Among the most notorious outlaws in the history of New Orleans is a runaway slave who lost an arm in a skirmish with the police, through which he earned the nickname that means “severed arm.” His career is visible in detail in the historical record but migrated into folklore and, in turn, literary works of various kinds, ultimately to form the basis of Sidney Bechet’s vision of the origins of jazz. Many supposed that he had supernatural powers, and his exploits as an entertainer in Congo Square in the antebellum period are the basis, for Bechet, of the expressive traditions that ultimately took shape as the city’s most significant cultural contribution to the world.

Several figures led efforts by a white, Creole community in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century to preserve and perpetuate their Francophone literary traditions, particularly as they came to see its authority and significance eclipsed by the considerable fame of a writer who criticized their culture, George Washington Cable. Other factors added to these writers’ sense of increasing marginalization, including the fading of the French language from the workaday realities of ordinary life in the city, and the closing of French publishing companies as well. The efforts to rally against this marginalization led to public tension with Cable, which in turn launched the career of Grace King.