A History of American Literature

250 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

cases, they are tied in blood and kinship. And all in the name of pride: an absurd

belief in caste, class, and color as the determinants of character. “There is a slavery

that no legislation can abolish – the slavery of caste,” Frowenfeld observes:

That, like all the slaveries on earth, is a double bondage. And what a bondage it is which

compels a community, in order to preserve its established tyrannies, to walk behind the

rest of the world! What a bondage is that which incites a people to adopt a system of

social and civil distinctions, possessing all the enormities and none of the advantages of

those systems which Europe is learning to despise! This system, moreover, is only kept

at bay by a flourish of weapons. We have here what you may call an armed aristocracy.

Cable vigorously dissects a pride of caste that is, as he shows it, both destructive

and self-destructive. He shows how the very communities and individuals that

are severed, separated by this pride are intimately, inextricably bound together. He

shows the subtle humiliations that are a consequence of such pride, and the unease

and even guilt that sometimes trouble even the proudest. One Grandissime even

admits that “the shadow of the Ethiopian” falls across his family and his society.

“I am ama-aze at the length, the blackness of that shadow!” he declares. “It is the

Némésis. ... It blanches, my-de’-seh, ow whole civilization.” But Cable also exposes,

in detail, the violence that is another consequence of caste pride. A mob of Creoles,

enraged by a Yankee shopkeeper’s liberal sentiments, attacks and wrecks his shop. An

old African-American woman is cut down from the tree on which she has nearly

been lynched, allowed to run for her life if she can, and then shot and killed as she

tries to flee. And a core story tells of an African, Bras-Coupé, “a prince among his

people,” who escapes from slavery to the swamps because, we are told, he would

choose “rather to be hunted like a wild beast among those awful labyrinths, than to

be yoked and beaten like a tame one.”

The Grandissimes ends on the promise of peace between the feuding families, with

the marriage of Honoré Grandissime to one of the De Grapions. There is even the

hope of some broader, social and racial reconciliation, as Honoré has suggested that

“Honoré free man of color” should become a member of the Grandissime mercantile

house. But the hope is a faint one. The novel also closes with “Honoré free man of

color” killing one of the haughtier white members of the Grandissime family, who

has slighted him precisely because of his racial coloration. Typically of Cable, the

reader is left with marriage and murder rather than marriage and music: a sense of

conciliation and concord is scarred by the reminder of the deep divisions, the

discords that continue to disturb this society. Cable undoubtedly felt an affection for

Creole generosity, magnanimity, bravado, and glamour; this was tempered, however,

by his understanding of what he saw as the disastrous consequences of Creole pride.

He was a sympathetic but unremitting critic of the Creole spirit and society; and he

used his imaginative analysis of old Creole days to criticize the South of his own

time, which he saw as its echo and extension. That criticism, leveled aslant in his

fiction and more directly in The Silent South (1885), a treatise advocating racial

reform, made him increasingly unpopular in his own region. He moved north to

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