Strange True Stories of Louisiana — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Editor as Character

Cable inserts himself into the narrative more directly than a typical anthologist. In “How I Got Them,” he recounts his own detective work: tracking down descendants, examining faded manuscripts, and deciding which details to include. He writes of the manuscripts as physical objects—some written on wallpaper during the Siege of Vicksburg, others in cramped handwriting on yellowed sheets. This framing makes the reader aware of the editorial hand at every turn. Cable does not pretend to be a neutral transmitter; he admits to selecting, condensing, and occasionally interpreting. The effect is that the stories feel doubly mediated: first by the original witnesses, then by Cable himself. His voice—colloquial, curious, occasionally wry—becomes a unifying thread across disparate tales.

Dialect and Diction as Evidence

Cable pays close attention to how his subjects speak, often preserving dialect and nonstandard grammar. In the account of Salome Müller, the “white slave,” the court testimony includes phrases like “the girl Bridget brought into Miller's household in 1822 was much darker than the plaintiff.” Cable does not smooth these into polished prose; he lets the legal language stand, with its repetitions and awkward constructions. Similarly, in the story of Alix de Morainville, the dialogue carries French-inflected cadences. By refusing to homogenize the voices, Cable treats language as a form of evidence—a marker of class, region, and authenticity. This choice also slows the reader, forcing attention to the texture of each speaker's world.

The Weight of Documents

Throughout the collection, Cable reproduces or paraphrases legal papers, letters, and diary entries. The “War Diary of a Union Woman in the South” is presented as a first-person record, with Cable’s interventions limited to brief explanatory notes. In the “Haunted House in Royal Street” section, he cites property records and newspaper accounts to ground the sensational tale of Madame Lalaurie. The most striking example is the trial of Salome Müller, where Cable quotes the judge’s ruling at length: “The supposed identity is based upon two circumstances: first, a striking resemblance… second, two certain marks or moles on the inside of the thighs.” By including such raw material, Cable invites readers to weigh the evidence themselves, blurring the line between story and case file.

Silence and What It Conceals

Cable often notes what the records do not say. After quoting the judge’s decision against Salome Müller, he writes: “What stir there was in the room when these words were heard the silent records lying before me do not tell.” He then imagines the scene—lawyers gathering papers, the plaintiff’s dejection—but always marks these as conjectures. This restraint is a deliberate authorial choice: Cable refuses to fill gaps with invented emotion. Instead, he lets the absence speak. The same technique appears in the story of the “Young Aunt with White Hair,” where the narrator withholds the aunt’s inner thoughts. By foregrounding the limits of his sources, Cable makes the reader aware of the many stories that remain untold, even as he tries to recover them.

Cable’s collection rewards a reader willing to move slowly, to pause over a legal phrase or a scrap of dialogue. The stories do not resolve neatly; they accumulate, like the documents from which they are drawn. Pay attention to the moments when Cable steps back and lets a witness speak, or when he admits he cannot know what happened next. Those are the places where the strangeness of true stories—their resistance to art—becomes most visible.

Reading Cable’s clipped courtroom transcripts, I remembered my grandmother’s low voice retelling our family’s exile from New Orleans—facts folded into folklore until I couldn’t tell where memory ended. The same hush came over me with Fix bayonets! — Reading Notes, where war’s mud and terror felt suddenly intimate, not historical. Both books whisper: the past isn’t distant, just waiting for someone to confess it quietly.