-Nelson invents an aesthetic where each sketch acts as a wanga charm, as local-color “charming,” and as a kind of social charm of fascinating the reader with her objects, characters and sketches alike.100

However, her use of “charm” and “charming” has to resist the too-close and scrutinizing attention long given New Orleans’s others, quaint or exotic. Rather than get caught in the paradox of disinterestedness—which is always a kind of intellectual and self-conscious interest in performed objectivity and/or superiority—Dunbar-Nelson uses alternative modes of sociality and connection available in her New Orleans landscape, and inspired by her own artistic engagement with it.

Again, if Dunbar-Nelson was subtly redirecting readers’ expectations of race and place, I argue that she did so by first inviting readers to search for clues about identity, and, then, by denying the search’s assured end, she guides readers through a complex landscape of social interaction where the reader surrenders herself to charm and attachment. Leo Bersani calls the first part of this reading sequence the desire for another’s secret, “a relation of paranoid

100 Brown, A Sense of Things, 84. See Brown on Jewett for the museum and collection. Thomas Strychacz has argued that Dunbar-Nelson uses rhetorical shifts in tone to “divert” away from the pleasing and romantic scenes of her stories. Strychacz argues, too, against the path scholarship on Dunbar-Nelson has gone in focuses on her strategy of encouraging local knowledge and decoding: her stories “invite readers to perform a continuing and always insecure negotiation with signifiers of race” (79). See “‘You could never be mistaken’: Reading Alice Dunbar- Nelson’s Rhetorical Diversion in The Goodness of St. Rocque,” 36.1 (2008), 77-94. 139 fascination,” one built around an “enigmatic signifier.” The enigmatic signifier is a secretive seduction that structures relation based on the idea from Lacan that relation necessitates difference: “we are originally seduced into a relation by messages we can’t read, enigmatic messages that are perhaps inevitably interpreted as secrets.” This view of relation is always structured by a “failure to relate,” and the “result of this original seduction would be a tendency to structure all relations on the basis of an eroticizing mystification.”101 We then relate according to difference, to seeing the world as where the self is not. Bersani, however, wants to describe a new way of being in space that is based, instead, on connections and correspondences. If viewers are to assess the “ontological laboratory” of Caravaggio’s paintings, Bersani explains in

Caravaggio’s Secrets, they must look with “only a receptive passivity,” not a learned disinterest, a fine distinction between the kind of amusement Willis finds and the kind of charm Dunbar-

Nelson creates.102 Following Bersani in his search for new models of relation, we can consider

Dunbar-Nelson’s details as signifyin(g) on the very notion of the enigmatic signifiers of New

Orleans identity and literature. Her subtle racializations are not resisting the readers’ simple equations of race—she is not intent on hoodwinking readers—but rather fulfilling their expectations for enjoyment and interest in complex but subtle ways (consider the diminutive and feminine terms Harman playfully uses to describe metaphysics: sincerity, charm, and allure).

Just as signifying functions through a logic of repetition rather than “black difference” and objectification, Dunbar-Nelson registers a social field that works through the idea of sameness and connection.103 Such vision of reading and transmission is similar to the syncretism required for a creolized religion. While Willis and others showed us a development of creoleness

101 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), 177, 107-108. 102 Bersani, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998), 57. 103 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), 109 and 69. 140 as contrast, Dunbar-Nelson highlights attachments as a reading of creolization. These are, of course, two versions of historical change and understanding that do not neatly map onto current critical trends surrounding creole culture, créolité, or creolization. While Dunbar-Nelson eschews certain types and qualifications of African American literature—with an almost complete avoidance of dialect except in her “The Praline Woman” sketch—she is certainly reliant on the kind of descriptive details help to sustain a charming touristic New Orleans.

However, I want to suggest that through style, she signifies upon these images and tropes, and, further, upon the very concept of the enigmatic signifier itself.

One way we can see this is in the way that detail functions—especially since detail is crucial for both local color and local color’s charm. However, the starting sentences of “The

Goodness of St. Rocque” show how difficult it is to parse particularity and generality in details:

“Manuela was tall and slender and graceful, and once you knew her the lithe form could never be mistaken. She walked with the easy spring that comes from a perfectly arched foot” (3). Here,

Dunbar-Nelson insists on the particularity of her characters but in such a way that short-circuits the enigmatic signifying power of New Orleans’s literature and types. Manuela is “tall and slender and graceful,” unsurprising adjectives for a young “tropical beauty” of ambiguous race, and Dunbar-Nelson lets them take center stage as the first words of the whole collection (158).104

By invoking the always-ambiguous characterization of the New Orleans creole woman specifically, Dunbar-Nelson shows how easily details lose their ability to truly particularize

Manuela in any knowable, granular way for the reader. What makes Manuela memorable is that

“once you knew her the lithe form could never be mistaken.” It is not that her “lithe form”

104 See examples qtd. in Berman’s: “Along with intelligence, the Creole negro combines a graceful form, supple movements, agreeable features, and a use of language that is gentler and stripped of all the accents which African negroes blend in” (39). See Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006). 141 cannot be mistaken—but the familiarity with her form (“once you knew her”) that makes

Manuela’s “lithe form” readable, particular, and unforgettable. Only when you know her can she be recognized; this relation is put before any kind of scrutinizing or attention as the path toward knowing her.

Kristina Brooks argues that Dunbar-Nelson’s use of New Orleans imagery allows her to question all scales of identity, “Pitting the individual against the mob, the ethnic orphan against the social requirement for a family name, or the non-local reader against complex and ambiguous local codes, Dunbar-Nelson dramatizes the conflict that flares along fault lines between individual and group identities.”105 Problems of scale and/or containers the tensions between them are always revealed by details. Dunbar-Nelson crafts the central contrast of the sketch—the black eyes of Manuela versus the blue eyes of her romantic rival—to show that her characters are always in allegorical positions. Most critics agree that Dunbar-Nelson’s purposeful obscuring of identity works to combat binaristic formulas, but that work is not done through eschewing the aesthetic tension that binary offers. It’s not just that we cannot confidently know Manuela’s race in binary terms. That resulting ambiguity is how racialization in New Orleans literature works, and, again, as Bersani explains in psychological terms, is the core of erotic address, a

“provocative unreadability.”106

Despite the fact that any detail’s main goal is to particularize and bring an object into focus (high contrast), detail is often applied to the theoretical background of regional sketches.

Thus background characters become adornment, too particularized, reversing the optics of a detailed foreground and a blurred background. In doing this, the focus shifts from individual identity to what agency and importance a social group might have. The latter is where the notion

105 Brooks, “Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place,” MELUS 23.2 (1998), 3. 106 Bersani, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 13. 142 of creolization, rather than the creole, appears in Goodness of St. Rocque, and in “Anarchy

Alley,” the sketch discussed previously in this chapter.

Of the fourteen stories in The Goodness of St. Rocque many depict carnival festivities or other local and often religious celebratory customs. In “Little Miss Sophie,” it is “Christmas Eve on Royal Street,” “no place for a weakling, for the shouts and carousels of the roisterers will strike fear into the bravest ones.” In “Odalie” and “A Carnival Jangle” the main characters find heartbreak and violence in the “motley merry throng” of Mardi Gras costumers. “The Goodness of St. Rocque” begins with a picnic, with “as merry a crowd of giddy, chattering Creole girls and boys as ever you could see.” In “Sister Josepha” a young nun considers the “fashionably dressed, perfumed, rustling, and self-conscious throng” instead of her rosary. A similar number of social scenes occur in Chopin’s Bayou Folk and Night in Acadie. In Chopin’s stories, the parties usually serve to show the connected neighborliness of the Red River region, as in “A Night in

Acadie” where the two main characters meet on a train with a feeling of “pre-acquaintance” before they make it to a ball.107

The scenes of play invite the reader into cultural traditions, blurring the line between, but also helping to create, the categories of the social and the cultural. The narratorial guide offers a glimpse at the real “native” life that local-color was supposed to provide. Throughout The

Goodness of St. Rocque, the narrator sometimes intrudes into the scenes of fun to frame them as especially authentic especially by using the second-person address, as she does in “The

Fisherman of Pass Christian,”

107 Stephanie Palmer argues that travelers stopping by tight-knit communities is a motif which “imagines that there is a space within modern culture for small-scale, face-to-face communities in which everyone knows each other and participates personally in communal decisions” (3-4). See Palmer, Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). Chopin’s story “A Night in Acadie” meditates on this feeling of communality with a sense of mystery. The young girl Zaïda says, “It looks like you ought to know me; I don’ know w’y.” The narrator continues, “They were satisfied to recognize this feeling—almost conviction—of pre-acquaintance, without trying to penetrate its cause” (9-10). Chopin, A Night in Acadie (Chicago: Way & Williams, 1897). 143

“You've never been for a hay-ride and fish-fry on the shores of the Mississippi Sound,

have you? When the summer boarders and the Northern visitors undertake to give one, it

is a comparatively staid affair, where due regard is had for one's wearing apparel, and

where there are servants to do the hardest work. Then it isn't enjoyable at all. But when

the natives, the boys and girls who live there, make up their minds to have fun, you may

depend upon its being just the best kind” (42-43).

The first line of “La Juanita” is similar in kind, “If you never lived in Mandeville, you cannot appreciate the thrill of wholesome, satisfied joy which sweeps over its inhabitants every evening at five o’clock” (195). In “The Goodness of St. Rocque,” the narrator quaintly similarly beckons with a rhetorical question that provides a tone of familiarity, “Now, a picnic at Milneburg is a thing to be remembered for ever . . . For what can equal the music of a violin, a guitar, a cornet, and a bass viol to trip the quadrille to at a picnic?” (5). It’s no wonder that one reviewer called her “brief and pleasing” stories “all bright and full of the true Creole air of easy-going.”108 In her scenes of fish fries and the veritable social party of waiting for the week’s mail at the lakeshore,

Dunbar-Nelson’s work falls firmly into what detractors would see in the genre, “lighter, more comforting version of realism, one in which descriptive detail and the humorous depiction of quaint customs painted over its lack of serious themes.”109⁠ In these moments, the reader is simultaneously included and distanced by the narrator’s intrusion and address, suggesting a mode of sociality that requires invitation, that maintains a sense of exclusivity without actual exclusion. The reader is welcome to linger, to read, to regard the background and landscape and detail. “Once you knew her [Manuela]” is folksy but it is also mysteriously withheld.

108 Qtd. in Gloria Hull, Color, Sex & Poetry, 50. 109 Donna Campbell, “Realism and Regionalism,” in A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, ed. Charles L. Crow (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 93. 144

The main reasons critics fixate on the racial indeterminacy of Dunbar-Nelson’s characters is because she rarely clear ethnic labels and because she avoids dialect. Again, it’s difficult to imagine that readers weren’t reading these New Orleans stories with questions of identity in mind. However, I want to suggest that rather than using detail as fetish, they work, instead, as charms because Dunbar-Nelson focuses on the interaction of detail placed at different scales with a reader’s kind of attention. Thus, she does something like “refetishize the fetish,” by returning it to its association with the religious, especially the creolized in-between of culture and blended religious practices.110 She turns characters into object-like scraps and bits against the kind of aggressive soliciting she plays with in describing Manuela. In “Sister Josepha,” we meet one of

The Goodness of St. Rocque’s many characters with indeterminate race. Camille, an orphan

“child without an identity,” is brought to a convent where she grows up “with the rest of the waifs; scraps of French and American civilization thrown together to develop a seemingly inconsistent miniature world” (157). Despite the fact that Camille is of unknown origins, or likely because of her lacking past, she is especially favored by all at the convent. The other girls envy her: “Camille, they decided crossly, received too much notice. It was Camille this, Camille that; she was pretty, it was to be expected. Even Father Ray lingered longer in his blessing when his hands pressed her silky black hair” (160). Camille is not racialized through broad caricature but, rather, on the level of detail and through her ambiguous exceptionality. She is a kind of enigmatic signifier to the other characters of the story drawn to her, where eroticism “advertises an availability that is somewhat opaque.” For readers, her desirability is known by following the

110 Schor writes, “refetishizing the fetish may well be a necessary step in understanding the function of the female protagonists in realism, for finally my concern is not so much with the representation of women as with the relationship between women and representation” (Reading in Detail x). 145 attention of others, and the reader is blocked from regarding Camille similarly so that the reader comes closer to witnessing instead of just reading.111

Camille’s desirability eventually causes the main problem of the story’s plot. One day, she is introduced to a couple that wants to adopt her from the convent, but she refuses to go with them. “The woman suited her; but the man! It was a doubtless intuition of the quick, vivacious sort which belonged to her blood that served her” (159). After this refusal, Camille takes her vows and becomes Sister Josepha. Soon after, on a “fete day” at church, she catches the eyes of a young man in the crowd and falls quickly in love. She decides to run away from the convent but overhears the Mother Superior discussing her one night with another nun, “You know, sister, how hard it would be for her in the world, with no name but Camille, no friends, and her beauty; and then—”. After digesting these words, Camille abandons her plan. The narrator writes of

Camille’s decision, “In a flash she realised the deception of the life she would lead, and the cruel self-torture of wonder at her own identity. Already, as if in anticipation of the world’s questionings, she was asking herself, ‘Who am I? What am I?’” (171). Called to relate to the rest of the world, Camille is reduced from questioning her identity to questioning her humanity, or the ability for her to ever claim an identity. We’re led to believe, especially with the cut-off conversation, the “and then—” that the Mother Superior is referring to Camille’s race. Does the

“deception” then refer to living a life passing as white? Or, does the “What am I?” suggest that the “deception” at the heart of choosing, or having thrust upon her, any identity. Her entire effort to become a subject—even putting aside the question of passing—would be “deception.”

We can position the love Camille feels for the boy in the crowd as a “haunting,” against the ambiguously rendered, though quite easily understood, interaction between her and the man who wanted to adopt her. This, again, is the way the enigmatic signifier works: as “reciprocal

111 Bersani, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 8. 146 readings of desire,” or, “it solicits intimacy in order to block it with a secret.”112 Thus, as Bersani explains, there are two ways we can approach the enigma, as something to be aggressively read,

“an epistemological challenge,” or as a “throng” without distinctions and a “charm.”113 The moment with her would-be father is the moment that Camille doesn’t understand but, marked as such, makes it all the more easy for the reader to “divine”: “Untutored in worldly knowledge, she could not divine the meaning of the pronounced leers and admiration of her physical charms which gleamed in the man’s face, but she knew it made her feel creepy” (159). Against the leering of the man, Dunbar-Nelson positions social correspondences, guiding the reader through different relations in space. The disturbing and unclear “gleam” of the man’s face here is echoed again when Camille finds herself reacting to her world and the convent’s parlor differently, “The room was not an unaccustomed one, for she had swept it many times, but to-day the stiff black chairs, the dismal crucifixes, the gleaming whiteness of the walls, even the cheap lithograph of the Madonna which Camille had always regarded as a perfect specimen of art, seemed cold and mean [emphasis added]” (160). The list of detailed objects is flat and shows just what that particular interaction does to the world around her, to the scenes of her little world that should fulfill her place in local color. Moreover, it is not unremarkable that the gleaming whiteness might also correspond to the man’s gleaming face, a way of reading race through extending interaction rather than through aggressive decoding.114

After Camille refuses to go with the couple and contemplates the objects of her convent, the rather gilded description of the fete day at the Cathedral takes on a different meaning to serve

112 Bersani, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 6, 9. 113 Bersani, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 13. 114 Like the way that Bersani describes Caravaggio’s paintings themselves performing an engagement of charm-as- looking: “If realism requires that we, as viewers, educate ourselves in order to earn our position of superiority, the work itself demands nothings of us except that we be its dispassionate judges. It doesn’t look out at us, it doesn’t call to us; it awaits our verdict. Caravaggio appears intent on forestalling such judgments by making the work itself another viewer” (45-46).

147 as the setting for Camille’s first feeling of love. The Cathedral is ribboned, the attendants’ clothes are shining, and the girls at the convent all wear blue-ribboned bonnets (in the liturgical calendar, the blue likely refers to the Virgin). The scene offers the most sustained description in the sketch, while everything else happens rather quickly, much description is given over to the mass and its appearance: “Upon the altar, broad sweeps of golden robes, great dashes of crimson skirts, mitres and gleaming crosses, the soft neutral hue of rich lace vestments; the tender heads of childhood in picturesque attire; the proud, gold magnificence of the domed altar with its weighting mass of lilies and wide-eyed roses, and the long candles that sparkled their yellow star points about the reverent throng within the altar rails” (165). It is in this scene that Sister Josepha

(Camille) sees a pair of eyes looking at her “pityingly.” After the service the eyes continue

“haunting her persistently” (167). She tries to do the work around the church, but the eyes continue maintain their presence: “And always the tender, boyish brown eyes, that looked so sorrowfully at the fragile, beautiful little sister, haunting, following, pleading” (168). The difference in the leering man and the haunting eyes is a significant clue as to how Dunbar-Nelson wants to resolve the problem of reading and looking at unknown characters or objects.

This idea of the throng takes precedence again (see the above quotation where the

“reverent throng” appears). Sister Josepha’s desire is not simply to escape her convent and find the pair of eyes, but “to merge in the great city where recognition was impossible, and working her way like the rest of humanity, perchance encounter the eyes again.” Her plan is to “unseen glide up Chartres Street to Canal, and once there, mingle in the throng that filled the wide thoroughfare” (169). This desire for haunting, for mingling with the “throng,” is a kind of social desire that is not allowed Camille in a world of leering and gleaming and reading, as she is reminded in that overheard conversation that makes her give up the plan. 148

This is not to say that crowds are all benevolent in The Goodness of St. Rocque, but any return to the motley scenes of New Orleans, violent or fantastic, counters the choice-based and overly logical definitions of the social of the late-nineteenth century. Across the local color genre, even beyond New Orleans, we might understand the inclusion of dancin’ parties and reunion picnics as more than just fulfilling the requirement for quaint social “customs.” These social scenes might well be one of the most maligned aspects of the genre: the jolly settings and the space for extended description where ethnic others are especially rendered as extraneous, merely distant background actors of a picturesque landscape. These scenes privilege quick and frantic interaction, making the sketch of simple daily life seem more “authentic.” Consider the opening story of Kate Chopin’s “A Night in Acadie,” which brings together interaction on different scales and tones, and the blending of background with voices bursting through:

The musicians had warmed up and were scraping away indoors and calling the figures.

Feet were pounding through the dance; dust way flying. The women’s voices were piped

high and mingled discordantly, like the confused, shrill clatter of waking birds, while the

men laughed boisterously. But if some one had only thought of gagging Foché, there

would have been less noise. His good humor permeated everywhere, like an atmosphere.

He was louder than all the noise; he was more visible than the dust. He called the young

mulatto (destined for the knife) ‘my boy’ and sent him flying hither and thither. Hee

beamed upon Douté as he tasted the gumbo and congratulated her: “C'est toi qui s'y

115 connais, ma fille! 'cré tonnerre!”

At times, I want to suggest, these scenes seriously engage with a different psychology and sociology of the group when we consider their placement in the overall plot of the sketch, if they at all enter as more than just authenticating background. Dunbar-Nelson reminds readers, against

115 Chopin, A Night in Acadie, 18-19. 149 the problems of personal judgment and insult, that it is similarly difficult, but perhaps just as fruitful, to understand how groups function without recourse to individuation. “Social equality” was a distracting issue for many reasons, but it also drew the distinctions between the “social” and the “civil” based on individual choice and an individual’s ability to own his own race or to pass. At this time, fiction was one of the most important ways to conceive group existence as a real material force or existence.

Folly: “White and Black Join in its Masquerading”

Booker T. Washington stated at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition that “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.”116 As I’ve already suggested, social equality’s folly was popular across sides of the debate, as both a ridiculous rhetoric and as a ridiculous carnival ideal. As Rachel F. Moran summarizes, “When foes of Reconstruction held up miscegenation as the bête noire of social equality, reformers laughed off the threat as extreme and implausible.”117 Also “laughing it off,” The Weekly

Louisianian remarked in 1873 argued that “every thinking man” knew the concept was

“eminently absurd” since “social equality never did and never can exist, not even among the white race itself.”118 “Social equality” was easily linked to satire, the topsy-turvy, putting the bottom rail on top, or to a particular understanding of carnival as the inversion of hierarchies of race and class.

If Washington called the spectacle of social equality a “folly,” then seizing the affective power of such folly was exactly what the Mardi Gras group the Krewe of Comus did as they grew more popular after the Civil War and as Mardi Gras became defined by their antics. This

116 Qtd. in Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna, La.: Pelican Pub. Co., 2003), 193. 117 Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race & Romance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 77. 118 “The Election Frauds,” Weekly Louisianian 1/11/1873 150

Mardi Gras parading association was formed in 1856 and started many of the traditions of large- scale parading and display. They ushered in the period of more consolidated Mardi Gras controlled by the exclusivity and secrecy of clubs, or krewes, and their members. As Mary Ryan summarizes, “Mardi Gras exemplified a major formal innovation in public ceremony accomplished after the Civil War, the turn away from didactic self-representation to a more spectacular style of civic expression.”119 Even if the members of these secret societies were mainly Anglo-Saxon merchants and not Creoles—the public name of the organization associated with Comus was The Pickwick Society—they needed to publicly differentiate themselves from the Northern carpetbagger Republicans. Thus, French-speaking white Creoles appreciated Comus’s visual attacks against Republican outsiders, the formerly and newly free black population, and new European immigrants. Other Krewes, like Rex, which was formed in

1872 and crowned a king of all Mardi Gras who took the keys of the city away from the mayor for the day, were organized around the same principles.120 There was, however, no such powerfully playful reply from the Republican side. Historian Reid Mitchell explains, “The

Republicans simply could not master the cultural forms necessary to communicate to New

Orleanians. In the middle of the nineteenth century—a century of progress—and after a unifying war, they did not consider using traditions they deemed parochial.”121

The elements of carnival and social equality converged throughout the late century but especially in the 1873 Mardi Gras, when the Mystick Krewe of Comus themed their parade and tableaux “The Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species.” This parade took place a few months before one of the most violent street battles of Reconstruction, what is known now as

119 Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997), 240. 120 Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1995), 70-71. 121 Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day, 76. 151

The Battle of Liberty Place. The costume designs understood Darwin’s theory as preposterous— and costumes of various animal figures marched representing local and national carpetbag government officials [fig. 5]. The parade was organized into animal sections, and miscegenation was the underlying theme.122 A poem composed for the occasion is printed in 1874 Handbook of the Carnival, which also details the themes of past seasons. The satire of both government and science is aided by the element of presentation itself, the marching orders and progression. The poem corresponded to the parade’s tableaux and progressed toward the “Missing Link”:

Oh! rosy hues o Time’s dim twilight morn.

In such an hour the ‘Missing Link’ was born;

The great Gorilla, flinging wide the gate

Of Darwin’s Eden; and our high estate.123

The official brand of folly that Mardi Gras displayed was based on the problem of social equality made visible through satire and the publicity of secretive exclusivity.124 The Krewe of Comus had perfected the two, attempting to control the possibilities of a more “polyglot,” to use

Bakhtin’s term, by making display and procession an entertaining way to submit to authority.

Eric Hobsbawm has observed that the entire postbellum period was a “the heyday of ‘invented tradition,’” or, “a time when old ceremonials were staged with an expertise and appeal . . . and when new rituals were self-consciously invented to accentuate this development.”125

Again, the supposed leveling of distinctions inferred from Darwin’s theory of evolution was a perfect analogue to social equality debates. Edward King’s profile on the city’s carnival

122 See Christopher E. G. Benfey, Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable (New York: Knopf, 1997), 178. 123 Handbook of the Carnival (New Orleans: John W. Madden, 1874), 44. The poem was written by a member of Comus, a reporter for the Times-Picayune. 124 See Susan Gillman on the mystical secretive origins of the Ku Klux Klan in Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 19. 125 David Cannadine, “The British Monarchy, c. 1820-1977),” in The Invention of Tradition ed. Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge UP, 2012), 107. 152 shows, in his essay “The Great South,” that interracial dancing of a promiscuous Mardi Gras celebration was a satirical play at acceptance [fig. 6]. This was a completely different brand of carnival, a satire of putting the bottom on top, compared to Bakhtin’s formulation of carnival’s all-embracing ambivalence. In Bakhtin’s formulation of carnival, “The people’s ambivalent laughter . . . expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.”126 Rather than an inversion of hierarchy, Bakhtin speaks of carnival’s most liberating function as part of its temporariness, its “suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”127 Bakhtin himself weighs in on the distinction between “festive laughter” and the “pure satire of his modern times”: “The satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becames [sic] a private reaction.”128 The Scribner’s piece by King is not itself satire, but it removes the enjoyment to an even further degree of amused observation.

126 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 11-12. 127 Ibid., 10-11. 128 Ibid., 12. 153

Figure 6: Ulysses S. Grant as a Tobacco Grub

Figure 7: "The Carnival--'White and Black Join in its Masquerading "

Still, at the center of festival culture is a belief that the group itself does have a material and real existence worth regarding and coming to know as a group, not just as a set of individuals. The Handbook to the Carnival emphasizes “The Throngs” as more than interaction of a plural: “The people did not merely gather; they thronged, they swarmed, they massed, in short, they simply came out in myriads” [fig. 7]. Comparing Havana celebrations and those of 154

New Orleans, cultural historian Daniel E. Walker argues that the “collective experience of the whole” was key: “most participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square brought with them an understanding of the festival that not only encouraged but mandated the incorporation of the festival that not only encouraged but mandated the incorporation of diverse and at times mutually exclusive elements into a whole that was more powerful than the sum of its parts.”129

Figure 8: Handbook of the Carnival (New Orleans: John W. Madden, 1874)

129 Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 13, 145 155

There is, of course, a mystical and transcendent belief about the group inherent in such arguments. Georg Simmel and sociologists influenced by his formalism argue that a social group can function differently than the sum of its parts, that something is created in excess of individuals, even if they are constitutive of that thing. There is, thus, a social force that can be appreciated (as sociability), is tangible, is real, and can act. Victor Turner calls this “the ecstasy of spontaneous communitas”; Michel Maffesoli calls it “immanent transcendence’—another way of describing the puissance which binds together small groups and communities.”130 While the affect and purpose of the group, sociability or ecstasy, matters, I want to focus mainly how important the very existence or ontology of a group was in this period of “social equality,” again, an idea of the social dominated by concepts of private, familial, individual choice, and exclusive concepts of class. As soon as “society” was understood as a discreet object of analysis in the sociological study, the rhetoric of “social equality” was, rather, a signal that conceiving of anything like the social as a totalized structure different than some other institution or container of thought—the economy or the law—simply didn’t make sense. Most current trends of literature and sociology alike are rethinking the reality or usefulness of the concept of “society” or of the adjective “social.” Bruno Latour and Cornelius Castoriadis demand that we break down the category to its individuals, its “actants.”131 Their critique is launched directly at there being something “irreducible” in the social. Castoriadis, thus, calls society an “imaginary institution.”

My contention is that this very notion of the imaginary, seen consistently in the folly of social

130 Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969), 38. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. Don Smith (Thousand Okas, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 59. 131 Their critique is at the center a critique of something “irreducible” in the social. “Society is not a thing, not a subject, and not an idea—nor is it a collection or system of subjects, things and ideas” (178). Castoriadis privileges the individual as raw material: “For centuries one hears it affirmed that man does not exist as man outside of the city: ‘Robinsonades’ and social contracts are condemned at the irreducibility of the social to the individual is proclaimed. But when we take a closer look, we see not only that nothing is said concerning what it is that would remain irreducible but that, in fact, this irreducible something is in reality reduced” (177). See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 156 equality, was exactly what inspired the social writing of New Orleans regionalists against the supposed realities of new sociology and the every-which-way absurdity of “social equality.”

With Mardi Gras celebrations changing and growing concurrently with the street violence of Reconstruction, this belief in the “throng” as “not merely” a gathering of individuals, but as exerting a real and differently conceived force, was a serious issue.132 As I referenced at the beginning of this chapter, street battles were explicitly linked to civil rights legislation. One of the most violent attacks was on the attack on the Mechanics’ Institute in 1866, when the state’s constitution convention attempted to reconvene illegally in order to assure rights and suffrage after a more moderate constitution had put black codes into effect. Marching in celebration toward the building, unarmed black residents, many Union veterans, were first attacked, and supporters waiting for their arrival in the building had to barricade themselves in as a street fight broke out [fig. 8]. These mobs, whose ideals collide with Mardi Gras celebrations that tried to represent them with a confused overlap of violence and laughter, made New Orleans particularly concerned with collective identity. While the White League and the Krewe of Comus used authority, they did so to combat another fear inherent in the threat of social equality: if the post- slavery world would not put the bottom rail on top, then, even worse, social equality would mean the absence of all natural or good distinctions, class-based and racial. This is the argument

Thomas Fik and Eva Gold make about the underlying logic of the conservative, anti- miscegenation, tragic mulatta novel Towards the Gulf. Representative of conservative

Reconstruction novels more generally, this 1887 novel displays an anxiety over, as the title

132 James K. Hogue puts the violence and the tone of carnival together in his striking summary of the violence of the Reconstruction period in New Orleans, “In 1868 alone [Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan] estimated that close to 1,880 had been killed or wounded in a carnival of terror aimed at preventing Louisiana’s freedmen from using their numerical majority to win the state’s electoral votes for Grant and the Republicans” (2). See Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006). 157 indicates, an overwhelming deluge that wipes out meaning and distinction. This fear was what another contemporary novel, Sisters of Orleans refers to, with the burning down of a plantation where races had mixed too indiscriminately, as “an indistinguishable, sweltering mass of fire.”133

Two of Dunbar-Nelson’s most often discussed stories in Goodness of St. Rocque depict mobs. “Mr. Baptiste” and “Carnival Jangle” both have similar endings of spontaneous, though perhaps anticipated, violence. Coincidence is the driving force of the individual murder of Mr.

