Graphic credit: 
"The Brown Pelican" 
by John James Audubon
http://www.audubon.org/bird/
BoA/images/originals/
00704p2.gif

For Audubon's commentary, see
http://www.audubon.org/bird/
BoA/F41_G4b.html
© Richard R. Buonanno, 1995 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

LOUISIANA, THE LITERATURE OF

Louisiana has always been exceptional as a southern state: its colonial origins were more French and Catholic than the Anglo and Protestant roots of other states; its politics and culture were shaped as much by its cosmopolitan port as by the plantation culture that typically dominated the region.  Even Civil War did not mark the state as definitively as elsewhere: the sentiment for secession was lukewarm,  New Orleans and the river fell under Union control early, and few significant battles were fought within its boundaries. Louisiana's literature bears the traces of that exceptionality.  The earliest writing was in French (and Spanish), and when English finally came to be the principal tongue in the mid-nineteenth century, the exotic flavors of Gallic and Caribbean culture lingered palpably.

Neither the French, who established the colony with a fort on the Red River near Natchitoches in 1714 and then, four years later, with the more successful settlement of New Orleans on the Mississippi, nor the Spanish, who controlled the territory after 1762, were ever able to make Louisiana a very profitable possession, a fact that helps to explain its eventual quick sale by Napoleon to the United States in 1803.  There were, of course, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many official and semi-official descriptions of the lower Mississippi valley, both in French and in Spanish, including Cabeza de Vaca's Relation-(1542), Le Page du Pratz's Histoire de la Louisiane [map](1758), Andre Penicaut's fascinating Relation, and Jean-Bernard Bossu's Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales-(1768). The letters and accounts of the Ursuline nuns' 1727 arrival in the colony by Marie St.Augustin de Tranchepain (Relation du voyages des premieres Ursulines a la Nouvelle Orleans [1859]) provide a unique early perspective by women   [Many of these French accounts were collected by Pierre Margry, Decouvertes et etablissements des francais dans l'ouest et dans le sud de l'Amerique Septentrionale (1614-1754)-(1876-1886).] Travel narratives about the state continued to appear throughout the next century, including such well-known works as Harriet Martineau's Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and more obscure but equally interesting accounts, like Elisee Reclus' astute 1853 commentary on slavery and the Americanization of the culture, "Fragments du voyage a la Nouvelle-Orleans," which appeared in an 1860 Parisian journal, Le Tour du Monde. [Professor John Clark translated the "Fragments"; see the link above.]

Nearly a century passed before colonial residents produced more conventional kinds of literary art.  Julien Poydras de Lallande, a native of Brittany, a merchant and planter in Pointe Coupee Parish across the river from the outpost of Baton Rouge, is credited with the first published work of poetry in the Louisiana territory.   Two anonymous poems (1777) in praise of the Spanish governor Bernardo de Galvez are attributed to him as well as his equally occasional "La Prise du Morne du Baton Rouge"(1779), two hundred and seven lines on the capture of the bluffs of Baton Rouge.  Somewhat more interesting is Louisiana's first extant drama, La Fete du Petit-Ble, ou L'Heroism de Poucha-houmma [The Festival of the Young Corn, or the Heroism of Poucha-Houmma] staged in 1809 and printed in New Orleans in 1814. Its elderly author, Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, had been an officer of the French army who had spent much of his career among the Choctaw people, whom he greatly admired.  Based on an event in the early 1750s, his "tragedy in five acts" couples a stiffly neo-classic form with a romanticized view of the noble savage, but it also incorporates knowledgeable details of native life.

But while these works claim the honors as the Louisiana's earliest published literature, the oral tradition was developing its own rich contribution to the state's literary ethos. Creole folk-songs and tales, incorporating and often blending elements of African folklore with French, German, Indian, Caribbean and other disparate sources, were an early reflection of the profound ethnic diversity that has characterized Louisiana's people since very early in its history. Because the primitive conditions and malarial climate made the colony rather unattractive to French settlers, many of the early inhabitants were largely involuntary: prisoners, vagabonds, and prostitutes impressed from the streets of France, together with African slaves, the first load of 500 arriving in 1719.  They were eventually joined by German farmers and successive waves of Acadian exiles from Nova Scotia after 1763, whose culture became extremely influential throughout the south central parts of the state.  Significant numbers of settlers from British colonies also ventured into French Louisiana, as well as groups from Spain and Haiti--and always, a continuing stream of slaves from Africa and the West Indies.  The relative lenience regarding private emancipations in the French Code Noir, [the 'black code' regulating the lives of black people, whether free or slave] also helped to create a large and fairly prosperous population of free people of color--les gens de couleur libre--nearly 1300 in New Orleans by 1803.  Later in the nineteenth century, this diverse population were joined by large groups of Irish and Italian immigrants, as well as many more of 'les Americains,' both from upriver and from the more Anglicized South, who made their own impacts on the state's language and culture. Henry Clay Lewis, writing in the southwest humor tradition as Madison Tensas, contributed his versions of frontier Louisiana in Odd Leaves from the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor (1843) and The Swamp Doctor's Adventures in the Southwest (1858). Less amusingly, Solomon Northup, a free man who was abducted from Saratoga, New York, and sold in New Orleans to a Red River planter, provided in Twelve Years a Slave (1853) a unique account of Louisiana's dreaded plantations "down the river."

