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Strange True Stories of Louisiana
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380 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1889
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About the author
George Washington Cable
105 books30 followersGeorge Washington Cable was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native Louisiana.
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February 26, 2025
The striking thing about the tales recounted in Strange True Stories of Louisiana, for me, was that the tales, while strange, were not startling or surprising. It is clear enough what factors drew New Orleans author George Washington Cable to the manuscripts that make up this volume; he was always a careful student of the history and culture of his native city and state, and therefore it makes sense that he would want to share these stories. At the same time, I found that this collection of stories, while interesting, did not rise to the level of the very best of Cable’s work, like the short story collection Old Creole Days (1879) or the novel The Grandissimes (1880).
George Washington Cable has been linked with Mark Twain and Kate Chopin as being among the first realist authors in post-Civil War Southern U.S. literature. Born in 1844 in New Orleans, Cable witnessed the fall of New Orleans to the Union Navy, and he joined the Confederate cavalry a year later, serving to the end of the war and surviving two combat wounds. In spite of his service to the Confederacy, Cable saw the injustice of slavery before the war and segregation afterwards, and his stories of aristocratic Franco-Spanish Creole men and their mixed-race “quadroon” women critiqued Southern racism of earlier times, and of his own.
By the time Cable published Strange True Stories of Louisiana in 1890, Cable had left New Orleans and relocated to Northampton, Massachusetts; his increasingly open advocacy of civil rights for African Americans had made it unpleasant if not unsafe for him to continue living in the South. Accordingly, it seems possible that his collecting and publishing these old manuscripts from varying phases of the history of New Orleans and Louisiana could have been something of a way to reconnect with his lost Southern homeland.
A prologue with the title of “How I Got Them” provides Cable’s recounting of how each of these manuscripts came to him; the manuscripts then follow, in chronological order, providing a sort of informal history of Louisiana and New Orleans.
“The Adventures of Françoise and Suzanne” (1795) begins with a recollection by editor Cable of how “Many of the immigrants who now came to Louisiana were the royalist noblesse flying from the horrors of the French Revolution” (p. 19). Françoise, who narrates the story for the benefit of her daughter and namesake, recalls how “In 1795 New Orleans was nothing but a mere market town. The cathedral, the convent of the Ursulines, five or six cafes, and about a hundred houses were all of it. Can you believe, there were but two dry-goods stores! And what fabulous prices we had to pay!” (p. 21)
The girls’ father, planter Pierre Bossier, tells the girls of his plans to take the family on a boat journey into the old Attakapas Parish, west of New Orleans in the heart of Acadiana or “Cajun” country. The journey is characterized by rough waters, storms, robbers, and other obstacles. On the flatboat journey, Françoise and Suzanne become curious about a fellow passenger – one Madame Alix Carpentier, the wife of a gardener going along on the journey. They notice that Alix wears jewelry that does not seem compatible with the humble lifestyle of a gardener’s wife, and it emerges that this young woman was once an aristocrat in pre-revolutionary France, before she came to be living the humble life of a Louisiana farm woman. Alix tells Suzanne that “titles and riches do not make happiness, but that the poorest fate illumined by the fires of love is very often radiant with pleasure” (p. 37).
The travellers get a break from the travails of the journey when they arrive at St. Martinville. It turns out that St. Martinville is “the Little Paris, the oasis in the desert” (p. 52) – the place where one-time French aristocrats, now exiled to Louisiana, can dance and cavort at grand balls, as in the ancient regime days of old.
“Salome Müller, the White Slave (1818-45)” engages the racial injustices of antebellum Louisiana, much the way Cable would do in the best of his fiction. As Cable tells it, Salome Müller was a young immigrant woman from Alsace who endured a harsh passage from France to the United States and then, through a series of bizarre circumstances, spent two decades as an enslaved woman. The story details the elaborate legal efforts to gain Salome Müller her freedom.