Baptiste and the young girl in “Carnival Jangle.” One brick hurled, one mistaken vengeful stabbing. In this way, it might seem like Dunbar-Nelson depicts the mob and festival as only a make-up of its individual parts, with particular motivations breaking through the veneer of a cohesive object or group. “Mr. Baptiste” is perhaps the most explicitly political as it is the only sketch to reference an actual event, an 1892 strike by the city’s dock workers. The narrator states at the end of the sketch, in one of the many intrusions that are also invitations, “You remember, of course, how long the strike lasted. . . . It was a fearsome war” (124). The strike was largely about the cotton trade’s reliance on the cheaper labor that could be used in hiring African-

American union-busting workers; they, of course, were “scabs” to the Irishmen only as a result of the latter refusing to work with these black workers.134 Mr. Baptiste, though, is an invention; he is a poor and pitiable Creole man who walks to the levee to take from “baskets of forgotten fruit” (113) that have started to spoil but are too good to throw away. Baptiste subsists this way,

133 See Thomas H. Fik and Eva Gold, “Race, Region and the Reconstruction of the Southern Gentleman: The American Race Melodrama in Buckner’s Towards the Gulf,” Southern Quarterly 35.3 (1997), 333. Sisters of Orleans contains a number of mob scenes, including one that takes place in New Orleans’s “Triangle Building,” also referenced in Cable’s Dr. Sevier. The novel is sympathetic to intermarriage, but it has little faith in the future of the Reconstruction South, with its main character a Northern educator come to New Orleans, and the titular sisters switched at birth. In its preface, the author comments on the issues of social equality: “As the black man accumulates wealth and intelligence in keeping with his improved opportunities, and especially as he reaches political position through the instrumentality of the ballot, it is not to be supposed that he will patiently consent to remain socially ostracized on account of the color of his skin” (9). No attempts have been made to determine the authorship of this anonymous novel. See Sisters of Orleans: A Tale of Race and Social Conflict (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1871). 134 See Daniel Rosenberg, New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor, and Unionism, 1892-1923 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 158

Figure 9: Harper’s Weekly: New Orleans Massacre, 1866 delivering the fruit he’s collected to his “clients,” who, in turn, provide him with meals. Because it is the cotton trade that is the cause of the strike and strife, Mr. Baptiste laments the resulting loss of the fruit trade. Because the men refuse to work “wid niggers . . . de fruit ship, dey can’ mak’ lan’, de mans, dey t’reaten an’ say t’ings” (115-16). 159

One morning a fight breaks out against the union strikers and the African-American workers loading boxes onto ships. Mr. Baptiste hides behind a bread cart but after “weakly cheering the Negroes on,” he is singled out by one of the angry Irish men who “let fly a brickbat in the direction of the bread-stall,” which hits Mr. Baptise, killing him instantly. As Kristina

Brooks points out, the mob is described by Dunbar-Nelson as “vague,” while Mr. Baptiste lays on the ground, an “individual,” or a “concrete bit of helpless humanity” (122). For Brooks, this is an important moment that demonstrates two modes of identification pitted against one another: the “vague” homogenizing mob controlling economic structures and the New Orleans-specific and accessory to the historical event, the “fruit-eatin’ Frinchman” (122). History forgets this first death in the skirmish, Dunbar-Nelson tells us at the end of the sketch, the “concrete bit” is unaccounted for in the historical record of the “fearsome war” that “you remember, of course.”

Tragic violence erupts not just at the meeting of the mob and the individual, but at the so- described meeting of the “vague” and the “concrete.”

However, the paragraph where the “vague” and the “concrete” meet in Mr. Baptiste’s death is complemented by a third element: “Fishmen and vegetable marchands gathered around him a quick, sympathetic mass. The individual, the concrete bit of helpless humanity, had more interest for them than that vast, vague fighting mob beyond” (122-23). Beyond the “vague” and the “concrete” is the “mass” which finds itself interested in Mr. Baptiste not as sympathetic individuals but as a “sympathetic mass.”

“Mr. Baptiste” is not the only story to end with a chilling death in which the main character is described as a “something,” a “concrete bit.” In that dance of disinterest and interest that charm facilitates, Dunbar-Nelson also has to wrestle with the related issues of objectification and abstraction of the characters she described as always trying to “get on friendly terms with.” 160

If local-color stories circulated in magazines detached from their contexts like museum objects, it’s striking that so many of Dunbar-Nelson’s characters end up not just dead, but object-like, a logical but alarming extension of their life as “charming” types. Another story from the collection, “When the Bayou Overflows,” ends when the restless Sylvie, who left his rural home outside New Orleans for Chicago, returns dead because the North was “too cold for him” (106).

When his family goes to the station expecting to meet him, there appears instead “some men bearing Something” from the train. The end of “Tony’s Wife” has a doctor declare that his patient is close to death, “he is completely burned out inside. Empty as a shell” (28).

Many of these tragic ends in The Goodness of St. Rocque are accompanied by active and even jolly social scenes, ending with a feeling of melodramatic coincidence.135 Exemplifying the coincidental event is “Carnival Jangle,” a short sketch where masking results in mistaken identity and death. A young girl, Flo, is whisked away by a dark crowd on Mardi Gras day. The leader, dressed as a Prince of Darkness, promises to show her “what life is” and brings her to a costume shop run by a French-accented woman with “eyes . . . sharp as talons in their grasping glance”

(130). Then traversing the town dressed as young male troubadour, Flo is soon mistaken for another “form” and stabbed in the back. “I’d know that other form anywhere. It’s Leon, see? I know those white hands like a woman’s and that restless head,” says the violent revenger before he stabs Flo. As a parable, the short sketch is pretty straightforward. Going to the pleasurable dark side to try a different identity can easily lead to the crisis moment that is constitutive of carnival itself: the breakdown between ritualized aggression and real aggression.136 “There is murder, but by whom?” the narrator asks, “for what? Quien sabe? [Who knows?]” In the same

135 Gloria Hull admits that Dunbar-Nelson’s “plots often seem predictable, her situations hackneyed or melodramatic, her narrative style unsophisticated” (Color, Sex, and Poetry 53). 136 Brazilian carnival has a word for this moment: “The most unwelcome of guests, briga suddenly appears in the midst of the celebration, its playful mask torn away” (15). Daniel Touro Linger, Dangerous Encounters: Meanings of Violence in a Brazilian City (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1992). 161 kind of meditation we saw over the body of Mr. Baptiste, Flo’s mother attends her slain daughter and we’re left with the final image and another “something”: “a broken-hearted mother sat gazing wide-eyed and mute at a horrible something that lay across the bed” (134).

The transformation of character, the “simple human beings” as Dunbar-Nelson insisted they were, into somethings suggests Dunbar-Nelson’s knowledge of the way her own sketches and characters could circulate as mere “material.” As Michael A. Elliot argues, all local color realism had in common the idea that “people could be ‘material’—that they possessed a certain identity that could be recorded in such a way to be instructive, even entertaining, to a consuming audience.”137 The problem is that, as Eliot puts it: “putting cultural material into circulation risks the possibility of condescension instead of appreciation.” Familiar with Grace King’s and

George Washington Cable’s work, Dunbar-Nelson knew that she would be working with the same kinds of “material,” but unlike Kate Chopin, who ironized this particular burden with her self-reflexivity, Dunbar-Nelson writes each sketch not just to be pleasingly charming but to work as a charm meant to fascinate (or fasten) attention without the kind of aggressive reading Bersani describes. The sketches endings are not overly sentimental but, instead, tragic and sincere, in the way Harman describes. As mostly coincidental, these deaths exemplify the qualification of local color to portray “smaller joys and sufferings,” even in death.138 No reader is expected to cry at the sudden twist in this short story form, at least not without regarding the element of sincerity and the artifice used to bring it about. In crafting these object-like endings for characters Dunbar-

Nelson risked condescending aesthetic contemplation of the cultural material in her sketches to create new charming social bonds.

137 Elliot, The Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002), 45. 138 Elliot, Culture Concept, 40. 162

Conclusion: George Washington Cable’s Congo Square

The motivations, disavowals, and submerged possibilities in “social equality” have not often enough been used to read or understand the literature of the period, of the Gilded Age, the age of the detail, and the rise of realism and regionalism. Most studies of regionalism have focused on the emergence of a “culture concept” while realism has been attached to social issues, progress, or as Amy Kaplan has argued, the fraught relationship of representation to social change.139

Because local color writing has been so constitutive of a concept of culture that embraced authenticity and variety, critics have retreated from similarly reading its sketches as accurate portraits of people and places. Thus, the idea of the social, any attempt at describing a group or interactions within a group, is cut out when it is associated with the real. This turn to new strategies for reading regionalism’s cultural importance to the late nineteenth century results from a restricted sense of the “social” and a limited assumption that regionalist writers only engage with the social in mimetic ways doomed to failure. But my goal in highlighting the importance of “social equality,” by suggesting that this problem offers a counter-definition to the

Gilded Age; not just an age of urban social problems and reform, seen in the increasingly visible divisions of wealth (and the idea of “conspicuous consumption”), but an entire rethinking of interactions as neither private and public occurrence.140

Brad Evans argues that this pre-history of culture in the late nineteenth century, which would be popularized by the work of Franz Boas, registers a fraught tension between the singular idea of culture and the sense of variety: “Without the anthropological concept of culture, without that word in the plural, we find ourselves without a comfortable vocabulary for describing the period’s engagement with difference.” I argue that this conversation about culture only tells half

139 Kaplan, The Social Construction of Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 10. 140 Thorstein Veblen published his account of conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). 163 the story. The overwhelming problem of social equality created a dance between the social and the cultural, between social order and interaction--difference in motion, or style, or the kind of

“public rights” perhaps purposefully ambiguously defined by those drafters of the 1868

Louisiana Constitution. Richard Teichgraeber captures something of the overlap in these concepts when he argues that “American understanding of culture was authentically individualistic . . . Personal choice and self-construction also provided a powerful counterforce to more authoritarian and elitist concepts of culture.”141 Yet personal choice was also the motivating and/or rhetorical reason to support Jim Crow. The effect, however, was that disallowing social equality worked to maintain personal choice, but in the service of sustaining hatred toward a group by another group.

Again, though, the idea of an individual’s right to self, and thus property and choice, was desired or used as a tactic by both sides of the civil rights debate. The idea of the individual was precisely one of the reasons that in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that racial identity came to represent “the most valuable sort of property.” Albion Tourgée used his fierce belief about the strength of the individual and his rights to make his case for Plessy. In his brief on the case he argued, “Probably most white persons if given a choice, would prefer death to life in the United

States as colored persons. Under these conditions, is it possible to conclude that the reputation of being white is not property? Indeed is it not the most valuable sort of property, being the master- key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity?”142 The basis of Tourgée’s argument for desegregation relied on the exception, on the success of the individual who could pass as white

141 Teichgraeber, Building Culture: Studies in the Intellectual History of Industrializing America, 1867-1910 (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2010), 141-42. 142 Tourgee’s brief, qtd. in Amy Robinson, “Forms of Appearance of Value: Homer Plessy and the Politics of Privacy,” Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1996), 247. 164 and could deconstruct the entire system—and on the inability for a reader (the train inspector) to properly recognize and read.

One person, one individual, can pass for white and legally be black; an entire group, however, may not, or would need different strategies. Stacey Margolis reads Charles Chesnutt’s

The House behind the Cedars and uses the Plessy case to understand Rena Walden’s decision to pass in the novel. Deciding to pass is the result of a fraught internal debate about her own sense of self and the self-deception required not by the act of passing but by the “social and political” norms that make her deny her own sense of identity not as racial biologism. “Simply put,” writes

Margolis, “The House behind the Cedars asks what it would mean if one could be what one appeared to be.”143 This language of “one” is telling—passing is based on individual choice against or toward self-deception. Rather than introducing Homer Plessy as a representative of a widespread truth, he is continually presented as an exception, and, yet, as an individual deserving his own sense of propertied self. Thus, the reply was on this level, and Louisiana was found to be still upholding the 14th Amendment, as detailed earlier by an earlier 1883 Civil Rights case where it was argued that “individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the

[14th] Amendment.”144 The social remained on the level of individual assessment and choice.

While this rhetoric and fiction was obviously important, it leaves open the question of whether or not a group of people could pass, and what this “fantasy of self-transformation” (Margolis’s language) would mean if understood not as self transformation but as a group or interactive transformation.145 One contradiction within ideas of uplifting the race was that it relied on a logic of individual achievement, progress, and accountability. With the rise of group identities of various kinds, goals and their invented performances in New Orleans—tales of voodooism,

143 Margolis, The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), 109. 144 Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 11 (1883). 145 Margolis, Public Life of Privacy, 113. 165

Mardi Gras, the White League, the Comité des Citoyens—more than personal choice and self-as- property mattered.

I return to George Washington Cable and his political contradictions in thinking about both social and cultural issues. Most famous for collecting and recording creole songs and dialects, he also wrote in support of black enfranchisement—and, of course, against “social equality.” This latter detail has proven a sticking point for Cable’s critics, and his dedication to

Home Culture Clubs in the northeast shows that he later became more interested in reformist strategies. In founding this “movement” in Northampton Massachusetts, Cable started to focus more on class difference than racial difference. The clubs were meant to simply be educational and pleasurable gatherings between people of “different walks of life.” “The spirit of the movement is very quiet and general,” writes Cable’s secretary and co-organizer, Adelaide

Moffatt, and compares that spirit to that of Cable himself.146 The clubs were successful; the only central organ was a letter that published some of the minutes and reading materials of individual clubs’ meetings. I want to understand Cable’s earlier local color writings as part of a continuum of his various ways of linking culture to social life.

Critics have long faulted Cable’s inability to challenge his own Christian and progressive views, and his disavowal of social equality. Disavowing and denying social equality could seem like an accommodation, a progressive upholding of the stable social order, as a way of thinking about inclusion, rather than reorganization. Many critics have assessed this limitation on his politics, arguing that his anti-social-equality stance similarly limited his fictional portrayals of

African-Americans as fully realized humans—despite his constant and tireless championing of their civil rights. Barbara Ladd argues that despite his reformist pushes, Cable wanted to

146 Moffatt, “Home-Culture Clubs,” in Christianity Practically Applied, vol. 2 (New York: The Baker & Tayor & Co., 1894), 287. 166 continue to support an “elitist” idea of class and manners.147 While I agree that Cable was often limited by his own commitment to progress, he also participates in a larger, many-voiced strategic negotiation around the bugbear, around the fallacious and absurd terms of “social equality.” “We have a country large enough for all the unsociability anybody may want,” he wrote in “The Silent South.”148 Ironically, it was accusations of supporting social equality that became a national scandal when Cable dined with a prosperous black family in Nashville to discuss the future of the club. He understood, as many did, that proximity itself was the true issue but thought beyond space through the invention of his short-lived Open Letter Club, a network of black and white intellectuals who would circulate essays amongst themselves before publication.

Like Douglass and others, he saw that the close contact of slavery was the cause of fears of social cohesion in space. In his essay “The Negro Question” he argues that too-close contact between the planters and the slaves led to “social confusion.” Here referencing sexual abuse he argues that if such contact happened before, it need not happen anymore. “Race fusion is not essential to National unity; such unity requires only civil and political, not private social, homogeneity.”149 Like many others drawing the social into the realm of private choice, Cable’s idea of the “private social” makes the social as a distinct category disappear.

Jonathan Daigle has recently explained Cable’s inability to usefully and ethically unite his devotion to preserving African-American and creole culture with his own extensive political calls for integration. As Daigle observes, these twin concerns do not seem to cross-pollinate in

Cable’s thought. Daigle reads Cable’s descriptions of Congo Square as denunciations of the very culture he (Cable) wants to preserve. “He [Cable] accordingly sacrifices ‘exhilarating novelty,’

147 Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996), 41. 148 Cable, The Silent South: Together with The Freedman’s Case in Equity and The Convict Lease System (New York: Scribner’s, 1885), 55. 149 Cable, The Negro Question (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 46. 167 endless invention’ and ‘wonderful lightness’ at the altar of civilization.”150 As Kenneth Warren has explained, Cable consistently used the genteel aesthetics of local color to guarantee that these notions of gentility, to “clothe the potential radicalism” of his cause, would not have to change with the granting of civil rights.151 Cable’s understanding of culture and his belief in “uneven racial progress as an objective reality” is an important caution in appreciating Cable’s championing of civil rights against the norms of his home state (and appreciation for his subsequent pillorying by white creoles).

Again, Cable’s New Orleans sketches and studies are without a doubt his most treasured by his contemporaries, as they are still the most studied today. George Washington Cable’s account of Congo Square is by far the most famous of any extant descriptions.152 In 1817 this square was ordained as the one space where slaves were allowed to congregate on Sundays, where they played music, danced, sold wares, and perhaps engaged in other forms of organization. Published in Century Magazine in 1886, Cable’s essay was accompanied by sketches drawn by E. W. Kemble, illustrator of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Joel

Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus. Cable, touring with Twain in the 1880s, even took his material on the road to packed houses, where he sang some of the creole songs he had collected and transcribed. Cable borrowed from sources as early as St. Mery’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1796)

150 Jonathan Daigle, “The Social Gospel in Evolutionary Time: George Washington Cable’s ‘Perhaps Unwise Love,’” ESQ 59:1 (2013), 36. 151 Warren, Black and White Strangers, 51. 152 In terms of eyewitness accounts, Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s is the most often cited by contemporary critics. His sensitive ear and his illustrations provide an important view of the way the music shocked sensibilities and standards for music and dance. See Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journals of Benjamin Latrobe, 1799-1820: From Philadelphia to New Orleans, ed. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Lee Formwalt (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980). For more on late nineteenth century sources and the misunderstanding of Cable’s own use of sources, see Ted Widmer, “The Invention of a Memory: Congo Square and African Music in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 98.2 (2003), 69-78; Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2009). 168 which was not an account of dancing at Congo Square, but of dances and voodoo practices in

Haiti. One sees almost exactly the same details of St. Mery’s account in an earlier work by

Helene d’Aquin Allian, Souvenirs d’Amerique et de France, par une creole (1882) when she describes her supposed eyewitness to voodoo ceremonies on her childhood plantation. Like

Cable, she never witnessed the dances at Congo Square either, and writes that she was never allowed to go see them, though she “used to hear the noise.”153

Of Congo Square and its dancing, Cable writes that “Only the music deserved to survive, and does survive—coin snatched out of the mire.” Such opinion is based on Cable’s association of savagery with “a frightful triumph of body over mind” (525). With this disapproval, the past was worth preserving as curiosity, but it took an artist and anthropologist to parse the inherent value of what was left behind. Of course, not being about to record or know anything about the dancing beyond some vague or invented descriptions, the songs themselves were the most likely to survive. Cable can record a verse of the Counjaille “from a manuscript copy of the words, probably a hundred years old, that fell into my hands through the courtesy of a Creole lady some two years ago.” The meanings of the dances, however, are communicated mostly through an over-the-top style, particularly striking as Cable switches to present tense to describe the movement: “Now for the frantic leaps! Now for frenzy!”154 What is left, beyond the “survival” of the music, at least somewhat intact, is the flattened sense of “entertaining variety,” the feeling of wonder that the dances took place with such “endless invention.”155 A bodily tradition would be

153 Helene d’Aquin Allain memoir, Louisiana Research Collection 781. Lisa Ze Winters argue that these late- nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts are largely rewritings of earlier accounts from Haiti. See Winters, The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2016), 74. Wagner argues that similar dances probably did occur given “the lively exchange” between these former colonies, but “we need to see that Cable was not representing but reenacting this vibrant syncretism as he reassembled the available archive.” (Disturbing the Peace 94). 154 Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo,” in The Century, vol. xxxi (New York: The Century Col, 1885-1886), 523. 155 Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo,” 522. “Language is, no doubt, only the tip of the intersubjective iceberg, the dead husk of the living celebratory fruit, but it remains the most efficient means of expressing and communicating 169 even harder to preserve. But William Wells Brown, in My Southern Home (1880), had a different opinion. Dance and mind, or body and memory, were one in the same, “These dances were kept up until within the memory of men still living, and many who believe in them, and who would gladly revive them, may be found in every State in the Union.”156

The gulf between an implicitly judgmental cultural account and Cable’s political program is strange, as Daigle points out. Cable was simply unable to reconcile the two, creating a kind of divided sphere where one should grant civil rights and appreciate culture but not accept that there was a politics in those songs and dances, or that one should reconsider the social order and definition of civilization to begin with, based on the messages and possibilities in such difficult art and interaction. A few scholars have traced an important history of dance as resistance and communication, but my main consideration here has been how the social group continued to emerge against the backdrop of social equality. Again, I mean to point to social equality’s strange effect of seeking to dictate and refuse any consideration or theorization of the social and all its unevenness and charm. Social groups, thus, continued to grow in rigidity, nostalgia, and performance, as was the case with Mardi Gras, representing a binaristic interpretation of the carnivalesque and increasingly binaristic thinking about how to witness race and culture.157

thoughts and feelings among members of a human community. Perhaps only celebration can adequately understand celebration, but language can give an approximate rendering of it and some semantic perspective on its products, the symbols it uses and leaves behind” (19). See Victor Turner, Introduction to Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, ed. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982). One might consider a similar idea in Peter Linebaugh’s reconsideration of the “safety valve” thesis around carnival and jubilee celebrations, “The bourgeoise, since jubilee could not be denied, developed a hermeneutics that disrobed jubilee of its liberating splendor turning it into ‘figurative language.’ The language of action becomes a language of adornment, a rhetoric, an allegory, or ‘just words’” (97). See Linebaugh, “Jubilating; or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee against Capitalism, with Some Success,” Midnight Notes 10 (1990), 84-98. I want to suggest that using the “language of adornment” (the detail, as Schor argues, always carries and references the sacred) and allegory, Dunbar-Nelson similarly wanted to rediscover the existence of social thinking and the power of charm. 156 Brown, My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People (Boston: A. G. Brown & Co., 1880), 124. 157 It wasn’t only the Civil War that changed these arrangements, but the lead-up to it. As Gotham explains, and as I discuss in the previous chapter, the ending of the three municipalities coincided with a slew of new regulations put on free people of color, including a prohibition on any new organizations composed of free people of color. See Gotham, Authentic New Orleans, 37. 170

Chapter Three: Charles Chesnutt and the Event

“Out of the blackest part of my soul, through the zone of hachures, surges up this desire to be suddenly white.” – Frantz Fanon1

The narrator of Charles Chesnutt’s 1921 Paul Marchand, F.M.C. refers to the title character’s

“radical” racial transformation, from free man of color living in 1820s New Orleans to a white

Creole: “No more radical change in one’s life would have been possible. In one moment, by the stroke of a decrepit old man’s pen, he was raised from a man of color to a white man. What that might mean in the South today is at least conceivable to any thoughtful, observant person who reads the newspapers.”2 Without clearly answering “what this might mean,” Chesnutt leaves readers wondering how exactly a specific present, a Jim Crow context, relates to Paul’s reveal as a white man. In this key sentence, one of only a few in which Chesnutt’s narrator explicitly refers to a present day, readers are asked to make numerous temporal leaps for their comprehension. The comparison of Paul Marchand’s 1821 and Chesnutt’s 1921 aren’t exact analogues in this sentence, though. The “one stroke” only has meaning if one is “thoughtful” and reads the newspapers. But there is stil gap in assessing what the transformation, or reveal, or ascension means for Paul in his fictional world. In this moment and throughout the novella, the very suddenness of Paul’s purported ascension causes an epistemological rupture that the novel uses to challenge narrative history and the purposes of historical romance. His “reveal” as a white man even challenges my own vocabulary, for throughout the novel and within its various textual objects, it’s difficult to tell whether or not there’s been a change or if there’s merely been a discovery. It is difficult to name what happens to Paul or what happens to those around him.

1 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 45. 2 Charles Chesnutt, Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1998), 126-27. Subsequent citations of this text will be in-text. 171

The event of Paul’s race challenges both concepts of ontology and epistemology by bringing them together.

Events in general, as heuristic and methodology for studying history, have been seen as inherently conservative, in the sense that they emphasize decisiveness or consensus over process; or, a chronology of events tends to tell the same stories of causation and progress.3 However, in

Paul Marchand the emergence of unthinkable events and the shape those events take offer

Chesnutt a way to think beyond linearity. Thus, I follow Alain Badiou’s concept of “event” to mean not just any historical occurrence, but something that breaks with chronology and rhythm.

Despite having its multiple causes, no antecedent can fully explain the force of the event’s newness.

Paul Marchand is a free man of color “with a proud expression, tinged with a melancholy discontent” who likes to imagine that “if all the white people of New Orleans had but one neck, and he could hold it in his hands, he would strike it through at a single blow” (9, 90). About halfway through the novel, Paul Marchand, to his complete surprise, becomes Paul Beaurepas when a prosperous white Creole man dies and leaves his estate not to one of his many eager nephews but to Paul, his secret son. After learning his true identity, Paul cannot provide a reasonable temporal logic to make his new life acceptable to the city of New Orleans, to his new cousins, or to himself. In a speech to these new family members, all but one of whom had abused him when he was previously a quadroon, Paul remarks, “I find myself in a unique and difficult position—one absolutely novel, so far as I can learn, in the history of Louisiana” (137). It is the force of the “one moment” and the “absolutely novel” that informs Chesnutt’s posthumously

3 Jordan Alexander Stein distinguishes between chronology and events, arguing that the way we bundle them together in narrative history is “simply not inevitable, nor neutral, nor necessarily most apt as a narrative device in all cases—or put into positive terms . . . in the writing of literary history, a chronological presentation of events is a choice” (861). See Stein, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History 25.4 (2013), 855-869. 172 published New Orleans story about race and propriety, narrative and event. Ultimately, because

Chesnutt’s novel is historical fiction of the most over-the-top Southern kind, complete with duels and dukes, readers actually witness how narrative makes Paul’s race into a nonevent, a rupture that is eventually disavowed by all, when Paul finally takes his family away from Louisiana and to France.

In this chapter, I examine traditional timelines of imperialism and racialization to reveal the linear teleology at their core. My intervention continues by suggesting that we consider events as formal and temporal controversies. In this chapter I first examine the temporalities of

Chesnutt’s essays on “The Future American” and propose that what seems like a troublesome theory of “absorption” by the white race actually marks the emergence of his thinking about the event as a concept. Evental thinking challenges all “amalgamation schemes,” to borrow Jared

Sexton’s phrase.4 At the fringes of these essays Chesnutt points to the effects of U.S. imperialism, and, thus, when considering this aspect of his rhetoric alongside Paul Marchand, we can clearly see the importance of hemispheric history in his portrait of New Orleans and the novel’s hidden secret about Haiti. Then, turning to the plot of Paul Marchand, I argue that the crisis of Paul’s true identity is not just a “passing’” trope aimed at exposing the arbitrary or binaristic nature of the color line, but is importantly set in a narrative confusion of prolepsis and analepsis. The trap of these linear temporal structures and movements show Chesnutt’s anxiety about change only being possible through progressive or imperial whiteness.5 In Paul Marchand

Chesnutt juxtaposes the sudden event of the racial reveal with the impossibility of organizing a coherent temporal narrative around racial identity. In the last section of this chapter, I link

Chesnutt’s critique of interracialist pasts, seen especially in Paul Marchand’s quadroon ball

4 Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2008).

173 scene, with antebellum poems by New Orleans’s free men of color. The anthology Les Cenelles, published in 1845 and containing the French-language romantic poetry of a salon-like group of free men of color, will illuminate and extend the ways that thinking through the event challenges the linear shape of race created by imperialism and interracial contact.

For such a short novel, a lot happens in Paul Marchand, F.M.C. The melodrama of its heightened events and disconnected set-pieces, expresses Chesnutt’s cynicism with the historical romance’s ability to distract from the event of race itself. The first few chapters introduce Paul’s plight as quadroon and merchant (the translation of marchand). Educated as an adolescent in

France where he experienced less prejudice, he lives in New Orleans with his wife and children, where he receives so much personal abuse that he methodically keeps a tally of the offenses in a pocketbook. The novel’s first major set piece has Paul bursting into a quadroon ball to save his beautiful niece from “the brutality inseparable from slavery and all its incidents” (50). Despite his mask, he is discovered and is knocked senseless for breaking caste. Paul then awakes in jail where he hears the conspiring of two (assumed) runaway slaves, but he decides not to report the potential revolt because of his newly appreciated sympathy with “the blacks” (63). Paul’s release is effected by his lawyer’s saying something to the magistrate, “not of record, though the tenor of it may be inferred from subsequent events” (68). Soon after, the story’s Creole patriarch Pierre

Beaurepas dies and his will establishes Paul, his abandoned son, as heir to the family fortune— and, in that stroke of the pen, reveals that Paul is actually “white of the pure blood.” With this new knowledge brewing as part of his previously sworn plan for revenge, Paul calls his new cousins to dinner and proposes a duel to settle the score with them—something essential, he argues, to assert his honor as a white man and a proud Beaurepas. Then, a whispered-about slave rebellion erupts on the Spanish plantation where a young girl, supposed to be betrothed to the 174

Beaurepas heir, is nearly murdered. Finally, after two weeks of ruminating on the “dilemma” of his new race, Paul moves to France with his family because, in New Orleans, he would not legally be allowed to remain in what had become an interracial marriage.

As for the fortune, Paul gives it to the only cousin who had not abused him when he lived as a free man of color. This Philippe Beaurepas, as Paul learns, is actually the one “of quadroon birth” (142). He is the grandson of Zabet Philosophe, a recurring character from New Orleans fiction that Chesnutt incorporates as the historian and philosopher figure she is in Grace King’s work.6 When Paul asks the cousins if they’d like to know the so-called “baseborn interloper” among them, they shout, “No!” and the secret remains with Paul. In refusing to know the secret, the cousins continue to live with the lie of “racial purity” that had always sustained their family, a lie that is and will always be dependent on suspicion, as they all then “[look] at each furtively” to determine any telling facial characteristics (143). Unable to assess and recognize the radically new world that Paul’s racial event should have revealed, history continues without rupture, and they refuse to acknowledge the “single thunderbolt” (73) that structures new knowledge. Thus, in a post-script paragraph ending the novel, the narrator tells us that the Beaurepas grandsons become leaders in the Ku-Klux-Klan and are responsible for passing a postbellum Louisiana law against intermarriage.

While the reverse passing narrative is a conceit novel enough to make Paul Marchand significant, it is not the reversal alone that drives the meaning of such a literary experiment but its suddenness. Conceiving of Paul’s drama as centered on a concept of the event highlights what

6 Alice Dunbar-Nelson also wrote about Zabet, the “Praline Woman,” which Judith Fetterly and Marjorie Pryse discuss in terms of the sketch’s important conclusion. “The ‘big crivasse’ at the end of the ‘Praline Woman’ serves as Dunbar-Nelson’s reminder to the reader that although her street vendor . . . may not in and of herself signify revolution, and while the end of Tante Marie’s economic world is always just a flood away, resistances do accumulate and there are occasionally [pace Michel Foucault] ‘great radical ruptures’” (130). See Fetterly and Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003). 175 is unique in the novel’s twist: it is about a mixed-race man who suddenly becomes white, despite having been white all along.7 Emphasizing the sudden in the “sudden squall” of the Beaurepas’

“placid stream,” Paul’s racial identity is not fully explicable through any historical, legal, or personal understanding of race. The shock remains supplementary to any aspect of the family’s or the city’s background that could explain how such a thing happened. There is, of course, a convoluted story about his mother’s need to conceal Paul’s birth, but what the moment of reversal “might mean” can be understood only through acknowledging and understanding the event’s ability to change the historical ground from which it arises. Elizabeth Grosz summarizes the effect such events have on their context, “Events erupt onto the systems which aim to contain them, inciting change, upheaval, and asystematicity into their order.”8 Chesnutt begins to explore the theoretical implications of the event as a way to complement or replace discourses on past, present, and future amalgamation prognostications, all of which he continually found to rely on forms of hegemonic temporalities.

