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98 “OUR CREOLE ‘WE’ DOES DAMAGE, AND OUR CREOLE ‘YOU’ DOES MORE” This rueful confession comes during the tentative beginnings of a friendship between Honoré Grandissime and Joseph Frowenfeld, two of the major characters in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novel of 1803 New Orleans (1988:151). While the two men seem to like each other well enough personally, their immediate, if shy, goodwill is complicated by the social and political circumstances between their nations. To Joseph Frowenfeld , Honoré Grandissime represents “the finest flowering” of the New Orleans citizen, but to that New Orleans citizen, Joseph Frowenfeld, the American immigrant in Louisiana, represents U.S. imperialism. Frowenfeld thus appears to the Creoles to threaten all the ways they constitute themselves as a culture—their language, economy, and territorial sovereignty . He especially appears to threaten their racial and ethnic taxonomies . In this chapter, I consider The Grandissimes, looking at the contest between the Creole “we” and the American “you” played out against the background of the United States’ 1803 purchase of Louisiana. This act doubled the size of the United States but precipitated a crisis over the racial and ethnic constitution and legal status of the new people who suddenly found themselves to be American citizens. Cable’s attempt to isolate the dynamic of how national and local identities are constructed as coextensive rather than antithetical narratives makes it useful for a study of regionalism. It is through the genre and conventions of local-color fiction or regionalism that Cable creates a tempo4 “The Shadow of the Ethiopian” GeorgeWashington Cable’s The Grandissimes rary textual site on which his white characters can maintain both a national and a local identity, even and especially when the two appear to be in immediate conflict. Cable’s reliance on regionalism as a narrative strategy allows him to use this genre as what Richard Brodhead calls an access point for the emergence of new voices and subjects into the American literary mainstream. This strategy also allows us to examine, quite literally, the “color” in the genre of local color.1 Finally, I suggest that the success of The Grandissimes in narratively assimilating the Creole to U.S. culture rests on divorcing its black subjects from the domain of the term Creole and expelling them from legal personhood in the text. Expelling and silencing black culture in this novel mark a larger historical project in which regionalism is complicit. The text’s rendering of local Creole identity in terms of whiteness helps create the local-color subjects who, like the New Englanders in Sarah Orne Jewett’s text, can be assimilated to an endangered notion of the real, or ancestral American . Likewise, it eases the assimilation of Southern territory into a PostReconstruction American nation. Subject/citizen and territory/nation are wedded through the novel’s varied, disorganized, and variously authorized versions of the origins of its most exclusive Creole family. In turn, this family history allegorizes the various national histories of the text. The ostensible topic of The Grandissimes is the purchase of the Louisiana Territory by the United States. This event is recounted with reference to the pivotal figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose slave revolt in Haiti forced Napoleon Bonaparte to sell Louisiana in a vain attempt to raise enough money to put down the revolt. The context of the novel’s publication —the Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War—is similarly acknowledged in the logic of the novel. It, too, is an event underwritten by, but finally inadequate to the reconstruction of, racial matters. In the time of the novel, the major freed black figures become social rather than political problems, without the ability to speak to the racial struggles for which their very existence has provided the terms. As the novel progresses, the identity of the Creole changes. “Creole” comes to mean not just “white,” it also comes to signify a cultural identity consonant (as race could not be) with the project of a politically homogeneous nation. Like The Californians, this book is haunted by the many national histories that produced the territory of Louisiana. Taking the fragments of these histories and regional stories as my starting point, I focus my reading on Cable’s deliberate use of the conventions of regionalism. I look at the novel’s rich use of languages and accents, asking how they help to order the novel’s various racial genealogies. I go on to examine how the text’s notoriously difficult family genealogies index...

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