Bayou St. John Stories

This chapter will examine three Chopin stories that are set in the Bayou St. John neighborhood, which is found in the middle of the city of New Orleans. The area is also known as Faubourg St. John (“faubourg” as in “suburb”), particularly if one is drawing the distinction between the neighborhood and the literal bayou. In the eighteenth century, Native Americans showed European traders Bayou St. John as a shortcut to access the Mississippi River. Europeans began to settle the area’s higher ground by 1718 (Craig). The area has long offered city dwellers deep connections to the natural world, as well as to the precolonial and pre-Civil War past. Although New Orleans is largely surrounded or saturated by water, Bayou St. John offers the only “front-yard water scene” to its residents, and because of Bayou St. John, New Orleans was and still is a central, strategic port on the Mississippi River. Within this central neighborhood, three essential Chopin stories trace the lives of Madame Delisle, Zoraïde, and Chicot in “A Lady of Bayou St. John,” “La Belle Zoraïde,” and “Nég Creol” within Bayou St. John, oblivious and unconcerned with any event, including the Civil War, beyond its parameters. Bayou St. John offered Chopin a microcosm of the world, one that contained love, longing, pain, and loss for her characters. These stories depend upon the depiction of Black servitude to White women; Chopin frames the desires for autonomy, for love, and for the past within complex relationships predicated on racial inequity. The author never raises the question of inequity or even challenges its presence but instead uses its presence to foreground the central human desires for freedom and love.