Imagining the Creole City by Rien Fertel

Author:Rien Fertel [Fertel, Rien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Foreign Language Study, Creole Languages
ISBN: 9780807158258
Google: MXeOAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2014-11-17T04:06:08+00:00

“If There Were Women, It Might be More Interesting”

Knowing her background and the circles she traveled in, it is easy to understand Grace King’s Lost Cause stance. However, her vehement defense of the Creoles and the impassioned provincialism that defined her later writing are less conceivable. King, though a New Orleanian by birth, could not and never dared call herself a Creole. But she was brought up as a Creole. Mrs. King, born Sallie Ann Miller but called Mimi, raised her children, as she had been raised, to speak fluent French. (Throughout their adult lives King and her sisters would continue to pepper their English speech and writing with French words and phrases.)61 King remembered Mimi, despite being raised Presbyterian, drinking wine with breakfast and practicing her piano on Sundays, two behaviorisms that suggested that “she too [was] a good little Creole.”62 Mimi and the King family, like most Creole New Orleanians, refused to honor the Fourth of July holiday. Instead, each year on July 14 the thoroughly creolized Kings sang the Marseillaise and read aloud the French Revolution’s bill of rights, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.63 The Kings sent their four daughters to Catholic schools, thus ensuring that they would get the same Creole education that Mimi had had. Grace attended a typical Gallic-style academy, the Institut St. Louis on Dauphine Street, which she would recall as being “unique in a picturesque way” and full of “peculiarly interesting” Creole girls. Overseen by the Paris-educated Mme E. Deron, this private institution modeled itself on the Ursuline Convent and stressed a curriculum strong in history and foreign languages, two disciplines in which King excelled then and throughout adulthood. Birthplace, education, and friendships forged in young Grace an allegiance to Creole culture and society that she would accuse Cable of lacking.64 For a Gallic-cultured American, even one who had not yet visited the patrie-mère, “the routine of life in New Orleans” could, as King posited, seem perfectly “French.”65

In her first visit to Paris, in late autumn 1891, King found the French capital—“the mother of New Orleans,” in her words—not as strange as she had previously imagined. The City of Lights appeared very much like home; King felt the city to be “so natural” because “New Orleans is very much like it.” But as it so naturally does for many Americans, Paris could still hold sway over her. During several lengthy stays the city became for King a place to better understand New Orleans history and her own connection to the Creoles. Paris, King’s “greatest pleasure ground in the world for memory,” allowed her to think like a historian.66 It was in Paris, her newfound home away from home, that Grace King would finalize her first work of history. Contracted by Dodd, Mead and Company to produce a book for their series “The Makers of America,” King chose as her subject Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founder of New Orleans. King would be filling in a major gap in

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