While chronicling these protracted court proceedings, Cable makes a point of noting that Salome Muller’s claim to freedom “rested not on the ‘hardship, cruelty, and oppression’ she had suffered for twenty years, but only on the fact, which she might yet fail to prove, that she had suffered these things without having that tincture of African race which, be it ever so faint, would entirely justify, alike in the law and in the popular mind, treatment otherwise counted hard, cruel, oppressive, and worthy of the public indignation” (p. 98). In other words, all the horrors of Salome Müller’s time as an enslaved woman would have excited no comment whatsoever if Salome Müller had been black or mixed-race. For many people of that time, slavery was only a problem if a white person was being enslaved.
Slavery is also a main area of focus in “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street” (1831-32). The house in question was the home of one Madame Lalaurie, an upper-crust Creole who, while maintaining her place among New Orleans’s Creole gentry, routinely kept the enslaved people of her household chained, starved, and tortured in out-of-the-way parts of her house. The symbolism of the hideous reality of slavery, under a façade of gentility, impresses itself upon the reader.
The element of class bias in the South is also of importance here. Cable relates how common working people of New Orleans would say, “Do you see this splendid house? Do you see those attic windows? There are slaves up there, confined in chains and darkness, and kept at the point of starvation” (p. 117). But because the people reporting the abuse were not wealthy or educated or socially prominent, their allegations were ignored – until an enslaved cook, chained to a wall inside the house, set a fire, and the fire brought a crowd who found the mistreated people inside Madame Lalaurie’s house.
Madame Lalaurie had to flee a mob that assembled outside her house; and in the aftermath of this affair, “It was proposed to go at once to the houses of others long suspected of like cruelties to their slaves. But against this, the highest gentility of the city alertly and diligently opposed themselves.” Indeed, Cable links this antebellum story with post-Civil War race relations in the American South, writing that the reason for not investigating reports of abuse of enslaved people was “the fear that the Negroes would be thereby encouraged to seek by violence those rights which their masters thought it not expedient to give them. The…odious parties were merely warned that they were watched” (pp. 124-25). In other words, nothing could be permitted to interfere with the maintenance of a white-supremacist system, based upon the threat of physical force.
And one of the book’s longer sketches, “War Diary of a Union Woman in the South,” makes clear how difficult was the lot of a Unionist in the Confederacy during the Civil War era. The diary’s unnamed writer, who was in New Orleans at the time of Louisiana’s secession from the Union, describes the grief with which she sees long-time friends gleefully greeting the Pelican State’s embrace of the rebellion. She finds that she is expected to provide material support for a Confederate cause in which she does not believe; on May 10, 1861, she records that “To-day I was pressed into service to make red flannel cartridge bags for ten-inch columbiads. I basted while Mrs. S. sewed, and I felt ashamed to think that I had not the moral courage to say, ‘I don’t approve of your war and won’t help you, particularly in the murderous part of it” (p. 156).
The diarist left New Orleans in early 1862 – an ironic decision, as the city fell to the Union later that year, and the diarist would have been safely back in the Union if she had only waited for Admiral Farragut’s fleet and its army support to arrive. As things stood, she and her husband endured a months-long odyssey of wandering throughout the watershed of the lower Mississippi, wanting to get back into U.S.-held New Orleans, but knowing that if they tried to do so, the diarist’s husband would likely end up captured and impressed into rebel service.
Eventually, the diarist and her husband ended up in Vicksburg, in time to endure the 48-day siege of the city. Her descriptions of Vicksburg residents digging caves in the bluffs of the area in order to hide from Union bombardment are moving. When Vicksburg falls to the Union on July 4, 1863, and the Union Army comes marching in, the diarist’s recounting of the event mixes pride in the success of Union arms with compassion for the sad lot of the defeated Confederates:
What a contrast to the suffering creatures we had seen so long were these stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set up and accoutered! Sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes – this was the pride and panoply of war. Civilization, discipline, and order seemed to enter with the measured tramp of those marching columns; and the heart turned with throbs of added pity to the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power. (p. 199)
Ultimately, the problem with Strange True Stories of Louisiana is something that Cable himself acknowledges in his introduction to the volume: “True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole.” I do not see the artistic arrangement of non-fiction material that was at work in earlier works of Cable’s non-fiction, such as his The Creoles of Louisiana (1884). That being said, the work does provide a number of valuable glimpses into Louisiana’s always-colourful and often-difficult history.
