By contrast, in “Levee Life” also for the Commercial, a remarkably detailed chronicle of the ashore time of stevedores and longshoremen, including their vices, songs, dances, women, and even a building-by-building description of “Rat Row” in Bucktown, a Black neighborhood located on the waterfront of the Ohio River, Lafcadio showed himself to be a man encumbered by the quotidian, pervasive racism of nineteenth century America. He wrote of the “half savage simplicity” and “purely animal” emotions of these Black men. He repeated ideas about the “peculiar fitness” of “colored folks” or “Negroes” for backbreaking, physical labor. In his efforts to capture their speech, he exposed us instead to caricatures of their vernacular.

New Orleans

By 1877, Lafcadio, overworked and physically exhausted, felt that his writing career could go no further in Cincinnati. He was also despondent that Alethea had left the home that they shared.

In an interview that Alethea would give to the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1906, she cited his “peculiarities,” his silent, taciturn nature, and gave embarrassing examples of his fussiness about his “linens” and his daily meals. She stated that, with the exception of one “dreamy” letter, he never contacted her again.

Twenty-seven-years old, Lafcadio boarded a steamboat for New Orleans, an American city finally of his own choosing. When he arrived, he found a city that was dissipated, faded, and crumbling. As in Cincinnati, he felt most at home in the quarters of the city where different races and cultures mixed and negotiated with one another on a daily basis. His years in boarding school had equipped him with fluency in French, and he developed an instant rapport with all things Creole: the patois, the food, and the women. He promptly fell in love with New Orleans.

Lafcadio found work at The Daily City Item, a newspaper for which he produced nearly 180 short satirical articles,6 which were sometimes accompanied by his own unrefined illustrations. Later, he moved to a more established newspaper, The Times-Democrat, where a young Elizabeth Bisland, the woman who would become his dear friend and first biographer, sought him out as she admired his articles, which by then veered toward the literary and the erudite.