Ebony & Ivory
After publishing novels more than thirty years, I’ve grown accustomed to all sorts of letters and emails from my readers. The most interesting and unusual one I ever received came last week from a 65-year-old woman living in the Midwest. It was in response to my latest novel, Creole Son, about French painter Edgar Degas’s 1872-3 visit to New Orleans and his encounter with an exotic caste classification based on degree of skin color. For those who didn’t read the book or are unfamiliar with the system, an octoroon is a person who is one eighth black and seven eighths white. Below is an old lithograph of a mulatto (left) and a quadroon, a person one quarter black, three quarters white. I was given permission to publish the following letter on the...
Read MoreGumbo Weather
When readers ask about the prominence of food in my books about New Orleans, I always say I can’t imagine not writing about it. Food is as much a part of the city’s fabric as jazz, Mardi Gras and humidity, and I know from living there eleven years that when people aren’t eating they’re usually talking about it. The city has been a gustatory destination for well over two centuries, so when I began Creole Son about French painter Edgar Degas’s 1872-3 visit, I knew I had to include the local cuisine. The Creoles famously loved to eat, and because Degas’s mother Celestine belonged to that particular ethnic group, it’s reasonable to assume he did too. As a well-educated Parisian of some means, he no doubt had a...
Read MoreCreole Defined: Not An Exact Science
It’s unexpected fun when a book title raises questions, i. e., Creole Son, my novel about painter Edgar Degas’s time in New Orleans. When people ask me to define Creole, I say it’s probably not what they think but lots more besides. Few ethnic terms are more misunderstood. The word comes from the Portuguese/Spanish criar meaning “to breed” and was applied to those born and bred outside the mother country. They were called criollos, which morphed into Creoles. The two most famous Creoles are probably Empress Josephine, born on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, and Simon Bolivar, a Spanish Creole born in Venezuela. Degas’s New Orleans-born mother Celestine made him half Creole. Creoles can also be of Portuguese, Italian...
Read More
Recent Comments