George Washington Cable has been linked with Mark Twain and Kate Chopin as being among the first realist authors in post-Civil War Southern U.S. literature. Born in 1844 in New Orleans, Cable witnessed the fall of New Orleans to the Union Navy, and he joined the Confederate cavalry a year later, serving to the end of the war and surviving two combat wounds. In spite of his service to the Confederacy, Cable saw the injustice of slavery before the war and segregation afterwards, and his stories of aristocratic Franco-Spanish Creole men and their mixed-race “quadroon” women critiqued Southern racism of earlier times, and of his own.
By the time Cable published Strange True Stories of Louisiana in 1890, Cable had left New Orleans and relocated to Northampton, Massachusetts; his increasingly open advocacy of civil rights for African Americans had made it unpleasant if not unsafe for him to continue living in the South. Accordingly, it seems possible that his collecting and publishing these old manuscripts from varying phases of the history of New Orleans and Louisiana could have been something of a way to reconnect with his lost Southern homeland.
A prologue with the title of “How I Got Them” provides Cable’s recounting of how each of these manuscripts came to him; the manuscripts then follow, in chronological order, providing a sort of informal history of Louisiana and New Orleans.
“The Adventures of Françoise and Suzanne” (1795) begins with a recollection by editor Cable of how “Many of the immigrants who now came to Louisiana were the royalist noblesse flying from the horrors of the French Revolution” (p. 19). Françoise, who narrates the story for the benefit of her daughter and namesake, recalls how “In 1795 New Orleans was nothing but a mere market town. The cathedral, the convent of the Ursulines, five or six cafes, and about a hundred houses were all of it. Can you believe, there were but two dry-goods stores! And what fabulous prices we had to pay!” (p. 21)
The girls’ father, planter Pierre Bossier, tells the girls of his plans to take the family on a boat journey into the old Attakapas Parish, west of New Orleans in the heart of Acadiana or “Cajun” country. The journey is characterized by rough waters, storms, robbers, and other obstacles. On the flatboat journey, Françoise and Suzanne become curious about a fellow passenger – one Madame Alix Carpentier, the wife of a gardener going along on the journey. They notice that Alix wears jewelry that does not seem compatible with the humble lifestyle of a gardener’s wife, and it emerges that this young woman was once an aristocrat in pre-revolutionary France, before she came to be living the humble life of a Louisiana farm woman. Alix tells Suzanne that “titles and riches do not make happiness, but that the poorest fate illumined by the fires of love is very often radiant with pleasure” (p. 37).
The travellers get a break from the travails of the journey when they arrive at St. Martinville. It turns out that St. Martinville is “the Little Paris, the oasis in the desert” (p. 52) – the place where one-time French aristocrats, now exiled to Louisiana, can dance and cavort at grand balls, as in the ancient regime days of old.
“Salome Müller, the White Slave (1818-45)” engages the racial injustices of antebellum Louisiana, much the way Cable would do in the best of his fiction. As Cable tells it, Salome Müller was a young immigrant woman from Alsace who endured a harsh passage from France to the United States and then, through a series of bizarre circumstances, spent two decades as an enslaved woman. The story details the elaborate legal efforts to gain Salome Müller her freedom.
While chronicling these protracted court proceedings, Cable makes a point of noting that Salome Muller’s claim to freedom “rested not on the ‘hardship, cruelty, and oppression’ she had suffered for twenty years, but only on the fact, which she might yet fail to prove, that she had suffered these things without having that tincture of African race which, be it ever so faint, would entirely justify, alike in the law and in the popular mind, treatment otherwise counted hard, cruel, oppressive, and worthy of the public indignation” (p. 98). In other words, all the horrors of Salome Müller’s time as an enslaved woman would have excited no comment whatsoever if Salome Müller had been black or mixed-race. For many people of that time, slavery was only a problem if a white person was being enslaved.
Slavery is also a main area of focus in “The ‘Haunted House’ in Royal Street” (1831-32). The house in question was the home of one Madame Lalaurie, an upper-crust Creole who, while maintaining her place among New Orleans’s Creole gentry, routinely kept the enslaved people of her household chained, starved, and tortured in out-of-the-way parts of her house. The symbolism of the hideous reality of slavery, under a façade of gentility, impresses itself upon the reader.
