Bayou Folk

By Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin's classic book of 23 masterful short stories shows rural life in Louisiana after the American Civil War and how former slaves, people of color, women, poor whites, and wealthy whites chafed against social restrictions. Lightly edited for modern readers, including translations from French and standardized spelling, the bones of th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inwood Commons Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998570402

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (1850-1904), was an American writer of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. Chopin is best known for her novel The Awakening, and for her short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Of French and Irish descent, her work depicted the various ethnic groups of Louisiana, especially of Creoles, with sensitivity and wit, and featured vivid descriptions of the natural environment there. After her husband died in 1882 and left her $42,000 in debt, Chopin took up writing to support her family of six children. Though popular, her serious literary qualities were overlooked in her day, and she is now seen as an important early American feminist writer.

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BAYOU FOLK

Inwood Commons Modern Editions

The Inwood Commons Modern Editions gently update out-of-copyright texts by women and people of color for modern readers. Texts are edited for clarity, ease of reading, social mores, and currency values to help you connect to the writer’s message. Correct spellings are used throughout. Best of all, the original texts are included in appendices, so that you may read either or both. Some editions also include essays by scholars to explain context and highlight ideas.

Bayou Folk

Kate Chopin

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Kate Chopin

Wikipedia Contributors

Kate Chopin, born Katherine O’Flaherty (born 1850, died 1904), was an American author of short stories and novels. She preceded twentieth century feminist authors of Southern and Catholic backgrounds, such as Zelda Fitzgerald.¹

From 1892 to 1895, she wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth’s Companion. Her major works were two short story collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included Désirée’s Baby (1893), a tale of interracial relations in pre–Civil War Louisiana, The Story of an Hour (1894), and The Storm (1898).² The Storm is a sequel to The ‘Cadian Ball, which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk.

Chopin also wrote two novels, At Fault (١٨٩٠) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively, both in Louisiana. The characters in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana, with many of her works set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana.

Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, American author and scholar Fred Lewis Pattee wrote,

some of [Chopin’s] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius.³

Life

Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father, Thomas O’Flaherty, was a successful businessman who had emigrated from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was a well-connected member of the French community in St. Louis and the daughter of Athénaïse Charleville, who was of French Canadian descent. Some of Chopin’s ancestors were among the first European inhabitants of Dauphin Island, Alabama.

She was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her half-brothers from her father’s first marriage died in their early twenties.

After her father’s death in 1855, Chopin developed a close relationship with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. She also became an avid reader of fairy tales, poetry, and religious allegories, as well as classic and contemporary novels. She graduated from Sacred Heart Convent in St. Louis in 1868.⁴

In St. Louis, Missouri in 1870, she married Oscar Chopin and moved to New Orleans.⁵ Chopin had six children between 1871 and 1879. In order of birth the children were Jean Baptiste, Oscar Charles, George Francis, Frederick, Felix Andrew, and Lélia (baptized Marie Laïza).⁶ In ١٨٧٩, Oscar Chopin’s cotton brokerage failed, and the family moved to Cloutierville in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several small plantations and a general store. They became active in the community, and Chopin absorbed much material for her future writing, especially regarding the Creole culture of the area. Their home, built by Alexis Cloutier in the early part of the nineteenth century, later became a national historic landmark and the home of the Bayou Folk Museum. In October, 2008, the house was destroyed by a fire, with little left but the chimney.⁷

When Oscar Chopin died in 1882, he left Kate with $42,000 in debt (about $930,000 in 2016 money). According to scholar Emily Toth, for a while the widow Kate ran his [Oscar’s] business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in a relationship with a married farmer).⁸

Although Chopin made an honest effort to keep her late husband’s plantation and general store alive, two years later she sold her Louisiana business. Her mother begged her to move back to St. Louis, so Chopin did, and the children gradually settled into life in St. Louis, where finances were no longer a concern.⁹ The following year, Chopin’s mother died.¹⁰

