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a CREOLE article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, May 25 1999
Cable described land of Creole planters
by Jim Bradshaw
George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844. He had to leave school at the age of 14 to support his family after the death of his father. During the Civil War, he saw military action in Mississippi. After the war, he became a columnist and reporter for the New Orleans Picayune, although he was a bookkeeper by profession.
He became a noted writer, particularly about Creole Louisiana, although not all of his depictions of Creole Louisiana, although not all of his depictions of Creole life met with approval from the New Orleans gentry. According to Joseph Tregle Jr., Cable's later depictions of Creole life made the writer the "most cordially hated little man in New Orleans."
"Cable's depiction of the original Louisianians and their descendants in such works as 'Old Creole Days' (1879) and 'The Grandissimes' (1880) so infuriated those about whom he wrote that a veritable flood of abuse and damnation swirled around him in newspapers, pamphlets, and public meetings," according to Tregle. "Even the venerable priest-poet Adrien Rouquette vilified his character in such scurrilous and vulgar denunciation that friends in the North actually feared for his safety."
He moved to Northhampton, Mass., in 1885, where his works depicting life in Louisiana and New Orleans were much more appreciated. Cable died in St. Petersburg, Fla.
In the first chapter of his 1886 book, "The Creoles of Louisiana," Cable attempted to show the difference between Cajuns and Creoles. It is obvious that he is writing about the white planter class, not black people. Here is some of what he wrote.
Among the great confederation of States whose Anglo-Saxon life and inspiration swallows up all alien immigration, there is one in which a Latin civilization, sinewy, valiant, cultured, rich, and proud, holds out against extinction. There is a people in the midst of the population of Louisiana, who send representatives and senators to the Federal Congress, and who vote for the nation's rulers. They celebrate the Fourth of July; and ten days later, with far greater enthusiasm, they commemorate that great Fourteenth that saw the fall of the Bastille. Other citizens of the United States, but not themselves, they call Americans.
Who are they? Where do they live?
Take the map of Louisiana. Draw a line from the southwestern to the northeastern corner of the State; let it turn thence down the Mississippi to the little river-side town of Baton Rouge, the State's seat of government; there draw it eastward through lakes Maurepas Pontchartrain, and Borne, to the Gulf of Mexico; thence pass along the Gulf coast back to the starting point at the mouth of the Sabine, and you will have compassed rudely but accurately enough, the State's eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty square miles of delta lands.
About half the State lies outside these bounds and is more or less hilly. Its population is mainly and Anglo-Saxon moneyed and landed class, and the blacks and mulattos who were once its slaves. The same is true of the population in that part of the delta lands north of the Red River. The Creoles are not there.
Across the southern end of the State, from Sabine Lake to Chadeleur Bay, with a north-and-south width of from ten the thirty miles and an average of about fifteen, stretch the Gulf marshes, the wild haunt of myriads of birds and water-fowl, serpents and saurians, hares, raccoons, wild-cats, deep-bellowing frogs, and clouds of insects, and by few hunters and oystermen, whose solitary and rarely frequented hunts speck the wide, green horizon at remote intervals. Neither is the home of the Creoles to be found here.
North of these marshes and within the bounds already set lie still two other sorts of delta country. In these dwell most of the French-speaking people of Louisiana, both white and colored. Here the names of bayous, lakes, villages, and plantations are, for the most part, French; the parishes (counties) are name after saints and church-feasts, and although for more than half a century there has been a strong inflow of Anglo-Americans and English-speaking blacks, the youth still receive their education principally from the priests and nuns of small colleges and convents, and two languages are current; in law and trade, English; in the sanctuary and at home, French.
These two sorts of delta country are divided by the Bayou Teche. West of this stream lies a beautiful expanse of faintly undulating prairie, some thirty-nine hundred square miles in extent, dotted with artificial homestead groves, with fields of sugar-cane, cotton, and corn, and with herds of ponies and keen-horned cattle feeding on its short, nutritious turf. Their herdsmen speak an ancient French patois, and have the blue eyes and light brown hair of Northern France.
But not yet have we found the Creoles. The Creoles smile, and sometimes even frown at these; these are the children of the famed Nova Scotian exiles whose banishment from their homes by British arms in 1775 has so often been celebrated in romance; they still bear the name of Acadians. They are found not only on this western side of the Teche, but in all this French-speaking region of Louisiana. But these vast prairies of Attakapas and Opelousas are peculiarly theirs, and here they largely outnumber the haughtier Louisianian who endeavors to withhold as well from him as from the "American" the proud appellation of Creole.
Thus we have drawn in the lines upon a region lying between the mouth of the Red River on the north and the Gulf marshes on the south, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas, and the Bayou Manchac. However he may be found elsewhere, this is the home, the realm, of the Louisiana Creole.
It is a region of incessant and curious paradoxes. The features, elsewhere so nearly universal, of streams rising from elevated sources, growing by tributary inflow, and moving on to empty into larger water-courses, is entirely absent. The circuit of inland water supply, to which our observation is accustomed elsewhere -- commencing with evaporation from remote watery expanse, and ending with the junction of streams and their down-flow to the sea -- is here in great part reversed; it begins, instead, with the influx of streams into and over the land, and though it includes the seaward movement in the channels of main streams, yet it yields up no small part of its volume by an enormous evaporation from millions of acres of overflowed swamp. It is not in the general rise of waters, but in their subsidence, that the smaller streams deliver their contents to the sea.
On the banks of this immerse fretwork of natural dykes and sluices... now lie hundreds of miles of the richest plantations in America; and here it was that the French colonists, first on the Mississippi and later on the great bayous, laid the foundations of the State's agricultural wealth.
The scenery of this land, where it is still in its wild state, is weird and funereal, but on the banks of the large bayous, broad fields of corn, of cotton, of cane, and of rice, open out at frequent intervals on either side of the bayou, pushing back the dark, pall-like curtain of moss-draped swamp, and presenting to the passing eye the neat and often imposing residence of the planter, the white double row of field hands' cabins, the tall red chimney and broad gray roof of the sugar-house, and beside it the huge, square, red brick bagasse-burner, into which, during the grinding season, the residuum of crushed sugar cane passes unceasingly day and night, and is consumed with the smoke and glare of a conflagration.
Even when the forests come in upon the banks of the stream there is a wild and solemn beauty in the shifting scene which appeals to the imagination with special strength when the cool morning lights or the warmer glows of evening impart the colors of the atmosphere to the surrounding wilderness, and to the glassy waters of the narrow and tortuous bayous that move among its shadows... Now and then, from out of some hazy shadow, a heron, white or blue, takes flight, an alligator crossing the stream sends out long, tinted bars of widening ripple, or on some high, fire-blackened tree a flock of roosting vultures, silhouetted on the sky, linger with half-opened, unwilling wings, and flap away by ones and twos until the tree is bare.
Should the traveler descry... a small canoe containing two men, whose weight seems about to engulf it, and by whose paddle-stroke it is impelled with such evenness and speed that a long, glassy wave gleams continually at either side a full inch higher than the edge of the boat, he will have before him a picture of nature and human life that might have been seen at any time since the French fathers of the Louisiana Creoles colonized the Delta.