Drawing upon and blending all this rich mix of cultures, the folk literature of Louisiana acquired an attractively exotic cast. Songs in the unique French patois of the Acadians and in the "gombo" French spoken by many blacks continued to circulate throughout the century.  Both songs and stories were frequently collected in period anthologies, such as Slave Songs of the United States (1867), but they also regularly appeared  in local periodicals such as Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, the first newspaper in the colony (founded by Louis Duclot in 1794) and L'Abeille (The Bee, a bilingual newspaper that lasted nearly a century, 1827-1923).   This folk material, often in an exotic (and disappearing) language, became important inspirations for later writers like George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Sidonie de la Houssaye, Grace King and Alcee Fortier, all of whom also collected this material as well.  Fortier's numerous publications, including Louisiana Folk-Tales, in French Dialect and English Translation (1895) remain important and influential resources, as does Hearn's Gumbo Zhebes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (1885) and Reminisces acadiennes (1907), a collection of tales gathered by Felix Voorhies, a St. Martinville judge.

But the coming of les Americains and their English to the tenaciously Francophile culture of Louisiana provided the real spur to French literature.  In the nineteenth century, there were as many as 133 French-language newspapers and journals in New Orleans and 152 more in the parishes (or counties), producing a generous market for stories and poems.  Edward LaRoque Tinker lists several hundred French authors in his bio-bibliography, Les Ecrits de langue francaise en Louisiane au XIXe siecle  (1932).  Among the most interesting were the poets and writers who had begun publishing their work in L'Album Litteraire, Journal des Juenes Gens, Amateure de la Litterature.  Founded in 1843 by Armand Lanusse and J. -L. Marciacq, L'Album was the first literary publication by free people of color in Louisiana, established just when racial prejudice increasingly threatened their free status.  Two years later, Les Cenelles appeared, a landmark anthology of poems by creoles of color.  Among the seventeen writers represented were Camille Thierry, Joanni Questy (whose work includes a serialized novella Monsieur Paul [1867]) and Victor Sejour, who later achieved considerable fame as a playwright in Paris.  The most famous (white) poets of the era were the Rouquette brothers, Dominique and Adrien.  Dominique, the elder, locally notorious for his derelict habits, published two volumes of romantic poetry that were highly praised in the French press, Les Meschacebeennes ("the Mississippians") (1839) and Les Fleurs d'Amerique (1857).  Likewise influenced by French romanticism, Adrien eventually became a priest and was well-known for his work among the Choctaw in St. Tammany parish.  The published works of "L'Abbe Rouquette" include several volumes of nature poetry and an idyll of Indian life, La Nouvelle Atala (1879).

Foremost among the French novelists were Albert Mercier and Sidonie de la Houssaye.  Mercier, a Paris-trained physician who was born in New Orleans, composed poems and plays and was a founder of the French literary club L'Athenee Louisianais (1875) and editor of Comptes rendus de l'Athenee Louisianais (1876), both of which were major forces in keeping alive Louisiana's French literature and language--at the very moment when the social upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction were making that struggle patently futile.  Of Mercier's six novels, the most interesting is L'habitation Saint-Ybars ou Maitres et Esclaves en Louisiane [St.-Ybars Plantation or Masters and Slaves in Louisiana] (1881), a detailed account of slave society from his youth.  Sidonie de la Houssaye (nee Helene Perret, whose nom de plume was Louise Raymond) is perhaps best known as having provided Cable with some materials for his Strange and True Stories of Louisiana (1889).  Her Les Quarteronnes de la Nouvelle-Orleans (1894-5), a group of four novels, some of which were published serially, develop a complexly eroticized version of the popular quadroon stereotype. Pouponne et Balthazar (1888) purports to give a true rendition of Evangeline, a continuing preoccupation in Louisiana ever since Longfellow had created her fictional odyssey.
 

Brief bibliography for this material:

Alexander De Menil, The Literature of the Louisiana Territory (1904);  Mary Gehman, The Free People of Color of New Orleans (1994); James P. Gilroy, ed. Francophone Literature of the New World (1982); Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (1992); Kenneth Holditch, ed. In Old New Orleans (1983); John Maxwell Jones, Slavery and Race in Nineteenth-century Louisiana-French Literature (1978); Richard S. Kennedy, ed. Literary New Orleans : Essays and Meditations (1992);
Dagmar Renshaw LeBreton,  Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette (1947); Thomas M'Caleb, The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State (1894); Charles Barthelemy Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (1937); Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (1963), and Louisiana:  A History (1984); Edward Laroque Tinker,  Ecrits de langues francais en Louisiane (1932); [revised by Auguste Viatte, Louisiana Review (1974)].

For a version of early Louisiana history, see the Catholic Encyclopedia's : http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09378a.htm
 

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