By the early twentieth century, the previous century’s discourses of amalgamation and miscegenation turned into debates about the “Negro Problem.” Following disagreements about leadership and uplift between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, Chesnutt joined in this conversation about the likelihood of African-American prosperity and posterity. After Plessy v.

Ferguson in 1896 this future was often discussed in terms of race relations or absence thereof, through issues of segregation. Of course, W.E.B. DuBois puts it best, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races

7 One might compare this twist to the fate of the twins in Pudd’nhead Wilson, but that plot crucially depends on the mirror image of race, as the white twin becomes black, and vice-versa; in Paul Marchand, Philippe’s purported mixed-race ancestry is never revealed to him or to anyone but Paul. A similar twist happens at the end of the anonymous Sisters of Orleans. As noted later in the chapter, most stories of unconscious passing and “race melodrama,” including William Faulkner, reveal a secret mixed-race ancestry. George Washington Cable’s “Tite Poulette” and “Salome Müller,” like Paul Marchand, are about presumed-black characters that are actually white. 8 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004), 8. 176 in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”9 Uplift of the race alone, attempted during Reconstruction by white and African-American actors, started to include ideas of

“relation,” or “social equality,” as discussed in the previous chapter.10 Thus, emerged a renewed and widespread discourse about “amalgamation” taken up by some African-Americans, who for the most part had refrained from championing this very thing that caused such white anxiety.

Amalgamation was a fear-mongering tactic that became a real possibility for those interested in thinking about the future of racial equality. One of the most popular of the former was 1864’s pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of Races, Applied to the American White

Man and Negro, a satire on the “superiority of mixed races.”11

Many early-twentieth-century essays and speeches attempted to settle a confused dichotomy of heterogeneity and homogeneity in these interracial formulas, especially in response to the “impending disappearance of the American Negro.”12 For example, Israel Zangwill, the writer who popularized the metaphor “melting pot” in his 1908 play, argued that “it is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-around give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.”13 Chesnutt and his own

9 W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1904), 13. 10 Kenneth Warren argues that, in the post-bellum era of literary realism, “advocates for black political equality,” such as George Washington Cable, “found themselves again and again having to deny the charge that they were promoting social equality” (23). Warren maintains that writers like Henry James crafted an aesthetic that essentially invented a domain of the social as distinct from the civil in order to support Jim Crow laws. See Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993). 11 It is telling that, as Tavia Nyong’o discusses, this pamphlet, coining and popularizing the word “miscegenation,” was often and easily regarded by readers as a hoax, especially because of its chapters on Egypt, and its detailed examinations of history and pseudo-biology. The pamphlet is a popular example of the “quasi-scientific discourses” that characterize the difference between miscegenation and the earlier term, amalgamation (27). See Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2009). 12 George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971), 246. This fear was, in part, inspired by acceptance of Social Darwinism and the 1890s Census. 13 Zangwill, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays, ed. Edna Nahshon (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006), 379. 177 plan for amalgamation, which he defined as “the fusion of all the various races now peopling this continent,” seem largely to agree with Zangwill’s hopeful plan.14

However, closer examination of Chesnutt’s three essays on “The Future American,” shows he is more realistic (or pessimistic) about the dominant type’s likely remaining dominant.

Many have argued that Chesnutt’s “Future American” represents his turn away from championing full civil rights for African-Americans to his participation in what critics see as unfortunate biopolitical racialist thinking.15 By contrast, some suggest that we read the entire essay as a performance; in the grand tradition of racial prognostications, it could be interpreted as a hoax. It seems impossible to settle whether or not one should take the essay completely seriously or where, if anywhere, to find the key to its ironic position.

It is my contention that this either/or logic is the basic problem of all such future race plans. Such arguments about the future American type conflate plan and prediction, hope and logical likelihood, and, thus, only celebrate, in the present, an uncritical and messy idea of the future. Thus, we can read the problem of the hybrid versus homogeneous theories of harmonious racial futures as a problem of time. As Tavia Nyong’o prompts, “How is it that hybridity evokes the simultaneous suspicion that it is entirely new and just more of the same?”16 Today, still, this dream of a multiracial ideal is always imagined in some ill-defined and endlessly deferred future.

14 Chesnutt, Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 131. Subsequent citations provided in-text. 15 Ryan Jay Friedman says that the essay’s “distant frame of time” for full absorption is at least three generations, but this prediction actually comes in the first discussion of racial mixture that Chesnutt proposes, one that is framed explicitly as an impossible experiment. Friedman also argues that this discourse’s concern with the future is one that sacrifices the present and ignores the past: “‘The Future American’ writes the history of blackness out of the consideration of its future” (53). However, if we attend to Chesnutt’s critical remarks on imperialism, and consider Paul Marchand and The Quarry, his last two novels, as intervening in these discussions, the aims of Chesnutt’s “Future” essays can be read quite differently. See Friedman, “‘Between Absorption and Extinction’: Charles Chesnutt and Biopolitical Racism,” Arizona Quarterly 63.4 (2007): 39-59. 16 Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: Univ. Of Minnesota Press, 2009), 15. 178

Representing the distant past and the frantic present, Chesnutt’s last two novels are representative of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ obsession with “racial origins and destinies.”17 Paul Marchand is Chesnutt’s only work of fiction set before the Civil War. His next and final novel, The Quarry, was his only novel set in his contemporary moment—in 1929, during the Harlem Renaissance. Most importantly, though, both novels share the same plot twist:

The Quarry’s Donald Glover is a successful light-skinned college student when he learns that he is not African-American but white, but in the end chooses to live as he always had. Both novels were refused publication multiple times and published posthumously. Paul Marchand is significant in Chesnutt’s career timeline for a number of reasons. Marking Chesnutt’s return to fiction after years of publishing essays and speaking on the future of African-American life and art, Paul Marchand emerges as an already-failed attempt at accessing the past for the sake of the future. In 1904, just before The Colonel’s Dream was published (his last published novel),

Chesnutt wrote to Walter Hines Page, “I have almost decided to foreswear the race problem stories, but I should like to write a good one which would be widely read, before I quit.”18 Not surprisingly, many critics have blamed the book’s failure on its portrait of a local-color New

Orleans, the perfect setting for what Susan Gilman calls the “race melodrama,” which, by 1921, had fallen out of style. Small details support this explanation for the book’s failure to find an audience, such as Chesnutt’s explanation to Knopf, “I am quite aware that it deals with a somewhat remote epoch in our national life and with conditions which have in large part disappeared, but it was a very interesting period, and enough of the old conditions still prevail to

17 Susan Gillman writes, “Racial origins and destines: intertwining past and future, racial thinking at the turn of the century provided specific conceptions of time and time consciousness” (201). See Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003). 18 Charles W. Chesnutt to Walter Hines Pages, June 29, 1904. Qtd. in William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980), 222. 179 make it of interest to thoughtful readers.”19 The city in these first decades of the twentieth century saw jazz musicians leaving the city for Chicago, especially symbolically important travelers of The Great Migration. New Orleans, long a center of inspiration for African-

American art, was overshadowed by the iconoclasm of Harlem. Similarly, so was Chesnutt, as he called his own out-of-time position between epochs, “Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem.”

New Orleans is not just significant to Chesnutt’s story because of its anachronism, which would align him with the nostalgia of the local-color version of the city. I argue for a more complex engagement with the timelines of imperialism in New Orleans whereby the increasing influx of Americans created a more hybrid population but not a more heterogeneous one, as they challenge and complicate the amalgamation discourses discussed above. Against Chesnutt’s description of a homogenous multiracial future in his essays, New Orleans’s history of squashing the distinction of the free people of color “caste” offers a case of tending toward homogenous blackness. Chesnutt writes in the novel’s foreword that after the Civil War the quadroon class,

Paul’s class, disappeared and “social decree has made them all Negroes.” The novel also discusses an earlier historical shift in racial categorization in New Orleans, with characters and the narrator often noting the influence of the new American population, those incoming classes discussed in chapter one. When the elder Pierre Beaurepas finds out that one of his racist nephews has struck Paul in the street, he laments, “I suspect he associates too freely with the sacres Americains who infest our city. No Creole of the older generation would have done such a thing” (33).

The “sudden stroke of the pen” is supposed to change everything for Paul and for New

Orleans, but, in the end, the suddenness, against the honor-bound past, is not “capable of

19 Chesnutt to Alfred Knopf, December 20, 1921. See Chesnutt, An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1900-1932, ed. Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III, Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 157. 180 forestalling the recuperation of the unknown to the known.”20 Turning toward New Orleans, a place so overwritten with fictions of miscegenation, Chesnutt exposes how difficult it is to name the moment that defines one’s race against a history of obfuscating and racist timelines. One can read this absence and suspension of time in the striking statement Paul makes, at the end, to his cousins: “A man cannot, at my age, change easily his whole outlook upon life, nor can one trained as a quadroon become over night a—Beaurepas” (138). The dash in the typography is not just a pause but a literal blank, an absent center in the narrative of his history as a Beaurepas. The dash leaves us with the possibility that maybe he could have become something else, but not a

Beaurepas, not a member of the old Creole regime.

“Change the world over night”: Chesnutt and his Amalgamation Schemes Much criticism has wrestled with the fact that Chesnutt’s politics often seem to align with the assimilationist strategies, or concessions, of Booker T. Washington. The ironies and subtleties of his fiction, including his acknowledgement of black folklore traditions, seem to clash with his desire to appeal to white readers. Du Bois criticized Chesnutt for being too much of a businessman, mired in the ideologies of respectability and opportunity that contributed to the

Great Migration. While Chesnutt was far more conservative in his speeches and essays, even explicitly denouncing some of the material of newer African-American writers as morally unpalatable, his earlier novels and stories are complexly ironic passing stories about social

20 Lloyd Pratt, “New Orleans and Its Storm: Exception, Example, or Event?” American Literary History 19:1 (2007), 254. Lloyd Pratt points out that recent books on New Orleans literature continue to wrestle with the idea of singularity in New Orleans; caught in this trap, all also describe the tension between the “exception” and the “example” made of Hurricane Katrina. Pratt suggests that we consider, and face bravely, the newness of the storm outside of the exception/example binary by considering the Badiouian Event instead. Throughout this dissertation I expand on Pratt’s sense of Katrina as “event” by considering, especially in this chapter, how many forms of event logic can help us understand New Orleans literature. 181 aspirations (in, for example, “The Wife of His Youth”), and, certainly, quite grim about the future of race relations (in the violence of The Marrow of Tradition).

Critics and historians have recently been interested in rediscovering the radical potential and emerging art forms in the messy and violent period post-Bellum and pre-Harlem.

Additionally, reassessments of respectability politics have shown the ways that people of color adopted this rhetoric to form and strengthen communities, not just to appeal to or accommodate white cultural norms. What has been particularly vexing, and critically rewarding, about studying

Chesnutt, however, is that he is often between political poles, a position that often means his views seem irreconcilable. As William L. Andrews asks with some frustration, “Did his resentment of southern symbols of respectability based on ‘wealth or blood or birth’ blind him to his own preoccupation with northern class-oriented success symbols, the pursuit of which left him ‘little time’ for his artistic development?”21 This question is the jumping-off point for most criticism about Paul Marchand, F.M.C., as the novel both critiques the absurdities of Southern honor but seems to maintain a similar ideology that praises Paul’s own sense of indignity and individualism. Susan M. Marren deconstructs the genre of historical romance and argues that doing so prevents us from becoming like Paul himself, “who ultimately fails to acknowledge the conflicts and tensions in his own identity.”22 Marren effectively rescues the novel Paul

Marchand from any moral equivalence with Paul, the novel’s narrator, or Chesnutt himself.

Marren’s discussion of Paul Marchand at least begins to illuminate the frustration in reading the extent or limits of Chesnutt’s irony.

Critics similarly attempt to rescue Chesnutt from his rhetoric in “The Future American” when they consider its performative scene. Published in 1900 in three installments in the Boston

21 Andrews, 264. 22 Susan M. Marren, “Ancestral Possibilities in Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.,” African-American Review 46.2-3 (2013), 397. 182

Transcript, and then in The Crisis, Chesnutt argues that the future American will be a “mulatto.”

Critics continue to be divided over whether or not Chesnutt’s essay is a proposal, a prediction, or, rather, a description of a current state. While Chesnutt does delve into some biological language, he does so mostly to evoke the easy slippage of such discourse into racism. Thus, some critics argue that the article’s subject is not to be taken seriously as a “scheme” or panacea.

Keith Byerman argues that “the article can be best understood, then, not as an actual proposal for social change that would occur by choice within a relatively short period of time”—see the absurdity of the first part of Chesnutt’s argument, in which a government with full sway forces amalgamation on every citizen. Rather, Byerman argues, Chesnutt is simply describing the past and the present, especially as he cites a good number of instances of successfully navigating the color line, and in calling the present reality “the future,” is one of many “calculated acts of provocation designed to discomfort the audience rather than persuade it.”23 Andrews also argues that the essays are very much in line with Chesnutt’s fiction, and, despite Chesnutt’s language of population management, his main goal is to deconstruct anti-miscegenation and segregation laws by showing that they might actually encourage transgression. “If,” Chesnutt writes, “it is only by becoming white that colored people and their children are to enjoy the rights and dignities of citizenship, they will have every incentive to ‘lighten the breed’” (Essays and Speeches 134).

The secret to this drive, an aspect of uplift that Du Bois chided Chesnutt for championing, was the “steady progress of the colored race in wealth and culture and social efficiency” (Essays and

Speeches 133).24

23 Byerman, “Performance Race: Mixed-Race Characters in the Novels of Charles Chesnutt,” in Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Susan Prothro Wright and Ernestine Pickens Glass (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2010), 86, 85. 24 Du Bois writes that, unlike Paul Laurence Dunbar’s temptation to return to a kind of depravity in his slave upbringing, Chesnutt’s temptation, as the son of free people, is that of “money making—why leave some thousands of dollars a year for scribbling about black folk?” See “Possibilities of the Negro,” Booklovers Magazine 2 (1903), 2-15. 183

Like so many conversations about amalgamation, the problem of progress is about deferral and about uncertain conflations of past, present, and future. Chesnutt’s program for assimilation will have to be slowly adopted because when he looks to the long history of racial mixture, he has to logically assume that there are many more years of it to come: “The formation of the new American race type will take place slowly and obscurely for some time to come, after the manner of all healthy changes in nature.” This image of the future is sanitized by referring to

“healthy nature” and projecting a happiness and healthiness that one assumes about progress.

But, as Dean McWilliams points out in his own reading of this passage, Chesnutt soon adopts an ironic stance to the idea of “slowly.”25 Still using the rhetoric of “nature,” Chesnutt writes in the same paragraph, “Slavery was a rich soil for the production of the mixed race, and one only need read the literature and laws of the past two generations to see how steadily, albeit slowly and insidiously, the stream of dark blood has insinuated itself into the veins of the dominant, or, as a

Southern critic recently described it in a paragraph that came under my eye, the ‘domineering’ race” (Essays and Speeches 126). These two conflicting views of “slowly,” one predicting the hopeful future and one adopting the language of contamination that white Southern writers fixated on (like the 1887 Towards the Gulf, in which the tragic child of miscegenation accidently dies in a cotton gin), make us focus on the double-voicedness of the speaker. Chesnutt’s plan for slow assimilation is not the only solution to the Negro Question, that question being the

“question of his own future” (Essays and Speeches 58). Thus, we can perhaps conclude that

Chesnutt does not solely make an argument about the slow pace toward homogeneity in order to allay the fears of white, or black, people, but to show how “slowly” is often a synonym for

“insidiously” in any racial prognostication.

25 Dean McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002), 50. 184

The fantasy of a homogenous America without racial strife is initially put forth as a thought experiment of radical and immediate transformation. Chesnutt asks his readers to consider an unlikely law that would permit only interracial marriages. He calculates, according to current populations and likely blood mixtures of white and black people, that “in three generations the pure whites would be entirely eliminated, and there would be no perceptible trace of the blacks left” (Essays and Speeches 124). He admits that this will never happen without a government “autocratic enough” to enforce such a strict law, so he proceeds to the argument that

“the formation of the new American race type will take place slowly and obscurely for some time to come” (Essays and Speeches 126).

Echoing “The Future American,” two paternal characters in Chesnutt’s The Quarry debate whether or not protagonist Donald Glover should be told about his newly discovered white identity. Mr. Seaton is the white man who first adopted Donald only to give him up when he (Mr. Seaton) was led to believe Donald was black. Mr. Seaton argues that Donald should be told his true race so that he can experience all the material and emotional gains of being a white man. The African-American lawyer, Mr. Brown, argues the opposite, claiming that “things are looking up” for the black race. He posits, “Why spoil a good Negro?” However, despite this emphasis on Donald’s success and goodness, Mr. Brown maintains a pessimistic view of biology. Despite wanting Donald to remain black for the rest of his life, Mr. Brown argues that the future is still one of white dominance: “I see no ultimate future for the Negro in the Western world except in his gradual absorption by the white race. . . . We’ll not live to see the day, but as sure as the sun rises and sets the time will come when the American people will be a homogenous race.”26 Mr. Brown sees absorption as the necessary solution to push off “the iron heel” of domineering whiteness. While this process of amalgamation might eliminate the “dream

26 Chesnutt, The Quarry, ed. Dean McWilliams (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 266. 185 of a pure white race,” Mr. Brown’s model still relies on a form of purity, and in eventual homogeneity. Thus, Mr. Brown has created a strange ideal for someone like Donald Glover: he should remain black and successful individual but for the sake of the homogeneous future. Mr.

Brown’s belief that race is a social category “unsuspectingly, reassert[s] the myth of race as biology,” or a problem to be solved permanently only by biological fixity.27

Again, Mr. Brown’s view aligns with much of what Chesnutt writes in “The Future

American”: “That such a future will be predominantly white may well be granted—unless climate in the course of time should modify existing types; that it will call itself white is reasonably sure; that it will conform closely to the white type is likely” (Essays and Speeches

123). Supposedly, the “absorption” of the black race would yield desirable results: “There would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals” (Essays and Speeches 124).28 At risk in such a hope of

“no inferior race” is the silencing of exactly those voices and histories of blackness that refuse to be to be assimilated; or, to sacrifice those generations that will have to, in the present, choose to be respectable people of color for the sake of later harmony.

Usually absent from discussion is the means by which the races have already been mixed by nonconsensual contact in slavery or the idea that to “lighten the race” light-skinned African-

Americans might marry exclusively, as they do in Mr. Ryder’s Blue Veins Society in “The Wife of His Youth.” Further, to address this subject would be to cross into the realm of the titillating, evoking the early-nineteenth abolitionists’ description of the “licentiousness of slavery,” or anti-

27 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 194. 28 The term “absorption” revises the original definition of “miscegenation,” a term coined in 1863 that described interracial “mixture” as “the dark races . . . . absorb[ing] the white.” See David Goodman Croly, George Wakenman, and E. C. Howell, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York, 1863), ii, 25. 186 abolitionist claims that all anti-slavery activists were “amalgamationists.”29 Chesnutt, too, carefully avoids any such conversation about consent, except when he refers to United States imperialism. These references and context for interracial contact were, at the turn into the twentieth century, replacing the dominant emphasis on the “scenes of subjection” in domestic, plantation-based slavery.30

Flaws in optimistic multiracialist thinking are many and critics of these discourses illuminate how such discourses marshal, and then scramble, timelines, chronologies, and ideas of progress. They take the liberal acknowledgement of difference and seek to homogenize it along terms of whiteness. Jared Sexton argues that most monoracial fantasies are built on a foundation of anti-blackness and only desire racial purity. Sexton further identifies a faulty causal reasoning behind multiracial predictions and argues, “First, there is miscegenation and then, in a moment of retroactivity—positing its presupposition—there is racialized difference.”31 Similarly focused on temporal ordering, Stefanie Dunning argues that “miscegenation is always an allusion to the idea of racial purity,” assuming that there are stable categories that can then “blur.”32

With these contradictions between his fiction and his essays, Chesnutt is one of those figures of the period that “do not fit neat categories of ‘accommodation’ and ‘protest.’”33 Thus, these years after Reconstruction, what Chesnutt himself called “Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem,” are precisely defined by the difference between the two time periods and their characterizations.

These years have been deemed the “nadir” of African-American life and art since historian

29 “There term was most widely used in the North in the 1830s where the concept became a great concern for those opposed to the immediate abolitionists or, as they were so often called, the ‘amalgamationists’” (4). See Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 30 Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). 31 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 218. 32 Dunning, Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2009), 12. 33 Blair Murphy Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2010), 8. 187

Rayford W. Logan’s 1954 book, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-

1901. It’s important to temper such characterization by acknowledging the successes of champions of civil rights, those achievements that sparked the extreme violence. For example,

Louisiana’s Constitution of 1868 offered suffrage to black men, only to have it taken away when the Radical Republican government was terrorized and defeated ten years later. These starts-and- stops are summed up by Du Bois by his statement in Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”34

Literature from this “nadir,” mostly written in a realist mode (which past critics have seen as a largely accommodationist mode itself), has been seen as far too accommodating when compared to the iconoclasts of the Harlem Renaissance.35 For example, as Henry Louis Gates has argued, Chesnutt consciously divorced himself from what he saw as the “mere compilations” of William Wells Brown to gain a white audience for himself, as George Washington Cable had urged.36 William Dean Howells, in his review of Chesnutt’s Northern stories, praises his realism and focus on character: “He belongs, in other words, to the good school, the only school, all aberrations from nature being so much truancy and anarchy.”37 Later, Chesnutt would break with

Howells and the demands of a particular realism, or, rather, the kind of “minstrel realism” that

34 W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (30). See Justin A. Nystrom explains the importance of New Orleans in this regard, “Americans correctly identified New Orleans and, by extension, Louisiana, as a bellwether for both the Republican Party’s aspirations in the postbellum South and the ultimate success or failure of its Reconstruction policies . . . .Yet while New Orleans might have seemed like potentially fertile ground for the growth of Southern Republicanism, the city’s unique wartime experience had also left it an incredibly volatile place” (55). Nystrom, New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010). 35 Andreá N. Williams argues against this assumption about realism: “Noting that black authors during the period were less engaged with ‘mainstream’ realism or, better yet, that they crafted their own forms of realism invites us to rethink both African American literary history and the category of realism itself.” See Williams, “African American Literary Realism, 1865-1914” in A Companion to African American Literature, ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Google Books Search. 36 See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), 127. 37 Howells, “Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 85 (1900), 700. 188

Gene Jarrett argues is completely at odds with the real experience of African-American life.38

Yet, Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard argue that those later writers set the terms of teleological progress toward breaking with such artistic demands. “To let the creators of the

‘New Negro’ movement in Harlem set the terms for retelling the history of African American cultural production, especially of the period immediately preceding it, is to fail to do justice to the work of a previous generation, and to overlook the long ‘foreground’ that made a Harlem

Renaissance thinkable at all.”39

Just as his Paul Marchand seemed outdated for 1921, so did Chesnutt’s views of the new crop of writers in Harlem that celebrated radical uproariousness and black identity. Chesnutt criticized the literary settings and styles of Harlem Renaissance novels in his retrospective essay

“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem” and explicitly called for new writers to create more “decent” and

“chaste” characters. Chesnutt’s ideas about proper literary subjects betray a consistently conservative idea of decency, often disguised as a plea for character complexity. Again, this privileging of character was something of utmost importance to Howellsian realism. One could easily argue that Chesnutt often sounded like the reactionary older generation worried over the morals of the new. In “The Negro in Present Day Fiction,” he took umbrage against the “social sub-sewers” and “hectic night-life” depicted in fiction (Essays and Speeches 547). These essays on literature do have an important relationship to Chesnutt’s essays on aspects of “the Negro

Problem,” and reveal the extent to which his interest in the complexity of his realism contrasted with what he considered a lack of multifaceted natures in Harlem Renaissance characters. Of

Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) he laments that so many “male characters are steeped

38 See Gene Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 34. 39 Introduction to Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919, ed. McCaskill and Gebhard (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2006), 4. 189 in baseness, some of which is so vile as to be merely hinted at” (Essays and Speeches 524). A stubborn racial prejudice emerges when Chesnutt maintains this idea of goodness and what he thinks is admirably “complex and difficult of treatment” in mixed-race characters (as opposed to fully black characters). Writing mixed-race characters is linked to the very goals of fiction in

“Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem”: “all of my writings, with the exception of The Conjure Woman, have dealt with the problems of people of mixed blood, which, while in the main the same as those of the true Negro, are in some instances and in some respects much more complex and difficult of treatment, in fiction as in life” (Essays and Speeches 547). Creating this distinct category of racial identity, as many critics claim was a primary goal in his fiction, meant that

Chesnutt held to the reality of being “neither black nor white” as intractable, not fluid or mobile, like the verb “to pass.” It seems logical, then, that his views on the distinctness of mixed-race people led him to conjoin biological and social understandings of race.

Chesnutt’s didacticism was undoubtedly at its height in The Quarry, perhaps a response to modernism’s distrust of realism and rejection of Enlightenment-rational thinking and individual agency. This is why, in the novel, it’s important that, in excess of Mr. Brown’s logical reasoning about racial futures, Donald Glover chooses to be black. The choice is the flipside of

Chesnutt’s earlier critiques of racial passing and characters that longed for those versions of whiteness. William Andrews, however, is quite damning of The Quarry’s protagonist and

Chesnutt’s mission in elevating him “to a race ideal,” “a paragon of propriety.” “In Donald

Glover,” Andrews laments, ‘Chesnutt uncritically reaffirmed those values which, thirty years earlier, he could view with a much richer mix of amusement and pathos, irony and understanding.”40

40 Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt, 270. 190

The Quarry’s structure is that of repeated temptation to pass. After many times refusing to pass as white, or take some other option that would allow himself a slightly different relationship to his race (moving to England and marrying an aristocrat), Glover’s final decision to remain black when he’s finally told he’s “actually” white shouldn’t be all that surprising.

However, this choice shows Chesnutt’s interest not just in choosing to be black when one believes one is black—Glover had some reason to doubt his race before but does not at all—but encourages people to access race beyond essentialism or biopolitics. In other words, for the bulk of the novel Glover believes he is black yet, over and over again, has to choose that blackness; after discovering his purely white genealogy, he still has to choose his race and continue to perform his blackness in a way that doubly makes him consider the relationship of racial ontology to appearances.

Undoubtedly, the New Negro movement made Chesnutt react to its self-professed notions of newness, but The Quarry’s assertive racial pride certainly shows Chesnutt as sympathetic to the main causes of the movement. Again, Chesnutt became increasingly desirous of stories that portrayed positive black characters and was interested in asserting pride but not necessarily redefining pride’s alignment with “outstanding noble male character[s]” (Essays and Speeches

523). As he writes in “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed” (1926), “If there are no super-Negroes, make some, as Mr. Cable did in his Bras Coupe” (Essays and Speeches 492).

Even though his race “problem stories” are often didactic, Chesnutt does not make this request about “super-Negroes” to simplify fiction or make it artistically straightforward. If Chesnutt was interested in representing strong and “decent” characters, Ryan Simmons is right to suggest that

“the remaining question [for Chesnutt] has to do with how to represent such characters.”41 I suggest that the how of representing these questions of exceptional mixed-race characters has

41 Simmons, Chesnutt and Realism: A Study of the Novels (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2006), 133. 191 much to do with being at the crossroads of different concepts of time, both the organizing of the past and the possibilities of the future. In contrast to being held fast to the multiple discourses about time moving backward and forward, Chesnutt was interested in the possibility of events and how to best recognize them.

We can see this in a particularly striking, lovely, but strange passage from “The Negro in

Art” where Chesnutt offers some diverse suggestions for those writers interested in creating

(often for the sake of newness) new stories and new plotlines,

Why does not some colored writer build a story around a Negro oil millionaire, and the

difficulty he or she has in keeping any of his or her money? A Pullman porter who

performs wonderful feats in the detection of crime has great possibilities. The Negro

visionary who would change the world over night and bridge the gap between races in a

decade would make an effective character in fiction (Essays and Speeches 493).42

Each suggestion is far-fetched in its own particular way—a Negro millionaire (“he or she”),

“wonderful feats”—but none so unthinkable as the “Negro visionary” with an “over night” solution. Chesnutt hints at this theme in The Quarry when the narrator tells us that Glover’s master’s thesis provides “a simple, clear, rational, and humane solution” to the “race question.”43

However, readers never learn the details of this perfect solution nor the solution’s relation to any aspect of the main plot. The literary quality and singular purpose of The Quarry outruns the protagonist’s genius and rhetorical example, and the realism of the novel is internally challenged by the limits of the narrator’s knowledge. The lack of detail suggests that “the Negro visionary

42 Suggesting that one might write about a Pullman porter solving crimes alludes to Eugene O’Neil’s play Emperor Jones, in which a Pullman porter is dragged into violence and moral debasement in the Caribbean. Chesnutt mentions the play in The Quarry: “He [Donald Glover] had seen Gilpin and Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones and other Eugene O’Neill plays, and had admired their superb acting but no Negro to his knowledge had ever played a serious or dignified role in any moving picture” (145). 43 Chesnutt, The Quarry, 178. 192 who would change the world over night” is important for Chesnutt’s view of fiction not because of any particular argument he (or she) could put forth about the “race question” but because only fiction could approach the logic of such an event. The important subject of such a novel would be envisioning and plotting the immediacy and the shock of whatever transformation such a visionary could effect, breaking with all the tensions of layered but linear narrative timelines.

In a similar vein, Chesnutt muses in a letter to his cousin, “If I could propose a remedy for existing evils that would cure them over night, I would be a great man.”44 While this sounds like utopian thinking, or the program of a too-ambitious reformer, the hope for the radical “over night” shift is consistently at odds in his work with all other rational timelines of racism and racial categorization. If, from The Conjure Woman to Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt became more and more pessimistic about the efficacy of realism and fiction’s ability to “effect instrumental reform,” I argue that Paul Marchand emerges as Chesnutt’s escape from the rhetoric of the race problem and is Chesnutt’s first attempt at creating and interrogating a theory of evental—not eventual—politics that could possibly undo temporal rationalities.45 In the last section of this chapter, by returning to “The Future American,” I will argue s this anti-Progressivism strain in

Chesnutt’s work depends upon a reckoning with U.S. expansion as an underlying force in any conversation about domestic race relations.

