There came to port last Sunday night the queerest little craft, without an inch of rigging on; I looked and looked - and laughed. It seemed so curious that she should cross the unknown water, and moor herself within my room - my daughter! O my daughter!

Due to hostility against him after two 1885 essays encouraging racial equality and opposing Jim Crow Cable moved with his family to Northampton Massachusetts. 2002
Pizer Donald and Earl N. Literary historians have said that Cable's treatment of racism in his fiction influenced the later work of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.

He lived there for the next thirty years then moved to Florida. Due to hostility against him after two 1885 essays encouraging racial equality and opposing Jim Crow Cable moved with his family to Northampton Massachusetts. He has been called "the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century as well as the first modern southern writer.