Chopin now found herself in a state of depression after the loss of both her husband and her mother. Her obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, felt that writing would be a source of therapeutic healing for Kate during her hard times. He understood that writing could be a focus for her extraordinary energy, as well as a source of income.¹¹

By the early 1890s, Kate Chopin began writing short stories, articles, and translations which appeared in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was successful and placed many of her writings in literary magazines. However, she became known only as a regional local color writer and her literary qualities were overlooked.¹²

Some of her writings, such as The Awakening, were too far ahead of their time and therefore not socially embraced. After almost twelve years in the public eye and shattered by the lack of acceptance, Chopin, deeply discouraged by the criticism, turned to short story writing.¹³ In ١٩٠٠, she wrote The Gentleman from New Orleans, and that same year she was listed in the first edition of Marquis Who’s Who. However, she never made much money from her writing, and depended on her investments in Louisiana and St. Louis to sustain her.¹⁴

While visiting the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Chopin suffered a brain hemorrhage and died two days later, at the age of 54.¹⁵

Literary Themes

Kate Chopin had different lifestyles throughout her life. These lifestyles provided her with insights and understanding that permitted her to analyze late-nineteenth-century American society. As a result of her upbringing by women with both Irish and French ancestry, and life in the Cajun and Creole cultures after she joined her husband in Louisiana, many of her stories and sketches were about her life in Louisiana. They incorporated her unusual portrayals of women as individuals with wants and needs.¹⁶

Chopin’s writing style was influenced by her admiration of the French short-story writer Guy de Maupassant:

...I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw...¹⁷

Chopin went beyond Maupassant’s technique and style to give her writing a flavor of its own. She had an ability to see life and put it down on paper creatively. She placed substantial emphasis on women’s lives and their continual struggles to create an identity of their own within Southern society. In The Story of an Hour, Mrs. Mallard allows herself time to reflect upon learning of her husband’s death. Instead of dreading the lonely years ahead, she stumbles upon another realization altogether.

Not many writers during the mid- to late-nineteenth-century were bold enough to address subjects that Chopin willingly took on. The feminist American historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese claims Kate was neither a feminist nor a suffragist, she said so. She was nonetheless a woman who took women extremely seriously. She never doubted women’s ability to be strong.¹⁸ Kate Chopin’s sympathies lay with the individual in the context of their personal life and society.

Through her stories, Kate Chopin wrote her autobiography and documented her surroundings. She lived during the abolitionist movements and the emergence of feminism. Her ideas and descriptions were not true word for word, yet there was an element of nonfiction lingering throughout each story.¹⁹

New Zealander scholar Jane Le Marquand saw Chopin’s writings as a new feminist voice, while other intellectuals recognize it as the voice of an individual who happens to be a woman. Marquand writes,

Chopin undermines patriarchy by endowing the Other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self, a sense of self to which the letters she leaves behind give voice. The official version of her life, that constructed by the men around her, is challenged and overthrown by the woman of the story.²⁰

Désirée’s Baby focuses on Kate Chopin’s experience with Creoles of color in Louisiana, where the idea of slavery and the atmosphere of plantation life were a reality. The possibility of one’s having a mixed background was not unheard of. Mixed-race individuals, those with both black mothers and white fathers, were common in the South. Chopin was not afraid to address the dark reality of racism, which was often suppressed and intentionally ignored to avoid bitter actuality, as a character in that story does when they refuse to believe that they are of black descent. Scholar Roslyn Reso Foy defines great fiction as that which has the only true subject of human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the view with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it.²¹

Notes

¹ Helge Normann Nilsen, American Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century: A Survey of Some Feminist Trends, American Studies in Scandinavia, 22 (1990): 27–9 (University of Trondheim)

² William L. Andrews et al., eds., The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (W. W. Norton, ¹⁹⁹⁷).

³ Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870, (New York: Harvard University Press, 1915), 364.

