“The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits / “That's the way with them Cajuns...ain't got sense enough to know a white man when they see one.” (327) / Kate Chopin came of age as a writer at the end of a century that had brought complex social and linguistic transformations to Louisiana. First settled by the French, then ceded to Spain in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War, reclaimed for France by Napoleon and then sold to Thomas Jefferson's USA in 1803, it has always been a space characterised by a volatile confluence of cultures, languages, skin colours and ethnic affiliations. Unequivocally, a key factor in the lasting appeal of Chopin's fiction is the vividness with which she evokes the human diversity of fin-de-siècle Louisiana. In what follows, I shall begin by providing a brief overview of recent theorisation on 'race' and ethnicity. I then go on to analyse representations of slaves of African origin, free people of colour, Native Americans and French Creoles and Cajuns in Kate Chopin's fiction, focusing on her first novel At Fault and on selected short stories from her collection Bayou Folk. In her landmark study The Word in Black and White: Reading Race in American Literature, 1638-1867, Dana Nelson observes that 'race' has been convincingly refuted as a valid scientific category, pointing out that it has never been a fixed or stable concept and that at different points in US history it has stood for cultural, evolutionary, moral, metaphysical and biological difference.