Paul Marchand, F.M.C. and the Temporal Orders of Race

As a perfect example of what Susan Gilman calls a “race melodrama,” Paul Marchand, F.M.C. destabilizes the black-and-white binaries that usually characterize what Peter Brooks defined as

44 Chesnutt to John P. Green, Dec. 1, 1900, in “To Be and Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, ed. McElrath, Leitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), 156. 45 Wilson, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, 152. In the Introduction to Paul Marchand, Wilson argues that in The Quarry Donald Glover finally discovers that “his rationality is beside the point when white people’s investment in racism is more powerful than their sense of justice” (xxix). 193 the “melodramatic imagination.” As Gilman argues, “Race melodramas are narratively organized through the structural polarities dear to the melodramatic imagination, but the doubling of plots, characters, and events in these texts—formal expressions of polarity—fails notably to provide the sense of order associated with the moral Manichaeism of melodrama.”46 Chesnutt, I argue, uses the melodrama’s heightened plot moments to highlight the sudden and disconnected nature of evental change and expose the temporal paradoxes inherent in the color line, usually conceived as a spatial configuration.

Chesnutt differentiates the event of race from Paul Marchand’s melodramatic plot with the first sentence of the book’s foreword, “The visit of a French duke to New Orleans, in the early part of the last century, and the social festivities in his honor, are historical incidents”

(xxxviii). Because Chesnutt, or the narrator, does a lot of historicizing and contextualizing for the reader throughout the novel, this particular set-up strikes one as appropriately specific and documentary; but, in comparison to the narrative’s psychological anachrony and even its historical vision of New Orleans, the duke’s visit is a trivial detail to provide context and occasion for the story’s plot.

However, halfway through the novel, readers learn that the duke’s visit is significant because it inspires the quadroon ball, an event that doesn’t on the surface propel or affect the linear psychological plot of Paul’s identity. Instead, the logic that links these three events changes the overall narrative race plot, the straight line in which subject-identity is dependent on movements forward or backward. The melodramatic set-pieces suggest a lack of chronology and lack obvious causational logic between them. They appear as wholly contained episodes with

46 Gillman, Blood Talk, 17. 194 heightened stakes of “moral polarization.”47 Thus, the plot beyond Paul’s genealogy jumps from event to event to event: the visit of a French duke, a quadroon ball, and a slave revolt. The relationship between the quadroon ball and the slave revolt is thus: when Paul breaks caste by entering the quadroon ball in disguise, he is struck senseless (by one of the Beaurepas brothers, of course) and thrown in jail where he overhears two runaway slaves plotting their revenge on the Trois Pigeons plantation and, significantly, decides not to report the plot. Even Grace King, in New Orleans: The Place and the People (1926), knows the significance of the relationship between quadroon balls and slavery: “Those brilliant balls, in their way, are as incredible now as the slave marts and the Voudou dances; which, in their way, they seem subtly, indissolubly connected with.” Paul Marchand’s extraordinary situations are seemingly impenetrable elements of discreet plot—but, of course, Paul sneaks into the exclusive ball donning a black and white mask, symbolic of melodramatic and racial binarism.

This is why melodrama is significant for Chesnutt. It is a form that combines two mismatched forms of temporality: the clear through-line of a moral narrative with discreet set-pieces or tableaux. Typical narrative “events” are shocking but repeatable across different iterations of the genre, and every deus ex machina is both highly predicable but emotionally intense. A passing narrative follows many of the same expectations of risk and reveal. In these ways, if a certain literary form is supposed to afford certain structural possibilities for narrative, the melodrama’s contradictory qualitative (shocking) and quantitative (repeatable) temporal measures are particularly suited to expose the illusions of modern time. As Michael Sayeau explains, the modern everyday is experienced as two incompatible forms: “the time of progress whose endpoint is infinitely deferred, and the striated heterogeneous time punctuated by events,

47 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976), 11. 195 turning points, and meaning.”48 Gilman puts this logic in conversation with late-nineteenth- century racial violence and argues that “the Manichaean logic and affective intensity of the melodramatic mode are perfectly attuned to the heightened polarities, the sheer violence, of U.S. race relations and race representations at the turn of the century.”49 The violence of the Civil War was followed by the violence of Reconstruction, especially extreme in New Orleans, and, finally, the scattered violence of Southern lynching, which was popular reading material in newspapers across the country. Reading about lynching offered the nation the shock of the new from a safe distance. As Guy Debord calls “spectacular time,” we might see the consumption of lynching images and stories as “the time of a real transformation experienced as illusion.”50 Like readers of melodrama, the society of the lynch mob paradoxically experienced the shocking singularity of a lynching over and over again and become “drugged by spectacular images.”51

As the crisis of identity that makes up the plot of Paul Marchand, the event opens a temporality that reorders what kinds of decisions about accessing time are even possible. The event of Paul’s race reveal does not just trouble the law and its relationship to identity. It marks the possible moment when “change itself changes,” and the possibility of a black man suddenly becoming white revises models of progressive change (or “absorption”) by acknowledging that

“the principles that make historical change possible in the first place may themselves undergo change.”52

To acknowledge this effect of an event is, however, nearly impossible to narrate, as the novel shows us. In Paul Marchand, F.M.C. the chronology of Paul’s identity is accessible only

48 Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 10. 49 Gillman, Blood Talk, 6. 50 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 113. 51 A discussion of lynching and spectacle, and “lynching’s fraught connection to modernity” (5) can be found in Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009). 52 Hayden White, “The Historical Event,” differences 19.2 (2008), 15. 196 through both prolepsis and analepsis. Chesnutt sets up his readers, like the characters in the story, to arrange a sensible chronology for Paul’s racial identity. These confused chronologies of identity still obsess over the structure of linear order, failing to account for the evental shape of time.

Throughout the novel, Chesnutt certainly plays with the arbitrariness of racial categorization. The reveal that Paul Marchand is actually Paul Beaurepas is hinted at from the beginning in multiple ways. In the first chapter of the novel, a man, whom readers have not yet been introduced to, is struck by one of the Beaurepas clan for lifting his hat and clearing the doorway “deprecatingly” for the white man and his wife. Bystanders expect to see a return blow.

The narrator explains, “Among the Creole French and Spaniards the point of honor was jealously guarded, and frequent resort was had to the code for its maintenance, while among the American adventurers who came down the Mississippi were violent men who had sought the city because of its distance from courts where their presence was urgently desired” (10). The bystanders are then surprised when Paul runs behind the corner. Brooding there, Paul pulls out from his pocket

“a set of tablets” and “the gold lead pencil which dangled from his watch chain” to make a record of the wrongdoing. “It is an interesting record,” he says to himself, looking over the list of times that he has been abused—not in a timeline but in entries of significant events.

After making the mark in his tablet, thinking of revenge, Paul continues, “I am free-born,

—I am rich—I am as white as they; and I have been better educated. Yet they treat me like a

Negro, and when I am struck I cannot return the blow, under pain of losing my liberty or my life” (10-11). At this point in the opening vignette, Marchand’s anger at being treated “like a

Negro” doubly makes sense since no spectator or actor in the scene has explicitly identified him as such, a reminder that to be treated “like a Negro” doesn’t derive exactly from biological race, 197 the color of skin, cultural success, or even close reading. In the next chapter, when Paul converses with the old slave Zabet, the discussion of Marchand’s complexion is pushed to the limit, “you are white, at least to look at you—you could pass for white. You have no mark of color—you could have been a gentleman, monsieur! There are others no whiter!” (13). Paul sighs because it is his marriage to another quadroon that prevented him from living as white when his beloved family moved from Paris to New Orleans. As Nick Bromell points out, a similar problem with Rena in House Behind the Cedars emphasizes the fact that private sense of self and physical appearance can be aligned, but it is relation that makes race intractable.53

Paul Marchand is not like Chesnutt’s other characters who adopt entire lives and identities as white people, who live, as Rena Walden does, with the consciousness of a great secret. While he lives his life unconsciously passing as black, Paul also “at times presumed upon his fairness of complexion to exercise, in company where he was not known, privileges reserved by law or by custom for white men only” (16). In this complexity of overlapping passing narratives, Chesnutt sets up an irony that goes beyond proving the arbitrariness of social categories. As McWilliams has discussed, the book offers a few different definitions of race that seem at odds with one another: biological, social, legal, and personal. The problem, I argue, is that all of them depend on organizing or scrambling chronology without recognizing an event that occurs as a “supplement” to any given “situation of knowledge.”54 Chesnutt does not only want to disrupt the novel’s linear representation by shifting backward or forward, or by merely

53 Nick Bromell, The Time is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 51-52. 54 “For the process of a truth to begin, something must happen. What there already is, the situation of knowledge as such, only gives us repetition. For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement; this supplement is committed to chance. It is unpredictable, incalculable; it is beyond what it is. I call it an event. A truth appears in its newness because an eventful supplement interrupts repetition. Examples: the appearance with Aeschylus of theatrical tragedy, the irruption with Galileo of mathematical physics, an amorous encounter which changes a whole life, or the French Revolution of 1792” (46). See Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2006). 198 interrupting or pausing time. For Chesnutt the qualitative sense of time is key to writing events out of quantitative racial linearity. Writing the event is about meditating on what Brian Massumi calls the “how-now,” of the event’s occurrence, or its ability to cohere in “dynamic unity.” This is the “qualitative dimension of the event’s occurring.”55

Chesnutt’s narrator tempts us to interpret Marchand’s character in various ways just as a significant portion of the novel is about all the other characters coming to terms with his new position. From the beginning of the novel the narrator offers clues that Marchand does not belong. Like many stories of tragic mulattos, Marchand lives in isolation. He cannot find “relief by speaking to any white Creole.” Moreover, his sense of rage against his caste does not make him fit for the rather pragmatic philosophy and “languor of the African” (22). When Chesnutt’s narrator explains that “Instinctively he held himself a little above all but a few of them,” the reader could be tempted to believe, later, that this instinct came from his actual identity as a white man, some subterranean unconscious sense that he was white and deserving.

Such analeptic interpretation or reasoning is used by the Beaurepas cousins, all but one of whom had physically or otherwise abused Marchand in the first half of the novel. Like others in the city, the cousins have trouble regarding the new Paul Beaurepas. Knowing Paul is white, their belief in white supremacy demands that they instantly overcome any lingering prejudice they might have toward him. Yet, the narrator describes the complicated circumstances by emphasizing the non-instantaneous nature of their racist beliers, “Those who had scorned him as a man of color felt some natural delicacy about forcing themselves upon him as a white man. It was felt that it would be better to leave these matters to time and circumstance. They would of course adjust themselves” (115).

55 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013), 4, 3. 199

In negotiating his new place in the Beaurepas family, Marchand decides to turn the hegemony of white honor against his cousins. Pulling out that small notebook that he had carried around to record insults against him, he confronts the cousins with the “morocco-covered memorandum book which he opened and held before him under the light of the wax candles which shimmered in the chandelier above the table.” He then asks, “can I, as a Beaurepas, enter into a compact of friendship with gentlemen, however closely related, who having thus offended me have not satisfied, in the traditional way, the honor of the Beaurepas?” (102). The cousins, thus, interpret the evidence of the memorandum book as evidence of the reality of Paul’s whiteness:

There was never a more astonished company. This cousin of theirs, while yet to all

intents and purposes a quadroon, had treasured every slight, had marked it down with day

and date; and to what end? He could have had at the time no inkling of his birth or

prospects. For what reason, except for a hypothetical revenge which he could have had no

probable means of realizing, could he have pursued such a course? To their superstitious

minds it almost appeared as though some supernatural influence had taken this cousin of

theirs under its protection and led him to do instinctively this curious and dangerous

thing. It was a proof, too, if any were needed, of his purity of race. No quadroon could

have taken such a course, it was foreign to the quadroon nature.” (102)

Revenge and its teleology, instinct and nature: their view of whiteness is transformed into the

“supernatural” so that it can be protected.

The Beaurepas cousins cannot decide when the new Paul Baurepas came into existence.

They cannot comprehend the event according to any other temporal logic. Paul’s logic about his own racial narratives is also deceptively clear. The Beaurepas family tries to accommodate a 200 radical event to a logic of causation and destiny (the “supernatural” force that gave him dignity), while Paul tries to argue for a continuist story that doesn’t quite describe the new truth of the event, either. When Paul confronts the cousins about the slights they’d made against him, one objects, “To us Paul Baurepas did not exist; and we could not insult one who had not come into being. The acts of which you complain were directed against a certain soi-disant quadroon, who, in his turn, no longer exists.” Against this charge, Paul argues that, actually, nothing has changed. “Paul Baurepas—I who speak to you—was not born yesterday, but twenty-five years ago. It was this cheek . . . it was this same cheek that tingled with the blow” (103). The problem is that the Event opens up a new temporality of identity, one that should make both the

Beaurepas cousins and Paul right in their assessment. Without considering the huge social change that the Beaurepas cousins feel, what was described as their “sailing across a placid stream” until encountering this “sudden squall,” Paul enforces a narrative of history that retroactively erases the life of Marchand, even while his own cheek still stings. He does not argue for any relation between the two identities, or even acknowledge a transformation. Rather than arguing that Marchand and Beaurepas are united in his hybrid self, Marchand disappears, and the “I who speak to you” is revealed in all-consuming whiteness that must be defended in a duel. Paul may not be able to narrate his identity, but, as Ryan Simmons argues, “in electing to remain Marchand, [he] has chosen for himself a life of complication, of alertness, of anxiety.”56

Chesnutt, on the other hand, in juxtaposing these two arguments, encourages readers to accept the event first as it exists, as “over night” as it is, and allow for the way its existence changes the rules of linear identities.

Indeed, this crisis relates to one of the main aspects of the Event as discussed by theorists: “its irreducible plurality, that is, that the event can never be reduced to the view from a

56 Simmons, 145. 201 single vantage point, nor assigned a fixed, unitary meaning.”57 Meaning, it turns out, is not the important lesson to be learned from the event. Andrew Robinson summarizes the basis of

Badiou’s work as such, “It is the existence of the Event, not its meaning, which is at stake.”58

This is the same idea Jared Sexton has in mind when he speaks of the “event of miscegenation”:

miscegenation as event should not be confused with miscegenation as interracial sex acts

or the presence of multiracial people. The latter are lures produced as components of the

fiction of racial whiteness—refractions of a restricted economy—terms that are mirrored

and reinforced by multiracialism’s loyal opposition. Miscegenation as event is what

cannot be represented, conceptualized, or apprehended in either the interracial sexual

encounter or the multiracial personality, but rather is that which prevents either

appearance from attaining a discernible image or a fixed and stable meaning, whether as

object of desire or aggression or both.59

Here, Sexton, like Chesnutt, takes an event to be that which “cannot be represented.” Events in general (“refractions of a restricted economy”) allow for a certain kind of social consensus and enactment to occur (a sex act or a “presence”). The “event of miscegenation,” for Sexton, is profoundly external to “racialized order.”60 Hence, we see Chesnutt’s inability to write it directly into narrative in a clear way, but we also see his desire to communicate its suddenness and blankness at the same time.

57 Ruth M. Buchanan, “Protesting the WTO in Seattle: Transnational citizen action, international law and the event,” in Events: The Force of International Law, ed. Fleur Johns, Richard Joyce, and Sundhya Pahuja (New York: Routledge, 2011), 225. Buchanan helpfully breaks the Event’s importance into the same two aspects I highlight in this section, but I think the tense of Badiou’s future-oriented decidability is also necessary to a full understanding of the Event. 58 Andrew Robinson, “Alain Badiou: The Event,” Ceasefire Magazine https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou- event/ 59 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 194. 60 Ibid., 194. 202

“A scene of brilliant gaiety”: Quadroon Balls and Les Cenelles

In the first section of “The Future American,” Chesnutt argues that the “future American ethnic type” is to be formed by all the various races of the population, “or, to extend the area a little farther, of the various people of the northern hemisphere of the western continent; for, if certain recent tendencies are an index of the future it is not safe to fix the boundaries of the future

United States anywhere short of the Arctic Ocean on the north and the Isthmus of Panama on the south” (Essays and Speeches 122-123). Additionally, in his discussion of the “Indian element,” which he initially considers as contributing little to the overall formula, he expands outward.

“The Indian element . . . looms up larger when we include Mexico and Central America in our fields of discussion. . . . The peculiar disposition of the American to overlook mixed blood in a foreigner will simplify the gradual absorption of these Southern races” (Essays and Speeches

124). Chesnutt is even more thorough in his study of Latin American and Caribbean countries, detailing what he believes to be more peaceful race relations there. Whereas in “The Future

American,” Chesnutt points to U.S. involvement in the hemisphere, in this essay, he is more interested in exploring the fate of the color line in other countries. Brazil, he argues, offers a good example for the U.S. because they have no laws preventing interracial contact. “[T]here lie to the south of us several countries inhabited chiefly by people of our own kind or kinds” (Essays

395). In Brazil, he sees “a country in which it is the well-defined and settled public policy to so mix the three constituent races of the population, the white, Indian and Negro, with the resultant of a race at least so homogeneous that there will be no race feeling or friction or animosity”

(Essays 395). Dismissing the possibility or reasonableness of emigration to these more accepting countries, Chesnutt finds it, in the end, only possible to address the present moment when he admits that “the settlement of the Race question by the Brazilian method of absorbing the Negro 203 is academic rather than practical, and will have to be left to the future.” While the speech goes through a very lengthy discussion of the statistics and descriptions of the populations belonging to these other nations, Chesnutt’s conclusion focuses on the impossibility of a future that aims only for amalgamation. He does this by burying the racism of such plans in a nesting-doll configuration of lengthy quotations. Chesnutt first cites Theodore Roosevelt’s account of Brazil originally published in 1913, who, within that article, cites an unnamed Brazilian of “pure white blood.” In this passage, the process of absorption--which elsewhere in the article Chesnutt seems to support—is deemed a sensible plan because, otherwise, with the color line intact “the Negro will remain in increased numbers and with an increased and bitter sense of isolation, so that the problem of his presence will be all the more menacing than at present” (Essays 395). Either way, understanding the complexities of the color-line in the hemisphere, or understanding the capacities of U.S. expansion (or occupation), both problems come together in nineteenth-century

New Orleans, and, more specifically, in the quadroon ball.

Almost all critics who discuss Paul Marchand address Chesnutt’s use of local-color as purposefully anachronistic. By 1921, that style had fallen out of vogue and its goal in reuniting a nation after the Civil War had, like Reconstruction, changed perception of the South. New

Orleans was also synonymous with the genre. As Bill Hardwig argues, the city was a “[symbol] of the South’s cultural disjuncture from the rest of the nation.”61 Thus, many read Chesnutt’s novel as an early example of modernist subversion of local-color, as seen in William Faulkner’s novels. Fetterly and Pryse take Chesnutt’s use of his sources to be evidence that he found Grace

King’s “work to be more the product of the dispassionate historian than that of the Southern

61 Hardwig, Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2013), Google Book Search. 204 apologist.”62 Examining how Chesnutt acknowledges and uses his sources is crucial if one’s argument about the text is similar to Simmons’s, that “the narrative of Paul Marchand enables

Chesnutt’s real target, an understanding of the historical circumstances Paul embodies—not the reverse.”63 Many critics, then, try to untangle Chesnutt’s use of New Orleans history and its evil twin, local-color. Many others are interested in what the novel has to say about identity construction. Then, a few others have sought to uncover an alternative history beneath the veneer of a mythic New Orleans by acknowledging the haunting presence of Haiti in the novel—the

Revolution is, after all, the event that drives the Beaurepas cousins into New Orleans and creates confusion over family origins.64 Most of these readings, however, create an either/or situation out of the characters and the setting, creating again the conditions for local-color, where either the setting is the “target” and the characters are stock, or where the characters are psychologically realist and the setting is mere adornment. The politics of the event, however, unite the two strands, making Paul’s race reveal more unaccountable than the strange tropes of New Orleans history.

An example of these either/or interpretations of the novel emerges from the way that critics approach context in order to make arguments about history. Bethany Aery Clerico’s recent study of Paul Marchand admits that the novel’s style is “rather uninventive” but shows that

Chesnutt was purposefully “working with a familiar genre to bring the unfamiliar, Haiti, in to the

62 Fetterly and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 289. 63 Simmons, 136. 64 Lynn R. Johnson, for example, reads the “account of the subject formation of Zabet Philosophe” as crucial to the novel. Like Bethany Ann Clerico, who makes this New Orleans virtually synonymous with Haiti, Johnson argues that “Zabet Philosophe’s biographical narrative is developed as a response to white Saint-Dominguan refugees’ historical erasure of black Haitians’ subjectivity in their descriptions of the wear and their transnational emigration to the United States” (1). See Johnson, “Bearing the Burden of Loss: Melancholic Agency in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, FMC,” The Southern Literary Journal 47.1 (2014). 205 scope of his narrative about New Orleans history.”65 This means, for Clerico, that mythic stories of New Orleans, those dear to the Beaurepas family, have always erased Haitian history. She suggests we can detect a secret archive for the novel in Chesnutt’s statement about who he took as his sources, “Miss Grace King and Mr. George W. Cable, which are available for the student or the general reader—the author has made free reference to them—as well as in the more obscure records and chronicles from which they draw their information” (italics added, xxxvii).

We can also see this timeline of erasure in New Orleans’s white supremacist history as the word

Creole came to mean something not much different than Anglo-Saxon by the late-nineteenth- century. We can also see this in the historical record when, in 1830, free people of color who had arrived in Louisiana after 1825 were forced to emigrate.66 Clerico is right to point out that we should consider “the novel’s hemispheric, not national, purview” to best understand Chesnutt’s immediate political goals in the novel.67 I want to suggest that Chesnutt’s interest in the global context for interracial worries or amalgamation hopes also informs the way he crafts his New

Orleans story, putting New Orleans at the center of a hemisphere and national purview.

The Haitian Revolution is certainly an important context for the novel, and for New

Orleans. Clerico is right that one of the most important decisions made by Paul in the novel comes after he witnesses the slave rebellion on the Trois Pigeons plantation. This small-scale rebellion is inspired by, as the men with whom Paul was imprisoned had been overheard, “our people . . . in San Domingo” (62). The Haitian Revolution’s haunting potential “draws New

Orleans into a space that lies beyond both Haiti and the United States,” or, “an entirely new region, one produced by nonhistory that acts as a counterpart to the New Orleans of local

65 Bethany Aery Clerico, “Haiti’s Revisionary Haunting of Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Careful’ History in Paul Marchand, F.M.C.,” in Haiti and the Americas, ed. Carla Calargé (Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 2013), 112. 66 See Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2003). 67 Clerico, 116. 206 color.”68 Spatial frames, the debate over New Orleans’s national, colonial, or hemispheric ties, produce many different interpretations for texts, but consequently seem to rely on impossible decisions about Chesnutt’s proper context and his positioning of New Orleans within or against it. Clerico begins her essay by dismissing critics who see Chesnutt’s main occasion for writing as increasing domestic violence and proposes with good evidence that, instead, Chesnutt wrote Paul

Marchand as an activist protest of the U.S. occupation of Haiti. If, as Clerico argues, Chesnutt is imagining some alternative rendering of space that imagines New Orleans and Haiti as one,

Chesnutt is even more concerned with more abstract, formal notions of race. He had long been interested in the effects of imperialism on race matters at home and, sometimes relatedly, on the large-scale race “admixture” he envisioned.69

In looking into these discourses and the way Chesnutt utilizes them in his “Future

American” essays and in “A Solution to the Race Problem,” we can better understand the extent to which Chesnutt saw these discourses intertwined with a hemispheric history of colonialism.

Further, in the New Orleans of Paul Marchand, he sees this as a problem of propriety and perversion. As Michele Mitchell argues about the “black man’s burden” that emerged in response to the rhetoric of the “white man’s burden” of empire, “The push for empire combined gender and race in provocative ways for Americans who were only decades away from being subjugated and enslaved themselves. Just as race was used at the turn of the century to ‘remake manhood,’ imperialism remade and reinforced a gendered racial identity for black American men.”70 To understand more fully the way this works in New Orleans, I delve into the

68 Clerico, 116. 69 See María del Pilar Blanco who describes this late-nineteenth century period as a time “during which conceptions of modernity as a temporal phenomenon characterized by rapid change are felt in terms of spatial transformation” (6). Blanco, Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape and the Hemispheric Imagination (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2012). 70 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2013), 74. 207 complexities of the free man of color’s relationship to imperialism’s “gender and sex” as they are registered in the city’s history of dancing and “quadroon balls.”

The first paragraphs of Paul Marchand are dedicated to setting this scene, a largely

“familiar” one, as Clerico would point out. “From a sleepy, slow, but picturesque provincial

French town, with a Spanish veneer, the Crescent City had been swept into the current of

American life, and pulsed and throbbed with the energy of the giant young nation of the West”

(1-2). Despite this portrait, we’re told in the next sentence that “these changes were in many respects as yet merely superficial” because the “great heart of the community” was still French

(2). We are soon introduced to M. Pierre Beaurepas, Paul’s secret father, by way of Cable-esque descriptions of his galleried home. Inside, we see that Beaurepas is a collector of great French and Spanish paintings, and “one of old Pierre himself, painted by David during one of the rich colonial’s frequent visits to Paris in former years” (24). Despite his love of France and its objects, we see through one of the cousin’s eyes, Adolphe Beaurepas’s, that the old man has, over time, lost the spirit of Revolution, “Old and ailing as he was . . . Adolphe could see the wreck of the virile, capable man of affairs, the disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire, cynical in his attitude toward life, none too trustful of his fellow men, that Pierre Beaurepas had been in his prime” (26).

Using the terms of recognizable literary tropes about New Orleans, Chesnutt understands the importance of French and Spanish national feeling without political attachment, “The echoes of the French Revolution still resounded loudly in New Orleans, although its watchword of

‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,’ no more harmonized with slavery and the Code Noir than did the Declaration of Independence” (47). In the chapter on the quadroon ball, Chesnutt links the lingering and abstract Frenchness of the colony to the ball. Chesnutt’s narrator explains that, 208 culturally, the French Creoles of New Orleans resisted American influx and occupation. As the

“institution” of the quadroon ball was “an outgrowth of the exotic civilization of a pioneer race,” they cannot really share in the intellectual and revolutionary tradition of France but only in its perverse colonial offshoots. Increasingly American in politics, their difference as French is transformed into a cultural allegiance that ultimately supports whiteness along a colonial timeline: “Reflecting, sentimentally, the political movements of France, the Creoles had shared the glory of Napoleon, and though no longer French politically, had cheered the restoration of the monarchy” (48). In contrast, Paul’s attachment to France sends him back there at the end of the novel when he admits, “A man cannot . . . become over night a—Beaurepas” (138). After he’s chosen to be a free man of color, he cannot accept living in New Orleans, which was more like late-nineteenth-century Brazil as Chesnutt described it in “The Future American.”

The cruelties and hypocrisies of white honor and chastity are shown to create the impossibility of black, and especially mixed-race, propriety. At the beginning of the novel, we are led to assume that Paul’s “irregular birth” necessarily means he also has the “strain of

African blood.” The narrator tells us, “That he had not been born in wedlock, as he naturally assumed, gave him little concern; no quadroon was, except in marriage between members of his own class, and he was not the fruit of such a union” (14). After we learn that Paul is one of the

Beaurepas, the lawyer reading Pierre Beaurepas’s will relates the story of Paul’s mother. He prefaces the “romance” at length by quoting Hamlet, “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, /

Thou shalt not escape calumny” (76). Going on, the lawyer explains that Paul’s mother had given birth to him after she was sure that her first husband had died and she had moved on to her true love, Pierre Beaurepas. But when her original husband chances to show up in New Orleans 209 after a shipwreck, from shipwreck she has to give up Paul, and send him to live with a “discreet quadroon woman” (not Zabet) he was to assume was his mother.

Yet, even this covering up of a shameful secret, a novelistic convenience, has another twist. Paul’s mother’s first husband soon dies, so Paul’s parents plan to adopt him (thus still maintaining a cover for his illegitimate birth). However, the parents of those five Beaurepas cousins are killed in the Haitian Revolution, and Pierre Beaurepas must take his nephews as his heirs. At the end of the novel, Paul will blame his entire situation on the mistakes of pride made by his parents, “never before . . . has the legitimate son of a good family been condemned by his parents to an inferior class solely to gratify a woman’s selfish pride and a man’s sentimental weakness—if not callous indifference—and then, after many years, been recalled to his own race and family” (137).

Thus, Chesnutt positions white obsessions with genealogy and chastity as deserving ire— in Paul’s story, these obsessions literally create “irregular birth” and miscegenation where it hadn’t existed before. In other words, his mother’s shame created Paul’s frustrated quadroon status out of thin air. Paul’s situation is supplementary to the switched-at-birth story that started in Haiti with Zabet. To review, Paul’s important “dilemma” and “decision” (from the titles of the book’s last two chapters) involve not just whether or not he should remain black, but whether or not he should tell the rest of the Beaurepas cousins which one among them is of mixed-race ancestry. Interestingly, this “interloper,” as Paul sarcastically calls him, is not the counterpoint of

Paul’s life. They are not life-swapped like the twins in Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. In other words, Paul was not switched for Philippe. The one’s predicament does not determine the other’s, but they influence the story, and each other, in an oblique way. In a chapter titled “The

Black Drop,” Paul rifles through his father’s “deeds, contracts, notes and securities . . . diaries, 210 commonplace books, and memoranda” after the reading of the will. Within these papers he discovers a letter revealing that there was “la petite,” a young girl, with the male Beaurepas cousins on the boat from Haiti to New Orleans (91, 92). After finding this “obscure” clause, Paul hails Zabet to explain, but she denies over and over that she knows anything about a female child. In a fury, Paul threatens her with “the slave gang, the whip, the pistol, or the sword,” reminding Zabet that she doesn’t have manumission papers, despite her living as if she were a free woman (95). Finally, Zabet admits that there was a little girl, but that when the girl died on the boat over to New Orleans, Zabet inserted her grandson in the child’s place, thus making him the fifth Beaurepas cousin. He is the child of Zabet’s daughter and one of the killed Beaurepas uncles. At Zabet’s admission, Paul grows excited with the hope of revenge on the family, ready to humiliate any one of the white supremacists with their true birth. But when Zabet whispers the name to Paul, his face turns from “joy” mixed with something “sinister” to “an expression very like disappointment” (96).

This “disappointment” leads us to assume that the mixed-race Beaurepas son is Philippe, the only one who never abused Paul, and, thus, is not deserving of the revenge that could be satisfied had the real quadroon been one of the cruel Beaurepas brothers. Later, the suspicion is confirmed when the narrator tells us how Paul debated letting the secret come out, knowing how it might personally hurt Philippe. By making Philippe the quadroon, Chesnutt prompts us to believe that something in Philippe--some unconscious, essential knowledge of racial kinship-- determined the kindness with which he always regarded Paul. Yet, Paul’s having to live as a quadroon is not caused by Zabet or even mirrored in the need to suppress Philippe’s origins.

Still, the two stories are related by the Haitian Revolution and the mass emigration from Saint-

Domingue to New Orleans. Paul has to remain without his parents because his father (Pierre) 211 was forced to take in the refugee cousins, Philippe only one amongst them. By including the

Philippe’s “switch” alongside Paul’s story, Chesnutt points us to a level of epistemology that even Paul has trouble recognizing. Considered together, the stories take the problems of sexual propriety to a global level and heighten the absurdity of the sentimental story of Paul’s mother’s ruined name. Paul blames the dupe of his life on his mother’s and father’s foolishness in this regard. However, propriety doesn’t just hide illegitimacy in a hypocritical or conservative way; it becomes a narrative that obscures the multiple, obliquely related events of racial confusion that connect and double in New Orleans and Haiti.