⁴ Literary St. Louis: Noted Authors and St. Louis Landmarks Associated With Them (St. Louis: Associates of St. Louis University Libraries, Inc. and Landmarks Associate of St. Louis, Inc., ¹⁹⁶⁹), accessed December ²⁶, ²⁰¹⁶ https://archive.org/details/LiterarySt.Louis.

⁵ Marriage certificate between Oscar Chopin and Katie O’Flaherty accessed on ancestry.com on October 19, 2015.

⁶ Biography, Kate Chopin International Society, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.katechopin.org/biography.

⁷ Jeff Guin, National Landmark ‘Kate Chopin House’ is lost to fire, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, accessed December 26, 2016 https://www.ncptt.nps.gov/blog/national-landmark-kate-chopin-house-is-lost-to-fire/.

⁸ Emily Toth, The Shadow of the First Biographer: The Case of Kate Chopin, The Southern Review, 26.2 (Apr 1, 1990): (starts on) 285.

⁹ An Introduction to Kate Chopin 1851-1904, in Short Story Criticism, vol. 116 (2008). Gale Virtual Reference Library http://gdc.gale.com/gale-literature-collections/short-story-criticism/.

¹⁰ Biography, Kate Chopin International Society.

¹¹ Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, ¹⁹⁸⁵).

¹² Kate Chopin, An Introduction to (¹⁸⁵¹-¹⁹⁰⁴), in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 14 (1984). Gale Virtual Reference Library http://gdc.gale.com/gale-literature-collections/twentieth-century-literary-criticism/.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ An Introduction to Kate Chopin, in Short Story Criticism.

¹⁷ Jane Le Marquand, Kate Chopin as Feminist: Subverting the French Androcentric Influence, in Deep South vol. 2 no. 3 (1996), accessed December 26, 2016 http://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/vol2no3/chopin.html.

¹⁸ Interview: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Emory University, Kate Chopin: A Re-Awakening, accessed December 26, 2016 http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/interviews.html.

¹⁹ An Introduction to Kate Chopin, in Short Story Criticism.

²⁰ Marquand, Kate Chopin as Feminist.

²¹ Roslyn Reso Foy, Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby, Explicator vol. ⁴⁹ no. ⁴ (¹⁹⁹¹): ²²²–²⁴.

A No-Account Creole

(1891)

1

One nice afternoon in late autumn two young men stood together on Canal Street, closing a conversation that had evidently begun within the clubhouse which they had just left.

There’s big money in it, Wallace, said the older of the two. I wouldn’t have you touch it if there wasn’t. Why, they tell me Patchly’s pulled two and a half million dollars out of the concern already.

That may be, replied Wallace Offdean, who had been politely attentive to the words addressed to him, but whose face bore a look indicating that he was closed to persuasion. He leaned back on the clumsy stick which he carried, and continued, It’s all true, I dare say, Fitch. But a decision of that sort would mean more to me than you’d believe if I were to tell you. The beggarly six hundred and thirty thousand’s all I have, and I want to sleep with it under my pillow a couple of months at least before I drop it into a slot.

You’ll drop it into Harding and Offdean’s mill to grind out the pitiful two and a half percent commission racket. That’s what you’ll do in the end, man—see if you don’t.

Perhaps I will. But it’s more than likely I won’t. We’ll talk about it when I get back. You know I’m off to north Louisiana in the morning—

No! What the hell—

Oh, firm business.

Write me from Shreveport, then. Or wherever it is.

Not so far as that. But don’t expect to hear from me until you see me. I can’t say when that will be.

Then they shook hands and parted. The portly Fitch boarded a Prytania Street car, and Wallace hurried to the bank to refill his wallet, which had been lightened at the club through the medium of unfavorable jackpots and straight flushes.

He was a sure-footed guy, this young Wallace, despite an occasional fall in slippery places. What he wanted, now that he had reached his twenty-sixth year and his inheritance, was to get his feet well planted on solid ground, and to keep his head cool and clear.

