Customer Reviews

Old Louisiana

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I have no particular gripe with Lyle Saxon -- I only encountered this book for some quick lexicographic research -- but readers should be cautioned that, in the lengthy excerpt I read, his is a thoroughly untroubled view of the legacy of slavery, and the black characters are presented largely as happy, childlike simpletons absolutely deferential to and enamored of their benevolent white superiors, albeit with dangerous impulses toward inexplicable violence among themselves.

Those who have encountered the "Happy Darky" stereotype before will likely cringe, for instance, when reading about the impoverished, uneducated black characters, including adults and an elderly man, gleefully falling over one another in the "hunting Santa" episode, in which a white woman of the plantation house has strewn sprigs of mistletoe for which the black characters hunt, many making hound-dog noises, in pursuit of "Santa" (a white woman in disguise). When they see her, many of them wail and scurry away in terror, until eventually one grown woman tentatively approaches for her stocking of fruit, nuts, &c. -- which are cast as evidence of the absolute beneficence and humaneness of the wealthy white dwellers of the manor house.

The nostalgia for slavery and the Jim-Crow world that prevailed for almost a century thereafter is unmitigated and ultimately creepy, made more so by the second-person narration, which places the reader among the good-hearted privileged white folks being served hand-and-foot by the black characters. For some reason I feel I should point out defensively that I am from the rural South, but it really shouldn't matter.

Ultimately, Saxon's portrayal of race relations doesn't appear hateful, but the miasma of nostalgia seems to make him thoroughly unreflective on the subject, not altogether unlike William F. Buckley's reveries about his childhood of wealth and privilege, and how he grew up dreading and resenting changes to his lovely and pleasant way of life, never much interested in reflecting, so far as I've read, on how his inherited privilege was predicated on the disadvantages of folks not of the yacht-and-ponies set.

It's largely unfair to compare Saxon with more important white Southern authors such as his contempraries Faulkner, Welty, Caldwell, and later O'Connor, but a moment's reflection on their more serious and conflicted engagement with the South's racial heritage will show how the sweet, elegiac nostalgia of Saxon's book is missing some key ingredients.

I'm pleased to find this book has been reprinted. I have found it to be most interesting and helpful to coincide with dates and history of Louisiana and compare those to my own geneology at the time my ancestors lived there. Mr. Saxon's love for this historical and diversed state and its people is very evident.