The element of class bias in the South is also of importance here. Cable relates how common working people of New Orleans would say, “Do you see this splendid house? Do you see those attic windows? There are slaves up there, confined in chains and darkness, and kept at the point of starvation” (p. 117). But because the people reporting the abuse were not wealthy or educated or socially prominent, their allegations were ignored – until an enslaved cook, chained to a wall inside the house, set a fire, and the fire brought a crowd who found the mistreated people inside Madame Lalaurie’s house.
Madame Lalaurie had to flee a mob that assembled outside her house; and in the aftermath of this affair, “It was proposed to go at once to the houses of others long suspected of like cruelties to their slaves. But against this, the highest gentility of the city alertly and diligently opposed themselves.” Indeed, Cable links this antebellum story with post-Civil War race relations in the American South, writing that the reason for not investigating reports of abuse of enslaved people was “the fear that the Negroes would be thereby encouraged to seek by violence those rights which their masters thought it not expedient to give them. The…odious parties were merely warned that they were watched” (pp. 124-25). In other words, nothing could be permitted to interfere with the maintenance of a white-supremacist system, based upon the threat of physical force.
And one of the book’s longer sketches, “War Diary of a Union Woman in the South,” makes clear how difficult was the lot of a Unionist in the Confederacy during the Civil War era. The diary’s unnamed writer, who was in New Orleans at the time of Louisiana’s secession from the Union, describes the grief with which she sees long-time friends gleefully greeting the Pelican State’s embrace of the rebellion. She finds that she is expected to provide material support for a Confederate cause in which she does not believe; on May 10, 1861, she records that “To-day I was pressed into service to make red flannel cartridge bags for ten-inch columbiads. I basted while Mrs. S. sewed, and I felt ashamed to think that I had not the moral courage to say, ‘I don’t approve of your war and won’t help you, particularly in the murderous part of it” (p. 156).
The diarist left New Orleans in early 1862 – an ironic decision, as the city fell to the Union later that year, and the diarist would have been safely back in the Union if she had only waited for Admiral Farragut’s fleet and its army support to arrive. As things stood, she and her husband endured a months-long odyssey of wandering throughout the watershed of the lower Mississippi, wanting to get back into U.S.-held New Orleans, but knowing that if they tried to do so, the diarist’s husband would likely end up captured and impressed into rebel service.
Eventually, the diarist and her husband ended up in Vicksburg, in time to endure the 48-day siege of the city. Her descriptions of Vicksburg residents digging caves in the bluffs of the area in order to hide from Union bombardment are moving. When Vicksburg falls to the Union on July 4, 1863, and the Union Army comes marching in, the diarist’s recounting of the event mixes pride in the success of Union arms with compassion for the sad lot of the defeated Confederates:
What a contrast to the suffering creatures we had seen so long were these stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set up and accoutered! Sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes – this was the pride and panoply of war. Civilization, discipline, and order seemed to enter with the measured tramp of those marching columns; and the heart turned with throbs of added pity to the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power. (p. 199)
Ultimately, the problem with Strange True Stories of Louisiana is something that Cable himself acknowledges in his introduction to the volume: “True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women rarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole.” I do not see the artistic arrangement of non-fiction material that was at work in earlier works of Cable’s non-fiction, such as his The Creoles of Louisiana (1884). That being said, the work does provide a number of valuable glimpses into Louisiana’s always-colourful and often-difficult history.
April 18, 2021
Like nearly all Cable it is not a compelling read. I start to think his popularity was for a reason he suspected. Northern progressives liked hearing a white Southern condemn his own people, even if he never went as far as they would like, having a sectional ambivalence that animates the work of many literate Southerners. Still, I give it an extra star for its historical value, and the diary of a Unionist living in New Orleans in 1861 was the book's highlight.
Sadly, I know Cable can write well when he wants to, such as his piece in Battles & Leaders. He was better when he stuck more to the style of memoir and non-fiction. The more literary he got, the more he stumbled.
Sadly, I know Cable can write well when he wants to, such as his piece in Battles & Leaders. He was better when he stuck more to the style of memoir and non-fiction. The more literary he got, the more he stumbled.
