Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 249the one other person left on the estate, “one old African mute” slave, then disappear
“in the depths of the swamp known as the Leper’s Land,” never to be seen again. It is
difficult not to see the plight of the younger brother as a curse: he became a leper
when the two brothers went on a slave-trading mission to Africa. Equally, it is
difficult not to see the seclusion into which the two brothers move as, at least in part,
a consequence of that curse. They are isolated from the world around them, and the
possibility of change and growth, by a scourge and a secret that issue directly from
their involvement in slavery. Like so many other characters in Southern fiction, their
past is their present; and that past tends to cripple them, to separate them from
ordinary humanity – and even from the processes of history. A similar sense of a
separation that cripples and confounds is to be found in Cable’s portrait of the
Creole families in his 1880 novel, The Grandissimes. “I meant to make The
Grandissimes as truly a political novel as it has ever been called,” Cable declared. And
here, again, he uses the medium of a romantic, at times even Gothic, tale to pursue
the issues that intrigued him most: pride of caste and class, resistance to necessary
change, racial oppression and violence. The plot is a convoluted one, but its central
premise is not. The Grandissimes hinges on a family feud between two old, proud
Creole families: a feud for which the narrator himself finds a romantic analogy in
the strife between the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet. In a move
characteristic of fiction generally classed as local color, the reader is introduced to
the warring families, the Grandissimes and the De Grapions, both of Louisiana, by
an outsider. Joseph Frowenfeld, a “young Américain,” comes to the city of New
Orleans with his family. The rest of his family soon dies of “the dreaded scourge,” but
he manages to survive. And he becomes acquainted with both Honoré de
Grandissime, banker and head of his family, and the De Grapions, who nursed him
during his illness. Slowly, he learns about the tangled history of the two clans, and
especially the Grandissimes: he learns, for instance, that Honoré has a brother,
“Honoré Grandissime, free man of color,” with the same father but a different
mother. He watches and witnesses the habits and eccentricities of the Creoles: their
“preposterous, apathetic, fantastic, suicidal pride,” their “scorn of toil,” their belief
that “English is not a language, sir; it is a jargon!” Cable uses his immense skill as a
creator of dialect speech to introduce Frowenfeld, and the reader, to the rich plurality
of cultures and traditions in old Louisiana. But he also measures the divisions of
class and color that separate the different communities, and, above all, the gap that
separates the white race from the black – and, in one notable instance here, brother
from brother.
“The Grandissimes,” Cable was later to say, “contained as great a protest against
the times in which it was written as against the earlier times in which its scenes were
set.” That is plain enough. Cable is writing about the Louisiana of old Creole days:
the novel begins in 1803. He is also writing about the South of his own time. Families
like the Grandissimes, the reader learns, have absented themselves from the
“Américain” system of which, notionally, they have just become a part. They are
willing to kill others of their own, Creole kind. Most serious of all, they deny
the humanity, the fundamental human rights of a race to which, in very manyGGray_c03.indd 249ray_c 03 .indd 249 8 8/1/2011 7:54:19 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 19 AM