With his early youth he had had certain shadowy intentions of shaping his life on intellectual lines. That is, he wanted to. He meant to use his talents intelligently, which means more than is at once apparent. Above all, he would keep clear of the whirlpools of dirty work and senseless pleasure in which the average American business man alternately exists, and which naturally makes his soul ragged.

Wallace had done, in a self-restrained way, the usual things which young men do who happen to belong to a good family, and have moderate wealth and healthy instincts. He had gone to college, had traveled a little at home and abroad, had frequented dinner parties and the clubhouses, and had worked in his uncle’s commission house. In all these activities he had spent much time and a bit of energy.

But he felt all through that he was simply in an initial stage of being, one that would develop later into something tangible and intelligent, as he liked to tell himself. With his inheritance from his father of six hundred and thirty thousand dollars came what he felt to be the turning point in his life. The time when it’s required of him to choose a course, and to get himself into proper shape to follow it manfully and consistently.

When the firm Harding and Offdean decided to have someone look after what they called a troublesome piece of land on Red River, Wallace requested to be entrusted with that special job of land inspector.

A shadowy, ill-defined piece of land in an unfamiliar part of his native state, might, he hoped, be a closet into which he could retreat and discuss his problem with his inner and better self.

2

What Harding and Offdean had called a piece of land on Red River was better known to the people of Natchitoches¹ parish as the old Santien place.

In the days of Lucien Santien and his hundred slaves, it had been magnificent in the wealth of its thousand acres. But the Civil War did its work, of course. Then Jules Santien was not the man to mend such damage as the war had left. His three sons were even less able than he had been to bear the weighty inheritance of debt that came to them with the dismantled plantation. So it was a deliverance to all when Harding and Offdean, the New Orleans creditors, took the place off their hands along with the responsibility and indebtedness which its ownership had entailed.

Hector, the eldest, and Grégoire, the youngest of these Santien boys, had gone each his way. Placide alone tried to keep a casual foothold upon the land which had been his and his ancestors’. But he too was given to wandering—within a radius, however, which rarely took him so far that he could not reach the old place in an afternoon of travel, when he felt so inclined.

There were acres of open land cultivated in a careless way, but so rich that cotton and corn and weed and nut grass grew rampant if they had only the appearance of a chance. The black folks’ quarters were at the far end of this open stretch, and consisted of a long row of old and very crippled cabins. Directly back of these a dense wood grew, and held much mystery, and witchery of sound and shadow, and strange lights when the sun shone. Of a cotton gin house there was left scarcely a trace. Only so much as could serve as inadequate shelter to the miserable dozen cattle that huddled within it in winter-time.

Two hundred feet or more from the Red River bank stood the family house, and nowhere on the plantation had time touched so sadly as here. The steep, black, moss-covered roof sat like a candle snuffer above the eight large rooms that it covered, and had come to do its job so poorly that only half of these were habitable when the rain fell. Perhaps the live-oaks made too thick and close a shelter around it. The verandas were long and broad and inviting. But it was well to know that the brick pillar was crumbling away under one corner, that the railing was insecure at another, and that still another had long ago been conthemned as unsafe.

But that, of course, was not the corner in which Wallace sat the day following his arrival at the Santien place. This one was comparatively secure. A Gloire de Dijon rose, thick-leaved and charged with huge creamy blossoms, grew and spread here like a hardy vine on the wires that stretched from post to post. The blossoms’ scent was delicious. The stillness that surrounded Wallace agreeably fit his mood for rest. His old host, Pierre Manton, the manager of the place, sat talking to him in a soft, rhythmic monotone. But his speech was hardly more of an interruption than the bees’ hum among the roses.

He was saying, "If it would been me myself, I would never grumble. When a chimney break, I take one, two the boys. We patch them up best we know how. We keep on mend the fences, first one place, another. And if it wouldn’t be for them mules of Lacroix—tonnerre (thunder)! I don’t want to talk about them mules. But me, I wouldn’t grumble. It’s Euphrasie, her. She say that’s all fool nonsense for rich man like Harding Offdean to let a piece of land going like that."

Euphrasie? asked Wallace, in some surprise, because he had not yet heard of any such person.

Euphrasie, my little child. Excuse me one minute, Pierre added, remembering that he was in his shirt-sleeves, and rising to reach for his coat, which hung on a peg nearby. He was a small, square man, with mild, kindly face, brown and roughened from healthy exposure. His hair hung gray and long beneath the soft felt hat that he wore.

When he had seated himself, Wallace asked, Where is your little child? I haven’t seen her, inwardly marveling that a little child would have said such words of wisdom as those attributed to her.

She yonder to Madame Duplan on Cane River. I been kind expecting her since yesterday—her and Placide, casting an unconscious glance down the long plantation road. But Madame Duplan she never want to let Euphrasie go. You know it’s her raised Euphrasie since her poor ma died, Wallace. She take that little child, and raise it, seem like she raising Ninette. But it’s more than a year now Euphrasie say that’s all fool nonsense to leave me living alone like that, with nothing except them black folks—and Placide once a while. And she came here bossing! My goodness, The old man chuckled, That’s her been writing all them letters to Harding Offdean. If it would been me myself—

3

Placide had a bad feeling from the start when he found that Euphrasie began to interest herself in the plantation’s condition. This bad feeling voiced itself partly when he told her it was none of her lookout if the place went to the dogs. "It’s good enough for Joe Duplan to run things en grand seigneur (like a big lord), Euphrasie. That’s what’s spoiled you."

Placide might have done much single-handed to keep the old place in better trim, if he had wanted. Because there was no one cleverer than he to do a craftsman’s turn at any and everything. He could mend a saddle or bridle while he stood whistling a tune. If a wagon required a brace or a bolt, it was nothing for him to step into a shop and turn out one as deftly as the most skilled blacksmith. Anyone seeing him at work with plane and rule and chisel would have declared him a born carpenter. And as for mixing paints, and giving a fine and lasting coat to the side of a house or barn, he had not his equal in the country.

This last talent he exercised little in his native parish. It was in a neighboring one, where he spent most of his time, that his fame as a painter was established. There, in the village of Orville, he owned a little shell of a house. During odd times it was Placide’s great delight to fix up this small home, inventing daily new beauties and conveniences to add to it. Lately it had become a precious possession to him, because in the spring he was to bring Euphrasie there as his wife.

Maybe it was because of his talent, and his indifference in turning it to good, that he was often called a no-account Creole by thriftier souls than himself. But no-account Creole or not, painter, carpenter, blacksmith, and whatever else he might be at times, he was a Santien always, with the best blood in the country running in his veins. And many thought his choice had fallen in very low places when he engaged himself to marry little Euphrasie, the daughter of old Pierre Manton and a problematic mother a good deal less than nobody.

Placide might have married almost anyone, too. Because it was the easiest thing in the world for a girl to fall in love with him. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world not to, he was such a great guy, such a careless, happy, handsome guy. And he did not seem to mind in the least that young men who had grown up with him were lawyers now, and planters, and members of Shakespeare clubs in town. No one ever expected anything quite so humdrum as that of the Santien boys. As youngsters, all three had been the despair of the country schoolmaster. Then of the private tutor who had come to shackle them, and had failed in his goal. And the state of mutiny and revolt that they had brought about at the college of Grand Coteau when their father, in a moment of weak admission to bias, had sent them there, is a thing yet remembered in Natchitoches.

