Gerstäcker's Louisiana fiction and travel sketches from antebellum times through Reconstruction

Gerstacker’s Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times through Reconstruction. By Friedrich Gerstacker. Edited and translated by Irene S. Di Maio. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. Pp. 344.  Acknowledgements, illustration, introduction, notes, bibliography. $49.95.)

 

The name Friedrich Gerstacker (1816-1872) is known to Arkansas historians for his writings about the State, particularly the 1844 narrative Wild Sports in the Far West and the collection of stories  In the Arkansas Backwoods<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" name="_ftnref1" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftn1"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a>.  If he is not as well known in other places, one reason may be the scarcity of available translations, a void that Gerstacker’s Louisiana, published in 2006, seeks to fill. This book is a collection of twenty of Gerstacker’s stories and sketches set in Louisiana, translated into English for the first time here by the excellent scholar Irene Di Maio. Who says there’s nothing new under the sun?  Di Maio is the best-qualified person imaginable to translate these texts, as a Gerstacker scholar and former professor of German at LSU. These translations will be welcomed by Gerstacker enthusiasts, and should be equally valued by historians for their depictions of everyday life in both antebellum and Reconstruction Louisiana.

A lifelong German citizen, Gerstacker viewed America sympathetically, through an historical/mythological lens encouraged by his reading of early American literature. He spent July 1842-July 1843 in Louisiana managing a hotel located in Point Coupee Parish on the West bank of the Mississippi, with the sole aim of earning money for return passage to his native Germany.  This Louisiana year receives scant coverage in Wild Sports in the Far West (1844), presumably because Gerstacker felt his activities there had little dramatic potential.<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" name="_ftnref2" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftn2"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> However, Di Maio notes that Gerstacker added significantly to the Louisiana material in a revised 1856 edition of Wild Sports. Those additions appear here in two pieces: the first, an account of the author’s attempt in 1838 to navigate the Great Raft of the Red River en route to New Orleans from Arkansas; the second a sketch of life in the Point Coupee and Bayou Sara communities.  Gerstacker returned to Louisiana in 1868 in the midst of a worldwide trip. He recorded his sober impressions of old haunts rendered almost unrecognizable by the ravages of the war, and his mostly fruitless attempts to locate old companions, in the sketch “To Louisiana.”

Point Coupee was in the heart of Louisiana plantation country in the 1840s, and the fiction of this collection often focuses on the treatment of blacks under slavery, while also emphasizing the fragility of the social contract in a culture that had little tolerance for ambiguities in race or class.  Violence seethes beneath the surface and often erupts in these stories, sometimes in the form of vigilante groups intent on delivering swift justice.  Gerstacker reserves his greatest sympathy, in stories like “Jazede” and “The Daughter of the Riccarees”, for the plight of characters whose mixed and/or nonwhite racial origins make them targets for abuse.  Jazede is the daughter of a planter, and her “light-brown flowing hair…dark-blue eyes, and…dazzling white complexion” offer no hints that she was conceived with a “light-skinned mulatto”--yet rumors of her parentage filter out among the locals. (149)  When her father dies suddenly, Jazede becomes the object of several local planters’ lascivious intentions, and she is clearly the prize of a hastily-arranged auction at the deceased’s home.  She flees the night before the auction to avoid such a fate.  In “The Daughter of the Riccarees” a young woman named Saise faces an equally inauspicious future when an incident from her past threatens her place in a plantation household. When she was a girl, a visitor in her home once commented that her hair was that of a “little nigger.” (178) Her father, a chieftan of the Riccaree tribe, struck the man for the insult. Vowing revenge, the man returns to abduct Saise and sells her to a slave trader, from whom Saise manages to escape. But the trader appears years later at the Louisiana plantation home where she is now a valued member of the household, recognizes her, and is able to present a bill of sale to the plantation owner, who accepts the document as unassailable proof of Saise’s legal status as property.  The planter’s veneration for the legal document is an implicit recognition of his own dependence on law for his wealth. Law sanctions injustice in this case, by substantiating an offhand comment uttered in ignorance. In “The Slave,” the central character Alfons is a male of mixed race, whose fair complexion allows him to quietly participate in bidding for a female slave with whom he is romantically attached. When the participants learn afterwards that Alfons has passed himself off as their equal, they form a mob determined to inflict physical punishment.

