VAGABONDAGE
"Now for jet black, the smooth, velvety, black skin that
remains cold as a lizard under the tropical sun. It seems to
me extremely beautiful! If it is beautiful in art, why should
it not be beautiful in nature? As a matter of fact, it is,
and has been so acknowledged, even by the most prejudiced
slave-owning races. Either Stanley, or Livingstone perhaps,
told the world that after long living in Africa, the sight of
white faces produced something like fear (and the evil
spirits of Africa are white).... You remember the Romans lost
their first battles with the North through sheer fear ... the
fairer, the weirder ... the more terrible. Beauty there is in
the North, of its kind. But it is not, surely, comparable
with the wonderful beauty of colour in other races."[10]
[10] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin
& Co.
As to Hearn's more intimate life at this time there are many
contradictory accounts. Published facts and the notoriety of legal
proceedings, however, are stubborn things, and generally manage to work
their way through any deposit of inaccurate scandal or imaginative
rumour. At all hazards the truth must be set forth; otherwise how
emphasise the redemption of this hapless genius by discipline and
self-control out of the depths into which at this time he fell?
The episode in Hearn's life in Cincinnati, with the coloured woman,
"Althea Foley," remains one of those obscure psychological mysteries,
which, however distasteful, has to be accepted as a component part of
his unbalanced mental equipment.
On sifting all available evidence, there is no doubt that while doing
reporter's work for the _Enquirer_ he fell under the "Shadow of the
Ethiopian."
In treating of Hearn's vagaries it is well to remember that his brain
was abnormal by inheritance, and at this time was still further thrown
off its balance by privation, injustice, and unhappiness. All through
the course of his life there was failure of straight vision and mental
vigour when he was going through a period of difficulty and struggle.
"He may have been a genius in his line," his brother writes to Mrs.
Atkinson, referring to Lafcadio, "but genius is akin to madness, and I
do really think that dark, passionate Greek mother's blood had a taint
in it. For me, instead of nobler aspirations and thoughts, it begat
extremes of hate and love--a shrinking and sensitive morbid nature.
Whatever of the man I have in me comes from our common father. If I had
been as you were, a child of father's second wife, I could have told a
different story of my life.... It was the Eastern taint in the blood
that took Lafcadio to Japan and kept him there. His low vitality and
lack of nerve force hampered him in the battle of life, as it has me. If
we had the good old Celtic and Saxon blood in us, it would have been
better for those dependent on us."
The girl was servant in the cheap boarding-house where he lodged. Hearn,
then a struggling almost destitute newspaper writer, used to return from
work in the dead of winter in the small hours of the morning. She was a
handsome, kind-hearted mulatto girl, who kept his meals warm and allowed
him to sit by her fire when wet and chilled. There was much in the
circumstances surrounding her to set alight that spark of pity and
compassion, one of Hearn's notable qualities. Born a slave near
Maysville, Kentucky, about sixty miles from Cincinnati, in 1863
President Lincoln's Proclamation gave her her freedom, and she drifted
into the city, a waif, like Hearn himself.
In consequence of hard work and exposure he fell seriously ill. She
saved him almost from death, and while nursing him back to health they
talked much of her early days and years of slavery.
His quixotic idea of legalising his connection with her surprised no one
so much as the girl herself. It completely turned her head; she gave
herself airs, became overbearing and quarrelsome, and Hearn found
himself obliged to leave Cincinnati to escape from an impossible
position.
After his death the woman made a claim upon his estate, and tried to
assert her right in the American courts to the royalties on his books.
The _Enquirer_ had articles running through several issues in 1906 on
the claim of Althea Foley, "who sued to secure Hearn's estate after his
death." The courts decided against her on the ground that the laws of
Ohio, in which state they both resided, did not recognise marriage
between races. But, the court added, "there was no doubt he had gone
through the ceremony of marriage with the woman Althea Foley, a mulatto,
or, as she preferred to call herself, a Creole."
It made Hearn very indignant, later, when some one criticising his work
called him a "decadent." Certainly at this time in Cincinnati it would
have been impossible to defend him from the charge. The school of French
writers who have been dubbed "decadents" and who exercised so great an
influence on him were infected with a strange partiality for alien races
and coloured women. Exotic oddness and strangeness, primitive impulses,
as displayed in the quest of strange tongues and admiration of strange
people, were a vital part of the impressionist creed, constituted,
indeed, one of the most displeasing manifestations of their unwholesome
opinions and fancies. Baudelaire boldly declared his preference for the
women of black races. Most of Pierre Loti's earlier novels were but the
histories of love affairs with women of "dusky races," either Eastern or
Polynesian.
