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This chapter discusses the work of Louisiana native George Washington Cable, whose works primarily centered on the creole identity during the Reconstruction. Delivered when the nation still felt the polarizing effects of military occupation, Cable dramatized an “occupation” black Creole identity that was caught up in social conflict. Cable was able to put the mutually constitutive categories of blackness and whiteness in tension by performing a black Creole identity that is, by definition, ethnically amalgamated. His displacement of racialized identity through ethnicity created a dual counterfeit for audiences to access pleasure and to repair sectional rifts between the North and the South through a privileged southern exoticism as his works set the stage for the critical roles that performance and performed identities would play in the Reconstruction. The chapter analyzes how Cable’s works, while illustrating “blackness,” also produced a version of whiteness that invaded, occupied, and “ventriloquized” alien “blackness.”

This chapter considers initially how past literary products and contemporary ones are inevitably judged differently. It then reviews the attraction that poetry had for the Free People of Color and considers why their descendants have been drawn to it especially. The connections between poetry and jazz are noted, as well as the strong preference for free verse by all today’s Creole poets. The New Orleans literary milieu is sketched: the Free Southern Theatre, supportive bookstores, poetry clubs, presses, anthologies. Several black poets of Creole heritage receive close attention: in chronological order, Bob Kaufman, Brenda Marie Osbey (whose 2012 book History is criticized), Mona Lisa Saloy, Sybil Kein, Arthur Pfister. White poets of Creole heritage or connected to Creoles are Sheryl St. Germain, Katherine Soniat, and Lee Grue (certain other poets mentioned briefly for the sake of completeness have only tenuous connections with the Creole world).

This chapter explores the history of the Creole accordion. Black Creoles in Louisiana have created their own, distinctive accordion music adapted from French, Native American, and African cultures. While Creole musicians in the early twentieth century were often hired for Cajun dances, where they played Cajun dance music, at their own gatherings they played a uniquely Creole repertoire that drew from the African American blues—a repertoire later developed by accordionists such Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Zydeco, as this music eventually was labeled, has become a symbol of Louisiana Creole culture. It is argued that despite the pressure on modern zydeco bands to adapt to the demands of the music industry, the traditional accordion and rubboard remain the core instruments, and zydeco accordionists keep playing in a distinctively Creole style.

This essay explores how Archibald J. Motley Jr. developed into the successful, notably iconoclastic, artist he became. In 1918, Motley announced his aesthetic independence, his embrace of “art for art’s sake,” in a manifesto in the Chicago Defender -- a significant precursor to later debates associated with an artistically-inclined New Negro movement dominated rhetorically by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Unlike such Chicago peers as William Farrow and Charles C. Dawson, Motley pursued his exceptionalist path without artistic, social, or financial support from Chicago's Black elite. Motley also described himself as a black Creole, or "French Negro." This unique ethnic heritage, his racially-exclusive associations within the art world, and his residence in the overwhelmingly white Englewood neighborhood amplified his sense of uniqueness.