“The Purchased Hangman” features a similar bloodthirsty group.  In this story, local citizens who have just witnessed the hanging of a convicted man are outraged upon learning that the hangman, an itinerant peddler named Wolf, accepted payment to stand in for the local constable, who lacked the stomach to perform the act.  In these stories Gerstacker underscores the cheapness of life in America, especially for those on the margins of society. The same idea comes out in a nonfiction sketch from Wild Sports, mentioned earlier, in which the author navigates the Great Raft of the Red River. Gerstacker attaches himself to a motley crew on a flatboat, and they successfully make passage through the Raft, arriving at the fledgling river town of Shreveport<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" name="_ftnref3" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftn3"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a>. Gerstacker reluctantly joins the crew in town, where a liquor-fueled backroom poker game descends into accusations and gun play.  According to Gerstacker, Shreveport’s “gangs of gamblers and thieves gave it the worst reputation a young city could possibly wish for.” (28) These stories and sketches certainly offer a corrective to overly romanticized accounts of the frontier, and offer further evidence of Gerstacker’s role in helping to shape the Western genre<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" name="_ftnref4" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftn4"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a>

 New Orleans provides the setting for at least four of these stories. Gerstacker describes a city buzzing with energy, a crossroads of the world, with exotic and colorful scenes governed by labyrinthine social conventions. His vivid portraits of the “Queen of the South” deserve consideration in any future anthology of historical writing on this city. (sample passage provided below)  The Mississippi itself occupies a central place in this collection, unsurprising for a writer so attuned to geography who spent significant time on or near the “father of waters”.  Gerstacker imputes mythological powers to the Mississippi:  An object of fear and awe, the River also offers a path for escape and renewal, and thus represents a sense of possibility for desperate characters searching for a place to start over.

Gerstacker’s fiction suffers somewhat from 19^thCentury conventions that seem artless by today’s standards, such as his flat or stock characters, heavy-handed narration, transparent foreshadowing, and melodramatic plotting.  In his nonfiction, Gerstacker was freed from literary devices to focus on what he did very well, which was recording finely detailed descriptions of people and places in narrative form. The result is that his nonfiction generally stands the test of time better than does his fiction.

The book does have a few flaws that deserve mention. For one, the price tag may put some off, and makes the lack of such things as an index, or period maps of the geography covered in these stories, a cause for complaint.  Also, some aspects of the formatting are confusing, such as the habit of beginning stories or sketches in the middle of a page rather than on a new one, as if they were subsections of an amorphous larger work rather than individual pieces.  Organizationally, the decision to subdivide the collection by genre (sketches vs. stories) detracts from the inherent cohesion of these pieces--a simple chronological pattern would have sufficed. 

This edition is praiseworthy on many levels.  Professor Di Maio has included a top-notch biographical sketch of Gerstacker for her introduction, and her extensive bibliography will prove useful to anyone doing further research on the author. Di Maio’s translations are graceful and accessible, but one feels grateful most of all for the work of translation itself, which seems a lonely occupation and one that is perhaps underappreciated in the academy.   Let us hope other scholars will follow her lead, so that the current paucity of Gerstacker texts available in English will finally find redress.

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“New Orleans”

It was still very early in the morning. Nevertheless, the levee was swarming with busy people—since in that warm climate almost all business is concluded in the morning. They were bustling about in great haste and paid scant attention to the new arrivals...Small, one-horse milk carts, packed with a lot of tin cans, rattled over the pavement. Lovely mulatto and quadroon girls, slender and full-bodied, with elastic gaits, brightly colored cloths wrapped coquettishly around their hair, offered fruits and flowers...Then the stores; the oddly large signs with gigantic letters; the herds of cattle here on the outskirts of the city pushing their way through the hordes of people or were being pushed toward their destination—the slaughterhouse; numerous Negroes and mulattoes, mestizos, quadroons, with all imaginable shades from white and yellow to black and brown; the elegant cabriolets next to the dirty market wagons, which bring fruits and vegetables from the interior to the city. It was a confusion of things that the immigrants...had not enough eyes to see nor ears to hear. At first they went up the levee toward the actual city as if they were caught in a wild, distorted dream. Pushed back and forth—for today they seemed to get in everyone’s way—they finally remained standing...hands in their lap, and let the hustle and bustle of the metropolis roll by.   (234-35, Gerstacker’s Louisiana)

 

 Tranaslated from Friedrich Gerstacker’s To America! A Book for the People (1855);   Irene Di Maio, translator.

 

JOHN RILEY

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, FAYETTEVILLE

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<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" name="_ftn1" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftnref1"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--></a> Gerstäcker, Friedrich, and Edna Leake Steeves. 1968. Wild sports in the Far West; the narrative of a German wanderer beyond the Mississippi, 1837-1843. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press;  Gerstäcker, Friedrich, and James William Miller. 1991. In the Arkansas backwoods: tales and sketches. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" name="_ftn2" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftnref2"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--></a> Di Maio translates the title of Gerstaecker’s 1844 narrative more accurately as Adventures and Hunting Expeditions through the United States of North America. However, until an—apparently much needed—new English translation of this text is produced, the title of the original 1854 translation is used here as the one most recognizable to American audiences.

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<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" name="_ftn3" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftnref3"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--></a> The Great Raft refers to the extensive logjam on the Red River, which was estimated to be anywhere from 60-150 miles long, and twenty miles wide.

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<a style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" name="_ftn4" href="file:///C:/Users/laptop/Desktop/gerstackers_louisiana_review_riley.doc#_ftnref4"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--></a> See Harrison R. Steeves, “The First of the Westerns.” Southwest Review. (Winter 1968), 74-84.  Steeves argues that Gerstacker was the first, or among the first, to develop the characteristics of the Western as we know it today.

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