Cable. Although he had served as an officer in the Confederate Cavalry, George Washington Cable was aware of much that was wrong in the old South and the new. His The Silent South and The Negro Question are antidotes to Page’s dangerous drugs; against the convict lease system, for instance, Cable wrote with startling pertinence even for our own day. Cordially hated in the South, he took up residence in Massachusetts, but though in “exile” he kept close to his heart the best interests of his section.
Praised as the first southerner to include just and sympathetic recognition of the Negro, Cable portrays Negroes or the background of slavery in most of his novels. For our purposes Old Creole Days (1879) and The Grandissimes (1880) are most important. Old Creole Days re-creates, with vivid local color, early nineteenth century Louisiana. In “Posson Jone”, a faithful servant outwits the sharpers who were preying upon his master; if the situation is old, the details are sharply observed. Less kindly pictures of slavery appear in “’Tite Poulette” and “Madame Delphine”, stories of octoroons of a warm seductive beauty, cultivated with care so that they may be “protected” by some Louisiana grandee. This “protection” does not keep tragedy from their lives, however. To these women, says Cable, “every white man in this country is a pirate.” Therefore, both mothers in these stories pretend that their daughters are not really theirs, in order that the girls may get around the law that rigorously forbade marriage of octoroons to “pure whites.” Bitterly acquainted with what faces her lovely daughter, Delphine cries out against the law “to keep the two races separate”: “A lie, Pere Jerome! Separate! No-o-o! They do not want to keep us separated; no, no! But they do want to keep us despised!”
In The Grandissimes, a long novel of old Louisiana, we have the background of slavery well worked in, and in the foreground, individualized Negro characters, far more convincing than the abolitionist victims. Outstanding is Honoré Grandissime, “free man of color,” educated, successful in business but an ineffectual victim of caste. Though true to New Orleans history, his type has been neglected in fiction for the more fascinating octoroon heroine. Palmyre is one of the best characterized octoroons in fiction.
This woman had stood all her life with dagger drawn, on the defensive against what certainly was to her an unmerciful world.... And yet by inexorable decree, she belonged to what we used to call “the happiest people under the sun.” We ought to stop saying that.
Under domineering and insult, Palmyre is shown as silent; “and so,” says Cable, “sometimes is fire in the wall.” Clemence, illiterate and superstitious, has folk-shrewdness:
You mus’n b’lieve all dis-yeh nonsense ’bout insurrectionin’; all fool-nigga talk. W’at we want to be insurrectionin’ faw? We de happiest people in de God’s worl’! Yes, we is; you jis oughteh gimme fawty an’ lemme go! Please gen’lemen!
Her cunning does not help, however, in this drastic case; she is told to run, and is coolly shot, stone dead.
One of the most unusual figures is the gigantic Bras Coupé, captured king of the Jaloffs, a legendary figure with counterpart in Louisiana history. He is contemptuous of whites, and kills the Negro driver who first tells him to work. Driven to the swamps for striking down his master, he puts a curse on the plantation. When he is captured he is “hamstrung”, in accordance with the Code Noir. When the name of his worst enemy falls upon his ears, even though dying, he spits upon the floor; when he is begged to forgive, he merely smiles. “God keep thy enemy from such a smile”, says the author.
Cable’s fiction shows full acquaintance with folk-songs, speech, lore and superstition, but unlike his contemporaries, Page and Harris, he does not use the material to support old traditions. He makes clear-eyed, telling observations on the South. A blow, punishable in a white offender by a small fine or conviction, assured Bras Coupé the death of a felon, by the old Code Noir.
(We have a Code Noir now, but the new one is a mental reservation, not an enactment).... The guests stood for an instant as if frozen, smitten stiff with the expectation of insurrection, conflagration and rapine (just as we do today whenever some poor swaggering Pompey rolls up his fist and gets a ball through his body)....