Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936

CHAPTER III: Grace King: That Great Mother Stream Underneath

CHAPTER III Grace King That GreatMother StreamUnderneath Grace King was born in 1851, 1852, or 1853: the sources vary.1 In any case, she was old enough to experience and remember vividly the period of Civil War and Reconstruction; much of her work is set in New Orleans during the latter period. "It had been her grand theme," says Robert Bush, ". . . defending the character of New Orleans and upholding the quality of its traditions."2 By 1853, both its economic and its social history had made New Orleans a city more European than most American cities, more sophisticated than most southern cities. Since the colonial period, its port had served to export goods from that vast section of the continent with ac- 94 TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY cess to the Mississippi; by 1835, New Orleans' exports exceeded those of New York, and by 1840 the city's population was exceeded only by those of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Although its economic and demographic position deteriorated during the immediate prewar period, New Orleanians seemed "complacent . . . tranquil and undisturbed."3 Moreover, the city mixed and separated racial and national groups to form a kaleidoscope unique in the nation. Originally settled by the French and Spanish, New Orleans produced the Creoles, highest in the city's social scale, self-segregated from the rest of the town, and often French-speaking. White Americans coming from South and North increasingly dominated the economic and political life of the city after 1803. Blacks in the city presented as wide a variety of cultures as did the whites, from the West Indians' indigenous life-style, to the mulattoes , some of whom were free (though withoutall the perquisites of full citizenship), to the quadroons and octoroons (the name indicating the number of black ancestors), who formed a caste of their own.4 Needless to say, the relationships among these groups provided a complexityof conflicts and resolutions that made New Orleans almost a perfect city for a writer. Grace King's principal subject matter was found in the society of the Creoles—the descendants of European aristocrats, the "best men under Bienville"—and their successors.5 George W Cable, another New Orleans writer, described the Creole character as it appeared just before the French ceded Louisiana to the Americans: [The women] were much superior to the men in quickness of wit, and excelled them in amiability and in many other good qualities. . . . [The men] are said to have been coarse, boastful, vain; and they were, also, deficient in energy and application, without well-directed ambition, unskilful in handicraft—doubtless through negligence only—and totally wanting in that community feeling which begets the study of reciprocal rights and obligations, and reveals the individual 's advantage in the promotion of the common interest. Hence, the Creoles were fonder of pleasant fictions regarding the salubrity, beauty, good order, and advantages of their town, than of measures tojustify their assumptions.6 Cable exhibits his own bias here, but certainly one of those "pleasant fictions"—and one of the city's traditions—was the definition of the sexes. "If it were not for the South," wrote Grace King, "the terms gentleman and lady would fall out of our vocabulary,which would contain G R A C E KING 95 only man and woman."7 The Creole definition apparently differed only slightly from the South's, probably in being more obviously European. In discussing the Creole man during the Civil War, Cable at any rate saw him as "little different from the Southerner at large, . . . gallant, brave, enduring, faithful."8 Grace King was not herself a born-to-the-blood Creole. Her father came to the city in the 18308. Alawyer, William King was a southerner, born in Georgia, raised in Alabama, and educated at the Universityof Virginia; he demonstrated his loyalty to his region during the CivilWar by refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union after New Orleans fell to Federal troops in 1862. Grace's mother, King's second wife, Sarah Ann Miller, also came from Georgian stock and retained her Protestant heritage. But she was born, like her daughter, in New Orleans and grew up in the middle of its French-speaking, Catholic, Creole society.9 New Orleans was one of the first southern cities to fall to Federal troops during the Civil War. For the rest of her life, Grace King remembered vividly the hardships...