"Idle White Rich" in Catherine Carmier

Map of False River in Pointe Coupee Parish. 

As Catherine drives Lillian home, Lillian looks out at the river and notices that the calm river soon breaks out in to waves as two motorboats roar over the surface. "In each boat was a boy and a girl waving and shouting at those in the other boat" as they raced towards Bayonne (39). Lillian comments that the occupants of the two boats are "the idle white rich" and they own the land and the river, not allowing the "poor" to fish it because "it's theirs to do what they want with it" (39). The map to the right shows how the land was divided amongst various individuals and families. Later in the novel, Jackson stands outside the store drinking a Coca-Cola and sees "[a] sailboat halfway out [on the river] drifting leisurely toward Bayonne" (174).  On the boat, Jackson can see the whites "diving off the boat, swimming away from it, then back to the boat again" (174). Jackson does not comment and call the whites "idle," but the scene resembles the one with Lillian earlier because in both instances the whites on the river appear to have nothing to do but partake in leisure activities.  

The two moments take up no more than two pages in a novel that consists of two hundred and forty eight. However, they are just as important as the rest of the novel because they point out that even though the novel centers around African Americans, Creoles, and Cajuns, the whites are the specter in the background they play an important role in the lives of the characters. Mack Grover sold land to Raoul, and Bud Grover , Mack's son, as discussed in another blog post, sold the prime farming land to the Cajuns. While they work the land, all Bud Grover, according to Aunt Charlotte, "do is drink. Ain't worth a penny" (29). Bud, like the "idle whites" on the river, has nothing to do except sit around and drink himself into a stupor while others work for him. Bud leases out the land to the Cajuns, who can  produce more crops than the African Americans because of the tractors, and all he has to do is rake in the profits.

Reigning over the land, the whites continually appear fleetingly throughout Catherine Carmier, and the themes that Gaines introduces in this novel recur in A Gathering of Old Men (1983). Here, Jack becomes the next Bud Grover. While everyone on Marshall is concerned about the shooting that happened down in the Quarters, before he can even hear about it, Jack Marshall lounges in a swing on the front galley passed out drunk, before twelve-thirty in the afternoon. Miss Merle tries to wake him up, but it is of no avail. Jack, like Bud Grover, has can idly waste his days away because others work to make him money. Elsewhere, Chimley discusses how Mat and he used to fish anywhere on the river whenever they wanted to. Now, however, they only have one little spot where they can fish because the white people "done bought up the river now, and [they] got nowhere to go but that one little spot" (27). Just as the whites parsed out the best farming land to other whites and to Cajuns, they also took control of the land, regulating where people can fish and where they can't. Chimley and Mat don't come in contact with the whites who "own" the river, but they feel the effects of that ownership hovering over them. Likewise, Lillian and Jackson do not encounter the "idle whites" on the river, except for at a distance; however, their presence is felt in the changing landscape of the Quarters and in the fact that the "poor" can no longer fish on the river.

The presence of whiteness in the background calls to mind Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993) where Morrison argues that American literature, specifically white American literature, oozes with an African American presence. She talks about this presence in the works of Hemingway, Cather, and Poe. Along with calling to mind Morrison, the fact that the whites appear in the background in these instances, more precisely in Catherine Carmier, makes me think of the African American presence in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). In a novel that many call a representation of the "Jazz Age," African Americans appear very, very infrequently. The only major appearance comes when Nick and Jay travel to New York. On the bridge into the city, they pass a car of African American revelers and a funeral hearse. Why, in a "Jazz Age" novel, do African Americans only really appear here? Could the revelers be seen as the democratization of the American Dream? As one blogger put it, the scenes in which African Americans appear in the most recent film version of The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann show that the American Dream crosses racial lines. While that statement is debatable, it's worth looking at Catherine Carmier and The Great Gatsby through the same lens, the lens of the presence that is there yet is not there. In Fitzgerald's case that is African Americans; in Gaines', it is the "idle white rich."

As an interesting side note, when preparing this blog post I came across an article from 2000 where Carlyle V. Thompson argues that Gatsby is in fact "black." To a certain extent, this argument is intriguing, considering the proliferation of "passing" novels by African Americans during the 1920s and earlier. I think it is something worth thinking about, especially considering individuals like Jean Toomer as well and the discussions about eugenics that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. If you have any thoughts on any of this, feel free to leave a comment below.