Cable & Chopin

            George Washington Cable was born on October 12, 1844 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father came from an old Virginian family and his mother was a descent of New England Calvinists. Cable was forced to leave his formal education in 1858 to support his family as a clerk when his father died. At the age of 19, Cable enlisted in the Confederate Army and served in the Fourth Mississippi Calvary. Once the war had ended, Cable returned to New Orleans in 1869 where he married and began working as a columnist for the New Orleans Picayune. In 1872 he was given access to the New Orleans archives to gather information about the city's charities and churches for and article in the Picayune. Here he found materials to turn into short stories. .
             Cable was an active sponsor for equal rights for African Americans and advocated his support through his stories and essays. The publication of Cable's s collection of seven stories, Old Creole Days (1879), established the genre of southern local-color fiction with its use of regional dialect, settling, and character. Five years after the publishing of Old Creole Days, Cable and his family were forced to move to Northampton, Massachusetts to escape the severe southern criticisms of his stories. Cable continued to write about the South and published three more collections of short stories until his death on January 21, 1925.
             Cable is most well-known for his essays on civil rights and early fiction about New Orleans. His deep roots in the city allowed him to write about Creoles and the black and white conflicts, even though Cable, himself, was not a Creole. His outside views of the Creole society allowed him to form his own opinions and feelings toward the color-based Caste Systems. Such views animated the plot of ""Tite Poulette," a story Cable completed in 1873. While doing research in old newspapers Cable reported that he gained sympathy for the plight of quadroon and octoroon women, who, in antebellum New Orleans, sometimes became the mistresses of white men because marriage across the color line was illegal.