Dolly: An Idyl of the Levee

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904)
From Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings

Interesting Links

Interview with Monique Truong: “Lafcadio Hearn’s Wandering Life as a Search for Home” (Library of America)

“Lafcadio Hearn and ‘the Orient at Home’” (Deborah Baker, Library of America)

“The Tanyard Murder” (Robert Wilhelm, Murder by Gaslight)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Some Strange Experience: The Reminiscences of a Ghost-Seer,” Lafcadio Hearn
• “Magic,” Katherine Anne Porter
• “Spunk,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “An Unfinished Story,” O. Henry

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“The Levee at Cincinnati, Ohio,” unattributed illustration from Harper’s Weekly, May 12, 1866. Spanning across the background is the suspension bridge designed by John A. Roebling; still under construction at the time this image was created, it opened in the following year on New Year’s Day.

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During the mid-1890s, the journalist John A. Cockerill was in Asia working as a correspondent for the New York Advertiser. In his late forties, he had enjoyed a storied if somewhat scandal-plagued career as the editor of several major American newspapers, including the Pulitzer-owned St. Louis Post-Dispatch and New York World. While in Japan in 1895, he ran into one of his former reporters, who was soon to become a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and Cockerill wrote about their encounter in the monthly Current Literature. “Every reader of magazines in our country knows something of him and his splendid literary work, though they know little of the man himself. I refer to Lafcadio Hearn.”

Cockerill recalled the years they both worked at the Cincinnati Enquirer:

One day there came to my office a quaint, dark-skinned little fellow, strangely diffident, wearing glasses of great magnifying power and bearing with him evidence that Fortune and he were scarce on nodding terms.

In a soft, shrinking voice he asked if I ever paid for outside contributions. I informed him that I was somewhat restricted in the matter of expenditure, but that I would give consideration to what he had to offer. He drew from under his coat a manuscript, and tremblingly laid it upon my table. Then he stole away like a distorted brownie, leaving behind him an impression that was uncanny and indescribable.

Later in the day I looked over the contribution which he had left. I was astonished to find it charmingly written. . . .

He was poetic, and his whole nature seemed attuned to the beautiful, and he wrote beautifully of things which were neither wholesome nor inspiring. He came to be in time a member of the city staff at a fair compensation, and it was then that his descriptive powers developed. He loved to write of things in humble life. He prowled about the dark corners of the city, and from gruesome places he dug out charming idyllic stories.

For his part, Hearn remembered Cockerill as “a hard master, a tremendous worker, and a born journalist. I think none of us liked him, but we all admired his ability to run things. He used to swear at us, work us half to death (never sparing himself), and he had a rough skill in sarcasm that we were all afraid of.” The manuscript that captured Cockerill’s attention was apparently, of all things, Hearn’s appraisal of Alfred Tennyson’s series of narrative poems, Idylls of the King, which was then appearing irregularly in installments. The essay appeared in two parts in the Enquirer at the end of 1872. Another early piece by Hearn was a strongly favorable review of a short story, “The Last of the Valerii,” by the then-unknown Henry James. Cockerill must have initially seen Hearn as a future book and arts critic, and maybe more.

Born to a Greek mother and an Irish father on the Ionian island of Lefkada, Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn had been abandoned by his parents to the care of a great-aunt in Dublin. When his aunt died, he was packed off by a guardian to a Catholic boarding school in France at the age of twelve, and then educated at a preparatory school in England, where a playground mishap resulted in the complete loss of vision in his left eye. In 1869, at the age of nineteen, his guardian sent him with the equivalent of five dollars to the United States, where he worked odd jobs in New York before traveling to Cincinnati. He had been told to seek the aid of his guardian’s brother-in-law—but the man refused to help Hearn. “I was dropped penniless on the pavement of an American city to begin life,” he later wrote. “Had a rough time. Often slept in the street.”

By the summer of 1872, Hearn struggled to make ends meet while he worked at various jobs—as a waiter, as a writer at a small local newspaper, and as a proofreader for a publisher. While staying in a boarding house, he fell in love with Alethea (“Mattie”) Foley, a servant who worked in the kitchen and who had been enslaved as a child on a farm in Kentucky. The couple married in the summer of 1874, in spite of the anti-miscegenation laws that made the marriage illegal in Ohio. Along with Foley’s six-year-old son from a previous relationship, they took up residence together but kept their marriage secret from everyone but their closest friends.

Foley almost certainly played a role in introducing her husband to the personalities and neighborhoods that served as grist for his writing at the Examiner, and he soon became one of the paper’s most popular daily reporters. As biographer Elizabeth Stevenson remarks, Hearn learned that the “best stories came out of the grimiest streets, or the dirtiest faces, or the ghastliest actions. There was news value in the low. But more than news value drove Hearn to these alleys and alley people.” In November 1874, he was sent to cover a gruesome story, the Tanyard Murder, and his series of articles on the crime catapulted the paper’s circulation to new heights. Yet not even the increase in his standing would save him when, in August 1875, the management learned of his marriage. He was fired on the spot for “deplorable moral habits.”

The editors at the rival Cincinnati Commercial, however, had fewer qualms about his personal life, and they hired Hearn that fall. Hearn wrote some of his best journalism there, including several articles on the “roustabouts” who populated the Black neighborhood alongside the Ohio River levee. “It is a very primitive kind of life,” he wrote in one report. “But, on a cool spring evening, when the levee is bathed in moonlight, and the torch-basket lights dance redly upon the water, and the clear air vibrates to the sonorous music of the deep-toned steam-whistle, and the sound of wild banjo-thrumming floats out through the open doors of the levee dance-houses, then it is perhaps that one can best observe the peculiarities of this grotesquely-picturesque roustabout life.” One of the best-known of these pieces is “Dolly,” which we present below as our Story of the Week selection.

Lafcadio Hearn and Alethea Foley separated in 1877 and, tired of Cincinnati, Hearn decided to move to New Orleans, where he lived for the next decade. After a difficult start writing for local newspapers, he gradually earned prominence as a contributor to such national magazines as Century and Harper’s Weekly and as a novelist and travel writer. In 1890 he moved to Japan, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life, marrying his second wife, Koizumi Setsu, becoming a Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo, accepting the position of chair of English Language and Literature at Tokyo Imperial University, raising three sons and a daughter, and publishing the many books on Japanese subjects that would make him famous to Western readers at the turn of the century.

Notes: Bucktown, Flat Iron Square, Rat Row, and Sausage Row were the names of four neighborhoods that made up the Bottoms, the notorious waterfront area that was home to bordellos and saloons, as well as much of the city’s Black population during the 1870s. The area is now home to Smale Riverfront Park and the Great American Ball Park. A police offer threatens to “vag” Dolly, that is, book her on vagrancy charges. Pickett’s was originally a large dance hall owned by Henry Pickett, a formerly enslaved man from Virginia who had purchased his freedom in 1854. As Hearn notes in one of his pieces about the neighborhood, however, Henry Pickett had recently “rented out his old quarters, partly as a barber shop, partly as a shooting-gallery,” and had divided the remainder of the building into a smaller dancing room (which doubled some nights as a theater space), a dining area, and rooms rented to Black river men “and their wives or mistresses.”

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“The Lord only,” once observed Officer Patsy Brazil, “knows what Dolly’s real name is.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.