And now Placide was going to marry Euphrasie. He could not recall the time when he had not loved her. Somehow he felt that it began the day when he was six years old, and Pierre, his father’s overseer, had called him from play to come and make her acquaintance. He was permitted to hold her in his arms a moment, and it was with silent awe that he did so. She was the first white-faced baby he remembered having seen, and he straightway believed she had been sent to him as a birthday gift to be his little playmate and friend. If he loved her, it was no big surprise. Everyone did, from the time she took her first dainty step, which was a brave one, too.

She was the gentlest little lady ever born in old Natchitoches parish, and the happiest and liveliest. She never cried or whimpered for a hurt. Placide never did, why should she? When she wept, it was when she did what was wrong, or when he did. Because that was to be a coward, she felt. When she was ten, and her mother was dead, Madame Duplan, the Lady Bountiful² of the parish, had driven across from her plantation, Les Chêniers (The Oaks), to old Pierre’s very door. There she had gathered up this precious little girl, and carried her away, to do with as she would.

And she did with the child much as she herself had been done by. Euphrasie went to the convent soon, and was taught all gentle things, the pretty arts of manner and speech that the ladies of the Sacred Heart can teach so well. When she left them, she left a trail of love behind her. She always did.

Placide continued to see her at intervals, and to love her always. One day he told her so. He could not help it. She stood under one of the big oaks at Les Chêniers. It was midsummer time, and the tangled sunbeams had enmeshed her in a golden fretwork. When he saw her standing there in the sun’s glamour, which was like a glory upon her, he trembled. He seemed to see her for the first time. He could only look at her, and wonder why her hair gleamed so, as it fell in those thick chestnut waves around her ears and neck. He had looked a thousand times into her eyes before. Was it only today they held that sleepy, wistful light in them that invites love? How had he not seen it before? Why had he not known before that her lips were red, and cut in fine, strong curves? That her flesh was like cream? How had he not seen that she was beautiful?

Euphrasie, he said, taking her hands, Euphrasie, I love you!

She looked at him with a little astonishment. Yes. I know, Placide. She spoke with soft Creole intonation.

No, you don’t, Euphrasie. I didn’t know myself how much until just now.

Perhaps he did only what was natural when he asked her next if she loved him. He still held her hands. She looked thoughtfully away, unready to answer.

Do you love anybody better? he asked jealously. Anyone just as well as me?

"You know I love Papa better, Placide, and Maman (Mother) Duplan just as well."

Yet she saw no reason why she should not be his wife when he asked her to.

Only a few months before this, Euphrasie had returned to live with her father. The step had cut her off from everything that girls of eighteen call pleasure. If it cost her one regret, no one could have guessed it. She went often to visit the Duplans, however. Placide had gone to bring her home from Les Chêniers the day of Wallace Offdean’s arrival at the plantation.

They had traveled by rail to Natchitoches, where they found Pierre’s no-top buggy awaiting them, because there was a drive of five miles to be made through the pine woods before the plantation was reached. When they were at their journey’s end, and had driven some distance, up the long plantation road that led to the house in the rear, Euphrasie exclaimed, Why, there’s someone on the gallery with papa, Placide.

Yes, I see.

It looks like someone from town. It must be Gus Adams, but I don’t see his horse.

It ain’t no one from town that I know. It’s bound to be someone from the city.

Oh, Placide, I wouldn’t wonder if Harding and Offdean have sent someone to look after the place at last, she exclaimed a little excitedly.

They were near enough to see that the stranger was a young man of very pleasing appearance. Without apparent reason, a chilly depression took hold of Placide.

I told you it wasn’t your lookout from the first, Euphrasie, he said to her.

4

Wallace Offdean remembered Euphrasie at once as a young person whom he had assisted to a very high perch on his clubhouse balcony the previous Mardi Gras night. He had thought her pretty and attractive then, and for the space of a day or two wondered who she might be. But he had not made even so fleeting an impression on her. Seeing which, he did not refer to any former meeting when Pierre introduced them.

She took the chair which he offered her, and asked him very simply when he had come, if his journey had been pleasant, and if he had not found the road from Natchitoches in very good condition.

