Bayou Folk and a Night in Acadie, Page 2

  The two couples in the story come from different social groups. Alcée Laballière (brother of Alphonse Laballière of “In and Out of Old Natchitoches”) and his beautiful but cool kinswoman Clarisse are Creoles—the elite of the region, comparatively wealthy, sophisticated descendants of settlers from France or Spain. Bobinôt and the seductive Calixta, with her Cuban blood, are part of the Acadian community—poorer, less well-educated descendants of the two thousand or three thousand Catholics who found their way to the bayous of Louisiana after the British drove them out of Acadia, Nova Scotia, in 1755. The possibility that Alcée might persuade Calixta to agree to a rendezvous in another parish is a dangerous threat to both couples—and the stability of both social groups. The intervention by Clarisse restores equilibrium. Balance once again prevails.

  The charming, witty “Madame Célestin’s Divorce,” focused on a marriage’s end, might seem the antithesis of “At the ’Cadian Ball,” but Chopin builds the story around a picket fence, suggesting a boundary that separates the hopeful lawyer from Madame Célestin and keeps the woman inside her marriage and her community. The story, like the interaction between the lawyer and the woman he would like to make his own, is flirtatious, and Chopin masterfully uses a broom to suggest the power of sex in preserving this marriage.

  Yet marriage is not the only subject emphasized in Bayou Folk, and at times balance—with the chance for stability and fulfillment that it brings—cannot be grasped by the characters in the collection. In “Ma’ame Pélagie” an obsession with the past interferes. In this story near the end of the book, Chopin develops the house-reconstruction motif she uses in the first story, and brings in an outsider as she does there and in other works.

  The outsider Wallace Offdean in “A No-Account Creole” will help Euphrasie restore the old Santien house. But the new person in “Ma’ame Pélagie”—La Petite, a niece of Pélagie—blocks a restoration effort. Like Offdean, La Petite articulates what she wants, and her sense of rich social possibilities resembles his: “I must live another life,” she says, “the life I lived before. I want to know things that are happening from day to day over the world, and hear them talked about. I want my music, my books, my companions.” But La Petite’s needs and Pélagie’s vision for the restored house are incompatible. The young girl will have what she wants, as will Pélagie’s sister. But Ma’ame Pélagie herself has lost her dream, her fantasy, and lost something tangible as well—her chance to regain for herself and her sister the prewar social position upon which her sense of fulfillment depends.

  The darkest moments in Bayou Folk are in “Désirée’s Baby,” Chopin’s most popular story throughout most of the twentieth century—and one of her few stories set before or during the Civil War. Again a fantasy, one of racial superiority, drives the narrative. But it leads not—as in “Ma’ame Pélagie”—to one person’s acceptance of a diminished social position in return for the happiness and fulfillment of a beloved sister, but to a woman’s shame, humiliation, and, presumably, death. Nowhere in Chopin’s fiction does an inability to balance social and individual fulfillment result in more disastrous consequences.

  The story’s famous ironic ending hinges on differences between cultures. Armand Aubigny’s white father and black mother apparently lived together happily in Paris, so Armand’s rejection of his wife and child because the child carries black blood—part, if not all, his own—is a rejection of his parents as well, and perhaps even of himself. It is not clear if Armand knows that he is of mixed race or if he has had a child with La Blanche, his slave, nor is it clear just what Désirée understands about her husband. The story leaves much unexplained, but its stinging condemnation of racism has burned itself into the memory of readers for generations.

  The depressing tone of “Désirée’s Baby” is echoed at the end of Bayou Folk. The youthful optimism of the early stories is gone. “La Belle Zoraïde” and “A Lady of Bayou St. John” are linked stories centered on whites’ attitudes toward race and on people’s obsessions with fantasies. Both stories—separated by the lighter “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche”—close the collection with a focus not on the possibilities of the future but on the destructive pull of the past.

