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3 Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the New Orleans Story Cycle Alice Dunbar-Nelson was twenty-four in 1899 when The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories appeared from Dodd, Mead and Company in New York,a major publisher of the time.1 African-American writers in the period enjoyed encouragement from such white writers as William Dean Howells and George Washington Cable and were able to find publication in the major periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly, the leading magazine of the day. Indeed, Paul Laurence Dunbar gave Howells credit for introducing him to a national audience when he reviewed Majors and Minors for Harper’s in June of 1896.2 Charles Chesnutt placed his stories in the Atlantic Monthly and his books with Houghton, Mifflin and Company, the foremost publisher in the country. The fact that Dodd, Mead and Company was also Paul Laurence Dunbar’s firm played some role in having The Goodness of St. Rocque appear with that company, and that connection was instrumental in generating public interest in Alice’s volume of interconnected stories. Gloria Hull gives Dunbar-Nelson credit for helping to institute a tradition of black stories, but she assumes that earlier writers had portrayed “only plantation and minstrel stereotypes,” which was not the case. Frances Harper and Charles Chesnutt both preceded Dunbar-Nelson in the genre, and they were not at all restricted to clichéd representations. Nonetheless, Hull continues, arguing that Dunbar-Nelson’s “strategy for escaping these odious expectations was to eschew black characters and culture and to write, instead, charming, aracial, Creole sketches that solidified her in the thenpopular ‘female-suitable’local color mode.”3 Hull is historically inaccurate in nearly every conceivable way.The Local-Color movement was not restricted to women in any sense.Indeed,the first two major practitioners of the mode were men, Bret Harte and Mark Twain. In Crumbling Idols Hamlin Garland maintained that the regional movement was the most important liter- Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the New Orleans Story Cycle 91 ary tradition in America, using the problems of common characters as the subject of important art, telling their stories in the vernacular, and establishing a truly indigenous literary movement distinct from the models of European literature.4 There was a widespread belief that this approach to literature would yield the highest form of art, not the lowest, a point made eloquently by Garland while Dunbar-Nelson was writing her stories. Nor did Dunbar-Nelson eschew anything; she wrote about the world she knew, the culture of creoles of color in New Orleans, depicting their fundamental humanity, social conflicts , and tragic dilemmas. For the most part, unlike her first husband, she did not write distinctly “dialect” literature but used the vernacular sparingly to reveal a character’s participation in a subset of city life. When she did indulge in linguistic representations, she did it with great effect and thematic richness, as in “The Praline Woman,” for example. Perhaps most significantly , she produced her most important book in the form of a story cycle, one in which all of the works share common settings, enlarge on a central core of themes, and draw from a shared cultural context. To form the new collection, she drew on three selections from her earlier Violets and Other Stories: “A Carnival Jangle,”“Titee,” which she revised to give a more positive conclusion, and “Little Miss Sophie.”5 All three are set in New Orleans, feature localized characters and events, and depict the complex ethnic social structure of Louisiana culture. She also constructed a thematic pairing in the new book, works that draw on localized issues and deepen or contrast ideas introduced earlier. Although it is notable for being set in New Orleans, and drawing on the cultural variations of that society,“Titee”(44–55) explores a different theme, social approbation based on a misunderstanding of a boy’s character and motivation . Written during a time Dunbar-Nelson was teaching in the public schools,the background of the action involves Titee’s violations of the codes of institutional behavior and commitment to his own affinity for the natural world and the impoverished section of New Orleans in the Third District, with its railroad section, levees, and swamps.The teacher, whose perspective provides a key judgment, regards him as an “idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy” who nonetheless knows a great deal about nature in the surrounding area and on the ocean, where he has sailed with fishermen. Although his situation is...

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