Lafcadio Hearn

by Nina H. Kennard

He describes a planter's house, an "antique vision," relic of the feudal splendours of the great cotton and sugar country, endeavouring to hide its ruin amidst overgrown gardens and neglected groves, oak-groves left untouched only because their French Creole owners, though ruined, refused to allow Yankee interlopers to cart them to the sawmill, or to allow them to be sent away to the cities up North.

We follow him as, in his near-sighted, observant way he wandered through the city, listening to the medley of strange tongues peculiar to the great southern port; observing the Chinese in the fruit-market, yellow as bananas, the quadroons with skins like dead gold, swarthy sailors from the Mediterranean coasts and the Levant—from Sicily and Cyprus, Corsica and Malta, the Ionian Archipelago, and a hundred cities fringing the coasts of southern Europe, wanderers who have wandered all over the face of the earth, sailors who have sailed all seas, sunned themselves at a hundred tropical ports, casting anchor at last by the levee of New Orleans, under a sky as divinely blue, in a climate as sunny and warm as their own beloved sea. Amongst them all he was able, he imagined, to distinguish some on whose faces lay a shadow of the beauty of the antique world—one, in particular, from Zante, first a sailor, then a vendor; some day, perhaps, a merchant. Hearn immediately purchased some of his oranges, a dozen at six cents.

From the market he made his way to the Spanish cathedral, founded by the representation of His Most Catholic Majesty, Don Andre Alminaster, where plebeian feet were blotting out the escutcheons of the knights of the ancient régime, and the knees of worshippers obliterating their memory from the carven stone.

Side by side with him you find your way to the cotton landing of the levee, thence watch the cotton presses with monstrous heads of living iron and brass, fifty feet high from their junction with the ground, with their mouths five feet wide, opening six feet from the mastodon teeth in the lower jaw. "The more I looked at the thing," he says, "the more I felt as though its prodigious anatomy had been studied after the anatomy of some extinct animal,—the way those jaws worked, the manner in which those muscles moved. Men rolled a cotton bale to the mouth of the monster. The jaws opened with a loud roar, and so remained. The lower jaw had descended to the level with the platform on which the bale was lying. It was an immense plantation bale. Two black men rolled it into the yawning mouth. The Titan muscles contracted, and the jaws closed silently, steadily, swiftly. The bale flattened, flattened, flattened down to sixteen inches, twelve inches, eight inches, five inches,—positively less than five inches! I thought it was going to disappear altogether. But after crushing it beyond five inches the jaw remained stationary and the monster growled like rumbling thunder. I thought the machine began to look as hideous as one of those horrible yawning heads which formed the gates of the Teocallis at Palenque, through whose awful jaws the sacrificed victims passed."

The romance that hung over the French colony of New Orleans appealed to Hearn's love of the picturesque. The small minority, obliged to submit to the rules and laws of the United States, but animated by a feeling of futile rebellion against their rulers, still remaining devoted to their country that had sold them for expediency.

With the sympathy of his Celtic nature he entered into the misery of those who had once been opulent—the princely misery that never doffed its smiling mask, though living in secret from week to week on bread and orange-leaf tea, the misery that affected condescension in accepting an invitation to dine, staring at the face of a watch (refused by the mont de piété) with eyes half-blinded by starvation; the pretty misery, young, brave, sweet, asking for "a treat" of cakes too jocosely to have its asking answered, laughing and coquetting with its well-fed wooers, and crying for hunger after they were gone.

Here for the first time since the France of his youthful days, Hearn mixed with Latins, seldom hearing the English tongue.

During this time, while he was loafing and dreaming, he at various intervals contributed letters to the Commercial. Now that his genius has become acknowledged, these "Ozias Midwinter" letters, written in the autumn and winter of 1877 and 1878, are appreciated at their just value; but it would be absurd to say that from the accepted signification of the word they come under the head of satisfactory newspaper reporting. The American public wanted a clear and dispassionate view of political affairs in the state of Louisiana, and how they were likely to affect trade in the state of Ohio.

We can imagine an honest Cincinnati citizen puzzling over the following, and wondering what in all creation the "Louisianny" correspondent meant by giving him such rubbish to digest with his morning's breakfast:—

"I think there is some true poetry in these allusions to the snake. Is not the serpent a symbol of grace? Is not the so-called 'line of beauty' serpentine? And is there not something of the serpent in the beauty of all graceful women? something of undulating shapeliness, something of silent fascination? something of Lilith and Lamia?"