  The principal theme in A Night in Acadie, as in Bayou Folk, is a search for personal fulfillment and cultural richness. But A Night in Acadie is a better balanced book, and its stories are stronger. Kate Chopin wrote other fine stories in the mid-1890s before she started on The Awakening, ones she did not include in this second collection—“The Story of an Hour,” “Lilacs,” “A Vocation and a Voice,” “The Falling in Love of Fedora,” “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” and one or two others—and she wrote some powerful short fiction later in her career, notably “The Storm” and “Charlie.” But she would produce little to surpass the works she published in A Night in Acadie—“Athénaïse,” “A Matter of Prejudice,” “Nég Créol,” “Tante Cat’rinette,” “A Respectable Woman,” “Ripe Figs,” and a few more. The Night in Acadie stories show us a world where life remains as difficult as it was in Bayou Folk yet is bursting with possibilities. A Night in Acadie is one of America’s best nineteenth-century collections of short stories—and one of the most compassionate views of life in American realistic fiction.

  The stories in the collection are framed by beginning and ending narratives about a man setting out on a short trip that leads to unexpected results—a probable marriage in the first, an act of kindness in the last. Within that frame is another, comprising two of Chopin’s strongest stories—the lovely, haunting “Athénaïse,” placed second in the collection, and “A Respectable Woman,” positioned just before the little sketch “Ripe Figs” near the end.

  The opening title story is a bridge from Bayou Folk. The setting is a ’Cadian ball held in a disintegrating plantation mansion, a perfect place for a narrative about young people—their options hemmed in by an oppressive poverty—seeking marriage partners and better lives. Zaïda Trodon, to be rescued by Telèsphore Baquette, himself escaping, at least for the day, from what he sees as the limited possibilities of his own region, is a cousin of the emaciated Mentine Trodon, whom Doudouce loves so desperately in the Bayou Folk story “A Visit to Avoyelles.” Chopin describes Zaïda arriving at the ball all in white (the young woman plans to elope later in the evening) and, in a skillful touch, notes that even her slippers are white, though “no one would have believed let alone suspected that they were a pair of old black ones which she had covered with pieces of her first communion sash.”

  Like ’Tite Reine of “In Sabine,” Zaïda is spared life with an arrogant man who drinks too much. She has the possibility now for a better match with the prudent, methodical Telèsphore, who adores her. But Zaïda is saved by chance. Without the fortunate appearance of an outsider, she might be in a difficult position the night of the ’Cadian ball, forced into a marriage she realizes would be a mistake.

  The story Kate Chopin tells in “Athénaïse”—the longest, and, perhaps, the best story in the two collections—at first resembles Edna Pontellier’s story in The Awakening. The title character is a young woman recognizing a new life within her. Athénaïse Miché is miserable in her marriage, despite comfortable surroundings, and unsure about what she wants in place of it. Her Creole husband is polite and attentive enough about some things but insistent and arrogant about others. She herself is moody, impulsive, and headstrong—determined to do things her own way no matter what the cost. She leaves her husband’s house, meets an attractive man, and finds her body and spirit suddenly alive, vibrant—full of new possibilities.

  “Athénaïse,” however, develops in a way that could hardly be more different from The Awakening. The man Athénaïse meets on leaving her husband, a journalist named Gouvernail, is drawn to her and would not hesitate to take her as his lover—but he understands better than Athénaïse herself does that what she needs at the moment is a confidant, a brother, so he holds her gently in his arms and tries to be that for her. Her husband, Cazeau, brought
her home once before, after she left him, but he is so horrified by the thought of treating his wife as his father treated a runaway slave that he cannot seek her out again. He writes to her saying he will always love her but will no longer force himself on her. Although he believes that he has lost his last chance for happiness, that Athénaïse will never care for him, he writes that he will wait for her to return. The story ends not in separation and suicide, but in pregnancy, reconciliation, and hope.

  There is no winner or loser in the narrative. Athénaïse changes, but so does her husband. To be sure, her brother is disappointed that she is behaving in such an “ordinary,” “commonplace” fashion by returning to her husband when she learns she is pregnant, and certainly Athénaïse is transformed by the discovery that she is carrying a child. But she comes back to Cazeau not because she is trapped but because she is happy, because she is “steeped in a wave of ecstasy,” because the “first purely sensuous tremor of her life” is washing over her as she speaks her husband’s name, because she now understands herself as a partner of Cazeau, a coproprietor of their estate, because she has chosen the best opportunity open to her, because she has reached for the best possible life.