February 22, 2018
This book was so interesting. I enjoyed every story and it was made all the better by the antiquated writing style. I felt like I was getting the real inside story from the times. I did not read the second case chapters about Salomé Müller (Sally Miller) because I read the book "The Lost German Slave Girl" many years ago so I was already familiar with that story. The last chapters that consist of the anonymous woman's ordeal recorded in her personal journal throughout the Civil War was both heartbreaking and special.
May 13, 2014
"I am so tired of cornbread, which I never liked, that I eat it with tears in my eyes." This book was fascinating. I kept reading it thinking it was fiction. It wasn't.
October 15, 2018
Cable brings a light sympathetic touch to personal histories of settlement, slavery, and war.
November 8, 2021
Based on the title and the cover image – a dark-haired and dark-skinned woman holding a finger up to her lips in a shushing motion, looking down slightly at the viewer, a key clasped in her hand upon which a diamond ring glints on her finger – I thought I was in for some spooky stories, perfect for leading up to Halloween. Well, I soon realized that none of these stories were going to be spooky, nor Halloween-ish, and there was no longer quite so much of a rush to finish it before Halloween.
Instead, Cable has assembled tales of curiosity, of unique interest because they are arguably things that only happen once, to one person in such a way. His point of view is as a collector of unusual experiences told by the person who lived them, and which can be verified by corroborating sources. The stories he assembles in this book he vetted first, to confirm their veracity as much as he was able, before publishing what surely comes across as a labor of love. Therefore, this is more an anthology of memoir-excerpts from different inhabitants of Louisiana and New Orleans predominantly, but also the South. The stories range from a family’s legal battle to prove a lost one of their own is wholly white and therefore not able to be enslaved, to a woman who runs a well-known household yet hides her horribly mistreated slaves from public eye, to two young sisters journeying by flatboat with their father and friends down the bayous to claim land. There is even the experience of a French noblewoman, an escapee from the bloody French Revolution, and the journal of a Union-minded, newly married woman as her and her husband flee to safer parts of the Confederacy while avoiding conscription for him and keeping them both safe as can be among people who may be too eager to cry out “Traitor!”
These are most of the stories, and as you can see by the brief descriptions, for the most part they offer themselves up as more of a curiosity. They don’t follow with a more modern idea of “strangeness” for the most part, or at least not as implied with the cover design. They do however fulfill the description on the back as being a wealth of cultural lore and historical fact. By far my favorite entry was of the Union woman living in the Confederacy – there was immediacy to her writing, to her need to keep secret people’s identities, and above all that intimate view of life in such conditions. Cable saved the best for last with her story, in my opinion, even if he seems to have spent the most time searching for and verifying the journey of Françoise and Suzanne on a flatboat. For in this woman’s journal I see echoes of how time may pass, but humans don’t change all that much in a mere 140 years. Sure the trappings of things may change, but the meat of it? Not so much.
Side note:
Janitress (page 226) is a term in use, apparently – why has the modern day lost the feminine form of janitor in common usage? This sort of thing has happened in French, too, over the past couple centuries or so.
Favorite lines:
(Note: These are all from the final inclusion, from the journal written by Union woman who lives in the Confederacy as her and her husband move around during the Civil War)
It is hardest to leave the books. – page 295
“The only drawback,” [a Confederate woman] said, “are the contemptible men who are staying home in comfort when they ought to be in the army if they had a spark of honor.”
I cannot repeat all, but it was the usual tirade. It is strange I have met no one yet who seems to comprehend a difference of opinion, and stranger yet that the ordinary rules of good breeding are now so entirely ignored. – page 322-323 – This line floored me – the exact same attitudes as she encountered then are still going on today, and still just as baffling as to why they persist.
