New Orleans is renowned for its many debaucheries and its love affair with the dark arts. No one captured this milieu better than Lafcadio Hearn, the newspaper provocateur whose woodcuts brought New Orleanians’ dark sensibilities to life

Tourists Confronted in City Graveyards!

Politicians Sentenced to Lengthy Jail Terms! Jazz Linked to Promiscuity! Street Gangs Murder in Territorial Wars! Pricey Coffee Shops Replace Public Libraries!

Writing a good tabloid headline these days is easy. You take a look at the very worst in human nature, then take it one huge step further. Summarise it, and keep all elements under five letters. Add an exclamation point. Or two. Even three!!! Consult your corporate libel lawyer.

And there you have it: the attention of a vast reading public.

The above headlines are all derived from real 2015 stories. But it was very much the same 137 years ago, when the work of the 28-year-old writer and provocateur Lafcadio Hearn first appeared on the pages of the New Orleans Daily City Item.

In only a short while, the ingenious Hearn was made editor, and began producing the first of almost 200 woodcuts he would carve of the debaucheries of New Orleans life. They were uniformly built on an underlying dark sensibility.



The “cartoons”, a first for newspapers in the South, caused a sensation – and a subsequent jump in circulation. But due to a childhood injury, Hearn was already working with just one semi-normal eye, and the strain brought on by the delicate carving caused his eyesight to further weaken. He decided to forego art and concentrate on his writing, focusing on the sensation-oriented, tabloid-type material with which he felt so comfortable.

Hearn began accumulating in words a picture that would become the city’s identity: the world’s poetic ideogram of New Orleans, images that would last beyond the following century.

Jonathan Cott, in Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, noted a phrase that I think typifies this process. New Orleans, Hearn wrote, is “a dead bride crowned by orange flowers”. Damned if the man wasn’t spot-on.



He recognized that he had stepped up a notch from living in Cincinnati, where he had lived with relatives after entering the US, even though he said of New Orleans:



Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists ... [B]ut it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

Again, things have remained much the same.

Gris-gris gumbo ya ya

However, for Hearn local politicians were nowhere near as much fun as exploring the covert New Orleans religion of voodoo.

This is, of course, not the same as Haitian or even African “Vodou”. Here, in this city, the dark arts required the use of gris-gris, originally derived from a Wolof term from the peoples of the horn of central western Africa.

In the 1880s these were cross-cultural, omnipresent packets or charms carried in a pocket to ward off the Bad Guys or attract the Good. They were specific to certain needs, like “Good Luck in Court” oil and “Come to Me” love herbs. Rich and poor, men and women alike, no matter their racial origins – all handled such items on a daily basis all over the city to try to influence the course of their lives. Voodoo dolls were added to the common American dictionary over the course of their appearance in late-19th-century New Orleans.

Hearn loved the whole milieu, and wrote about it on the big stage of national magazines.

Photograph: supplied

Doctor Jean Montenet, universally called “Doctor John”, was one of the first recognized public practitioners of voodoo in the city. He is to this day revered, his life story minutely explored. He was said to have mentored voodoo queens like the infamous Marie Laveau, whom Hearn eulogized and even tried to prove a fraud.



But Doctor John’s and Marie’s influence was way too strong to be diminished by the time Hearn appeared on the scene, and voodoo society remained active and even flourished after both traiteurs’ deaths. Marie had helped establish the pervasive subculture of Li Grand Zombi, the sacred giant albino python:



Li Grande Zombi was worshipped at Marie Laveaux’s New Orleans voodoo rituals every year on St John’s Eve, June 23. St John’s Eve is the day when the biggest voodoo gatherings were held where even members of “polite society” were invited – including reporters, prominent citizens and the police. It is also the day that some believers claim the ghost of Marie Laveau rises from the dead. To this day, it is still the most important voodoo holiday in New Orleans.

It is said that every person carries both a Great Angel and a Small Angel in their bodies, and that after death the big guy heads to heaven or hell and the little angel hangs around with the flesh for two to three days, until it decomposes. But if the body is disturbed before complete corruption, and the little angel disconnects and flees, the corpse is reanimated and rises back from the dead (which is presumably what happened to Marie’s albino snake) – and is ensconced in the undead hell that is cable television.



After only a century, bad-breathed ancestors of Li Grand Zombi have lurched with stuttered step on to widescreens in The Walking Dead, a show whose demographics are much much younger than, say, Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Kids in the money-spending demographic love zombies. It stands to reason if Hearn hadn’t told the story, 18- to 25-year-old Americans might have instead remained fixated on drug criminals or ad agencies.

(By the way, the TV show doesn’t tell you the New Orleans voodoo prescription: that zombies are supposedly much put off by both salt and frogs. So if you are worried about being imminently carried off by the rambunctious undead, you might carry a supply of one or both. Alternatively, you can eat a well-spiced meal at any one of five New Orleans restaurants that regularly carry salted frog legs on their menus. One tiny postprandial belch, and away flee the undead hordes. Or so goes the gastronomic lore.)



A late-career documentarian

Past the tales of ghosts and voodoo, Hearn set about documenting all aspects of the city. In 1883 he was the first writer to document the Filipino Manilamen or Tagalag villages at Saint Malo, south of the city.

Lafcadio Hearn, Harper’s Weekly, c1885.

In 1885 he wrote Gombo Zhèbes: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs, and later that same year the prolific writer published La Cuisine Créole, a collection of recipes from both the chefs and Creole housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine.



A few years later, in 1889, he penned a short novel that is still taught here at university – Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a story set with incredibly descriptive intensity during the horrific hurricane of 1856, and first published nationally in Harper’s Monthly.

A couple years ago, by a fluke right turn, lost and driving down a little-used side street, I discovered that Hearn’s main residence during his tenure in New Orleans still stands here in the city. Completely isolated from all residential areas, and surrounded by the steaming concrete and asphalt of hospital parking lots, it has been named a National Historic Landmark, and was visited several years ago by his great-grandson.



By an equally coincidental twist, I found a beautiful commemorative copy of Hearn’s collection of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan, in the bargain bin at a bookstore a month back, for $4.95. I had not known about this portion of his biography, being a New Orleans-centric brand of reader. It seems he left New Orleans to spend the last decade or so of his life doing the same for Japan – defining it. He is revered there too.

In reading the stories, and Hearn’s appended notes on mosquitoes, butterflies and ants, I again began to personally care for this bawdy maker of legend. Today, in present-day New Orleans, I find myself reading the raging headlines and thinking: Hearn wrote about all this a century ago. And it is still here, core to the city. Core to my own existence.

I need me some gris-gris, Lafcadio, and right now.