  Other characters in A Night in Acadie are also changed by a child or children. “Polydore,” “Regret,” and “A Matter of Prejudice” are touching little narratives about the effect of a child on an older woman (and in “Mamouche,” later in the collection, the older person is a man). In “Polydore,” Mamzelle Adélaïde discovers a “bond of love” connecting her with a motherless boy she has raised as her own. In “Regret,” Mamzelle Aurélie learns she has blundered in refusing marriage and the possibility of children. And in “A Matter of Prejudice,” old Madame Carambeau—one of Chopin’s more memorable characters—forgives her son for marrying an American woman and reaches out to her daughter-in-law and her grandchild.

  Old Madame Carambeau’s prejudices are part of a motif running through many Chopin stories—the way Creole culture influences people’s sense of what is natural. Madame Carambeau “was a woman of many prejudices—so many, in fact, that it would be difficult to name them all. She detested dogs, cats, organ-grinders, white servants and children’s noises. She despised Americans, Germans and all people of a different faith from her own. Anything not French had, in her opinion, little right to existence.” Yet almost everyone around her yields to her dispositions. When she decides after ten years to reconcile with her son, she insists that Providence had arranged the details and “no one contradicted her.” Like Maman Nainaine in the delicate sketch “Ripe Figs,” near the end of A Night in Acadie, Madame Carambeau speaks with such authority that others accept her view as natural. Creoles—Madame Carambeau, Maman Nainaine, and others—maintain their dominant position in Chopin’s Louisiana by virtue of their cultural, if not their economic, power and influence.

  Yet Chopin makes clear here and throughout her fiction that such dominance is waning, that among young people French, like other languages immigrants have brought to America, is being displaced by English, and that most mainstream American values will eventually prevail. Madame Carambeau in “A Matter of Prejudice” will teach her granddaughter French, but the little girl will teach her English, and the old woman—having never before ventured into the American quarter of New Orleans—has now passed across the boundary separating it from the French quarter and will surely make the trip again.

  Some Night in Acadie stories, like some in Bayou Folk, focus on people of color. “Nég Créol” and “Tante Cat’rinette” depict the loyalty of former slaves to the families that once owned them. The stories are among Chopin’s strongest works in part because of the sensitive, loving portraits of two African Americans of great courage and dignity. Loyalty is a highly prized value in Chopin’s stories. In “Ozème’s Holiday,” the closing work in A Night in Acadie, a ’Cadian man gives up his annual week’s vacation to help a former slave pick her cotton and nurse her son back to health, and in “Odalie Misses Mass” a young girl stays with an old black woman left alone on a feast day. But in “Nég Créol” and “Tante Cat’rinette” a loyal commitment to others is measured not in hours or weeks, but in years, a lifetime.

  Old Chicot, the nég créol, earns his keep in the teeming multi-cultural French Market of New Orleans among Sicilians and Gascon butchers, among Irish, Jews, Choctaws, mulattoes, blacks, and others. Because he is “so black, lean, lame, and shriveled,” the merchants call him “Chicot” (stump), “Maringouin” (insect, mosquito), or simply “Nég.” Powerless and dominated, he nevertheless builds an identity for himself by proclaiming his association with what he insists is an elite white family and by secretly caring for the diseased, poverty-stricken, seventy-five-year-old daughter of that family.

  Tante Cat’rinette’s devotion to her former owners is the same. Because she had saved the life of his daughter before the Civil War, a rich planter whom she calls Vieumaite (old master) had given Tante Cat’rinette her freedom and a house in Natchitoches. But a generation later, hard times and sickness have fallen upon Vieumaite’s child, so Tante Cat’rinette once again saves her—with her nursing and with a loan of a thousand dollars she earns by selling her house. But the former slave rescues herself as well by avoiding the humiliating loss of her house (it is in poor repair and has become a danger to the community) and by integrating herself again into the lives of people whom she loves and who love her.

