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Remembering Desiree’s Baby
by Lane Morris Buckman
A few months ago, during all the furor over the Presidential elections in the United States, I had some very interesting political discussions flying back and forth in my blog. If you kept up with the elections at all, you might have noticed that many discussions of the topic became particularly nasty. Conversation threads in my blog were no different.
In answer to a question asked of me, I stated that I understood how some groups felt their ways of life threatened by the Bush Administration because I was part of a group that felt somewhat threatened by the Clinton Administration. One respondent wrote a very angry reply.
She said, “What a bunch of b------t. You're a white, prosperous, heterosexual, middle class Christian. Your ‘way of life’ has never, ever, ever been threatened by any administration in this country. In fact, your peer group has maintained a position of unparalleled privilege throughout the entire freaking history of this country. It's appalling to me that you or anyone from such a privileged [sic] group would whine about feeling ‘threatened.’”
Well, saving the fact that I am a woman, and women have had the right to vote for less than a hundred years, the rest of what she said was true (except I wasn‘t whining. I promise).
If I were to write a story about prejudice, especially racial prejudice, my story might come out to be a bit like Kate Chopin’s short story, Desiree’s Baby. I certainly hope it would be better written because Chopin‘s writing is elementary at best, but the tone and the tender would be very similar.
Recently, Natalie Portman, another white, very prosperous, heterosexual took a public blow after having made the statement that reading Web Dubois’ book, Souls of Black Folk, left her with the feeling that, "I'm not black, but I know what it feels like." She later amended her comment to say, "If I had spoken more articulately, I might have conveyed what I truly feel: I could never know what it is like to be a black American. The 'it' I was referring to when I said, 'I know what it feels like,' was not intended to signify that I know 'how black people feel' but rather that I know what Dubois' concept of double-consciousness feels like."
Poor Natalie. Gaffes like that make me glad I am not famous. I would be in the press apologizing for my last comment every other day. As is, I only have to apologize to people I’ve offended with my blog. And a coworker now and then.
But what has all this to do with Literature? Everything. We write what we know, and when we try to write from a perspective of life outside our experience and understanding, we open ourselves up to mistakes of epic proportion. For example, when a white society girl tries to write about racism, it can go quite pear-shaped. However, read in context of a writer’s timeline, even a pear-shaped story can give us a painfully accurate view of our history.
Desiree’s Baby, which can be read in its entirety here, is the story of a young, orphaned, white woman of questionable ancestry, who marries very well into a rich, white, Southern family, only to give birth to a black baby. Her husband, Armand, who knew all along that Desiree did not know either of her parents, is accusatory and cruel by way of neglect. Her black baby has brought shame to the purity of his family’s line.
Rather than further sully her husband’s name with what she now believes is her horrible blackness, Desiree takes her baby for a long walk into a deep swamp, never to be seen again. As the relieved Armand is throwing all of Desiree’s and the baby’s things onto a fire, he comes across a letter his mother has written. In it, she is proclaiming her joy that her son has been born white of skin, so that he may never know the truth of his heritage--that his mother is half black.
If you do a quick search for Kate Chopin, you find out easily that she was an Irish-American debutante and an “acknowledged belle of St. Louis.” She went on to marry very well and after having been widowed became the owner of her husband’s cotton brokerage. Reading between the lines, it is highly likely that Chopin was around black people in her lifetime, but from her position of relative power in the late 19th Century, it is a gaffe of Portmanesque magnitude that she wrote Desiree’s Baby.
Written from Chopin’s debutante/wife of a cotton broker status, Desiree’s Baby becomes something sickening. Why? Because the moral of the story, rather than being a cautionary tale against prejudice, seems more to be that you should be absolutely certain to peg the correct family member with mixed race, so that the right person can commit suicide. The tale seems more to say, “Better dead than anything other than Ivory soap white.”
Armand shows no remorse in the deaths of his wife and baby. Instead, he seems mortified to find out that he is actually the one of mixed race. The tone of the story does not imply that he should grieve over the loss of Desiree and his own idiocy, but it is a smug slap of irony. Ha ha, Armand! You’re black! The story centers around horrible blackness and how that horrible blackness can be passed down from generation to generation, ruining families. I want to apply a smug slap of my own each time I read the story, but alas, it is against the law to exhume graves without permission. But it is in the idea of horrible blackness that we see a most unappetizing slice of Americana. Rotten apple pie, if you will.
Chopin serves us the worm of racism and leaves us with a bitter taste in our mouths. I can imagine the fainting horror with which her peers might have read this story. “Heavens!” Mrs. Stonewall Jefferson Lee might have cried, fanning herself with one hand, the other clutching her bosom, “How horrible for that poor girl to think she was black! When it was her husband all along! I do declare, I don’t know what I would do if that were to happen to me. I just thank God that I know our line is pure. Did I tell you that Betsy Jackson Davis’ son is courting a Yankee? Why that’s almost as bad!”
Humiliating, isn’t it? To know that there was a space in time where that attitude was prevailing. In light of late 19th Century society, it is painful to read this story. Knowing that there are still people out there, few though they be, who eat that rotten apple pie daily is more even more embarrassing. And as pear-shaped and off -kilter as Chopin’s elite perspective may be, it is that perspective that gives us our history, like John the Baptist’s severed head, on a silver platter.
It is that very bitter taste which makes Desiree’s Baby important. We need to read this story. We need to be made uncomfortable by it. It should make us angry. It should stir us to weed certain attitudes out of our own pretty mental gardens. It should make us take a look at our past, acknowledge it, then prick us to make a better future.
In twenty years or so, I may look back on my fire starting, post-election blog entries and feel the same embarrassment that I feel reading Chopin’s story. I hope not, but if I do, at least I can take comfort in knowing that I’m in good company. Maybe I’ll start a Crow-Eating Society. Natalie Portman and I can be the poster children. Kate Chopin can be our historical guide.
Lane Morris Buckman studied English, Foreign Language and Classics
at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she received her
B.A. in 1995.
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