Louisiana Creole Literature by Brosman Catharine Savage;

Author:Brosman, Catharine Savage;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Some Twentieth-Century Louisiana Prose Writers

Although many fiction writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether Louisianans or visitors, have dealt with New Orleans, relatively few have emphasized the Creole background, traditions, or their remnants; fewer still call themselves Creole or are of mainly Creole extraction. The Creoles of Color, who preserve and cultivate their créolité, form a more cohesive group than do the descendants of white Creoles, whose community is barely identifiable at the present. What visitors and many residents are likely to identify now as “Creole” would generally be bits of recalled history or incidental features—cooking, a few customs, the architecture of the French Quarter (mostly of Spanish design), and certain plantations.

Whereas during much of the nineteenth century isolationism characterized the white Creole community, confined largely to the Vieux Carré, it was ultimately driven across Canal Street, as the Quarter became dilapidated and business moved. This urban displacement reduced cohesion. Intermarriage of Creole whites (despite their prejudices) with local whites of Irish, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, and other origin, and with those who settled in Louisiana from elsewhere, has diluted the early Creole stock. In 1950 one commentator wrote of the changing names in New Orleans: “Not that there are not many that are still Creole, but for the past half century enough have been Anglo-Saxon to make the Creole the exception rather than the rule.” Assimilation has been the effect, if not the intention—whereas by the 1960s blacks had learned that “you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition, and your own culture.” Among Catholic church parishes in New Orleans populated by whites, the old ethnic identifications (Irish, German, French, Italian) are largely gone. The “French” church, Notre-Dame de Bon Secours, was destroyed by fire, though the congregation continues under another name. The French language is widely studied in private schools but is no longer a part of everyday life. (In 1883 Alfred Mercier had predicted the extinction of the Creoles if French was no longer spoken in Louisiana.) Jazz is appreciated by whites as well as blacks, but Dixieland jazz remains a black creation, and white Creoles have no other special art or medium; nor, despite calling themselves Creole, do they identify so much with their legacy as in the past.1

With few exceptions, late twentieth-century white writers have been critical of the Creole legacy, especially in what can be termed its “Uptown” element (complacent, snobbish, traditionalist, racist). There is thus more agreement about the shortcomings of Creoles than their qualities and the importance of their heritage. Literary ridicule of such institutions as Carnival krewes, snobbish schools and churches, elite clubs (the Boston Club, Pickwick Club, Lawn Tennis Club), among the oldest such in the nation and populated chiefly by descendants of Creole families, is tempting and, indeed, facile; it has contributed to what is essentially an anti-Creole literature, or, more broadly, a satire of older social values. Changed social attitudes and broad public opinion

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