Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Children of the Levee

Children of the Levee

Hearn, Lafcadio
Frost, O. W.
Ball, John

Paperback

19th Century United States HistoryBlack American StudiesRegional: Midwest

ISBN10: 0813152542
ISBN13: 9780813152547
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: Jul 15 2014
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.29 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

Cincinnati in the 1870's was the largest inland city in the nation. Much of its prosperity and growth it owed to the commerce which floated along its Ohio River boundary on the way between Pittsburgh and New Orleans. This traffic also sustained a unique African American culture--saloonkeepers, boardinghouse operators, entertainers, and women who served the steamboat hands between trips.

Into this great western metropolis came young Lafcadio Hearn, who after several tentative starts became a newspaper reporter first for the Enquirer and then for the Commercial. Drawn to the Ohio River by his interest in the unusual, Hearn found beneath the rough surface of levee life a kind of cosmopolitan tolerance which emphasized the essential humanity of the community.

Hearn's twelve sketches--here reprinted as a unit for the first time--are perceptive and sympathetic, yet not highly subjective and romanticized. Collectively they form an important comprehensive picture of African American life in a border city just after the Civil War. Among the earliest of his writings, they also foreshadow the course Hearn's life was to take in New Orleans, the West Indies, and finally Japan.

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