Wallace only come since yesterday, Euphrasie, put in Pierre. "We been talking plenty about the place, him and me. I been told him all about it—va (go)! And if Wallace want to excuse me now, I believe I go help Placide with that horse and buggy." He descended the steps slowly, and walked lazily with his bent figure in the direction of the shed beneath which Placide had driven, after dropping Euphrasie off at the door.

I bet you find it strange, began Wallace, that the owners of this place have neglected it so long and shamefully. But you see, he added, smiling, the management of a plantation doesn’t fit into the routine of a commission merchant’s business. The place has already cost them more than they hope to get from it, and naturally they haven’t the wish to sink further money in it. He did not know why he was saying these things to a mere girl, but he went on, I’m authorized to sell the plantation if I can get anything like a reasonable price for it. Euphrasie laughed in a way that made him uncomfortable, and he thought he would say no more now. Not until he knew her better, anyhow.

Well, she said in a very decided fashion, I know you’ll find one or two people in town who’ll begin by running down the land until you wouldn’t want it as a gift, Wallace. Who will end by offering to take it off your hands for the promise of a song, with the land as security again.

They both laughed, and Placide, who was approaching, scowled. But before he reached the steps his instinctive sense of the courtesy due to a stranger had banished his look of ill feeling. His bearing was so frank and graceful, and his face such a marvel of beauty, with its dark, rich coloring and soft lines, that the well-clipped and groomed Wallace felt his astonishment to be more than half admiration when they shook hands. He knew that the Santiens had been the former owners of this plantation which he had come to look after, and naturally he expected some sort of cooperation or direct assistance from Placide in his efforts at reconstruction. But Placide proved noncommittal, and showed an indifference and ignorance concerning the condition of things that surprisingly felt like a facade.

He had positively nothing to say so long as the talk touched upon things concerning Wallace’s business there. He was only a little less tight-lipped when more general topics were approached, and directly after supper he saddled his horse and went away. He would not wait until morning, because the moon would be rising about midnight, and he knew the road as well by night as by day. He knew just where the best fords were across the bayous, and the safest paths across the hills. He knew for a certainty whose plantations he might cross, and whose fences he might derail. But, for that matter, he would derail what he liked, and cross where he pleased.

Euphrasie walked with him to the shed when he went for his horse. She was bewildered at his sudden decision, and wanted it explained.

I don’t like that man, he admitted frankly. I can’t stand him. Send me word when he’s gone, Euphrasie.

She was patting and rubbing the pony, which knew her well. Only their dim outlines were visible in the thick darkness.

You are foolish, Placide, she replied in French. You would do better to stay and help him. No one knows the place as well as you—

The place isn’t mine, and it’s nothing to me, he answered bitterly. He took her hands and kissed them passionately, but stooping, she pressed her lips upon his forehead.

Oh, he exclaimed ecstatically, you do love me, Euphrasie? His arms were holding her, and his lips brushing her hair and cheeks as they eagerly but unsuccessfully sought hers.

Of course I love you, Placide. Ain’t I going to marry you next spring? You foolish boy, she replied, withdrawing herself from his embrace.

When he was mounted, he stooped to say, See here, Euphrasie, don’t have too much to do with that damn Yankee.

But, Placide, he isn’t a—a— ‘damn Yankee.’ He’s a Southerner, like you. A New Orleans man.

Oh, well, he looks like a Yankee. But Placide laughed, because he was happy since Euphrasie had kissed him, and he whistled softly as he urged his horse to a canter and disappeared in the darkness.

The girl stood awhile with clasped hands, trying to understand a little sigh that rose in her throat, and that was not one of regret. When she reentered the house, she went directly to her room, and left her father talking to Wallace in the quiet and perfumed night.

5

When two weeks had passed, Wallace felt very much at home with old Pierre and his daughter. He found the business that had brought him to the country so engrossing that he had given no thought to his personal questions he had hoped to solve in going there.

