Abstract
This paper focuses on "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880), a story to and around which Cable claimed the larger work was built. It tells of an African candio sold into slavery who, to the dismay of his white purchasers, refuses to work, strikes his master, and runs away to lead a life of a fugitive in the swamps. He is finally captured, whipped, and maimed, but not before he casts a powerful voodoo curse at his master and his plantation. He dies a heroic death, with the last words that he goes "To--Africa." Cable once said that he "meant The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called." It is a political work in that $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}^{\prime}s$ personal rebellion is associated with much-feared slave revolts, especially the black revolution in San Domingue/Haiti. There is also $Honor{\acute{e}}$ f.m.c. (free man of color), one of the narrators of "The Story of $Bras-Coup{\acute{e}}$" and a stand-in for the Freedmen in the postbellum United States, who nurses his own insurrectionary flame. Through these figures Cable makes a "terrible suggestion" that a black revolution is on the horizon unless whites would not mend their ways soon.