Although Paul angrily thinks his entire life history is the result of a Creole obsession with propriety, the episode in which he saves his wife’s sister Lizette from unmasking at a quadroon ball—which would announce her availability to white men there—stakes his own claim to female sexuality. As Marren points out, Paul plans to make a better, but not completely dissimilar, arrangement for Lizette when he brings his family to France, and her reputation would be sullied by unmasking at the quadroon ball. Donning a “domino” mask, covering half his face in black and white, Paul, who is “not allowed at the cordon bleau balls” finds Lizette in the ball and tells her that she’ll soon have to unmask, “If you’re not away by then, your good name will be ruined and our family disgraced” (58). Because readers are told that Lizette

“walked with a seductive grace that bordered unconsciously upon wantonness,” we recognize the racist assumptions about black female sexuality that created quadroon ball spectacles in the first place (56). However, when we consider the tradition of free men of color commenting on these displays of interracial sexual contact, we can complicate the notions of hypocrisy or complicity in this and other quadroon ball scenes. 212

There are thus two versions of respectability and propriety that Chesnutt sees in the history of New Orleans. The fear of shame that results in Paul’s genealogical crisis is at odds with the quadroon ball party crashing if we interpret his actions in ways similar to those who have analyzed the theme of the quadroon balls in the poetry of Les Cenelles. With the poets writing as lover/brother figures protecting young quadroon women’s chastity, critics have not reached a consensus on how to interpret their gestures of ownership and condemnation of sexual improprieties through lovelorn lyric. As Shirley Thompson explains, “Les Cenelles mines the interlacing themes of incest, group identity, and orphanhood in order to reveal alternate paths to gender propriety for both men and women.”71 They are at once “hoping to delimit and fix the in- between position of Creoles of color” and rejecting the “purifying logic of Americanization.”72

All free men of color, the writers of Les Cenelles dedicate their collection to “Au beau

Sexe Louisianais,” or “To The Fair Sex of Louisiana.” The epigraph below asks for their attention: “A single glance fallen from your virtuous eyes / Will mean as much as glory and immortality.” Claiming propriety for the “fair sex,” the poets begin to protest too much. The writers of the 1979 edition’s preface argue that the poets were rather unfortunately imitative, and, thus, missed the very point of French Romantic poetry as it emerged out of Revolutionary thought. “Had the Creole poets treated some of those areas most closely touching upon their lives,” they argue, “the results might well have been poems of a depth, substance, and intensity which could favorably compare with those of the French Romantics” (xiii-xiv).73 Most of the more recent attention paid to Les Cenelles counters this claim. One of these critics explains that

71 Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2009), 186. Thompson ultimately argues that the Les Cenelles poets do construct “conservative gender formulations” but do so in order to preserve a “claim to actual territory” in their city, making the link between plaçage (from the word place, “to place”) and the physical place of the city that belonged to their women. 72 Thompson, Exiles at Home, 185. 73 However, this desire for a more historically and politically rich poetry becomes all the more interesting when one considers that, legally, free people of color were restricted from publishing political criticism by 1830s. 213 winning a young lady’s glance “signifies more than a personal victory on the battlefield of love.”74 Thus, not only are the Les Cenelles poems important for their stylistic uniqueness—

Henry Louis Gates finds them significant for their departure from the vernacular and the sanctioned genre of slave narrative—but they are expressive of a unique perspective because of the way that political, sexual, and artistic claims are made all at once in the service of preserving the Creole of color community.

This is not mere irony, though. In the introduction, Armand Lanusse, mentor to the poets and editor of the anthology, states his hopes for the collection, “future poets will see how those who preceded them thought and how they praised the charming ladies of Louisiana whose beauty, grace, and loveliness will doubtless be preserved in all their marvelous purity by those who succeed them.” The focus is on “how they [the poets] praised,” emphasizing the artistry over the objects of praise, the ladies. Their expression, their politically charged praise, is essential to maintaining purity. The Les Cenelles poetry is a romantic protest against the seductions of colonialist quadroon balls. Carolyn Cossé Bell explains, “No doubt aware that literary Romanticism had served as a springboard to other forms of social and political activisim in France and Haiti, [Lanusse] had envisioned a leading role for these ‘young Louisianians’ in his prediction of imminent, cataclysmic change.”75 Thus, their obsession with purity and virtuousness does not share the same logic that inspires the fascination white American men had with virtue and exoticism. In Paul Marchand, the narrator describes the women who attend quadroon balls sounding like a poet from Les Cenelles, “Their life—poor butterflies of passion! poor hostages for the chastity of their white sisters!—their life yet had its compensations” (50).

74 Floyd D. Cheung, “‘Les Cenelles’ and Quadroon Balls: ‘Hidden Transcripts’ of Resistance and Domination in New Orleans, 1803-1845,” The Southern Literary Journal 29.2 (1997), 5-16. 75 Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1997), 123. 214

These poets know what historian Emily Clark argues in her study of the development of quadroon myths, “white men, by possessing free women of color, imply the ability to subjugate all persons of color.”76 The posture of a romantically devastated male is key, then, to the emotional politics of the poems, and so is poetic community. In “The Louisiana Laborer,” the epigraph states that the poem is “Inspired by Beranger,” imprisoned in France for his political writings, and is dedicated “To my friend Armand Lanusse” (the editor of Les Cenelles),

“Then, they said to me: you must go to France, To see her people, teach yourself their songs. To lighten the sufferings of one’s brothers Never does one need to seek instruction, Misunderstood sons of New Orleans, Despite her many faults I love her still.77

A few of the poems address quadroon balls specifically, using them and the addressee’s desire to dance as symbols for the waywardness and delicacy of their community. Armand

Lanusse’s poem “The Young Lady at the Ball” is one poem where the speaker addresses a girl that loves “glitter” and excitement so much as to cause death.

The ball is ending, darkness flees, I implore you, Come, come next to me, rest yourself a bit. You are very tired but you are still waltzing! Oh! what’s wrong with this child? She is crazy, my God!78

This poem makes the woman complicit with the quadroon ball’s lures much like his

“Epigramme,” which criticizes the mothers responsible for placing daughters in such arrangements. The anonymous “A New Impression” does the same: “…a shameless mother /

Today sells the heart of her grieving daughter.”

76 Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2013), 77 Valcour, “The Louisiana Laborer,” in Les Cenelles: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century, Translated by Régine Latortue and Gleason R. W. Adams (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980), 13. 78 Lanusse, “Young Lady at the Ball,” in Les Cenelles, 109. 215

This “selling” the daughter is part of the quadroon myth that has largely been debunked by historians. According to a few of the two dozen travel narratives upon which many of the myths are based, the mother would attend her daughter at the ball and negotiate with the white suitor the terms of the plaçage, a term denoting a kind of common-law marriage, a system that allowed many women of color in New Orleans to gain property and support for their children.

While Lizette’s mother does not appear at Chesnutt’s quadroon ball, he does describe a madame- type figure, who is responsible for orchestrating the balls and drawing in its dancers. National and white ideas about plaçage were scandalized and condemned, or, by contrast, written about as one of the must-see attractions in New Orleans. Travel writer Harriet Martineau condemns the practice: “Every Quadroon woman believes that her partner will prove an exception to the rule of desertion. Every white lady believes that her husband has been an exception to the rule of seduction.”79 However, the problem with all the sources is that none of them quite knows how to judge the relationships of plaçage, nor can they understand what relation the balls they witnesses actually had to these arrangements. Thus, about half the accounts suggest that the women are merely “concubines.” One visitor in 1844 describes the system quite fully,

“The quadroon balls are places to which these young creatures are taken as soon as they

have reached womanhood, and there they show their accomplishments in dancing and

conversation with white men, who alone frequent these places. When one of them attracts

the attention of an admirer, and he is desirous of forming a liaison with her, he makes a

bargain with the mother, agrees to pay her a sum of money, perhaps 2000 dollars, or

79 Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2 (Paris: Baudry’s, 1837), 81. 216

some sum in proportion to her merits, as a fund upon which she may retire when the

liaison terminates. She is now called ‘une placée.”80

While most of the sources on the quadroon balls are those provided by visitors, we can see how Creole people of color, like the writers of Les Cenelles, lamented the way that imperialistic American practices changed the property gains that went with earlier plaçage practices. As Bell explains, “Creole writers saw the practice as a threat to the social fabric of their community.”81 The conversation about the fate of free men of color as related to plaçage was one that inspired much New Orleans folklore.

Cable documents the plight of free men of color in relation to quadroon balls in his

Creole Slave Songs from The Century (1886). He describes them as “fiddler crabs,” a translation of the words in the song “Trouloulou.” The name “was applied to the free male quadroon who could find admittance to the quadroon balls only in the capacity, in those days distinctly menial, of musician.” The accompanying song describes a similar subject to some of the poems from Les

Cenelles, and the plight of Paul Marchand and the “mulatto orchestra [playing] Gottschalk’s

Danse Négre” (55):

Yellow girl goes to the ball; Nigger lights her to the hall. Fiddler man! Now, what is that to you? Say, what is that to you, Fiddler man?82

Chesnutt was most likely familiar with this particular text, describing in Paul Marchand the role that black men played on the outskirts of the quadroon ball, “black men were not allowed at the quadroon balls in any capacity, under pain of death, though they might light the way of the

80 George William Featherstonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1848), 141-42. 81 Bell, The Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 113. 82 Cable, “Creole Slave Songs,” The Century, vol. 31 (1886), 808. 217 women thither with lanterns” (53). Another popular song, written by a local poet Joseph

Beaumont, in a response to a popular court case just before the Civil War in which a young woman tried to pass herself as white, taunts the young girl with the refrain, “Ah, Toucoutou, we know you! / You are a little Mooress. / Who does not know you?” and “Ah, Toucoutou / When these white lawyers give a dance / Will you be able to go? / Will you, O beautiful devil, / You who love to dance so!”83 Shirley Thompson, in her illuminating discussion of the case and the popularity of the song during that year’s Carnival season, argues, “In mocking her efforts, the revelers provoked their own confrontation with Toucoutou at the same time that they redirected their outrage toward a third party: whites (or whiteness).” Further, Thomspon argues that

Beaumont certainly seemed to be “evoking the racial landscape of the ‘quadroon balls’ and

‘plaçage’” in describing her as a dancer; thus, the song satirically trivializes her desire to become white.84

This portrait of quadroon balls gleaned from Les Cenelles, folk songs, and the travel accounts remains incomplete. Their poetry, while offering a different perspective, seems to align with the account of quadroon balls from later writers, and what Chesnutt writes of free men of color in a rather awkward sentence: “No amount of wealth or education could qualify a male quadroon for this gathering of the cream of his own womanhood” (50). Chesnutt and the poets depict fun-loving quadroons dancing at the balls as part of their love of coquetry and desire to develop aristocratic tastes. The poets of Les Cenelles, if not invitees, are contemporary witnesses to the balls’ popularity and the power of their symbolic weight. In actuality, the balls seem to be more akin to vice-filled entertainment halls, an early form of tourism largely distinct from the practice of plaçage, or the multitude of other experiences of interracial contact.

83 Rodolphe Desdunes includes a portrait of Joseph Beaumont and excerpts from the song in his Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits. 84 Thompson, Exiles and Home, 97-99. 218

Historians have long been interested in revising the idea that the system of plaçage, started in the early days of New Orleans settlement when white women were scarce, was equivalent to prostitution. Plaçage was rather like a common-law marriage, and, while certainly derived from a colonial practice that sought to use women as tools for the overall conquest, the system did allow people of color to claim property in New Orleans. However, there is evidence that the quadroon balls of myth had more to do with Americanization than with French or

Spanish traditions in the city. This reading of the history shows that the quadroon balls were more a simulacrum of the Creole of color community, and, as they increased in popularity, the practice of long-lasting plaçage arrangements decreased. Therefore, the balls themselves were only really attached to plaçage in the late nineteenth century, and, some historians have determined that the term was not used in antebellum records except to refer to a relationship between two free people of color.85 This means, then, that most likely the quadroon balls were even more complexly tied to, as Chesnutt suggests, “the brutality inseparable from slavery and all its incidents” (50).

Quadroon balls actually started as “tri-color balls” in the late Spanish period of the 1790s.

These were the events where races were said to mix freely. There were also, at the home of

Bernard Coquet, dances for free people of color, both men and women, that started in 1799. This tradition disappeared only a year later after complaints about those dances becoming dens of vice where slaves and whites were allowed to attend as well. But, importantly, as Kenneth Aslakson has uncovered in Spanish colonial records, “free people of color fought to retain ‘their dance,’ implicitly blaming white men for any inappropriate behavior taking place there.”86 Aslakson describes, in particular, a petition by members of the free black militia that had returned to

85 See Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of the Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2014), 222 n. 25. 86 Aslakson, 126. 219

Louisiana from Florida disappointed to see that their dances had ended. They ask for a reinstatement of the weekly dances for free people of color and for guards to maintain the peace, explaining, “When we were on expedition, we were informed that some people came to the dances that were given there, determined to disrupt the peaceful diversions.”87 While the continuation or the cessation of these balls for free people of color remained largely in the hands of whites and their desire to attend or need to condemn them, this petition was likely heard, and the Coquet was allowed to hold these public balls again.

Thus, it may be important to differentiate the quadroon ball as a dramatic break with this history of dancing available to free people of color. Drastic shifts in population and the colonial situation are likely responsible for the emergence of the quadroon ball. West Indian people, reacting to Haiti, poured into New Orleans in 1804, and one of those was August Tessier, who, the following year, advertised the first quadroon ball, an event explicitly only for women of color and white men. This event also took place at Coquet’s home on St. Phillip Street, and Coquet would follow Tessier’s success by starting quadroon balls of his own. These events capitalized on the tradition that started as one for free people of color, a scene that white men invaded. The newer quadroon balls were aimed at travelers, and capitalized on the exotic, as a few writers, including the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, observed the cliché that these women were vastly superior in beauty to the white women of the city.88 These events existed alongside the extralegal de-facto marriages that became known as plaçage.

All of this background on the quadroon ball serves to complicate their function in myth and in New Orleans society. The poetry of Les Cenelles that criticizes women for their love of

87 Qtd. in Aslakon, 135. 88 Corroborating Alsakon’s work on this subject, Diana Williams concludes that the quadroon balls were not “a vestige of a more racially fluid, seigniorial culture” but were “commercial innovations” like many others in catering to booming business in the city. See Williams, “They Call it Marriage”: The Interracial Louisiana Family and the Making of American Legitimacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007), 170. 220 dancing seems to suggest that the balls were attended by respectable young women like Lizette of Paul Marchand. John Latrobe writes in 1834 of the balls, “the best quadroon society is to be found at them.” Yet, this staid affair, which Latrobe finds pleasing as he watches couples spin around the floor in cotillion dancing, devolves into a bit of chaos as he describes two men fighting and trying to unmask each other. He is excited to see “two excellent quarrels” and intrigued by “the handsomest person at the ball”: “a Spanish gentleman, who was dressed as a woman and was not discovered, although he wore no mask, until many of his sex had been introduced to him, some of acquaintances among the number, and proceeded to make love to him as a female.”89 This description points to the main purpose of the events as curating a simulacrum of luxury in contrast to the sexual tourism that was most likely the purpose of the balls, as the price continued to drop through the antebellum period. Emily Clark has found that the balls eventually brought in women from other cities, women who found the scene of entertainment and performance a good way to make money. Some of these women, too, might have been white. As one editorial in the New Orleans Bee complains about a quadroon ball in

1835, “there were in the rooms more white ladies than colored ones.”90 It’s difficult to determine what they were doing there: seeking pleasure, seeking money, or seeking their wayward or their promised husbands. Historians have argued all three, and their presence, and the city’s worry over their presence, shows the extent to which the presence of masked and alien bodies conspired with the confusion over what the true purpose of these balls was, at once “orderly, decent, and well-conducted” and “unhallowed sanctuaries” for “every clerk and scrivener who can muster up a few dollars.” The point was that any ability to determine whether something was truly

89 John H.B. Latrobe and His Times, 1803-1891 (Baltimore: The Norman, Remington Co., 1917), 316. 90 Bee Nov 30, 1835, qtd. in Monique Guillory, “Under One Roof: The Sings and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls,” Race Consciousness: Reinterpretations for the New Century ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York UP, 1997), 87. 221 luxurious and proper, or mere “sensual indulgence” or offensive imitation, was impossible for

Anglo-American travelers and the local American-run newspapers. The offense, as usual, was the erasure of class distinction, as English actor Louis Tasistro observed, “Nor is it at all unusual to see members of the legislature mingling freely with these motley groups,” groups of “every flat-boatman or cattle dealer.”91 As with Les Cenelles, and in the risk Lizette poses to the family, questions of propriety simply fail to make easy sense.

Such evidence indicates that the balls were places for white men to dominate women of color, or for these women to negotiate short-term arrangements, not necessarily the more long- term plaçage. Looking to the quadroon ball to explain the plight of the community of Creoles of color has narrowed and simplified the various kinds of lives these women led in the city. The

1844 account quoted above mistakenly suggests that all free women of color came of age and expected to find themselves a plaçage relationship. As Jennifer Spear has tallied from the 1850 census, “New Orleans’s 257 free women of color property holders” were indeed singular, accounting for 92 percent of free women of color property holders in the lower South. However, these 257 women only accounted for just under 3 percent of the city’s entire free “gens de couleur libre” population. Spear therefore cautions us “not to exaggerate their general condition as ‘privileged’ or ‘elite.’”92

Certainly, stories like Cable’s “Tite Poulette” have propagated common understanding of the city’s population as dependent upon interracial relationships. The quadroon ball as an event quarantines a messier set of arrangements that allowed free women of color to become property owners and pillars of their communities in New Orleans. Aslakson argues, “while the quadroon- plaçage myth simplifies the nature of white man-colored female relationships and misrepresents

91 George Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Note-book (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1860), 208; Louis Fitzgerald Tasistro, Random Shots and Southern Breezes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1842), vol. 2, 20-21. 92 Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), c 222 the role of the quadroon balls, it reveals a great deal about the Anglo-American fascination with interracial sex.”93 It seems that in regarding white women’s chastity, Chesnutt was not hypocritically asserting the free man of color’s claim over “his” women, but responding to the hierarchy in interracial relationships that dictates those terms and possibilities within the community of people of color, making the scenes of the quadroon balls almost impossible to comprehend as interracial social events. They had their connections to white dominance and exoticism but carried with them the history of the city’s Spanish-era dances, wherein the problem wasn’t propriety but property, in the sense that slaves were being welcomed at dances for free people of color. The uneven relationship between quadroon balls, plaçage relationships, and the creoles of color community bespeaks a sociality that is difficult to track.

Conclusion

Two versions of the event, the reveal of Paul’s race and the quadroon ball, both stand in as the

“event of miscegenation,” the “form that miscegenation gives to time, the form, precisely, of bloodlines, interfertility, sexuality, and kinship.”94 Both attempt to capture the relationship between linear time and propriety. The quadroon ball is certainly a dangerous constellation that has perpetuated myths about black female sexuality, even when scholars attempt to suggest their agency in choosing to participle, to craft lives for themselves by using the social fascination with interracial sex. When Monique Guillory discusses the history of the Orleans Ballroom—once a lavish quadroon ballroom and then the convent for the Sisters of the Holy Family, an order of nuns of color—she reminds us that spaces and events matter because they prompt us to decide how to organize linear time. “The juxtaposition of these two extremes—the quadroon concubine

93 Aslakson, 710. 94 See Tavia Nyong’o’s summary of Jared Sexton’s “event of miscegenation.” Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz, 13. 223 and the quadroon nun—set the parameters of proscribed sexuality” for free women of color in our historical memory of New Orleans.95 Chesnutt, taking his cue from Grace King, does mention that this building would later house the “colored nuns, but in this earlier generation devoted to scenes of pleasure in which the quadroon and octoroon women of that age played anything but a conventual role” (53).

Chesnutt, by revealing Paul Marchand to be Paul Beaurepas, empties the “event of miscegenation” of all actual or material occurrence, replacing that racialized story of unknown origins with the romantic tale of foolish white honor and confused linearity. He demonstrates what Jared Sexton argues about the “retroactive projection” that constructs fear of mixed-race individuals: “If the so-called mongrel is the sign of race mixing par excellence, this unstable figure can only ever serve as the troubled embodiment of an interracial sexual encounter that will have been.”96 In constructing this ungraspable event in fiction and in New Orleans, Chesnutt stages the myths of race admixture by focusing on the strange events that “supplement” linear and imperialistic histories. A consideration of the complexity and singularity of Events importantly changes Chesnutt’s many essays on the future of the races and how he regards white and black readers. In an oft-cited passage from an 1880 private journal, Chesnutt recommends yet another trick of time: “The subtle, almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans—cannot be stormed and taken by assault; the garrison will not capitulate, so their position must be mined, and we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it.”97 Like his flipped passing stories in Paul Marchand and The Quarry, Chesnutt reversed the usual task of uplift, writing instead for “the elevation of the whites.” In this meditation on how to change minds, Chesnutt combines the suddenness of an event’s effects

95 Guillory, “Under One Roof,” 69. 96 Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 208. 97 The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard Brodhead (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 140. 224 with a patient strategy. Even if the “repulsion” cannot be vanished immediately, the alternative has the same effect of inexplicable immediate change—“we will find ourselves in their midst before they think it.” Rather than argue that Chesnutt’s biography and shifting views on the best view of time, the best conclusion is that he always conceived of how both timelines and misunderstood events linked his world to a racist past.

We might newly consider the powerful framing of the “problem” in this opening vignette in his speech on “A Solution to the Race Problem”:

Several evenings ago a young man called at my house to talk over the Race Question; an

intelligent, earnest, eager young man, filled with zeal for social service and the uplift of

humanity. With the impatience of youth, he wanted to find an immediate solution for this

vexed problem. We discussed various suggested remedies--education, property, the

ballot, assimilation, segregation, expatriation--in fact every ‘ation’ except annihilation,

which, historically, has settled some race problems.

When he left, about eleven o'clock, I was glad to see him go, and the Race

Problem was no nearer solution, except by about three hours time, than it was when we

began. I don't know that we will be any further along with it when I shall have finished,

except perhaps by another hour. (Essays and Speeches 384) 225

Chapter Four: Toward New Orleans

Many narratives and myths surrounding national place are created out of directions. The mid- century injunction to “Go West, young man” imagines a path as a straight arrow, suggesting the frontier’s penetrability and non-resistance. Places are not just created out of arbitrary borders but also through the well-trodden paths toward them. Even as Walter Johnson zooms in from

“epochal history” to find the contingent in the smaller, everyday moments of slavery’s sales, he notes that he does not mean to “diminish the chilling effect of that broad arrow on the map,” the route of the slave trade.1 With the number of productive critical impasses that are created by interrogating geographical scales—the local, the regional, the national, the hemispheric, or the global—, there are as many reasons for recognizing the importance of movement in the creation of place itself. These discussions of movement include all forms of migration (forced or not), nomadism, creolization, or circum-figures. Many of these influential scales and accounts of cultural flow or proximity have influenced the previous chapters, as they influenced and troubled the writers I’ve discussed.

This chapter describes one of the most important directional and orienteering tropes for literature about New Orleans, or literature that keeps New Orleans as a destination: “toward New

Orleans.” Toward, like contrast as discussed in the first chapter, emphasizes proximity—but in a different way; it is a direction and orientation that has a desire and may or may not work in cooperating with the cardinal directions. The suspension of reason and affect and the amused glance as a form of understanding that I described as parts of “contrast” are crucially different from reading “toward” New Orleans. Toward is not a form but a prepositional movement,

1 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1999), 17. 226 perhaps the pre-position par excellence. New Orleans had always seemed poised on the precipice in the nineteenth century, geographically destined to be a gateway or an entrepot, a commercial and tourist destination. One popular travel writer wrote in 1828, “Every boat, that has descended from Pittsburgh, or the Missouri, to New Orleans, could publish a journal of no inconsiderable interest.”2

In the century’s literature and popular culture the most salient illustration of “toward New

Orleans” was the oft-minstrelized fear of a slave’s travel there, of being “sold down the river” like Uncle Tom or like Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or like the nearly one million exported from the Upper South to the cotton regions between 1790 and 1860, a good portion of those sent to the slave pens in New Orleans first.3 This large-scale forced migration did not put

New Orleans itself at the center of literary culture; instead, it importantly remained a peripheral terminus for travel from a variety of starting points. That so much literature, music, and history moves “toward” New Orleans is the result of this forced migration and the elective movements of commerce and labor that followed. In the two authors I examine in the following pages, however, “toward” New Orleans became a heuristic for imagining the nature of change itself. If

Alice Dunbar-Nelson found a way to charm and build attachments within New Orleans (see chapter two), this chapter considers what Lafcadio Hearn calls the “irresistible invasion” toward

New Orleans.4 What is “irresistible” in Hearn’s novel Chita is not New Orleans but the force

“invasion” itself. The thrust of toward is both geological and historical for New Orleans, sometimes in related ways, as anyone knows who understands Hurricane Katrina as more than a

2 Timothy Flint, A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States, or The Mississippi Valley, vol 1 (Cincinnati: W. M. and O. Farnsworth, 1828), 213. 3 Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), 3. 4 Lafcadio Hearn, Chita: A Memory of Last Island (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2003), 10. Subsequent citations of this text will be in-text. 227 natural disaster. The very creation of the New World, of plantations, and of a seemingly predestined city follows the path of hurricanes, hungry and devouring, leveling the coastlines and changing the landscapes.5

This notion of “toward” allows for both utopic and terrorizing thoughts, as that abstract preposition can be interested, hopeful, or threatening in its lack of an absolute or particular cartographic direction.6 Grammatically and methodologically, toward is a pre-position. It is not quite as loosely undetermined as a concept of change like flow or as built on reciprocity like the prefixes trans- or circum-. However, while its destination is implied or even stated, a motion of

“toward” can be made up of a variety of different kinds of movement, forced or improvised.

Studies of American literature are just as concerned with types of movement as with the borders of geography. For example, The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature is organized by sections: shifts, zigzags, and impacts. Russ Castronovo writes in his introduction to this collection that such mobile spatializations are meant to challenge “predominant patterns for a good deal of history.” “[S]traight lines,” he explains, “are downplayed under this tripartite schema.”7 While I don’t want to return to the rigidity of straight lines, a hegemony that has been so fully attached to Eurocentric exploration narratives and American expansion narratives, I want to suggest that a spatial trope like “toward” is not incompatible with the messiness of shifts, zigzags, turns, circles, or flows. It does, however, account for a posited endpoint.

Much hemispheric and transnational work does not only push borders to expand the

5 For this process in Caribbean plantations, see Lizabeth Paravisini-Gerbert, “‘He of the Trees’: Nature, Environment, and Creole Religiosities in Caribbean Literature,” Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughre, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005), 184. 6 See Kate Thomas on the “prepositional quality of queer,” described as the “shiftingly relational rather than teleological” (70). See Thomas, “Post Sex: On Being Too Slow, Too Stupid, Too Soon,” in After Sex?: On Writing Since Queer Theory, ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 66-78. 7 Castronovo, Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 4. 228 container of nation but also questions directions of influence. Hegemonic stories and myths are built out of over-determining directions; to reveal the constructed and false nature of these stuck compasses, scholars reveal cross-pollinations, reciprocities, and how the axes of north-south and east-west influence one another.8 Routes create and define space. Revealing motion as a methodology is part of the goal of the recent collection Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century

American Literary Studies in Motion. The scholarly “turn” is theorized in Hester Blum’s introduction as a kind of deviation that can be traced back; “[t]o turn is to have followed a path, a line of demarcation that has subsequently been altered.” A scholarly “turn” (or perhaps any turn) is usually attached to prepositions, like “toward” or “away,” as so many academic ventures

“require navigational language” (“new directions in geography”).9 To turn is also to acknowledge that “the terminus of that turn might be unknown or imagined,” Toward, however, necessarily posits an endpoint and derives its meaning from the idea of its terminus, not its present or continuous movement.

Chapter one centered on the use of some of the regularly recurring forms of creolization and creole life in the antebellum period. Focusing on the relationship of the southern tropics to the city, I hinted that tropical forms of contrast clashed with the seemingly deterministic shape of the Mississippi River. This chapter takes up not a form but a figure and a sensation, the movement of “toward,” or the more archaic “thither” (to or toward a place), and applies it not just to human movement but also to geological history. The focus of toward and thither, then, counters what is usually thought of as the pull of touristic and enchanting New Orleans, or the

8 Stephen Knadler, for example, looks beyond Delany’s actual sites in planning for emigration to argue that Central America was also a source for a “reciprocal . . . two-way circuit of labor migration and intellectual and cultural exchange” (30-31). See Knadler, Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2010). 9 Blum, Introduction to Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in Motion, ed. Blum (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016), 3, 4. 229 overdetermined nature of commerce and progress. Exoticism, which posits an agency such that its object seems to beckon visitors, is inverted by the frame of “toward,” of which the most important example in the nineteenth-century United States was the domestic (and illegal global) slave trade.

In Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man; His Masquerade New Orleans is the destination never reached. His cast of characters set off on April Fools’ Day on the steamboat

Fidéle down the Mississippi River. The Confidence-Man is much less a story of New Orleans than it is a story of the river, or that “moving concourse of nations.”10 Some critics argued there might/should have been a sequel, taking Melville’s final words literally, “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”11 Still, there is a wild thrust to the story, a desperation in the search for confidence that matches the sense of a voyage that has a predetermined but ominous end.

Gary Lindberg pays special attention to the prepositions of the final sentence of the novel:

“Melville does not need to tell us that something will follow after the Masquerade, for it is obvious that the Masquerade, which is simply our experience, will itself continue. But if we are more than willing than the barber to play with suppositions, something more than Melville has directly stated may follow from the Masquerade.”12 Lindberg suggests that understanding the limits of fiction and the social world is related to the orienting language of prepositions, or directions. Like his earlier Mardi; or, A Voyage Thither, Melville charted voyages wherein ships were forever approaching lands and destinations, real or imaginary. Fiction is always on its way somewhere, Melville seems to suggest, as he compares his Fidéle passengers to Chaucer’s pilgrims. With the same kind of nationalist fervor found throughout Moby-Dick, Melville describes the steamboat: “Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type

10 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1984), 39. 11 Melville, Confidence-Man, 251. 12 Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 18. 230 is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.”13 Jennifer Grieman’s gloss on this passage, often read as an ironic take of the myths of the West, emphasizes the unidirectional aspect of imagined plurality, “All the passengers’ activities of massing and dissolution, estrangement and judgment, accompany their relentless flow in a single direction.”

