New Orleans The Place And The People

Photographic reproduction of Grace King's classic 1917 account of New Orleans and some of the people who made it great. Illustrated.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... THE CONVENT OF THE HOLY FAMILY. TT epitomizes a great section of the city's past, this -*- Convent of the Holy Family. And in no other place of the city do the heart and the mind seem to be working together so reverently to spell from its past indications for its future. And, it would seem, in no other place to the historian, sociologist, or may we simply say humanitarian, does the future appear, not so bright, not so purely hopeful, but so providentially directed as in this institution. It was on New Year's day, 1888, that the news spread through the community that the Mother Superior of the Coloured Convent of the Holy Family was dead. It was an occasion for the inquisitive to satisfy curiosity, as well as for the friends and well-wishers of the convent to pay the respect of a call; for those of the Catholic faith to do more. The body had not yet been transported to the chapel. She lay on the cot on which she had died a few hours before. Can one ever forget the sight? So small, so shrunken, so withered, such a mummy of a human figure, with a face, under the glitter of the burning candles, so yellow, wrinkled, sunken, so devitalized, so dehumanized, of all the elements of earthly passions. All around the bed were kneeling figures from the street, from the market, servants, beggars, sisters, orphans, and white ladies, the latter predominating, not by their number but by the elegance and distinction they cast over the assemblage. It was the time and the opportunity of all others to ask who was she, this Mother Juliette -- and what is this Convent of the Holy Family? During the ancien rSgime in Louisiana, the pureblooded African was never called coloured, but always negro. The gens de couleur, coloured people, were a class apart, separated...

The New Orleans writer Grace King was an intensely loyal daughter of the South. Fostered by bitter memories of the Civil War, her loyalty was kept burning by her family’s struggle to regain its wealth and maintain its social position during the long agony of Reconstruction. In Grace King: A Southern Destiny, Robert Bush tells of King’s life and her art, both of which she enthusiastically dedicated to the memory and welfare of her region, her city, and her family. When she began writing in 1886, it was out of a sense of anger at what she saw as George Washington Cable’s disloyalty to the South, his deliberately false portrayal of New Orleans’ Creoles and blacks. King was herself a conservative in racial matters, and a number of her stories celebrate the loyalty that she has observed freed slaves showing their former masters. But Grace King was far from conservative in her determination to earn money as a writer and to master the ideas of her era—neither endeavor considered a particularly appropriate ambition for a patrician woman of her time. She was proud to be able to contribute to her family’s income, and she developed a sharp eye for the fluctuations in the literary marketplace. In the late 1880s King worked in the local-color genre that was then in vogue. When the demand for that school of regional writing declined in the 1890s, she turned to the shorter “balcony stories” in which the details of local background were minimized. Then later in the decade, she focused her talents on writing Louisiana history after she found that publishers wanted the kind of sound, colorful work she was capable of producing. Grace King’s major accomplishments in fiction are a small number of first-rate stories and a quiet, realistic novel about New Orleans during Reconstruction—The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. Her best historical work is New Orleans, the Place and the People. However the significance and fascination of her life lies not just in the pages of the books she wrote but also in her role as a literary champion of the South, carrying her determined views from New Orleans to New York, New England, Canada, England, and France.

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