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Katherine O’Flaherty Chopin (1850–1904) belonged to a St. Louis family that valued education, art, and social connection. Educated at home and at Catholic schools, Chopin benefitted from strong ties with women in her family and devoured English and French novels that dared to present women in less dependent roles. Throughout her life, Chopin took sometimes controversial positions on what today would be called civil rights and human rights issues.
In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, and the couple moved to New Orleans, where they had children. At a time when it was common for married women to focus their attention on the home, Chopin had moved about the city on her own and pursued interests outside of family life, with Oscar’s approval. When Oscar’s business failed, the Chopins left the city for the family plantation in Cloutiersville. Here, Chopin observed rural life in Louisiana as she had city life in New Orleans. Not long after Oscar’s death in 1882, Chopin returned to St. Louis, where she began to write her collections of local color stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Local color is a style of writing that captures the geography, culture, and language of a particular area, and Chopin’s vibrant stories of people in Louisiana’s Creole and Cajun cultures were popular.
“Désirée’s Baby” is included in Chopin’s first collection of stories, Bayou Folk (1894), and is widely anthologized. It lacks the humor of many stories in the collection and instead addresses a serious topic—discrimination against and enslavement of people of African descent. Economics founded on the enslavement of people was a fact of Chopin’s world, and enslaved people are part of many of her stories. “Désirée’s Baby” makes one of Chopin’s strongest statements on issues of race, yet in the collection, it stands out both for this statement and for its tragic denouement. Another story in the collection, called “The Bênitous' Slave,” is about a man called Uncle Oswald who, in his old age, believes he has been freed and tries repeatedly to leave the family that enslaves him, with disastrous results until the “venerable servitor” is finally persuaded to stay with the family for his own safety. The story that follows “Désirée’s Baby” is “The Turkey Hunt,” in which an enslaved girl named Artemise, who speaks mostly in monosyllables, amuses the story’s narrator with her “unfathomable ways” and calm incompetence. Both stories rely heavily on comedy, and their characters are played for laughs. “Désirée’s Baby” marks a distinct difference in tone; the story’s serious examination of the South’s obsession with race is ironic, and the white characters who align themselves firmly within this system of racist oppression are undone by it. Chopin’s serious approach in this story allowed her to develop the tone and purpose that she would later use in her realistic novel The Awakening (1899). That novel’s protagonist, Edna Pontellier, is white, married, and financially secure, but like Désirée, she pays with her life for her lack of autonomy.