The actual “masquerade,” Grieman argues, is the fiction of the “democratic multitude” itself.14

Johnson’s study of the river’s “all-fusing Spirit” is focused on New Orleans as a terminus:

“Whatever currents of history—whatever desires and whatever fears—flowed through the imagery of the steamboat sublime, they culminated in the port of New Orleans.”15

Dashing, pouring, flowing, culminating—these are the words that describe the movement of “toward” in a very “confident tide.” Just as “turn” is having its academic vogue, prepositions have been key in a certain scholarly attitude. Both “toward” and “approach” connote a kind of hesitancy, a hopeful but humble expectation. A thoughtful and hopeful critic merely approximates, moves toward but doesn’t quite grasp the text with her approach; she suggests

“new directions” for inquiry. At the same time, any “approach” also raises the question of where one is coming from, what one brings with them, assumptions or anything else external to the text.

With these meanings of “literary approach” in mind, methodologies that spatialize interpretations such that an object of study is posited at a distance and the critic moves toward it, I proceed with a heightened consciousness of how the “confident tide” of reading proceeds toward New Orleans in the nineteenth century.

The two texts I consider below are, perhaps, an odd pairing. Lafcadio Hearn’s oceanic

13 Melville, Confidence-Man, 9. 14 Greiman, Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (New York: Fordham UP, 2010), Google Book Search. 15 Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013), 84. 231 and swampy ecological disaster in Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1888) and Martin Delany’s conspiratorial black nationalism in Blake; Or, the Huts of America (1859-1862) give us senses of disaster and apocalypse through their meditations and tropes of “toward.” Their biographical connections to New Orleans are quite different. Delany only visited New Orleans briefly in 1839, part of a Southern tour in which Delany was trying out Texas as a possible site for black settlement.16 He returned to the city during Reconstruction to speak at a political rally in Congo

Square, where he argued for “a pro rata of positions” for black politicians.17 Hearn, as peripatetic in thought and life as Delany, left Cincinnati and lived in New Orleans from 1877 to

1888, where he started writing for local newspapers, carving woodcuts and writing descriptions of daily life. He wrote Chita, his first fictional novella, after a trip to Louisiana’s coastline and tourist resort, Grand Isle, the same setting for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Hearn’s association with New Orleans, and with the West Indies, is his most well-known and only recently appreciated contribution to American literature. Hearn eventually ended up in Japan, continually searching for more and more exotic lands, and has been the subject of much scholarship there.18

Both writers were journalists interested in the non-biological sciences; both were interested in finding an elsewhere, either as a place to settle a population or a place to delight the imagination.

My turning “toward New Orleans” into a metaphor or heuristic for reading literature of two different periods shows the endurance of this trope, but I also find that each author employing the trope has a different sense of its effects and its possibilities. It is a “broad arrow on the map” that not only described a journey but signified arrival or near-arrival. Solomon

16 Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997), 25. 17 The black daily newspaper the Tribune argued that former slaves were the most needed representatives for Louisiana’s legislature. See Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 550. 18 For a Japanese perspective on Hearn’s popularity and importance, see Sukehiro Hirakawa, Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn: Japanese Legends, Life and Culture (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 1997). 232

Northrup, for example, made his experience in the city a definitive and memorable account of slavery-as-transit. Northrup, in his Twelve Years a Slave, has two “arrival[s] at New Orleans” (so his chapter descriptions indicate): his first night in the slave pen and his returning to the city in order to leave on a steamship. Even the most ecstatic moment of his regained freedom is figured as an approach to New Orleans. The city becomes the threshold for entering slavery and entering freedom. Of that second trip, Northrup recalls, “As the steamer glided on its way towards New-

Orleans, perhaps I was not happy—perhaps there was no difficulty in restraining myself from dancing round the deck—perhaps I did not feel grateful to the man who had come so many hundred miles for me—perhaps I did not light his pipe, and wait and watch his word, and run at his slightest bidding. If I didn’t—well, no matter.”19

This chapter tells both stories, follows the course of the overwhelming tide that always seems to be arriving in New Orleans, and pays attention to the moments that directions shift meaning. In Hearn’s and Delany’s novels, counter-maps are made, and counter-knowledge is made out of conflicting directions, where the river meets the gulf and meets bayous in and around New Orleans. Indeed, as Stephanie LeMenager argues about Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America, “Making the Mississippi River and its tributaries corridors of conspiratorial black ‘intelligence,’ Delany reclaims the market road that commodified African Americans and speaks directly to pervasive white fears about the permeability of the riverine South.”20

While my previous chapters have been (mostly) contained by historical logic and frames, this one departs from such contextualization in a way that matches its subject, where direction determines and informs space and time, rather than the other way around. New Orleans is an

19 Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 310. 20 Stephanie LeMenager, “Marginal Landscapes: Revolutionary Abolitionists and Environmental Imagination” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 7.1 (2005), 54. 233 important destination for many texts concerned with slavery’s pasts and futures—and I focus on just that, not as New Orleans as a setting but as a destination. What Chita and Blake have in common, not in context or purpose but in directions and direction-as-subject, is as important as their differences. After writing Chita, about the destruction of a coastline island by a hurricane,

Hearn wrote a fictional account of slave rebellion in Martinique. Fascinated by cultural and environmental ruin, Hearn was not unlike Delany who was inspired by terrestrial and cosmic versions of landscape possibly determining cultural change. Using these texts, with Stowe,

Northrup, Melville, and Twain filling in the general landscape, will I hope do more than prove

New Orleans’s centrality to or influence on a dominant Northeast point-of-view or canon. A concept of “toward New Orleans” reformulates what “influence” means, how and why it travels, like the so many tributaries into the Mississippi and toward New Orleans.

Lafcadio Hearn’s Chita and Disaster Creolization

“Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy” (Chita 10)

Antebellum travelers to New Orleans often documented the surprise of seeing masts and buildings emerge out of the treacherous journey through the low-lying river. Clichés about the cities bursting into view were employed, but the bend in the river literally created this landscape of sudden arrival and anticipated approach. There were “three approaches to the city” in the antebellum years. Elizabeth Urban Alexander explains that travelers could arrive via steamboat down the Mississippi, on steamboats from Mobile, or they could come in through the Gulf and have to be guided by an experienced pilot from the small ill-reputed town of La Balize, the oldest

French settlement in Louisiana. Muddy water from the river would block navigation, the same sediment build-up that created natural levees in the area. “Ships caught inside the river might be 234 delayed for months, while ships outside also had to wait patiently for the waters to subside and the entrance to deepen.”21 This was the way architect and engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe came to the city in 1819 from the northeast; he found La Balize, near where he was commissioned to build a lighthouse, desolate and miserable. (Latrobe died of yellow fever before construction began—his son would adopt his father’s plans but the building quickly settled into the soft ground.) La Balize would virtually stop operations by mid-century as steam and river travel increased in ease, and by 1860 a hurricane forced the town of pilots five miles upriver.22 In this case of literal access to New Orleans, two causes, environmental and industrial, came with ideas of both progress and destruction. As he recorded in his journal in 1819, “It is not easy to assign a cause for the present course of the Mississippi, although there is certainly an invincible necessity in the physical circumstances that belong to this mighty stream, which confines it to the present bed and forbids it to form any other.”23

Materially, the city and its surrounding regions made up an area connected through a series of weather and geological effects and changes. Craig Colten, offering an overview of the human battle against water in An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature, states simply but significantly, “New Orleans’s site makes it unique.”24 A site, as Colten uses the term, encapsulates a material understanding of place that has to do with interaction, and perhaps better shows the contingency of something so stable as a “city” or as amorphous as “region.”

Moreover, Colten’s book reveals just how much a city, seemingly the antithesis of nature, is in fact always working within it, with it, or against it. In historical work about New Orleans,

21 Elizabeth Urban Alexander, Notorious Woman: The Celebrated Case of Myra Clark Gaines (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001), 31. 22 As Lafcadio Hearn writes in Chita, “The magic of steam has placed New Orleans nearer to New York than to the Timbaliers, nearer to Washington than to Wine Island, nearer to Chicago than to Barataria Bay” (21). 23 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1905), 159-60. 24 Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005), 2. 235 geographer Pierce Lewis’s phrasing has caught on, especially since Hurricane Katrina; New

Orleans is “the inevitable city on the impossible site.”25 What made New Orleans attractive for

New World colonialism was also what made settlement’s future shaky.

Hearn’s Chita: A Memory of Last Island, first published in Harper’s in 1888, shows us this relationship of prospect and disaster by focusing on the non-human agency of the Gulf’s ocean. Chita takes place mainly in the Barataria Bay region of Louisiana, within a coastline fishing community, where once pilots lived and guided in ships. The short novel is about two disasters: a hurricane that wipes out an entire island and a yellow fever epidemic that repeats familial loss. Hearn tells the story of Last Island, or L’Ile Derniére, a vacation resort that was completely destroyed and mostly submerged in 1856. The loss of the island itself is as shocking as the human loss; the Picayune and other national newspapers reported that the storm took “the best classes of the population of Louisiana” and “made the whole place desolate forever.”26

Hearn’s story is not about one but multiple human and nonhuman journeys towards New

Orleans. I argue that despite Hearn’s lush and descriptive language usually indicative of tropical romanticism, and despite his fascination with death, he actually offers us a unique version of a creolization process accounts for events of disaster and destruction. Hearn is, in Chita, not only concerned with geography but with geology, the physical and non-biological world, and how communities are determined by it but can improvise against or with it.27 Only by appreciating the

25 See Scott Cowen, The Inevitable City: The Resurgence of New Orleans, ed. Scott Cowen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 26 See Evening Star, Washington, D.C., September 4, 1856, pg. 1. 27 See the collection Second Line Rescue: Improvised Responses to Katrina and Rita, ed. Barry Jean Ancelet, Marcia Gaudet, Carl Lindahi (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013). “The current displacement of people from New Orleans will produce new cultural combinations that we cannot even imagine yet,” writes contributor Ancelet (6). This focus on the cultural outcomes aligns with the telling phrase “from New Orleans.” “Toward” New Orleans, of course, tells a slightly different story and, thus, we see in Hearn and Delany more than cultural diffusion but an awareness of rootedness and routes relationship to one another. An important contribution to disaster criticism, the collection is unflinchingly optimistic. See Ancelet, “Storm Stories: The Social and Cultural Implications of Katrina and Rita,” Second Line Rescue, 3-29. 236 investment Hearn had in rethinking a non-human world, both biological and geological, can we appreciate what aspects of his story were not just mere “gothic narrative maneuvers” of describing terrifying storms and “geographic marginality.”28

In Hearn’s story, a supposedly true one he heard from his friend George Washington

Cable, a young girl’s wealthy creole parents are lost to the Last Island storm, and she is adopted into a community of “a swarthy population of Orientals,—Malay fishermen, who speak the

Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the

Catholic tradition of the Indies” (Chita 5). This fishing community reveals, Kirsten Silva Gruesz argues, “not some innate flavor of Spanishness left over from the colonial period, but something deeply rooted in hemispheric geopolitics.”29 A Spanish couple, Feliu Viosca and his wife

Carmen, rescues and takes in the blonde-hair, black-eyed Eulalie (Lili), effectively replacing their deceased infant child Conchita. As the newly named Chita adapts and thrives in her new home, Hearn reveals that her real father Julien has survived the storm and is living in New

Orleans, where he visits the graves of his wife, daughter, and himself. After experiencing more death in the Civil War, Julien, the “revenant,” becomes a doctor (Chita 65). In the last section of the novella, sixteen years after the storm, Julien travels to Viosca’s Point where he has been called to heal an old family friend who is, coincidentally, under the care of Feliu and Carmen.

Julien, however, has himself contracted yellow fever. Mad with sickness, he dies before he can question the family about Chita, who has the “smile of dead Adéle,” his wife and Chita’s mother

(Chita 102). As the “true story” goes, or as Hearn reports in a letter, “Chita” was brought back to

28 Kale Bantigue Fajardo, “Decolonizing Manila-Men and St. Maló, Louisiana: A Queer Postcolonial Asian American Critique,” in Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York: New York UP, 2016), 235. In Hearn’s “Saint Malo,” discussed below, Hearn specifically mentions the “weird landscaped painted with words by Edgar Poe—Silence: a Fragment” (56). 29 Gruesz, “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans,” American Literary History 18.3 (2006), 489. 237 city but, feeling stifled and unsuited for that life, returned to the fishing community that reared her. Hearn doesn’t supply this postscript in his novella. Instead, Chita ends with Carmen

Viosca’s ambiguous exclamation over Julien’s deathbed, “O Jesus misericordioso!—tened compassion de él! [Oh merciful Jesus!—you had compassion for him!]” (Chita 110). Hearn, however, keeps Julien coming and going in a sickly cosmopolitan world, while Chita thrives and sinks deeper into her new-found home. While this plot seems to reinforce the innocence and stability of remote communities, I argue that Hearn’s use of “toward New Orleans” in the storm’s movement reverses the direction of these colonialist tropes.

Hearn also goes beyond the charm and beauty of nature in Chita. In his earlier sketch of a similar community in an area of Louisiana called Saint Malo (wiped out by a hurricane in 1915),

Hearn was much more dependent on the picturesque: “Such is the land; its human inhabitants are not less strange, wild, picturesque.”30 He starts off this 1883 piece for Harper’s with the sense of the exotic: “The place of their lacustrine village is not precisely mentioned upon maps, and the world in general ignored until a few days ago the bare fact of their amphibious existence.”31 Like

Chita, “Saint Malo” is inspired by supposedly true events and Hearn’s own travels to this remote town. The sketch begins with a story that had made the unknown area familiar to “civilization”: that a woman had finally been brought to the all-male settlement. Her presence, Hearn writes, caused immediate dissension and violence. “And at least,” Hearn writes, “the elders of the people had restored calm and fraternal feeling by sentencing the woman to be hewn in pieces and

30 Hearn, “Saint Malo,” in Lafcadio Hearn’s America: Ethnographic Sketches and Editorials, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Lexington: U of Kentucky, 2002), 57. Hearn here describes a mainly Philippine settlement east of New Orleans. These communities seem to be started in the late eighteenth century by sailors that escaped or left Spanish ships. The region itself is named after the runaway slave Juan St. Malo, discussed briefly in my chapter one. Juan San Malo was the (supposed) leader of a band of maroons that operated for over a decade in the 1770s and 1780s. Gwendolyn Mildo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in 215-235. 31 Hearn, “Saint Malo,” 54. 238 flung to the alligators of the bayou.”32 Kale Bantigue Fajardo argues quite adamantly for Hearn’s

“orientalist colonial ethnographic and gothic cartography”: “As Hearn moves eastward, away from New Orleans, toward St. Maló, the racial and cultural gaps grow wider for the crew and passengers, as well as for the white bourgeois reading public [my emphasis].”33 However, I argue that Chita, written six years after this sketch, reverses that direction. Instead of moving

“away from New Orleans,” we readers start in the ocean and move toward the city, following not a geographical but a geological path that links New Orleans to the Antilles and even the

Philippines oceanic and historical currents. This doesn’t prevent Hearn completely from an ethnographic style but it changes the overall narrative of relation and invites an early version of theoretical creolization that is not cultural alone. Describing the forces of water and mud that create the New Orleans and Barataria region, from the city and out toward the Gulf, Hearn writes, “Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;— and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape” (Chita 10). Those living on “these Creole islands” do not fight against one environmental enemy but navigate and shape the two or more bodies of water.

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of local-color writing is its particular way of joining description and narrative. As I discussed with Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, many local-color plots are melodramatic, based on coincidence and character types. Such narratives make the stories easily digestible and sacrifice complexity of plot for background, detail, and character.

However, I would suggest that it is possibly Hearn’s thinking through plot, through the overlapping narratives of human life and death, as well as hurricane movement, that makes Chita different than the picturesque of “Saint Malo,” though some of the same language and details are

32 Ibid., 54. 33 Fajardo, “Decolonizing Manila-Men and St. Maló, Louisiana,” 236. 239 certainly reused by Hearn. In other words, while the sketch form has been seen by some to have its own kind of “freedom,” Hearn’s novella Chita gives us a sketch-like quality—even his prose is filled with dashes and ellipses—joined to a mysterious plot of overwhelming fullness, “the idea of one monstrous and complex life!” (Chita 83). This relation of narrative scope to hurried style is itself indicative of the preposition “toward.”34 Chita is quite short but it still undoes the equation of local-color with the short form, and realism with the novel.

When the almost-drowned Chita is rescued by Viosca and a small group of fisherman attempt to find out her history, but their once-pure Spanish and German languages are so far creolized that they would struggle if she was indeed of those backgrounds. Only one man can

“Talk gumbo to her” (Chita 54). She is one of the upper-class French-speaking creoles, an example of one of the many definitions of creole that Hearn uses throughout his Chita.

Throughout Chita Hearn uses “creole” as an adjective mostly referring to those that speak the creole language, but he also describes the Malay fisherman as speaking the “Spanish-Creole of the Philippines” (Chita 5). In the corpus of his work, his own use of creole shifts to suit his needs. In his 1877 piece on “Los Criollos,” Hearn was immediately interested in a comparative approach to the creole identity of both New Orleans and the Antilles and in the history of

Spanish conquest. In another piece on medicinal practices, he writes, “Finally, let me request the reader to observe that I have used the word ‘Creole’ only in its popular sense,--just as we used to say in slave days, a ‘Creole negro,’ or as we say to-day, a ‘Creole egg.’”35 Perhaps most

34 Gregg Camfield discusses sentimental traditions and “relative freedom of the genre of the sketch” (58). See Camfield, “The Sentimental and Domestic Traditions, 1865-1900,” in A Companion to American Fiction, 1865- 1914, ed. Robert Paul Lamb, G. R. Thompson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 53-76. “As a character- rather than plot-centric form, the sketch isolates finer moment of interpersonal exchange, moments that, in their casual everydayness, signify the repetition and constancy through which intimacy is produced and enhanced over time” (303). See Travis M. Foster, “How to Read: Regionalism and the Ladies’ Home Journal,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castonovo (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 291-308. 35 Hearn, Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. S. Frederick Starr (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001), 70. 240 significant, Hearn’s Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave (1890) contains an early use of the word “creolization,” though he doesn’t mean a creative process as today’s theorists do but, instead, describes creole degeneration due to the environment.36 In his description of the fishing community of Chita, Hearn begins to understand creole as a particular relationship to place and, further, an “affinity” for physical environment, not just romantic nature or “sense of place.”37 I want to suggest that Hearn takes this experience of a more geological, physical understanding of place to create ethical links between storms, disease, families, and culture. Moreover, as the storm at Last Island literally changes the shape of the coastline, Hearn understands a directional environmental process of renewing combinations. This attention to environment not as merely mysteriously dangerous but as destructive, the idea of disaster not as human but as inhuman, and the particular plot and style of Chita I see as providing answers for the question posed of Hearn by Bill Hardwig: “How then should we reconcile the seemingly contrasting perspectives of

Hearn, one as living in a retrogressive cloud of Orientalist fantasy and the other as celebrating the core ideas behind the progress and ‘liberatory’ creolization/hybridity theories, such as those of [Édouard] Glissant and Homi Bhabha?”38

Throughout his writing and personal correspondence, Hearn stresses the importance of

36 Michael Wiedorn discusses Chris Bongie’s claim that this was the first documented use of the word, but Wiedorn provides examples of much earlier uses. See Wiedorn, “Death and the Creole Maiden: Do Chita and Youma Haunt Today’s Creolization,” International Journal of Francophone Studies 17.3-4 (2014), 374-75. 37 Carolyn Allen argues that “Perhaps more important than race, then is the Creole’s affinity to place, having intimate knowledge of it and being committed to it by experience and or attachment” (53). Allen, “Creole: The Problem of Definition,” in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, ed. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2002), 47-63. A focus on the Caribbean ecologies also challenges what we mean by “sense of place”: “Given the multiple ethnic settlements in the Caribbean, and the continuing pattern of diaspora and outmigration, how does a writer achieve a sense of place?” (21). See Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, Introduction to Caribbean Literature and Environment, 1-30. 38 Hardwig, Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013), Google Book Search. 241 scientific knowledge and the limitations of Christian thought. As David Miller examines at some length, Hearn was interested in developments in evolutionary theory and, thus, in reckoning with nature’s seeming agency. Such knowledge, as Hearn wrote, challenged a solely “humanly-ethical point of view.”39 Hearn’s interest in the entanglements of science and art continued to grow, as he began collecting folklore in a manner influenced by the cataloguing and detail-oriented aspects of science. In a 1905 review of Hearn, another student and recorder of Japanese culture wrote of the writer, “Never perhaps was scientific accuracy of detail married to such tender and exquisite brilliancy of style.”40

Hearn came from Cincinnati to New Orleans in 1877 to escape a ruined reputation after he married a mixed-race woman. He first covered New Orleans life for a Cincinnati paper and eventually got a job at the New Orleans Times-Democrat. Many note his important friendship with George Washington Cable since it supposedly offered up the original story of Chita, but perhaps one of his most significant friendships was with salonstress Leona Queyrouze. With her help and the help of her maid-servant Marie, originally from Martinique, Hearn translated Creole folktales and proverbs into English and learned of a broader creole life.41 After capitalizing on the emerging taste for folklore, Hearn turned to fiction, wrote Chita, and then traveled as a correspondent in 1887 to Martinique. After two years there, Hearn settled in Japan to teach and publish. Collecting creole recipes and proverbs, published in Gombo Zhébes and La Cuisine

Creole (1885), prepared Hearn for the same kinds of folklore work he would do in Japan.

Both of Hearn’s novels, Chita and Youma are disaster stories, one about a hurricane and

39 Qtd. in David Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989), 241. 40 Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (London: John Murray, 1905), 65. 41 See Donna M. Meletio, Leona Queyrouze (1861): Louisiana French Creole Poet, Essayist, and Composer (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2005), 29. 242 the other about a slave revolt at Martinique. I use the term “disaster” broadly in order to account for the overlap Hearn saw in all varieties of non-human agency and human loss. Hearn was interested in the apocalyptic aspects of both events and the overwhelming, disorderly sense of both ocean and mob. The extended account of the take-over of the island in Youma echoes

Hearn’s own writing scene, as he locked himself away from a yellow fever epidemic,

“Barricaded within their homes, the whites of the lower city could hear the tumult of the gathering . . . . Masters and slaves alike were haunted by a dream of blood and fire,--the memory of Hayti.”42 I pose these accounts against the etymology of creole, with comes from the Latin

“creare,” to create.43 Syncretisms were not always safe or generative, Hearn shows us in Chita, and at least not in the ways creolization theorists have come to celebrate with the general sense that “[c]reolization is cultural creativity in process.”44 Concepts of “emergence” are challenged in Hearn by considering the nonhuman social world against creolization as a cultural phenomenon alone. I do not mean, however, to simply pose Hearn in alliance with the opposite, the myth of creole degeneration. Hearn’s disaster creolization does not move backward but accounts for the constant process of destruction as well as creation. It is not a longing for the past but a problem of the present with a posited destination; hence, the return of Conchita as Chita and the problem of living over and over through death that Julien confronts when he thinks about the burden his being a revenant of sorts puts on his social world: “They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking to much to demand a repetition” is one of the only thoughts that keeps Julien from suicide (Chita 64).

A consensus on whether or not Hearn relies too greatly on exotic modes in his constant

42 Hearn, Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 154. 43 See Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006), 8. 44 Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara, Introduction to Creolization as Cultural Creativity (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012), 3. As notions of creolization become more universal, possibly applicable to all cultures, there is 243 search for the “new” is difficult to reach, especially since Hearn worked in so many genres and forms, sometimes embracing a local-color whimsy and other times providing extensive footnotes to show his detailed research. While we concern ourselves with these human ethics in questions of “Orientalist fantasy” or “creolization/hybridization,” ecocritics have encouraged us to think about issues of exoticism and conquest as part of changing relations with the physical world. In the same way that Hearn’s all-inclusive view of the world tends toward a kind of fetishization of maybe-disappearing cultures and mulatta women especially, Timothy Morton has described a similar practice in nature writing. “Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar,” Morton writes in Ecology Without Nature, “does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman.”45 Hearn is certainly guilty of this kind of “sadistic admiration” of all-male culture in “Saint Malo,” and, in Chita of getting lost in the ocean’s violence and fixating on tropical plants’ ability to survive a landscape of human death. However, I argue that Hearn’s characters all confront a wholeness that embraces the “toward” motion of creolization that accounts for culture’s relationship to disaster, as well as newness.46

While most of my previous chapters focus on urban New Orleans, Hearn brings us to regard New Orleans’s urban development in tandem with its peripheries. In “Saint Malo,” for example, though Hearn continually emphasizes that civilization knows not of this watery place,

“nevertheless this life in the wilderness of reeds is connected mysteriously with New Orleans, where the headquarters of the Manila men’s benevolent society are—La Union Philippina.”47

More than any other popular local-color location, Louisiana bayous and plantation settings were

45 Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007), 5. 46 This kind of temporal motion should be compared to new theorists of creolization and its abstraction in conjunction with postmodernism. “[T]he temporality of the creole for all of them is one of a present that moves towards the future, and decidedly not one of the present as a sick, lingering vestige of the past” (Wiedorn, “Death and the Creole Maiden,” 388). 47 Hearn, “Saint Malo,” 59. 244 still tethered to a city, to New Orleans.48 The storm on Last Island mainly affected the vacationers from New Orleans or surrounding plantations. The storm arrives late in the resort season, on a final night of dancing in an aristocratic hotel, which the hurricane wipes out, “What are human shrieks now?—the tornado is shrieking!” These lost are the “pleasure-seekers,— representing the wealth and beauty of the Creole parishes” (Chita 24). This is the creole family from which Chita comes. But Feliu and Carmen Viosca are part of a fishing settlement that was built by piling up a “hill of clam-shells” so the earth could form over it with the help of worms

(Chita 36). Their population, after turning the “the fishing station” into a “permanent settlement” still “retained a floating character: it ebbed and came, according to season and circumstances, according to luck or loss in the tilling of the sea” (36). Feliu and Carmen live in one of the many

“homes constructed of heavy timber and plaster mixed with the trailing moss of the oaks and cypresses” (36). That Hearn depicts these people as intertwined with the ocean and its vegetation is not exactly condescension; they are not clinging to disappearing nature or culture but, instead, surviving disaster.49

As I’ve stated, Chita begins in the ocean. Making his way slowly through a large portion of the novel toward his character-based plot, Hearn describes the sky and the sea before spending paragraphs on jellyfish. If you venture out into the ocean alone and feel something rush by you,

Hearn writes, “Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also” (Chita 15). Only when you venture out with others can you ignore “the long,

48 “The city’s economic success depended on a thriving agricultural hinterland, and without adequate flood protection neither city nor hinterland could survive” (Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis, 20). Curiously, in the group of late-nineteenth century writers of New Orleans, Cable was one of the only ones who did not describe scenes outside of the actual city. 49 Adam Rothman argues that the loss of Last Island is a “synecdoche of the fallen South” (118), but Hearn seems little concerned with the Confederate South; his push outward into the Gulf, past New Orleans, pushes the very conception of the direction-derived name. See Rothman, “Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean,” in New Orleans in the Atlantic World: Between Land and Sea, ed. William Boelhower (New York: Routledge, 2010). 245 quivering, electrical caresses of the sea” (Chita 16). Everywhere is “primitive flora as yet undecided whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume terrestrial ones;—and the occasional inspection of surprising shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time” (Chita 35). This is not the edenic tropics, but a zone of movement and change. Despite the “floating” movement, though, the hurricane will show the

“irresistible invasion” of the ocean toward the land. The boat that will get caught in the storm right at the shore sits as the only remains of Last Island, with “weed-grown ribs” on its “graceful skeleton” (Chita 30).

Hearn saw the erosion and disappearance of coastal towns by reversing the steam-driven direction that Mark Twain and others made so familiar in his fiction, that the slave trade had made so familiar, and by adopting the direction of Gulf storm travel, a reminder of a nondomestic course of culture and geology. Hearn starts, instead, by moving away from New

Orleans, continuing past it, taking the energy of “toward New Orleans” further than the common traveler would be comfortable. The first sentence of Chita fulfills yet surpasses expectations by continuing south, “Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways” (Chita 3). Hearn guides the reader downward through the collection of towns built up around small rivulets, to Grand Isle, the popular vacation resort of The Awakening, where “negro-quarters remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests” (Chita 8). Travelling still farther, Hearn recalls Last

Island, once the “most fashionable watering-place of the aristocratic South” (Chita 8). He knows that Grand Isle is next at risk as the coastline disappears, and the pursuit of New Orleans is emphasized from the ocean’s perspective, not the traveller’s: “the sea is devouring the land. 246

Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless changing of Ocean’s cavalry” (Chita

9). Last Island provides a narrative warning that can only be seen by changing the starting point of “toward New Orleans.” “Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,—slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone!” (Chita 11).

Such meditation on land loss was widespread in regional writing of this period, though usually this conservationist aesthetic was directed at ways of life romantically attached to

“nature.” Disappearing but persisting (subsisting, perhaps) communities and manners offered entertainment but were hardly rallying calls for reform in these kinds of fiction nor did they confront utter destruction. Kate Chopin, for example, might have depicted the lower class populations of rural Louisiana with respect (though wavering) and a sympathy beyond pity; but, if she was concerned with a vanishing and struggling population, she did not seem to offer alternative solutions in her fiction, though she did offer glimpses of examining the causes, the relationship of plantation to city, the effects of cosmopolitanism and capitalism. Hearn, more than romanticizing the unstable power of the ocean against humanity, attempts to return various landscapes and human networks to their environmental causes, factors, and relations by describing the foundling’s new home within the fishing community.

Overall, the narrative structure of Chita doesn’t follow the course of civilization or exactly reverse it. “Toward” is a concept of desire but it is also an oceanic and a riverine one in

Chita. In describing the hurricane of 1856, Hearn did not precisely predict the destruction of

“The Great October Storm” of 1893, but he seemed to presage it just by attending to the subject, as he did the Saint Malo hurricane of 1915. The 1893 hurricane would be the “deadliest disaster in Louisiana’s history” with a toll after the storm surge that reached above two thousand dead. 247

This storm wiped out the town of Cheniere Caminada, yet another island of the Barataria region and the subject of Kate Chopin’s “At Cheniere Caminada,” a sort of prequel to The Awakening.

