King began writing out of annoyance at what she considered the unfair treatment of her native New Orleans by George Washington Cable. Her Balcony Stories (1893), which included “The Little Convent Girl,” are to be imagined as tales told among women sitting on a balcony on a hot New Orleans afternoon. King's work is in the tradition of women's regional realism, and her rejection of Cable's advanced views on civil rights places her also in the “plantation school” of conservative Southern fiction.

Nonetheless, “The Little Convent Girl” is an effective and nuanced story of a tragic mulatta. Much of the impact of her story comes from the girl's radical innocence, which the rough-hewn steamboat crew tries to protect. She has never seen the stars, because she has never been allowed outdoors at night. She is frightened and delighted by the world of experience opening to her, symbolized by the river beneath the river of the pilot's imagining. But this chaotic world includes the forces of sexuality and race in New Orleans, into which the little convent girl is about to be plunged.

Text: Grace King, Balcony Stories (New York: Century, 1893).

THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL

She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by (good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper. She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into everything by some one else.