The argument was long, but when a woman is obstinate and eloquent, she generally conquers. - page 327
Instead, Cable has assembled tales of curiosity, of unique interest because they are arguably things that only happen once, to one person in such a way. His point of view is as a collector of unusual experiences told by the person who lived them, and which can be verified by corroborating sources. The stories he assembles in this book he vetted first, to confirm their veracity as much as he was able, before publishing what surely comes across as a labor of love. Therefore, this is more an anthology of memoir-excerpts from different inhabitants of Louisiana and New Orleans predominantly, but also the South. The stories range from a family’s legal battle to prove a lost one of their own is wholly white and therefore not able to be enslaved, to a woman who runs a well-known household yet hides her horribly mistreated slaves from public eye, to two young sisters journeying by flatboat with their father and friends down the bayous to claim land. There is even the experience of a French noblewoman, an escapee from the bloody French Revolution, and the journal of a Union-minded, newly married woman as her and her husband flee to safer parts of the Confederacy while avoiding conscription for him and keeping them both safe as can be among people who may be too eager to cry out “Traitor!”
These are most of the stories, and as you can see by the brief descriptions, for the most part they offer themselves up as more of a curiosity. They don’t follow with a more modern idea of “strangeness” for the most part, or at least not as implied with the cover design. They do however fulfill the description on the back as being a wealth of cultural lore and historical fact. By far my favorite entry was of the Union woman living in the Confederacy – there was immediacy to her writing, to her need to keep secret people’s identities, and above all that intimate view of life in such conditions. Cable saved the best for last with her story, in my opinion, even if he seems to have spent the most time searching for and verifying the journey of Françoise and Suzanne on a flatboat. For in this woman’s journal I see echoes of how time may pass, but humans don’t change all that much in a mere 140 years. Sure the trappings of things may change, but the meat of it? Not so much.
Side note:
Janitress (page 226) is a term in use, apparently – why has the modern day lost the feminine form of janitor in common usage? This sort of thing has happened in French, too, over the past couple centuries or so.
Favorite lines:
(Note: These are all from the final inclusion, from the journal written by Union woman who lives in the Confederacy as her and her husband move around during the Civil War)
It is hardest to leave the books. – page 295
“The only drawback,” [a Confederate woman] said, “are the contemptible men who are staying home in comfort when they ought to be in the army if they had a spark of honor.”
I cannot repeat all, but it was the usual tirade. It is strange I have met no one yet who seems to comprehend a difference of opinion, and stranger yet that the ordinary rules of good breeding are now so entirely ignored. – page 322-323 – This line floored me – the exact same attitudes as she encountered then are still going on today, and still just as baffling as to why they persist.
The argument was long, but when a woman is obstinate and eloquent, she generally conquers. - page 327
December 15, 2016
This book is so extremely interesting! As others have said before, the tales are not "strange" in the way you might expect. That is to say, they are not tales of the supernatural. Still, to a modern reader, these tales of life in Louisiana (not always New Orleans) during and right after the Civil War are "strange" in that they remind me that it was not too long ago that people bought and sold other people as slaves, which seems inconceivable now. Cable's stories, in an understated, matter-of-fact, unsentimental way, point out the irrationality and injustice of racism and racial oppression. The book is an easy read, and the stories have an immediacy that made me viscerally aware of the minute aspects of the history of race relations.
November 7, 2021
As a Louisianian, I loved this book which is a collection of a few short accounts from Louisianians from the 1700s through the end of the civil war. I love people and hearing what they think and how they live, so that is why this book was so interesting to me. This book gives a glimpse in to what times were like back in the day in Louisiana. Some things were very different, but the very nature of people never changes as evidenced by what these past people had to say.
November 30, 2023
A collection of accounts of real people living in Louisiana between 1795 and 1863. Like most readers, I did not find anything strange (i.e., weird) about these stories as seemingly implied in the book’s title, but I think the author’s usage of this term was in the sense of “not before known, heard, or seen,” which fits given his unfamiliarity with the stories despite his strong connections to the area. So, if you are seeking something of the paranormal persuasion or something that will shock you, this is not the book for you - even the section on New Orleans’ infamous Madame Lalaurie was tame. Yet, while the narratives are free from embellishments and sensationalism and apart from the first chapter being a snooze (it’s all about how the author came upon and verified the collection), the stories are captivating and I found it hard to put the book down. And, though most readers probably seek out this volume for the story of Madame Lalaurie, I appreciated it most for the memoirs of the female settlers and the diary of a Union woman who was living in the south at the time of the Civil War. All in all, I really enjoyed this book. My only disappointment was that the author abridged the journal of the Union woman, as I found her story to be fascinating and I learned things about the war that I had never heard before. I wanted to keep reading her diary and was saddened that her full story has been lost to time by his choice.
April 21, 2020
Strange True Stories was written in 1888 when history was largely still a branch of literature and the boundaries between fact and fiction were not as clearly defined as today. Cable's stories are true, but one sees the author taking some editorial liberty and blurring the lines. In that sense it is like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Cable inserted dialogue and dramatized the stories to pull in the reader and emphasize his message. As a white southerner in the post-reconstruction, Jim Crow, "New South" Cable mocked slavery and the hypocrisy of white supremacists, poked fun at the New Orleans elites, and promoted black civil rights through these stories.
October 8, 2019
I think the collection of stories cannot be valued by stars rating- they are invaluable. However, since this is a book im going to say 3 is an adequate valuation. The last story was certainly my favorite and well chosen as an ending. If you like true stories i would recommend this read for its realness.
October 3, 2022
Tad bit disappointed. I put down this book so many times, I've lost count. It wasn't what I was expecting and have finally just given up. Not folklore, as I was hoping, but sort of a narrative of the authors life in the South, Louisiana in particular.
May 7, 2017
A very archaic writing style makes it difficult to get into. None of the stories were what I would consider "strange".
February 5, 2022
It was different!
I liked as a period piece. It was little bit of ghost story and a little bit of a window of a past that is being swept away.
I liked as a period piece. It was little bit of ghost story and a little bit of a window of a past that is being swept away.
May 8, 2022
Typical Roman Louisiana
July 24, 2022
Not strange
May 28, 2023
would were the book all ; "Dear Brother... make all haste."
June 8, 2025
I don't understand.
July 25, 2025
a glimpse of pre war and civil war Louisiana, horrifying depiction of war conditions, truthful descriptions of slavery
July 18, 2018
Strange, True Stories of Louisiana fascinated me from the first story to through the last. The description of how Cable got them bored me a bit, but that information is curious to keep in mind when reading the stories later. I loved being able to map the journeys of these people who actually lived in some of the same places that I’ve been through or very near. Learning of their experiences and knowing how quickly we travel and the different social customs of today… just wow. The vast ways that the geography of Louisiana has changed over the years are mind-boggling. Reading this book only reinforced my desire to see more of my home state. Admittedly, I plunged through the first 4 stories, anxious to read the diary from a Union woman who lived in the Confederacy. Of course, that diary was saved for last. A rewarding read. Highly recommend to anyone who loves history or just Louisiana.
January 14, 2013
The antiquated writing style works against it, but the stories themselves are so interesting that after a while you won't care. I'm already looking for more information on several of the stories. My favorite way of absorbing history is by reading about a particularly interesting individual's life. The lives described in this book are fascinating.
October 15, 2013
This is one of strange but true books popular in the 19th and 20th centuries before we had strange but true television. This is very interesting but true probably is a word stretched thin. Iread the book because it contained the story of Madame Lalaurie which is being included on American Horror Story this season.
Read
July 14, 2016A personal view of early America
Good book regarding life in the early south
During the 18th & 19th centuries
Enjoyable but yet reminding one how fortunate we are in thus century
Good book regarding life in the early south
During the 18th & 19th centuries
Enjoyable but yet reminding one how fortunate we are in thus century
August 18, 2010
Beautiful, full of compassion, highly recommended. My favorite Cable.
January 17, 2011
This book is an eye-opener showing the truth behind what it was like for Louisiana's early settlers.
June 3, 2013
I genuinely liked this book, though really there wasn't too much strange, though I believe the stories to be true. The civil war diary at the end is fantastic.
November 30, 2012
This was a really hard read for me. I don't know if it was how it was written or just me. It was hard to get into.
January 10, 2013
These stories are more curious than strange, and probably a bit more embellished by Mr. Cable than strictly necessary; but they certainly held my interest.
January 30, 2013
Loved the stories, but the authors writing style was a bit hum drum.
January 9, 2014
Good collection
Several short stories, not written by "Writers" (at least that's the assumption) but by unknown people who experienced amazing events.
Several short stories, not written by "Writers" (at least that's the assumption) but by unknown people who experienced amazing events.
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