Criticizing the “historical amnesia that pervades American publics,” Cedric Johnson reminds us of this, and other nineteenth-century disasters, that rival Katrina in their destruction, and suggests the spatial and temporal enormity of the problem and the failures of neoliberal governance.50

It’s tempting to read back and find a clear history of vulnerabilities and accidents after

Hurricane Katrina; these “approaches” to the past can seem anachronistic, but as Hearn shows, and as Delany shows in different ways discussed below, concerns about the disappearance of

New Orleans were environmental. Additionally, physical environmental questions coincided with other disasters and epidemics, especially yellow fever and slavery (or its aftermath). For years writers marveled at the perilous layout of New Orleans and its accompanying risky behaviors and bubbling insurrectionary potentials, slave rebellions and filibustering. They saw that the relationships amongst all these factors were not mere metaphors or only pathetic fallacies. For Kate Chopin, storms were central to a way of feeling and remembering. In The

Awakening (1899), having Edna’s story begin and end in Grand Isle was a clue to what would be

“short-lived” about her journey to self-discovery and actualization. Such readings, as Barbara

Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke perform, allow us to see “how great storms powerfully reverberate, transforming the meanings of fiction as well as the significance and contours of people’s lives.”51

Adam Rothman argues that much of Hearn’s journalistic writing unites both tropicality and Orientalism, as he describes the fading creole society in “dreamy nostalgia.” Rothman

50 Johnson, Introduction to The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011), xix. 51 Ewell and Menke, “The Awakening and the Great October Storm of 1893,” Southern Literary Journal 42.2 (2010), 2. 248 quotes from one of Hearn’s pieces for the Cincinnati Commercial that describes the “splendid indolence and the splendid sins of the old social system which has passed, or which is now passing away forever.”52 The loss of a culture and an “old social system” was not, however, the same as the ecological loss. Rothman is right that Hearn found in Louisiana’s fishing archipelagos a “more primitive, organic way of living.”53 In the tropics Rothman finds Hearn further developing a more binaristic take on the natural and the human world, where the tropical environment is both “fecund” but also “degenerative,” giving and taking away.54 However, Chita does not adopt these adjectives in ways that correspond to cultural success. Chita, growing up beside the ocean, “wonder[s] at the multiform changes of each swell as it came in— transformations of tint, of shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, and spectral” (Chita 83). Instead of thinking binaristically of growth and decay, life and death, Chita shows a more complex interconnected relationship between “subtle” concepts, the figural and the in-motion.

Thus, I argue, Hearn’s version of Louisiana creole wrestles with not just the ever- renewing aspects of creolization but with a temporality that is still “toward” something, but perhaps “toward” a cycle of destruction and creation. Hybridization of culture certainly occurs in

Chita, but it is not derived from two pure ethnic ideals; instead, the process of moving forward contains something of the horror of combination. Hearn describes Chita’s memory of God as the beginning to a description of her adaptation to the “life on the coast.” Hearn tells us that Chita’s

“idea of God had been first defined by the sight of a quaint French picture of the Creation.”

Though this picture is quaint, the description is nothing like that. Hearn’s description is

52 Qtd. in Adam Rothman, “Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans and the Caribbean,” in New Orleans in the Atlantic World: Between Land and Sea, ed. William Boelhower (New York: Routledge, 2010), 116. 53 Rothman, “Lafcadio Hearn,” 117. 54 Rothman, “Lafcadio Hearn,” 120. 249 confusing, since this picture is one of a “shoreless sea” with an anthropomorphized god emerging from it, “bearded gray head” and all. This is not the only disturbing combination; in fact, this binary of the “shoreless sea” and the man that looked like “Doctor de Coulanges, who used to visit the house, and talk in a voice like a low roll of thunder.” Instead, there is something even larger than the representation of sea and bearded man, something that engulfs even this vision of the natural world and the heavenly world opposed. “At a later day, when Chita had been told that God was ‘everywhere at the same time’—without and within, beneath and above all things,--this idea became somewhat changed. The awful bearded face, the huge shadowy hand, did not fade from her thought; but they became fantastically blended with the larger and vaguer notion of something that filled the world and reached to the stars,--something diaphanous and incomprehensible like the invisible air, omnipresent and everlasting like the high blue of heaven” (Chita 77). It’s unclear if this “later day” means Chita’s time with Feliu and Carmen, but the language of “diaphanous and incomprehensible” certainly corresponds to Hearn’s description of the jellyfish movement of the ocean. This is not the greenery and anthropomorphism that similarly challenges the equation of these “floating” people with

“nature.”55 In a long passage devoted to Chita’s journey to understand “the life of the coast,”

Hearn offers a description of an almost lifeless world “of tint, of shape, of motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the strange cold life of lizards and of fishes” (Chita 83).

The sea is “incandescence ruining into darkness . . . a luminous billowing under a black sky”

(Chita 81). These are not the “natural settings” of “natural country ease.”56 If Hearn relies

55 See Dana Luciano’s discussion of “alternate sensory possibilities” and “unmak[ing] the ‘human’ body toward another mode of being in the world,” or the “pre- and the post-human” (271-272, 297). See Luciano, “Geological Fantasies, Haunting Anachronies: Eros, Time, and History in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s ‘The Amber Gods,’” ESQ 55.3-4 (2009), 269-303. 56 For the overlapping ideas of nature and human “nature,” see Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001), 12. 250 heavily on dense description, these descriptions are mostly about knowledge, rather than mere sensory experience.

Hearn’s vision of creolization is weighted with creations that approach nothingness and oblivion, or forgetfulness; it is forward moving but it is not always “toward” a teleological or progressive vision of civilization. He reminds us that if creolization is a process forever renewing, it is not without non-human agency, both creative and violent. One example of Chita’s exploration of her island community illustrates this process. After Chita has become naturalized to her new environment, she ventures out to a forbidden part of the swamp where Carmen had told her not to go. Finding a tomb there, she peers inside the “black hole” to find “A brown head—without hair, without eyes, but with teeth, ever so many teeth!—seemed to laugh at her; and close to it sat at Toad.” It is the skeleton of a “Spanish fisherman” from the “early days of settlement,” that has been largely forgotten, a “sepulchre” that many have forgotten or continue to avoid. Even the human remnants of death are not quite dead enough; the gravesite itself is crumbling. “There was a ragged hole at one end, where wind and rain, and perhaps also the burrowing of crawfish and of worms, had loosened the bricks, and caused them to slide out of place” (Chita 75). (A similar description is given to a vault that Julien contemplates as he meditates on suicide, “under the continuous burrowing of crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall” [Chita 65].) Disturbed by the images, Chita runs home in tears.

“To the vivid fancy of the child there seemed to be some hideous relation between the staring reptile and the brown death’s-head, with its empty eyes, and its nightmare-smile” (Chita 75).

Such an experience, where she detects “some hideous relation,” is a grasp at oceanic wholeness.

As such, Chita is like Glissant’s “errant,” one who “conceives of totality but willingly renounces 251 any claims to sum it up or to possess it.”57 The sea, Hearn writes, offered her “the idea of a unity of will . . . the idea of one monstrous and complex life” (Chita 83). Chita the foundling (“Perhaps she has ceased to belong to any one else” [Chita 50]), the “floating character” of the fishing village, and even Julien the “revenant” are all without steady roots.

George B. Handley argues that “the best of ecocriticism helps us to see the artificiality of separating one form of ethics from the other and challenges us to identify and critique neocolonialisms as well as how these discourses might still offer salutary relationships to the environment.”58 It is my contention that Hearn’s positioning of the skeleton from “the early days of settlement” tries to tell this story; that some of the paths of “nature,” like that of the hurricane, are trailing or informing the paths of human settlement moving “toward” New Orleans. Thus,

Hearn helps us see the connection between human and environmental cycles as related ethical problems, especially when Chita finally turns to disease as a semi-natural disaster. In the nineteenth century, yellow fever was always associated with climate, and, as hinted at in my first chapter, climate was thought to determine culture. In New Orleans many thought that the cause of yellow fever had something to do with contamination, and, thus, with poor water quality. The struggle with water was, thus, both a natural and an urban problem. In actual fact, the fever’s cause was mosquitos; those vectors were indeed attracted to standing water, a problem in urban

New Orleans equal to the flooding problem.59

Hearn accounts for a kind of “poetics of oblivion” (Handley’s term) that extends beyond

57 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997), 21. 58 George B. Handley, New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007), 26. 59 See Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005), 36. 252 our understandings of a divide between culture and environment.60 As the Viscoa family tries to find Lili’s/Chita’s family, they find that “Sea and sand had either hidden or effaced all the records of the little world they had engulfed” (Chita 59). Among other descriptions of nothingness, retold in various ways: the sea, God, the Virgin, the communities wiped away,

Hearn does not just depict a quaint society where a straight timeline allows for a frozen civilization worth preserving against gradual disappearance. This constant insistence on unknowing, on nothingness, and on coming back from the dead is intertwined with the creativity of the bayou “south from New Orleans” community. Still, the scrambles of time, the dead coming back to life, and the dead skeletons beside toads that Hearn uses for his narrative sequencing are no match for the hurricane’s teleological force toward New Orleans. The thrust of toward creates a direction that can be traced back to the ecological consequences of travel and expansion.

Blake and the Affect of an Ending

Scholars have been recently interested in the overlap of slavery’s effects on physical landscapes and that landscape’s effect on slaves’ lives. For example, studies of the Caribbean plot system, whereby slaves were allowed their own land to plant food or gardens, have been read “as the foundation of a specific approach to nature and environmental conservation in the Caribbean that would allow the return to a pre-encounter ecological balance.”61 One of the risks of studying the ways slaves (or indigenous people) cohabitated with or used the ecological systems is reducing

60 “Because New World history has blocked historigraphic access to much of its evidence, historical reconstruction would benefit from a poetics that acknowledges that whatever the contours of a total history might look like, the past can only be known in its remnant parts” (Handley, New World Poetics, 45). 61 Paravisini-Gebert, “‘He of the Trees,’” 185. Simon Gikandi further argues that sometimes these plots were used to communicate and enjoy “aesthetic and moral value,” by the planting of ornamental, not nourishing, plants. See Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011), 239. 253 them to nature, and thus implying the distance of whiteness from nature, a supposedly better position from which to master and control land. Not only was the pastoralism of slavery misrepresentation in terms of slavery’s implied ethical human peacefulness and care, but such images also covered up what plantation slavery did to its environment and resources. As Jeffery

Myers points out, for example, “Both the bodies of slaves and the pine forests of the American

Southeast had to be exploited in order to make the fortunes—and the culture—that cotton and tobacco plantations made possible.”62 This truth of a ruined landscaped started to become more visible after the Civil War when plantation literature began to break down “the very dichotomy between natural and human histories.”63

Martin Delany’s attention to the non-human world had little to do with the natural world, the swampy and plantation atmospheres one is used to seeing as settings for literature about slavery. In Blake: Or, the Huts of America the protagonist Henry/Blake rejects the science and revolutionary potential of the conjurers in the Dismal Swamp and turns, instead, to celestial bodies and movement. More interested in the planetary and cosmic, Delany has Henry, his fugitive protagonist, explain to slaves how to map the coordinates of the North Star. These chapters appeared in the same issue of the Anglo-African Magazine as Delany’s nonfiction essay on “The Attraction of Planets.” Britt Rusert argues that Delany’s interest in the attractions of planets is linked to the movement of fugitivity: “Delany explores how various fugitive bodies, which constantly exceed the restrictive boundaries of the human, become vectors of force and affect change in the world, a world that stretches beyond the South, beyond the nation-state, and

62 Myers, “Other Nature: Resistance to Ecological Hegemony in Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘The Conjure Woman,’” African American Review 37.1 (2003), 6. 63 Handley, New World Poetics, 23. 254 reaches across the cosmos.”64 Robert Levine suggests that these particular interests in cosmic science came from Delany’s general expertise in the sciences—he worked as a medical doctor— but also from his long Masonic affiliation.65 Delany is less interested in life sciences, part of an overall effort to reject the leading sciences of racial(ist) science of the period.

Delany’s essay “The Attraction of Planets” was published in the Anglo-African in the same issues with the first excerpts from Blake. Those excerpts, chapters twenty-eight through thirty, ending with “The Pursuit,” were an out-of-order teaser. The following issue contained the chapters one through five, as well as the essay “Comets,” wherein Delany describes a theory of energy and movement: “the comet . . . has a continuous succession of accelerated motions, every center it approaches impelling it onward in its course.”66 I argue that this “continuous succession of accelerated motions” is the kind of mobility Delany develops for his hero in Blake, who appears on the scene (if you start reading at chapter one) after his wife Maggie has been sold away from their Louisiana plantation. After he learns this news, Henry denounces white men, religion, and slavery, and says he will “‘stand still’ no longer.”67 From that moment, Henry traverses the southern states spreading an ambiguous secret and encouraging slaves to build networks of communication from plantations to swamps to major cities. After he leads his own family to freedom in Canada, Henry finds employment on a slave ship heading Cuba where he expects to find his wife. In the latter half of the novel, readers find out that Henry has actually

64 Rusert, “Delany’s Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation,” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013), 814. Rusert cites Gilles Deleuze and argues that “In addition to the standard narrative of a slave becoming a ‘man’ (becoming-human), Blake is composed of a series of other becomings” (820). Another pleasing meeting between my reading of Blake’s use of mobility and Rusert’s study of fugitivity is her article’s final subtitle, “Toward A Fugitive Science” (822). 65 Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003), 313. 66 “Comets” in Martin R. Delany, 313. Jerome McGann mentions that storms are especially important “Natural” events that drive providential aspects of Blake’s plot (87). See McGann, “Rethinking Delany’s Blake,” Callaloo 39.1 (2016), 80-95. 67 Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 21. Subsequent citations provided in-text. 255 been all along Henricus Blacus, a West Indian free man of color, born to wealthy planter. While in Cuba, Blake (as he is known in the second half of the story) joins with an organization of slaves and free mulattos plotting insurrection. Most infamously, the gathering energy of the final plot ends abruptly, the reader never knowing whether or not violence breaks out, or what

Delany’s fictional plan for Cuba could have been.

Henry/Blake’s movement has been the focus of most scholarship on the novel. Judith

Madera argues, for example, that “[t]hrough geographic discourse, Delany drew attention to white territorial practices precisely so that he might decode and reconstruct spaces for black passage.”68 Mobility is seen as a form of resistance, white territorial practices being a stable background that erases traces of movement. However, I would suggest that we also take heed of

Mark Simpson’s important critique of any easy championing of mobility itself. Simpson reminds us that mobility itself was capable of becoming hegemony. In the nineteenth century, he argues,

“Treating mobility as the key to national temperament became habitual, even hegemonic, serving to bind together two traits supposedly intrinsic to ‘the American’: the need to move (freedom as geographical expansiveness) and the need to rise (freedom as social uplift).”69 I suggest then, that these are the reasons Henry’s vector-like movement seems so abstract in Blake, as Delany tries to divorce his project from all other forms of forced migration.

Blake’s serial publication also allows Delany a version of “toward” that informs both the novel’s spatiality and Delany’s related politics of black emigration, a concept we might also rethink or reverse through this lens of “continuous succession of accelerated motions.” Blake keeps an important question in abeyance, the question that Michelle Ann Stephens raises about

68 Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Durham: Duke UP, 2015), 74. 69 Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005), xxv. 256

“black empire” fiction throughout the nineteenth century, “Is the route to black freedom one of mobility or stasis—the constant, growing movement in search of a black state or the determined location of that state in a particular territory?”70 My argument about “toward” might obviously favor or be more attuned to see the former option in Blake, like Rebecca Skidmore Biggio’s suggestion that, “Rather than insurrection or emigration, the ultimate goal for Delany is a cohesive separatist community prepared to command its own destiny.”71 However, what makes

Blake even more complicated is that uprising and emigration don’t necessarily align in time or space; they do not have an easy cause and effect relationship. They are, in Blake, separate though related issues and this gap is where “toward” emerges.72 In Delany’s non-fiction writing, emigration was discussed more practically and as an elective project for the betterment of black lives; in Blake, emigration is an issue less practical and only half-imagined. Community in Blake requires different kinds of assembly, evidenced by the seriality, pace, and condensations of time in Blake itself.

Delany changed his mind many times about the proper site for emigration. Or, rather, he was forced to consider the reality that particular locations wouldn’t work as he paid close attention to the conditions and changes within certain regions or countries. He also quarreled with those abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who advocated colonization of Liberia.

Delany’s plans for emigration were not exactly meant to leave the United States or citizenship behind. As Delany envisioned it, his emigration plan for Liberia was part of a commercial enterprise best suited for the enlightened and enterprising. As Robert S. Levine summarizes,

“Delany can be refreshingly inconsistent in his beliefs and actions, arguing at one moment for a

70 Stephens, Blake Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914- 1962 (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), 60. 71 Biggio, “The Specter of Conspiracy in Martin Delany’s Blake,” African American Review 42.3-4 (2008), 443. 72 “The plan for freedom in Blake lies beyond either insurrection or accommodation . . . Blake is arguing the necessity of emigrating from white racist America, emigrating ‘to Afraka’” (McGann, “Rethinking,” 89). 257 black nationalism linked to U.S. nationalism, at other moments for a Pan-Africanism that dissolves a politics of racial integrationism when that politics seems possible and useful.”73 The point is that Delany tried many different geographical options, in reality and in fiction.

Delany’s commitment to search the hemisphere for his black empire, in fact, interrupted the publication of Blake, so that the novel’s second half had to be published in another magazine, the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. The complex publication history make it difficult to align episodes of Blake with any biographical impetus, especially when it’s unclear whether or not Delany had already written all installments or was continuing to write into 1861.74 According to Levine, the majority of the novel was composed between 1856 and 1859, but Delany might have started writing the narrative in 1852. Shifts in thought, shifts in Delany’s own literal place in the world, are reflected in Blake and are responses to the turbulent changes in the possibilities for slaves and black free men to build and sustain communities.

Many scholars cited within this chapter have elucidated ways that considering different repetitions, patterns, and effects of the print history of Blake should affect our readings. Katy

Chiles argues that the palimpsest of time and space created by the parallel content in the magazine matched Delany’s “nation within a nation” scheme: “Delany presents a nation-state in which local, regional, national, and transnational figurations overlap and permeate each other.”75

Again, Blake first appeared in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859. Those first out-of-order chapters depict a transition in the plot, wherein we see Henry and his family attempting to escape

73 Levine, Introduction to Martin R. Delany, 6. 74 The temporal and other forms of messiness—plot, character, and setting—could be read as a response to an often unstable publishing world for African American writers, as a series of poorly constructed plots composed under the duress of chaotic conditions. However, John Ernest encourages readers to reconsider an aesthetics of chaos as a particular antebellum African American style and community standard. See John Ernest, “The Art of Chaos: Community and African American Literary Traditions” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 27-41. 75 Katy Chiles, “Within and Without Raced Nations: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or, The Huts of America,” American Literature 80.2 (2008), 325. 258 on a steamship on their way to Canada. These chapters may have been introduced first because as a set they have the suspense of a traditional slave narrative. However, the Anglo-African claimed that they are not offered as a sample “because of their particular interest above the others, but that they were the only ones the author would permit us to copy.”76 The family is captured, with “blasted prospects for liberty” ending these chapters (Blake 149). The next month, the Anglo-African started publication from chapter one, ending with chapter twenty-three, “The

Rebel Blacks,” or the chapter wherein we see the aftermath of a failed New Orleans insurrection.

“Blasted prospects” continue into the next chapter when readers are presented with two other extreme options of community, the “Brown Society” of light-skinned uplift in Charleston and the

Dismal Swamp of conjurers.

As Martha Schoolman notes, the Anglo-African version of Blake, if we consider it as a separate entity, “is marked by a sense of thwarted possibility,” ending first with “The Pursuit,” and, then, in New Orleans.77 The whites of the city congratulate themselves on effectively and keenly discovering the bubbling rebellion in New Orleans before it boils over, but they then impart stricter regulations on slaves and free people of color. The final paragraph of the New

Orleans chapters discusses these punishments, but with Delany’s strange temporal marking and dangling modifier, it’s unclear where in the timeline of the novel the stunted rebellion’s aftermath takes place. In other words, narration has already left New Orleans behind. Henry himself leaves New Orleans for Mobile, and “admonishe[s] as his parting counsel, to ‘stand still and see the salvation’” (Blake 108). The timing of the New Orleans insurrection was apparently wrong; although Henry proclaims early in the novel that he will stand still no longer, he also appropriates the biblical Exodus’s command to “stand still and see the salvation” as a password

76 Qtd. in Chiles, “Within and Without,” 328. 77 Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014), 10. 259 and instruction for his insurrection plan. Thus, the final paragraphs of New Orleans aftermath confuse our expectations of how the narrator should fill in the story for the reader: “Taking fresh alarm at this incident, the municipal regulations have been most rigid in a system of restriction and espionage toward Negroes and mulattoes, almost destroying their self-respect and manhood, and certainly impairing their usefulness” (Blake 108). These final words communicate Delany’s equation of readiness for “salvation” to a kind of masculine self-enlightenment, “self-respect” and “usefulness,” characteristics Delany discusses elsewhere.78 Those taking “fresh alarm” are absent from the action of the above sentence, with one of Delany’s rarely noted disorienting clauses. The narration skips from updating the reader on what happened in New Orleans to a present perfect tense, used to express a past event that has current (or ever-current) consequences. In other words, the sentence reads as if the narration zooms out of the diegetic terms previously set and to Delany’s present extra-diegetic reality.

This is a rare moment in the whole of Blake, where usually action and description leaves a site along with Blake when he departs it. Consider, though, the confusion of clauses and orientation of perspective in even more mundane moments that end chapters, as at the end of “A

Night of Anxiety,” when Henry bribes a boatman: “The weight of seven half eagles dropped into his hand, caused him eagerly to seize the oars, making the quickest possible time to the opposite side of the river” (Blake 130). If one reads the first clause as a modifier instead of the independent clause or part of a series, then the sentence has no subject. If one reads it, more likely, as an independent clause with the “caused him eagerly to seize the oars” as the next part of the series, then the “making the quickest possible time” clause is without its modifying antecedent (or at least its relation is unclear). Actors disappear from sentences and motion

78 See Delany, “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,” in Martin R. Delany, 210. 260 becomes unmoored.

I do not mean to criticize Delany’s inconsistent use of traditional (or correct) syntactical structure. I only mean to highlight some particularities of his style that have long gone unnoticed for the sake of larger-scale narrative or cultural readings of Blake. One of the few critics who discusses Delany’s style at this granular of a level is Jerome McGann, whose edition of Blake is forthcoming. “Henry and the omniscient narrator each present a norm of enlightened black speech against which all the other characters are measured. So do Blake’s run-on and truncated sentences, dangling constructions, and loose/incorrect syntax become essential features of its oral style.”79 In general, these kinds of sentences contribute to a general sense of temporal confusion against spatial assuredness.

Ending with “The Rebel Blacks” chapter in the Anglo African, subsequent chapters were published from 1861-1862 in the Weekly Anglo-African. These chapters describe Henry’s time on a slave ship and in Cuba, on a plantation, and then in Havana during an Epiphany festival.

Again, Blake as we have it available to read today is missing its last six chapters, leaving the moment of insurrection in Havana as the end of the novel, with a minor character, a well- renowned chef in the city, shouting an “authentic statement of the outrage, ‘Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (Blake 313). As Blake stands, one is reminded of the ending of The

Confidence-Man (though Melville’s novel was not serialized, Melville perhaps initially intended it to be published in excepts in Putnam’s).80 As McGann argues, “The ‘style’ of Blake, of so much of the greatest American literature, is not dedicated to resolution but to revelation.”81 With these last chapters presumably written but never published, or lost along with vanished issues of the Weekly Anglo-African, it’s unclear whether or not this rebellion will have an afterlife or if it

79 McGann, “Rethinking,” 85. 80 Historical Note, The Confidence-Man, 278. 81 McGann, “Rethinking,” 93, fn. 12. 261 will be squashed in the way it is in New Orleans.

The extant plot of Blake ends with potential, but if the pattern of prior publication is any indication, all the gathering force of the Cuban insurrection still might end in disappointment, as clearly as did the truncated 1859 version in the Anglo-African. The plot’s lack of consummation and lack of violent climax has informed almost all interpretations of the novel, usually well- supported by the novel’s many moments of seclusion and conspiracy. As Biggio argues, secrecy and community are always required first for any rebellious action to occur: “blacks in Delany’s novel come together through their commitment to the appearance of conspiracy, whether or not one actually exists.”82

Blake is thus anti-teleological in temporal and in spatial terms. If Delany does not “stave off the arbitrariness of endings,” as Jordan Stein puts it, he displays this willingness in more than just the spectacular end in Havana. Instead, by focusing so fully on the motion of “toward,” the very nature of arrival changes. Indeed, Henry/Blake arrives in many real places and the narration provides travelogue details of them. “Blake alters space as he moves through it,” argues Judith

Madera.83 It’s not just, Madera seems to suggest, the novel gives us a wider scope by taking us outside national bounds, but that, even within the southern states, Blake’s movements recreate or refigure place. One way to challenge the hegemony of geography is to change to borders; another way is to emphasize that place is often contingent on movement and direction. This acknowledgement effectively turns place back into space, as theorist and sociologist Michel de

Certeau distinguishes between them. If place is “an instantaneous configuration of positions” and an “indication of stability,” space “is composed of intersection and mobile elements” and “exists

82 Biggio, “Specter of Conspiracy,” 443. 83 Madera, Black Atlas, 81. 262 when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.”84 Henry’s many arrivals to new locations challenge the directions implied in his status as a runaway, and all varieties of direction often associated with the South, with slavery, and with New Orleans, too.

When we consider direction as a separate but related issue from the kinds of borders and stable cartographical elements of Blake, a new set of challenges emerge that are related to a sequence that includes New Orleans. While Henry’s “criss-crossing” movements in Blake create alternative maps, his continual motion of toward and arriving requires not just new spaces but new conceptions of what space can do and how it is felt.85

Of course, Delany’s interest in space and mapping makes sense if we read Blake as a response to both the Fugitive Slave Law and the Dred Scott case. Together, these cases enacted different aspects of spatial control: the former expanding the terror of place and the latter dictating a slave’s relationship to place. Therefore, Delany was inspired to address the problems and possibilities of “a racially integrated US nation.”86 In many ways, Delany never abandoned the idea of belonging to a republic, even if his geographic schemes exceeded United States territory.87 When the Civil War broke out and Delany’s son joined the Union army, his focus turned to the nation again, and during Reconstruction he fought for black politicians’ elections.

In 1861 Delany wrote to black abolitionist James Holly, who advocated immigration to Haiti, a plan Delany did not support, especially because a white antislavery activist, James Redpath, was appointed the emigration official. Additionally, Delany maintained his own interest in Africa, but

84 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), 117. 85 John Wharton Lowe focuses on Delany’s Cuba section, arguing that the way Blake “criss-crosses” the gulf partakes of and reflects a “circum-Caribbean political and literary culture” (62). See Lowe, Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2016). Judith Madera argues that “Blake reads as a counterdiscourse to slaveholder spatializations, that the novel “represents the work of black deterritorialization as something that moves boundaries” (Black Atlas 88). 86 Jordan Alexander Stein, “‘A Christian Nation Calls for its Wandering Children’: Life, Liberty, Liberia,” American Literary History 19.4 (2007), 850. 87 See Levine, Introduction to Martin R. Delany, 6. 263 in the same letter to Holly, he writes, “I cannot, I will not, desert her for all things else in this world, save that of my ‘own household,’ and that does not require it, as it will thereby be enhanced.”88 Again, Delany saw his devotion to a new “civilization” as not incompatible with his home in and attachment to the U.S.89

The failure of the insurrection in New Orleans is striking, not only because it ends the first 1859 version of Blake, but especially because its preparations so closely mirror the gathering storm in Havana, taking place during Mardi Gras and El Dia de Reyes, respectively. In both cases, Henry/Blake finds an organization awaiting a time to strike and awaiting a leader.

The festivals of each city give readers a parallel that shows us how Delany was “concerned with more than finding a specific nation for the former slave to achieve self-determination and self- government.” Stephen Knadler argues that, more important for Delany, was considering any single possibility as part of “a broader plan for a pan-American solidarity.”90 Assuming that the strike in Cuba goes as planned, the failure at New Orleans can be read as proof of exhausted possibilities within national borders; New Orleans’s supposed cosmopolitanism then becomes just as much of a deceit as its carnival. In other words, Delany’s sustained interest in Central

America, as a real possibility for emigration or as a sustained inspiration, shows us that a transnational community or threat of alliance is the better option.

At least it seems Cuba has a better chance of successful overthrow than a strike coming from New Orleans, from the Dismal Swamp, or from any of the other “huts” Henry visits. This is essentially Andy Doolen’s argument about Blake; Doolen claims that all nationally based origin

88 “Letter to James T. Holly, 15 January 1861,” in Martin R. Delany, 365. 89 Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues that cosmopolitanism is not incommensurate with citizenship, with a “Black community that crosses boundaries of color, class, and nation” (57). See Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005). 90 See Knadler, Remapping Citizenship, 44, 45. 264 stories of revolution have been wasted and used up by the lies of their own subsequent histories, so Blake must search for alternatives and use the knowledge of those in New Orleans and the

Dismal Swamp otherwise. The maroons in the swamp are to Henry, Doolen argues, corrupted by a certain kind of historical nationalism because they fought and carried out strategy in the

American Revolution, a story of freedom proven not all that useful to the black community.91

Thus, while Henry moves “continually” through the states and toward new landings, he does not find any appropriate site from which to launch an attack. Henry only seems to travel toward these locations, not from them in any meaningful way. He always seems to be arriving, and many of the transition chapters between major stops are named as such: “A Shadow,” “Fleeting

Shadows,” and “A Flying Cloud.” At the start of chapters we see, for example, Henry “safely in

Mobile,” where he has “landed without a question” (Blake 108). After meeting his family in

Canada, he quickly leaves them, “the tears streaming as he turned from his child and its grandparents; when but a few minutes found the runaway leader seated in a car at the Windsor depot, from whence he reached the Suspension Bridge at Niagara en route for the Atlantic”

(Blake 157).

These kinds of spatial markers are likely by-products of serialization, making it easy for readers to keep track of the spatial story, but that doesn’t discount their significance as they contribute to a sense of space created by vectors and directions. Blake’s serial publication requires consistent orientation for each new installment; rather than only the other way around, where scholars might only see Delany’s broader hemispheric designs determining the novel’s settings. As much attention as is given to these hemispheric aspects of the novel and to pinpointing Henry’s coordinates in the plot, Blake also reveals a placeless network of spectacle

91 Andy Doolen, “‘Be Cautious of the Word “Rebel”’: Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America,” American Literature 81.1 (2009), 153-179. 265 and connection. Henry advises slaves early on in the text, “You must now go on and organize continually. It makes no difference when, nor where you are, so that the slaves are true and trustworthy, as the scheme is adapted to all times and places” (40-41). Here, we see the shades of

Delany’s “frustration with the lack of a spatial resolution through African emigration or a temporal resolution through organized violent insurrection.” Biggio argues that these issues “led him to seek unity through less tangible means.”92

“Unity through less tangible means” is all over Blake, not only in the passing of secrets but also in the ambiguity of sociality afforded by sanctioned displays of festivity and happy affects. The first in the chain of Blake’s festive scenes is chapter ten, “Merry Making.” This chapter depicts something familiar to plantation traditions in fiction, travel, and even art, proslavery depictions of simplistic enjoyment, or the kind of active joyousness depicted in minstrel shows. The chapter also responds to the counter-discourse that worked to expose the ruses of these pleasures, like Lydia Maria Child’s opening to the sarcastically titled “Slavery’s

Pleasant Homes,” which covers up the sins with “dancing, shouting, clapping of hands, and eager invocations of blessing on the heads of ‘massa and misses.’”93 Scenes of celebration and moments of contentment meant to communicate happiness and a stable social arrangement in a paternalistic utopia were easily exposed as performance. I want to argue that Delany was not in agreement with either strategy of presenting the authenticity or the lie of slaves’ happiness.