Hearn, as we have said before, was an exemplification of the theory of
heredity. The fancy for mulattos, Creoles and orientals, which he
displayed all his life, is most likely to be accounted for as an
inheritance from his Arabian and oriental ancestors on his mother's
side. He but took up the dropped threads of his barbaric ancestry.
All his life he preferred to mix in the outer confines of society; the
"levee" at Cincinnati; the lower Creoles and mixed races at New Orleans;
fishermen, gardeners, peasants, were chosen by preference as companions
in Japan. He railed against civilisation. "The so-called improvements in
civilisation have apparently resulted in making it impossible to see,
hear, or find anything out. You are improving yourself out of the
natural world. I want to get back amongst the monkeys and the parrots,
under a violet sky, among green peaks, and an eternally lilac and
luke-warm sea--where clothing is superfluous and reading too much of an
exertion.... Civilisation is a hideous thing. Blessed is savagery!
Surely a palm two hundred feet high is a finer thing in the natural
order than seventy times seven New Yorks."[11]
[11] "The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn," Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Hearn was a born rebel, and every incident of his life hitherto had
goaded him into further rebellion against all constituted authority.
That a race should be trampled upon by one regarding itself as superior
was a state of things that he could not contemplate without a protest,
and by his action he protested in the most emphatic manner possible. He
never took into consideration whether it was wise to do so or not.
Later, when the turbulent spirit of youth had settled down to accept the
discipline of social laws and conventions, he took a very different view
of the racial question in the United States and confessed the want of
comprehension he had displayed on the subject. Writing years afterwards
to a pupil in Japan, he alludes to the unfortunate incident in
Cincinnati. He resolved to take the part of some people who were looked
down upon in the place where he lived. He thought that those who looked
down upon them were morally wrong, so he went over to their side. Then
the rest of the people stopped speaking to him, and he hated them. But
he was then too young to understand. The trouble was really caused by
moral questions far larger than those he had been arguing about.
Hearn was certainly correct in thinking that, from the point of view of
the people amongst whom he was living, an attempt to legalise a union
with a coloured woman was an unpardonable lapse from social law. Not
only then, but for years afterwards, public opinion was strongly
influenced against him in consequence of this lamentable incident. Even
at the time of his death, in 1904, a perfect host of statements and
distorted legends exaggerating all his lapses from conventional
standards were raked up. Amongst other accusations, they declared that
when in New Orleans he was the favoured admirer of Marie Levaux, known
as "The Voodoo Queen."
Page Baker, the editor of the _Times Democrat_ immediately came forward
to defend Hearn from the charge. Referring to the Voodoo Queen, the
article says: "All this wonderful tale is based upon the fact that
Hearn, like every other newspaper man in New Orleans who thought there
might be a story in it, entered into communication with a negro woman,
who called herself 'Marie Levaux,' and pretended, falsely as was
afterward shown, to know something of the mysteries of Voodooism.
"Whether as reporter, editor, or author, Hearn insisted on investigating
for himself what he wrote about; but what the _Sun_ states is not only
untrue, but would have been impossible in a Southern city like New
Orleans, where the colour line is so strictly drawn. If Hearn had been
the man the _Sun_ says he was, he could not have held the position he
did a week, much less the long years he remained in this city.... He
certainly was not conventional in the order of his life any more than he
was in the product of his brain. For this, the man being now dead and
silent, the conventional takes the familiar revenge upon him."
In 1875, as far as we can make out, Hearn left the _Enquirer_, and in
the latter part of 1876 was on the staff of the _Commercial_, but he had
too seriously wounded the susceptibilities of society in Cincinnati to
make existence any longer comfortable, or, indeed, possible. The
uncongenial climate, also, of Ohio did not suit his delicate
constitution. He longed to get away.
Dreams had come to him of the strange Franco-Spanish city, the Great
South Gate, lying at the mouth of the Mississippi. These dreams were
evoked by reading one of Cable's stories. When he first viewed New
Orleans from the deck of the steamboat that had carried him from grey
north-western mists into the tepid and orange-scented air of the South,
his impression of the city, drowsing under the violet and gold of a
November morning, were oddly connected with _Jean ah-Poquelin_. Even
before he had left the steamboat his imagination had flown beyond the
wilderness of cotton bales, the sierra-shaped roofs of the sugar sheds,
to wander in search of the old slave-trader's mansion.
A letter to his half-sister, Mrs. Atkinson, effectually disposes of the
statement that he left Cincinnati in consequence of any difference of
opinion with the editor of the _Commercial_. In fact, money for the
journey was given to him as well as a roving commission for letters from
Louisiana to be contributed to the columns of the newspaper.