Through an interesting stream of consciousness, we came across one of the most interesting people on our World Tour: Lafcadio Hearn.
Stream of Unconsciousness
So, due to a combination of quantum effects, uncertainty principles, and tidal forces, the HBO algorithm suggested Kwaidan. The poster was creepy enough to draw me in.
Kwaidan (Japanese: 怪談, Hepburn: Kaidan, lit. ’Ghost Stories’) is a 1964 Japanese anthology horror film directed by Masaki Kobayashi. It is based on stories from Lafcadio Hearn‘s collections of Japanese folk tales, mainly Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), for which it is named. The film consists of four separate and unrelated stories. Kwaidan is an archaic transliteration of the term kaidan, meaning “ghost story”. Receiving critical acclaim, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.
Notice the hidden gem in this description: Lafcadio Hearn.
Lafcadio Hearn
Japan was a pretty mysterious place to most Westerners in the 19th century. Lafcadio captured the west’s imagination by describing Japan, its culture, customs, history, and folk tales.
Hearn’s early life was like a Dickens’ novel – a childhood of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection, the loss of an eye in a playground incident, squabbling Irish Protestant/Catholic relatives. He finds himself homeless on the streets of Cincinnati with $5 in his pocket. He is able to make it because of his brilliant mind (fluent in half a dozen languages) and extraordinary writing skills.
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn: The Nuts and Bolts
Yakumo Koizumi (小泉 八雲, 27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), born Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (Greek: Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χέρν, romanized: Patríkios Lefkádios Chérn), was a British-born writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West.
His writings offered unprecedented insight into Japanese culture, especially his collections of legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Before moving to Japan and becoming a Japanese citizen, he worked as a journalist in the United States, primarily in Cincinnati and New Orleans.
On 14 June 1874, Hearn, aged 23, married Alethea (“Mattie”) Foley, a 20-year-old African American woman, and former slave, an action in violation of Ohio’s anti-miscegenation law at that time.
In August 1875, in response to complaints from a local clergyman about his anti-religious views and pressure from local politicians embarrassed by some of his satirical writing in Ye Giglampz, the Enquirer fired him, citing as its reason his illegal marriage. He went to work for the rival newspaper The Cincinnati Commercial.[…] While working for the Commercial he championed the case of Henrietta Wood, a former slave who won a major reparations case.
Henrietta Wood (c. 1819 – 1912) was an American woman held as a slave who won the largest verdict ever awarded for slavery reparations in the United States. Born as a slave in Kentucky, but freed as an adult, Wood was later kidnapped and sold back into slavery. After the American Civil War, Wood successfully sued her kidnapper and won financial damages.
Reparations trial In 1870, Wood began the litigation process to sue Zebulon Ward in federal court in Cincinnati. The trial, Wood v. Ward, took place in 1878, presided over by Judge Philip Swing. Wood and her lawyer, Harvey Myers, asked for $20,000 in restitution, and the jury awarded her $2,500, which she received in 1879.
The amount is equal to $65,000 in 2019 dollars, and remains the largest award ever given for slavery reparations. Her case was championed by Lafcadio Hearn of The Cincinnati Commercial.
Hearn lived in New Orleans for nearly a decade, writing first for the newspaper Daily City Item beginning in June 1878, and later for the Times Democrat.
Lafcadio helped invent the “mystic” of New Orleans:
The vast number of his writings about New Orleans and its environs, many of which have not been collected, include the city’s Creole population and distinctive cuisine, the French Opera, and Louisiana Voodoo. Hearn wrote enthusiastically of New Orleans, but also wrote of the city’s decay, “a dead bride crowned with orange flowers”.
Hearn’s writings for national publications, such as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s Magazine, helped create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a distinctive culture more akin to that of Europe and the Caribbean than to the rest of North America.
Hearn’s best-known Louisiana works include:
Gombo zhèbes: Little dictionary of Creole proverbs (1885)
La Cuisine Créole (1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine
Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889), a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper’s Monthly in 1888
Hearn then spent some time in the West Indies, where he wrote Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave.
“Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave” by Lafcadio Hearn is a novel that depicts the harrowing life of a young African girl named Youma, who is forcibly taken from her home and sold into slavery on a Caribbean plantation, detailing the brutal realities of slave life, her resilience in the face of extreme hardship, and her eventual yearning for freedom.
Youma is considered a powerful literary depiction of slavery, providing a glimpse into the experiences of enslaved people from the perspective of a young woman, contributing to the growing body of abolitionist literature.