Regarding these two choices, Delany seemed to see that proslavery and antislavery writers were only writing back to one another one the same tired terms about the falseness or truth of slaves’ psycho-social pleasure.

An underlying problem with scenes of the “happy darky” is that they assumed a

92 Biggio, “Specter of Conspiracy,” 445. 93 A Lydia Maria Child Reader, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), 238. 266 particular kind of psychic life could disprove what was exploitative about a system. As Saidiya

Hartman argues, the creation of a subject within slavery was itself an insidious form of control.

Scenes of “merry-making” that are especially vibrant or excessive, like being forced to dance on a slave ship, or being encouraged to cut loose and imbibe during holidays, were only schemes to make slaves exhausted and docile.94 Frederick Douglass sees holidays and revelry as quickly leading to painful intoxication as he observes in My Bondage and My Freedom that “all the license allowed appears to have no other object than to disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom, and to make them as glad to return to their work, as they were to leave it.”95⁠ Elsewhere,

Douglass argues that holidays “serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.”96

On the other hand, this kind of escapism could be just that—a chance to escape or rebel, as it is in Delany’s Blake. Delany’s understanding of these festive and “merry” scenes can be understood in light of scholarship that seeks to show the potential resistance and subversive communication in dance and music. Summarizing scholarship that tries to understand these scenes as both positively and negatively affecting slave lives, Katrina Thompson writes, “For blacks, performing constituted a way to gain agency, cope, entertain within their own community, and rebel. For the white community, these performances affirmed their dominance, served as a form of amusements, supported their ideals of paternalism, and veiled their constant fears of rebellion.”97 Enjoyment for the enslaved, and for those of African or diasporic ancestry, was as an experience of having to negotiate the differences between private experience

94 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 23. 95 Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1857), 255. 96 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. Houston A Baker, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1986), 115. 97 Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2014), 7. 267

(personally experiencing pleasure), social building (communication and memory), and public performance (trying to seize means to change the script of happiness and docility).

Being so often compelled to perform happiness or truly feel content for the maintenance of slavery changed the very definition for such personal affects, and changed the effect of actions associated with happiness, or “merry making.” While Blake is hardly known as a sentimental novel or a novel of feeling, elements of stated emotion appear throughout the novel. These moments either coincide with social gatherings or as tags to introduce some lines from a song or a brief interpersonal exchange. In these moments, Blake invites readers to consider those multiple scales of glee—private, social, and performative, as mentioned above—that get complicated and rendered more ambiguous by slavery’s control of not only pain but also pleasure. Delany offers emotional tags and descriptors with the same kind of insistence on orientation as we see in his map of insurrection. Tension inheres between the simple personal

“glee” or “sadness” and the social bonds enacted in the following scenes.

In New Orleans, restrictions are prevalent from the beginning, but they are also, paradoxically, broken when permitted. “Though the cannon at the old fort in the Lower Faubourg had fired the significant warning, admonishing the slaves as well as free blacks to limit their movement, still they were passing to and fro with seeming indifference” (Blake 98). This vague sense of free mobility is a ruse; unlimited restriction seems the clearest when movement is undirected (“with seeming indifference”), scattered as it is in this scene.

Delany’s use of New Orleans is usually only briefly discussed. John Ernest argues that it shows us a “world of domination under the guise of freedom,” a familiar critique of carnival’s conspiracy with power. It’s difficult, though, to exactly detect irony in Delany’s description of the Mardi Gras scene, especially in the sentence, “Freedom seemed as though for once 268 enshielded by her sacred robes and crowned with cap and wand in hand, to go forth untrammeled through the highways of the town” (Blake 99). Another fantastically difficult sentence, it is difficult to tell whether or not a comma is not just missing after “seemed.” Freedom is, as Ernest would suggest, part of a dress-up game in New Orleans. But in this sentence, freedom is not finally exposed underneath the glitter and terror of slavery but, instead, comes forth adorned and en costume, protected by those layers. This image is made even more confusing by the second clause of the sentence: “Freedom seemed as though for once enshielded by her sacred robes and crowned with cap and wand in hand” is much different than “Freedom seemed as though for once . . . to go forth untrammeled through the highways of the town.” The former emphasizes the falseness and singularity of the costume; the latter the kind of permissiveness that allowed so many to theorize concepts of pleasure and its forbiddances. Delany isn’t exactly dismissive of the Mardi Gras carnival of conspiracy, just as he isn’t as damning of the “merry making” in the slave quarter, at least not in the same way as Douglass or Child.

Not unlike most writing about New Orleans from the antebellum years, Delany emphasizes the city’s version of plurality and its resulting utopian civilities: “The fancy stores and toy shops on this occasion [Mardi Gras] were crowded seemingly to their greatest capacity.

Here might be seen the fashionable young white lady of French or American extraction, and there the handsome, and frequently beautiful maiden of African origin, mulatto, quadroon, or sterling black, all fondly interchanging civilities . . . Many lively jests and impressive flings of delicate civility noted the greetings of the passerby” (Blake 99). Delany briefly describes the opportunities for a city of commercial and social equality in The Condition, Elevation,

Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), citing the prominent black shopkeepers and bankers of New Orleans as proof of the “practical utility of colored 269 people as citizen members of society.”98 His New Orleans scene in Blake, by contrast, is more fanciful, less practical. It is a cliché version of plurality and overblown civility, just as “to and fro” reads as a fraud version of liberatory mobility. Delany quotes from a popular song describing the women of the city, “From snowy white to sooty.” The scenes of “bowing, curtseying, and rubbing their hands” are all between females, suggesting an idealized courtly past, instead of the “practical utility” of the shopkeepers he describes in Condition, Elevation,

Emigration. The failed rebellion of the city reveals its effect on men such as these; again,

“destroying their self-respect and manhood, and certainly impairing their usefulness” (Blake

108).

If, as Ernest argues, “[a]ll of African American historical writing before the Civil War extended from and necessarily returned to the immovable fact of an unrepresentable experience,” it matters immensely that the deceptions and rebellions in Blake, mass (in Cuba) and singular (in the act of running away), are often associated with scenes of merry making.99 After the “Merry

Making” chapter, Henry tells two slaves upon whom he’s about to impart the “secret” of his large-scale organization, “The merrymaking was only to deceive Franks,” their master. However, it’s not just that such social scenes are deceptive in outward appearance, but that they are constituted out of and made possible by multiple acts of deception, or interpretation, at many levels.

During Mardi Gras in New Orleans Henry meets with an already-formed “secret

98 Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993), 109. Glenn Hendler’s chapter on Delany explores his public participation in a variety of “voluntary associations” (Alexis de Tocqueville’s term), and argues that throughout his work, Delany “plays with” the slippage “civil society” and civilized manners to approach a definition of citizenship (56). Hendler writes, “Communication serves to link the macropolitical and the economic to the micropolitical practices of social exchange” (75). See Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001). 99 Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writes and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004), 91. 270 organization” (Blake 101). Here, then, Mardi Gras itself becomes part of an even bigger diversion, not just itself a diversionary safety valve. The house where Henry enters has a good number of seats arranged, “evidence of an anticipated gathering; but the evening being that of the

Mardi Gras, there was nothing remarkable in this” (Blake 102). Men from different plantations gather for the purpose of a strike, but their “seclusion” (what Henry calls his various meetings) is interrupted by the entrance of Tibs, a drunken member of their secret society. Henry encourages him to wait, to make sure he doesn’t act rashly. “You must have all the necessary means, my brother,” says Henry to the eager Tibs. The plot, however, has already been betrayed by Tibs: another figure is discovered in the yard, presumably spying on the gathering, and Tibs causes further diversion, “shuffling, dancing, and singing at such a pitch as to attract attention from without” (Blake 106). There is a fundamental deception that has been built into festive energy, but it bursts forth at every level, personal, social, and public.100 Tibs’s behavior, and the complex negotiation of emotions of singing laborers (discussed below) and the merrymakers in the slave cabin, are not public displays on the level of the Havana “gala day” at the end of the narrative.

They, however, partake of an intensification that makes up the narrative’s overall thrust.

The links between New Orleans and Havana are striking, but they are not mirror images of one another in Blake. It’s not that Havana is described in Blake as having particular advantage over New Orleans. With only two short chapters devoted to the latter, comparison isn’t the point of their sequence. Still, the most striking doubling that occurs is Mardi Gras in New Orleans and

El Dia de los Reyes, or King’s Day in Blake. When describing King’s Day, Delany links the

100 Eric Sundquist discusses national holidays’ importance to anti-slavery narratives, rather than a general sense of “merry making.” Sundquist argues, “Festival moments are typically conservative in their reverence for an ancestral or nationalist past, but they are also frequently laced with a subversive energy derived from the temporary abridgement of social codes or hierarchical structures” (211). The potential for “inversion” of national heroes and myths is key for Sundquist. I want to, however, extend the notion of the national holiday to a more everyday sense of “festival moments” or what I call above “festival energy.” See Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993). 271 holiday to Congo Square (not depicted in the earlier chapters): “The demonstration consisted of a festival—physical, mental and religious—by the native Africans in Cuba, in honor of one of their monarchs; being identical, but more systematic, grand and imposing, with the ‘Congo Dance,’ formerly observed every Sabbath among the slaves in New Orleans” (Blake 299). A “physical, mental and religious” festival (or demonstration—again, the referents throughout Blake create opportunities for interpretation) opens up the very concept of festival to those aspects of both the personal and social.

New Orleans and Havana have been the subject of a few comparative studies in recent years. Rebecca Scott’s analysis of the two plantation economies focuses on communication from city to plantation. Her somewhat controversial thesis is not comparative but actually connective.

Throughout the nineteenth century, “Louisiana and Cuba were for each other nearby possible worlds.”101 Cuba was not just a focus point for Louisiana planters and of particular interest to

New Orleans’s free people of color; Cuba was of national interest, as Delany himself knew when he published essays on possible annexation in The North Star. As Scott maintained, the fates of southern states and Cuba were linked. Delany writes, “[A]t the instant of the annexation of Cuba to these United States, it should be the signal for simultaneous rebellion of all slaves in the

Southern States, and throughout that island.”102 Still, as this chapter has as its recurring trope,

New Orleans was a nodal point for thinking about Cuba, and, quite famously, since Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, the best way to Havana. Even Ned Buntline’s 1854 The Mysteries and Miseries of

New Orleans ends in Cuba.

Daniel E. Walker in No More, No More: Slavery an Cultural Resistance in Havana and

New Orleans looks at forms of resistance especially in the two cities’ festivals, those depicted in

101 Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2005), 2. 102 Martin R. Delany, 165. 272

Blake. Walker urges us to see the functional purpose of these festivals, and of African dance and singing in general. “In both instances,” of expression in Africa and in the Americas, “cultural and artistic production devoid of societal relevance is virtually nonexistent.”103 Arguments such as

Walker’s seek to show the importance of cultural continuity and scenes of fun as not merely scenes of fun or aesthetic displays. They attempt to combat the still-lingering effects of reading happiness as proof of individual freedom or acceptance. Moreover, Walker means to counter studies that dismiss participation in festival behavior as a mere “safety-valve,” or constitutive of another ruse of “social control.”104 Walker wants to prove that what appeared as happiness was a direct response to a complete lack of it, “When not attempting to violently overthrow the regimes of oppression that chained them to the New World plantation societies, the religious activities of slaves buttressed their collective psyche against the dehumanization efforts of the slave regime.”105 A “collective psyche” is part of the resistance to the violence involved in the call to become a subject, as Hartman theorizes the process.

Such arguments leave behind language of affect, poisoned by a regime of happiness, for social history and the recovery of cultural continuity. The latter are obviously important projects, taken up by scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Eric Sundquist. However, I want to suggest that

Blake shows us sentimental and emotional language anew, as strange and disorienting as his dangling modifiers and syntax. It would be much easier with our critical tools and with Delany’s familiarity with minstrel and sentimental performances to prove that any over-the-top display of joy was a deception of truer existence. Blake continually shows that such a theory of unmasking truth is unsatisfying and that one cannot so easily pull off, nor perhaps should one pull off, the

103 No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004), 4. 104 Ibid., ix. 105 Ibid.,16. 273

“externally pleasing veneer.”106 Finally, this attention to emotional descriptors in Blake has its parallel in the orientation of directions. Affects and directions both function as prepositions, as orienting relations to their objects. Blake doesn’t quite align with the strain of affect theory that differentiates between emotion and affect, the latter being unaffected by ideology or intention.107

Instead, I would suggest, in order to combat the social control that makes distinctions between personal happiness and festival spirit, Delany refuses an “artificial consensus over the varied meanings of affect, emotion and feeling.”108

There are quite a few musical interludes in Blake, music being another “manifestation of resistance through the indirection of a trickster strategy.”109 The trickery goes both ways, however, as a mode of control and of resistance. For example, on the ship with illegal cargo, the captains order the slaves to sing to their work, to fend off a passing British vessel. In New

Orleans the songs of enslaved boatmen unloading at the levee accompany the general scene of

Mardi Gras. Using these characters, Delany likely was responding to yet another popular myth of

106 Ibid., 18. 107 Ruth Leys critiques the new critics of affect by arguing that they are “making a mistake when they suggest that emotion or affect can be defined in nonconceptual or nonintentional terms” (802). Further, she adds, “even as they condemn the subject-object split, there is a constant tendency among the new affect theorists I am considering to adhere to this same false opposition between the mind and body.” Delany shows us Leys point, that there is a mistaken dualism in affect and intention—that to posit this too strongly is to miss all the opportunities in using affect as a ruse. Charles Altieri’s response to Leys is that she wrongly equates the “nonconceptual” with the “nonintentional,” suggesting that these very ideas of concept and intent are more flexible than Leys implies, and helps to complicate what consciousness means in relation to his understanding of mood. “Rather than debate how much cognition is required before something counts as an intentional state, it seems more accurate and more practical to admit that consciousness within a mood and self-consciousness about a mood are simply different modes by which agents take up positions in a world” (880). The debates here excerpted hardly do justice to the wide range of work done on affect theory, but I do not want to suggest that their debates about intention and directionality reflect on the connection between feelings and festivity in Blake (emotions, according to Silvan Tomkins, have an object, while affects do not). However, the examples I’ve provided about the kind of “festive spirit” of Blake and the complex/ambiguous tagging of emotions before songs and conversations do suggest that Delany was not avoiding sentiment, or affect, altogether just because he was not writing a sentimental novel. Sentiment and sympathy, the many ways that literary critics discuss it today, was not ever part of Delany’s vigorous complaint against Stowe’s paternalism and support of colonization, as he detailed in letters to Douglass, printed in the latter’s newspaper. See Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997), 78-82; Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011), 434-472; Charles Altieri, “Critical Response II: Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys,” Critical Inquiry 38.4 (2012), 878-881. 108 Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, Introduction to Feeling Photography (Durham: Duke UP, 2014), 7. 109 Robert H. Cataliotti The Music in African American Fiction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 23. 274 black joy, as the mid-century often used boatmen’s songs in theatre and minstrel shows.110 The descriptions Delany offers of the emotional complexities of these songs, even religious lines, are sung with important spatial and affective orientations:

Along the private streets, sitting under the verandas, in the doors with half-closed

jalousies, or promenading unconcernedly the public ways, mournfully humming in solace

or chanting in lively glee, could be seen and heard many a Creole, male or female, black,

white or mixed race, sometimes in reverential praise of

Father, Son and Holy Ghost—

Madonna, and the Heavenly Host!

in sentimental reflection on some pleasant social relations, or the sad reminiscence of ill-

treatment or loss by death of some loved one, or worse than death, the relentless and

insatiable demands of slavery. (Blake 99-100)

This long sentence is packed with orientations and spatializations, as well as mismatched, or unmatched, emotions. There is no overall, dictated positive or negative emotional tone of Mardi

Gras; it is both discernably celebratory and painful, as it is both performative and participatory.

Delany gives us a series of options in space but doesn’t attach particular affects to them; it is the chaos of New Orleans, seen in his careful inclusion of all possible races of the creoles.

The songs of enslaved boatmen in New Orleans scramble the affective placement of

“glee.” The personal, the communal, and the public performance become difficult to represent in text only, and this is the final use of festivity’s inherent deception where the personal and the social become inscrutably entangled. Delany describes their singing on the levee’s harbor.

“Every few hours landing, unloading and unloading, the glee of these men of sorrow was

110 Michael Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990), 216. 275 touchingly appropriate and impressive” (Blake 100).111 Any happiness was also connected to sorrow, as Delany’s shows in his phrase “the glee of these men of sorrow.” Delany does more than explore the regime of displayed happiness. This singing of happy songs is not merely a ruse or a disguise, nor is it a (usually religious) coping of the kind that Henry sees as pacifying to slaves. “[R]econciling themselves to livelong misery,” writes Delany, “they are seemingly contented by soothing their sorrows with songs and sentiments of apparently cheerful but in reality wailing lamentations” (Blake 100). Here, the idea of being “contented” is obscured not only by “seemingly” but by the chain of effects the singing has; they are “contented by soothing,” only seemingly. The source of contentment shifts in a kind of “parallax view,” by just changing orientation in the sentence slightly. The lyrics, the tone, the performance, the personal feeling, and the communal shift are all tied up in what is obviously not a “cheerful” song: “O, could I somehow a’nother, / Drive these tears way; / When I think about my poor old mother, /

Down upon the Mobile bay” (Blake 101). Again, the way Delany describes the boatmen being

“seemingly contented by soothing their sorrows” provides a double obfuscation of reading not just “glee” but reading even how “soothing” actually works. In other words, one cannot tell for sure if the “soothing” leads to “contentment.”112

One last example, again from the “Merry Making” chapter, brings together the importance of truncated endings, affect, and festivity in Blake. The chapter starts with the irony of Saturday afternoons being given over “by many liberal masters to their slaves” (Blake 32).

The women on the Franks plantation prepare for their feast, putting on the clothes of their

111 Allen argues that early in the nineteenth century probably only a few free blacks and slaves worked on river boats, but those numbers seem to have “increased dramatically during the steamboat era, as white men found safer and more lucrative occupations” (Western Rivermen 91). 112 Undoubtedly, especially since the song fits the lyrical structure of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” the slave boatmen’s music is doubly in relationship to antebellum minstrelsy, where slave songs and river songs had equal billing. There is little consensus about the origin of this song, if it was taken by Stephen Foster for “Old Folks at Home,” or if it was derived from the song. Another possibility is, as Foster’s biographer suggests, that Delany and Foster may have crossed paths in Pittsburgh. See Allen, Western Rivermen, 16-17. 276 mistresses to celebrate, “all dressed neatly, and seemingly very happy” (33). “Merry Making” shows, again, the inherent deception of the social gathering, not just in the “seemingly very happy,” because the audience for the “seeming” here is vague. In fact, Colonel Franks does not attend the feast as he should: “Conscious that he was not entitled to their gratitude, Colonel

Franks declined to honor the entertainment, though the invitation was a ruse to deceive him, as he had attempted to deceive them” (33). The final sentence of the chapter describes the break-up of the gathering, “Falling upon his knees, the old man offered an earnest, heartful prayer to God, asking his guardianship through the night, and protection through the day, especially upon their heartbroken daughter, their runaway son-in-law, and the little grandson, when the two old people retired to rest with spirits mingled with joy, sorrow, hope, and fear; Ailcey going into the great house” (36). “Merry-making” thus ends with gerunds: Maggie’s father falling in the moment and

Ailcey perpetually going after the rather ominous mood created by the semicolon. Like some of the other sentences I’ve pointed out above, the syntax here creates a tense and temporal issue that points us to the many directional relations in Blake.

Conclusion

Both of these authors counter termination in New Orleans with the fact of pre-position. In the various senses of relation I’ve traced throughout the previous chapters, a movement toward New

Orleans seems the most filled with a sense of otherness. As I’ve attempted to show throughout this chapter and those previous, with the interruption of chapter three’s temporal questions, the social is a spatial phenomenon. Rei Terada, in her perfectly titled “Approaching Proximity,” brings together the concerns of this chapter with concepts of being-together I’ve previously discussed. Proximity and approach are put together in Terada’s brilliant reading of an entire field 277 of politics and ethics and psycho-social identity: “Proximity, the afterlife of approach, also retains the trace of time in spatial relations; no consciousness of proximity exists without at least a hypothesis of how one came to be near, whether one arrived before or after the other.”113

Mostly stemming from ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, much of the field of proxemics is a sociological intersubjective and political field, spanning microsociality of interaction to questions of borders and “neighbors” or strangers. “Contemporary ethics in the lineage of

Levinas,” writes Terada, “figures the other as an overpowering given that makes asymmetrical, ultimate demands.”114 Desmond Manderson provides further summary of this important ground for ethics in the social: “For Levinas, and for those who have been influenced by him, the word ethics implies a personal responsibility to another that is both involuntary and singular. The demand of ethics comes from the intimacy of an experienced encounter, and its contours cannot therefore be codified or predicted in advance.”115

In both Hearn and Delany’s novels, proximity is not an ethical injunction of self and human other. In Hearn proximity is a question of the islands’ relations to one another, the proximity of storms and mosquitos, water and destruction. Hearn and Delany, thus, take what is the most spatially profound aspect of the social and turn ideas of “approaching proximity” to the terrestrial and extraterrestrial. Spatial coordinates and social ontologies, or experience, is the basis for the ethics of proxemics, and I see Hearn and Delany trying to write this version of sociality before applying it or making it the basis for an ethics or the basis for enjoyment, as both

Nathaniel Parker Willis and Alice Dunbar-Nelson did in the first two chapters.

The nearness denoted by the idea of proximity has been described by Heather Love in her

113 Terada, “Preface: Approaching Proximity,” Postmodern Culture 15.2 (2005), par. 1. 114 Ibid., par. 2. 115 Desmond Manderson, Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of the Law (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006), 7-8. 278 description of reading “Close, but Not Deep.”116 The idea of being able to “close read” without conflating such an activity with another scale of surface and depth is a mind-bending prospect, but it certainly seems useful for the kinds of reading one does of these wildly different styles of

Hearn and Delany. Hearn’s writing is lush, overly loaded with adjectives that make sinking deeper a risk of being pulled into his swamp and ocean full of potential danger (the fear of jellyfish described earlier), and Delany’s prose and narrative is one focused on created flat maps of both land and human experience, a rare abolitionist novel not sentimental but perhaps about sentiment or the direction of sentiment. Proximity is certainly at issue for the communities Hearn describes in Chita and elsewhere, and for Delany. Stretching the porous boundaries of places, cities or nations, allows us to consider more things not only as part but allows movement toward something else, allows us to maintain the strange encounters with difference and endings.

116 Love, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41.2 (2010), 371- 391. 279

Coda: Get Down

At dinner with my family in uptown New Orleans the owner of the popular restaurant came over to chat with us as we split up the bill. She asked us about our connection to the city, if we were just visiting. She went on to tell us what was special about New Orleans, and I nodded as she confirmed my then still developing reading of plurality in proximity and of contrast. She used the word “jostle” as so many have before, as Alice Dunbar-Nelson did when she described “Anarchy

Alley” and the “poverty and opulence” in contrast, brushing elbows.

Pondering this rhetoric, I wanted to find other ways of considering plurality and wanted to understand how the nineteenth century gave us the terms with which to think about New

Orleans and, consequently, pleasure. I have found that, after wanting to write a dissertation about parties and celebration, wanting to understand why people come together and how the social gathering overlaps with the form of the novel, historically and theoretically,--I have I found myself facing the fact that the novel did not find a home in New Orleans until after the Civil

War. This is true of the U.S. south in general.

New Orleans, really any project that depends on some kind of rootedness or locality, has to justify or theorize its importance as a container for a literary archive. This leads to the critical impasse laid out by Sophia A. McClennen: “In de-emphasizing the location of culture and resisting the notion that history and literature are bound by regional borders, it is equally important not to lose sight of the very real territories of existence that are under attack.”1 “Very real territories of existence” brings us back to the “lives” in Social Lives.

1 McClennen, “Inter-American Studies of Imperial American Studies?” Comparative American Studies 3.4 (2005), 408. 280

There are two related stories to tell about contemporary New Orleans: rebuilding and tourism. These are stories that I tried to tell about the nineteenth century, and I tried to answer the question: how do you tell a story about the social in the midst of building, rebuilding, and tourism? What counts as the social and how did people understand it when New Orleans was and likely will always be appreciated within the regime of cultural authenticity?

“the salve trade” could be called Fred Moten’s Hurricane Katrina poem, beginning with

“all down on perdido street, from san juan / to inglewood, up on that bridge.”2 Perdido Street runs parallel to the Superdome. It reminds you of Louis Armstrong’s “Perdido Street Blues,” but it also evokes the popular song “Basin Street Blues,” the former red light district street:

Where young and old folk meet

The place where all my friends meet

Where the elite always meet

Where the light and the dark folks meet

First recorded in 1926, then made famous by Louis Armstrong, the blues song that is also an invitation:

Now won’t you come along with me

To the Mississippi?

We’ll take a trip to the land of dreams

Blowing down the river, down to New Orleans

Every pilgrimage or pleasure trip there is reminiscent of every other forced location there, and yet, “You’ll never know how nice it seems / Or just how much it really means.”

Reading through Hughson’s Tavern, I could find New Orleans in clear references, and in lines that sung out as subjects I had been wrestling with: “the problem of amusement and black

2 Fred Moten, “the salve trade,” in Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2012), 65-66. 281 reconstruction” (22). Moten explains in a podcast interview with The Poetry Foundation that “the salve trade” came from a simple and auspicious typo, where slave would become salve, where the secret to healing is in the strange but amusing rearrangement of letters.3 Moten’s poem blends his school life, his community, and his academic career with brief images of Katrina’s destruction, like “the big fat women and the helicopters they bring.” Thus, Moten’s speaker dances in the poem: “move myself / in half, dance to the fray, write a paper on the salve trade.”

In the end, Moten blends these subjects together with the question, “if you ain’t gon’ get down then what you come here for?” He’s asking the journalists, rebuilders, the academics, and the party-goers, why they aren’t getting down, why they don’t just “tear shit up?” Why not dance and drink hard, why not think hard? In the beauty and horror of language, where a simple mistake of technology turns the dirtiest and scariest phrase into a soothing poem that is also riotous. Pleasure doesn’t simply pop up in strange places, but it derives from thinking about and writing Katrina, academics, and drinking with friends all at the same time without really knowing the exact connections—which, importantly, is a reminder that the social might mean

“just . . . the act and fact of association,” but there are so many mysterious ways to qualify and understand varieties of connection or near-connection.4

This dissertation began wanting to describe more of Nathaniel Parker Willis’s fascination with The St. Louis Hotel bartenders, the southern casual “come-and-take-a-drink,” and I wanted to describe the girls getting ready for their debutant ball in Grace King’s Monsieur Motte, as well as Edna Pontillier’s dinner party of freedom with garnet-colored cocktails. I found, however, that my interest in what it means to think about the social in the nineteenth century is more complicated than our (my) present understanding of parties—although nineteenth-century New

3 “What You Come Here For,” The Poetry Foundation: Poetry Off the Shelf, http://feeds.poetryfoundation.org/PoetryOffTheShelf. 4 Felski, Rita, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42.4 (2011), 578. 282

Orleans had its fair share. The questions its literature raised, however, were less about wanting to expose the falseness of masquerading. I found in the authors and events I discussed in the preceding chapters that sociality was often simply proximity, a way of thinking about difference as nearness, and, often, how this could be pleasurable or hopeful. I was interested in finding overlaps rather than causations, juxtapositions rather than comparisons—and I was interested in this because this is how I think pleasure and sociality work in the texts I’ve discussed. They are proximate, but not the same, and the necessary gap between them makes their coming together all the more important.

These questions are rarely asked of place-based literature, of which cultural studies or accounts of literary communities would be the more likely methodology. For New Orleans, these topics are still developing, as we continue to understand the origins of its many particular practices and continue to recover French- and Spanish-language authors on the subject of the city. Risking abstracting the city, I wanted to explore how variously the writers I discuss rethink that very quality of authenticity and out-of-timeliness so many appreciate about New Orleans. To do so, I found that I had to know the details—just as Charles Chesnutt needed to know when he wrote to his old friend George Washington Cable, as he was writing Paul Marchand, F.M.C. and

Cable was living in Massachusetts.5 This novella, in which genealogy is a melodrama, the details of New Orleans history matter immensely to Chesnutt and count as his version of “truth.” (Cable had advised Chesnutt: “don’t found fiction on fact” but “found your fictions on truth, but stay away from actual occurrences of historical value.”)6 Chesnutt must have recalled these words when he wrote to Cable after years of estrangement (after the Open Letter Club fell apart quickly

5 Cable did, indeed, offer Chesnutt much advice in his early career and read an early draft of The Marrow of Tradition. 6 Chesnutt, “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, ed. McElrath, Leitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), 41. fn. 3. 283 in the late century). His “I have for wishing to know” is either coy or overly formal—likely the latter. He references their “former acquaintance” as he returns to ask the only person that might know the answer to his obscure questions about New Orleans. In this letter sociality, fact-as- detail, and proximity (“without making a trip to New Orleans to find out”) collide in the act of writing fiction [fig. 9].

Figure 10: Cable Collection, Box 17, Louisiana Research Collection 2, Tulane University

284

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ERICA STEVENS

—Abbreviated Vita—

EDUCATION

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 2012-2016 PhD Candidate, English Literature

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 2010-2012 MA, English Literature

Loyola University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, 2004-2008 BA, English

ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT

Pennsylvania State University Instructor, Department of English, 2010—

Courses Taught ENGL 432: The American Novel to 1900, 2015 ENGL 015: Rhetoric and Composition, 2010-2014 ENGL 202A: Writing in the Social Sciences, 2014 ENGL 202D: Business Communication, 2012-2013

PUBLICATIONS

“Three-Fingered Jack and the Severed Literary History of John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquin Murieta,” ESQ 61.1 (2015), 73-112.

AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS

Dissertation Support Grant, Research and Graduate Studies Organization, 2016 Dissertation Fellowship, Center for American Literary Studies, 2015-2016 Bunton-Waller Fellow, Penn State University, 2010-2013