A History of American Literature

248 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

Demoiselles, the realm of maiden beauty, the home of merriment, the house of

daring, all in the tremor and glow of pleasure, suddenly sank, with one short, wild

wail of terror,” the reader is told, “– sank, sank, down, down, into the merciless,

unfathomable flood of the Mississippi.” The vision of the splendid mansion

disappearing into the water is a dreamlike echo of the closing moments of “The Fall

of the House of Usher.” But it has a serious political point: the disappearance, the

gradual sinking away of Creole ascendancy and power. In another tale, “Jean-ah

Poquelin,” a proud French Creole, a former smuggler and slave-trader, becomes a

recluse in his “old colonial plantation-house half in ruin.” The house stands “aloof

from civilization,” so does old Jean Marie Poquelin. Nevertheless, civilization

encroaches in the form of a new road being built through the fetid marshland

surrounding them. Cable subtly dramatizes the cultural conflicts of the time in

which the tale is situated, as Poquelin struggles to come to terms with a new order

and a strange new set of practices. This is “the first decade of the present century,”

the narrator tells us; and the old Creole has to deal, not only with newfangled

notions of progress and profit, but with a “Yankee” administration and the English

language, now that his land is no longer on French territory but American. Poquelin

takes his complaint about the incursion of the roadbuilders to the top. He visits the

governor, and the way he addresses him shows how Cable could use his mastery of

dialect to expose social and cultural tension. “I come to you. You is le Gouverneur,”

Poquelin declares,

I know not the new laws. I ham a Fr-r-rench-a-man! Fr-rench-a-man have something

aller au contraire – he comes at his Gouverneur. I come at you. If me had not been

brought from me king like bossals in the hold time, ze king gof-France would-a-show

Monsieur le Gouverneur to take care his men to make strit in right places. Mais, I know;

we billong to Monsieur le Président.

The speech reveals, in its mixture of languages, just how culturally conflicted

Poquelin is, torn between old allegiances and a new set of practices. The old Creole

is having to deal with a system the speech and assumptions of which he hardly

understands – and for which, quite clearly, he has little sympathy. Much the same

could be said of the South in and to which Cable wrote, during a period when the

region was facing, and trying to resist, civil and political change. Both the speech,

and the story in which it is embedded, have as much to do with the time in which

they were written as with the time in which they are set. Or perhaps it would be

more accurate to say that, for Cable, both times were part of one continuing, and

often regrettable, history.

Characteristically of Cable, “Jean-ah Poquelin” becomes darker and more

macabre, as the narrator turns to violence and the Gothic to reveal the “haunted

heart” of this fictional world. There is mob action against Poquelin. Poquelin dies

suddenly, and a secret reason for his wanting to keep the world away is revealed.

A ghost that the local community had claimed was haunting his property turns out

to be his younger brother, bleached white by leprosy. The brother, accompanied by

GGray_c03.indd 248ray_c 03 .indd 248 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM