Signifying Songs: The Double Meaning of Black Dialect in the Work of George Washington Cable

Abstract

Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) produced a "peculiar impression" (Hearn, "Grandissimes" 9) on its early readers, many of whom found it difficult to say with certainty what the novel was about. Despite its conventional love plot, its "local color" atmosphere, and its romantic treatment of the aristocratic French-Creole family after whom it was named, the final effect of The Grandissimes was hardly orthodox: it was too "full of allusions which are hard to trace" (Boyesen 12), rendering the reader "like one guessing out a half-told riddle" (Eggleston 5). Another peculiarity concerned the novel's strange historical parallelism: it was clearly set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, yet it also spoke to the Reconstruction South (Boyesen 10-11), especially in the central section that dealt with the brutal treatment of the rebellious slave Bras-Coupe. These early reviewers were intrigued by the apparent confusion of New Orleans society, manifested in a profusion of "mongrel dialects" (Rev. of Old Creole Days 6) and in a chaotic racial situation that produced two Honore Grandissimes: the first a "dazzling contradiction of the notion that a Creole is a person of mixed blood" (Cable, Grandissimes 38), the second a free man of color and wealthy property owner cursed by a racial prejudice that belies his appearance. This paper attempts to account for these peculiar impressions of the novel by investigating the linguistic, aesthetic, and political aspects of the interaction of African-American and French-Creole culture, as seen in The Grandissimes, in Cable's two neglected ethnographic essays "The Dance in Place Congo" and "Creole Slave Songs" (1886), and in his various political essays of the 1880s. With an analysis of the ambiguities involved in the notion of the "Creole" (both as racial group and language variety), and with an examination of how the African-American cultural products of dialect, song, and sat-