frost1957

@Book{ frost1957,
    editor = {O. W. Frost},
    author = {Lafcadio Hearn},
    title = {Children of the Levee},
    address = {Lexington},
    publisher = {University of Kentucky Press},
    year = 1957,
}

From Introduction by John Ball, p. 3:

Cincinnati by 1870 had become notorious throughout the Midwest for its wide open waterfront. Violence was common, and arrests were numerous in spite of the fact that police generally did not intrude on the night life of the levee if they could help it. However, beneath the surface the levee was not always as rough as it seemed, as Hearn discovered quickly. There was a kind of cosmopolitan tolerance and acceptance that was the rule. Hearn noted particularly a lack of artificiality and pretense which serve to emphasize the essential humanity common to all.

Note that Ball’s introduction is dated and often racist (p. 4: “Just as in every other part of Negro America, Negro Cincinnati in 1870 represented the incomplete acculturation of a race of people brought largely from West Africa against their will from five to nine generations before. The acculturation process had paradoxically been both remarkably fast and remarkably slow”). But he characterizes Hearn as “a serious student of these aspects of Negro culture” that remained most visible as “remnants of Africa” (p. 4), and describes his sketches of Bucktown as “perceptive and sympathetic, yet not highly subjective and romanticized” (p. 7).

p. 6: “His speech seemed a bit strange to American ears. His tastes and ideas were no less strange; he like the occult, the remote, the macabre.”