SOURCE: Piacentino, Edward J. “The Enigma of Black Identity in Grace King's ‘Joe’” The Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 1 (fall 1986): 56-67.

In the following essay, Piacentino asserts that King, while depicting the complexities surrounding the identity crisis of an African American slave in the short story“Joe,” in the end clumsily conceals this legacy of slavery in order to appease the dominant Southern community.

Balcony Stories. Grace King's second volume of short fiction, a book that has been acclaimed her “most artistically accomplished work” (Kirby 47)¹, was published by the Century Company in 1893.² The thirteen stories that comprise the first edition initially appeared in Century Magazine between December 1892 and October 1893. A second printing was subsequently issued by Graham in New Orleans in 1914, and a third, an expanded edition containing two new stories—“Grandmother's Grandmother” and “Joe”—by Macmillan in 1925 (Bush, Grace King 142).

Unlike several of the better-known “balcony stories” in...