The old man had driven him around in the no-top buggy to show him how dismantled the fences and barns were. He could see for himself that the house was a constant menace to human life. In the evenings the three would sit out on the gallery and talk of the land and its strong points and its weak ones, until he came to know it as if it had been his own.

Of the rickety condition of the cabins he got a fair notion, because he and Euphrasie passed them almost daily on horseback, on their way to the woods. It was seldom that their appearance together did not rouse comment among the black folks who happened to be standing around.

La Chatte (Cat), a broad black woman with ends of white hair sticking out from under her bun, stood with arms akimbo watching them as they disappeared one day. Then she turned and said to a young woman who sat in the cabin door, That young man, if he want to listen to me, he going quit that there capering around Euphrasie.

The young woman in the doorway laughed, and showed her white teeth, and tossed her head, and fingered the blue beads at her throat, in a way to indicate that she was in hearty sympathy with any question that touched upon male attention toward women.

Lord, La Chatte, you ain’t going hinder a man from paying intentions to a young lady when he a mind to.

"That all I

Reviews for Bayou Folk

[wendyfairy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This edition has versions that have been "translated" into modern English, including passages originally in French. The original versions are in appendixes.

[pitcherbooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"Kate Chopin, born Katherine O'Flaherty (February 8, 1850 – August 22, 1904), was a U.S. author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is now considered by some scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald.Of maternal French and paternal Irish descent, Katherine O' Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She married and moved with her husband to New Orleans. They later lived in the country in Cloutierville, Louisiana. From 1892 to 1895, Chopin wrote short stories for both children and adults that were published in such national magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her stories aroused controversy because of her subjects and her approach; they were condemned as immoral by some critics.Her major works were two short story collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her important short stories included "Désirée’s Baby" (1893), a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana, "The Story of an Hour" (1894), and "The Storm"(1898). "The Storm" is a sequel to "At the Cadian Ball," which appeared in her first collection of short stories, Bayou Folk.Chopin also wrote two novels: At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle, respectively. The characters in her stories are usually residents of Louisiana. Many of her works are set in Natchitoches (Pronounced Nahk-ah-tehsh) in north central Louisiana, a region where she lived." - Wiki.Within a decade of her death, Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. In 1915, Fred Lewis Pattee wrote, "some of [Chopin's] work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America. [She displayed] what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius." Genre: Realistic fiction. - Wiki. FREE E-BOOK available online.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bayou Folk (1894) is a collection of 23 short stories that tell of life in 19th century Louisiana – on the bayou, in small towns, plantations, and New Orleans. It’s a kaleidoscope of locations, types of stories, and races of characters – whites, Creoles, Acadians, ‘Negros’, and ‘Mulattoes’ are all mixed together here. Most are poor and many are illiterate. The stories take place mostly after the Civil War, but I found the strongest three to be set before (or during) it:‘Desiree’s Baby’ – probably her best in this collection, it deals with mixed-race children, with a surprise ending which subtly questions the feelings of racial superiority.‘La Belle Zoraide’ - about the cruelty of slaveholders in trying to arrange a marriage between a creole beauty and a mulatto she doesn’t love. ‘A Lady of Bayou St. John’ - about a young married woman in a lonely marriage who because attracted to another man, believes she will go “anywhere, anywhere” with him, but finds her heart changes after her husband is killed in the war. There is a great quote from this one: “That mysterious, that treacherous bond called sympathy, had revealed them to each other.”Overall the stories are a little uneven in terms of emotional impact, and her other collections are stronger, but these clearly show her promise as an author and you could do worse. Chopin sought first and foremost to portray truth, like one of her literary heroes Guy de Maupassant, and in that she was successful. Because of the themes of poor folk in the country living in a stratified society, I was also reminded of Turgenev’s ‘Sketches From a Hunter’s Album’.