  Chopin’s attitude toward race in these works is complex. Her characters’ language reflects the speech of the people in the regions she describes: “Negro,” usually offensive to our ears, appears frequently in the stories and “darkey” comes up a few times, as does the hateful “nigger” or “nigga.” Her characters’ assumptions about the social position of African Americans also mirror those of their communities. Almost everyone in “In and Out of Old Natchitoches,” the second story in Bayou Folk, accepts the social boundaries that separate whites from mulattoes, and African Americans throughout the stories insist on “maintaining the color line.” Marriages between whites and blacks are impossible, as are relationships built on social equality.

  Yet Chopin is not blind to racial injustice, any more than she is blind to patriarchal oppression or self-serving assumptions about gender, class, or ethnicity. She describes the racial situation as she has found it. In many stories friendship and trust are common among people of different races, and affection flows back and forth between blacks and whites, especially between black women and white children. “La Belle Zoraïde,” “Nég Créol,” “Tante Cat’rinette,” “In Sabine,” and other stories depict individual people of color as loving, sensitive, and strong. The stories capture both the suffering and the triumphs of these black people’s lives. Chopin does not apologize for the racial situation in late-nineteenth-century Louisiana, nor does she idealize it. Her family had owned slaves when she was a child in St. Louis. During the Civil War, her half-brother fought on the side of the Confederacy and died of typhoid fever. Her husband joined the notorious White League in New Orleans. The culture of the Louisiana she knew inherited some ugly racial attitudes.

  But Kate Chopin functioned in more than one culture and more than one language—and attitudes toward race were not the same from one group to another, so she always sees more than her characters see. She is not a revolutionary; she does not seek to overthrow the social order. She lived her entire life among people suffering the consequences of a violent destruction of their social and economic system. She values her communities, such as they are, because she values the individuals in them. She draws her characters—white people, black people, Native Americans, and people of mixed blood—with respect and dignity. She seeks the truth about the life she portrays. Within such a context—within an imaginative world where compassion and acceptance can be taken on trust, where the goal is to capture what is (though not always what ought to be) the truth—Chopin’s limitations of vision as a white, middle-class, nineteenth-century Southern American woman loom not so l
arge.

  The depressing nature of race relations does not dominate the ending of A Night in Acadie as it does some late stories in Bayou Folk. “A Respectable Woman” occupies roughly the same position near the close of A Night in Acadie that “Athénaïse” has near the start. Sophisticated as well as respectable, Mrs. Baroda becomes fully aware of how powerful an influence her husband’s friend—the journalist Gouvernail, who took such good care of Athénaïse Miché—is having upon her. Sitting alone with him one night, she is deeply disturbed: “She wanted to reach out her hand in the darkness and touch him with the sensitive tips of her fingers upon the face or the lips. She wanted to draw close to him and whisper against his cheek—she did not care what—as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman.”

  Gouvernail murmurs, “half to himself,” lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!/Still nodding night—.” Only after Mrs. Baroda returns to the house does he complete Whitman’s “apostrophe to the night.” Chopin does not quote the remainder, but readers may be familiar with it: “Press close bare-bosomed night—press close magnetic nourishing night!/Night of south winds—night of the large few stars!/Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.”

  In “A Respectable Woman” Gouvernail approaches the intimate circle of a married woman, as he had done in “Athénaïse,” and again understands the woman in some ways better than she does herself. Kate Chopin does not often assign such understanding to a man. In her stories women are generally not only more attractive, graceful, and energetic than the men around them, but more insightful as well. Chopin likes Gouvernail, however, and gives him a small role in her novel The Awakening. He attends the party Edna Pontellier throws to celebrate her independence, and he observes carefully the events of the evening. Again he quotes a fragment of poetry—this time a sonnet by Algernon Swinburne—and again Chopin withholds the rest of the passage. But readers who recognize the Swinburne sonnet will see what the sensitive Gouvernail sees: that watching over the wild scene near the close of Edna’s party is the brooding figure of death.