Rosa's Eyes  ·  A Hidden History of Love, Loss, and a Legacy Reclaimed  ·  Part Four

The Son Who Kept Her Secret

James Daniel Hearn

The Forgotten Brother and His Lifelong Search for the Famous One

c. 1854  ·  Cephalonia, Greece  —  14 June 1933  ·  Bethany, Michigan, USA

He is not the famous one. His name does not appear on the spines of books still read in universities, does not echo in the ghost stories and Japanese folk tales that made his brother a legend. James Daniel Hearn — born on the Greek island of Cephalonia in 1854, dead in the flat fields of Gratiot County, Michigan, in 1933 — spent his life as the forgotten brother of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated writers.

But James's story is not merely a shadow of Lafcadio's. It is a story in its own right — of a child uprooted at three and deposited in an English boarding school, of two Atlantic crossings and the Great Chicago Fire, of a flour mill and a Michigan farm and a silence so complete that his own children never knew their grandmother's name. It is the story of two brothers who spent decades searching for each other across an ocean, and who never managed to meet again as grown men.

What follows is a preview of The Son Who Kept Her Secret, Part Four of Rosa's Eyes by Bradford C. Hearn.

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The Early Years

Born on a Greek Island, Raised by Strangers

James Daniel Hearn was born on the Greek island of Cephalonia in 1854, the third child of Charles Bushe Hearn — a Surgeon Major in the British Army — and Rosa Antoniou Cassimati, a noblewoman from the island of Kythera. He was raised by Rosa alone for his first three years — the one stretch of ordinary mothering either of Rosa's surviving sons would ever have. It ended when Rosa remarried on the condition that she would raise no children from her first marriage. James, not yet three, was sent alone across the sea to England, baptized at Liverpool, and deposited at a boarding school in Alton, Hampshire run by a Dr. Stewart. He would live there until he was sixteen.

His brother Lafcadio, three years older, had been taken in by family in Dublin. James went straight into the care of strangers. It was a distinction that shaped both men for the rest of their lives.

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The Silence He Kept

The Mother He Never Spoke Of

There was one subject James Daniel Hearn never raised with his children, never once mentioned across the decades of farm life in Michigan. That subject was his mother.

Lafcadio could not stop reaching for her — writing about Rosa from Cincinnati, from New Orleans, from Japan, with a longing so raw it reads almost like grief for someone recently lost. It was Lafcadio who wrote to James asking whether James remembered their mother's face:

James's answer, if he gave one, is not recorded. What is recorded is silence. Rosa died in the mental asylum at Corfu on 12 December 1882. Whether James ever knew of her fate, the record does not say. He carried her inside him for seventy-eight years — in a silence so complete that even his own children did not know she existed.

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Two Crossings, Three Trades

The Great Fire and the Road West

At sixteen, James crossed the Atlantic alone for the first time, bound for Madison, Wisconsin, to learn market gardening. He passed through Chicago in October 1871 — just as the Great Chicago Fire tore through the city. He lost part of his luggage in the chaos. He was seventeen years old, alone in a burning foreign city, on his way to meet strangers in a state he had never seen. He simply continued west.

He crossed the Atlantic a second time to learn tobacco farming in Connecticut. Then his patron Dr. Stewart died, the India plan dissolved, and James headed west again — this time to Ohio, to a flour mill in Gibsonburg, and to the woman who would become his wife.

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Ohio & Michigan

The Miller, the Marriage, and the Move North

In Gibsonburg, Ohio, James bought a part interest in a flour mill and met nineteen-year-old Cora Belle Brubaker. He was thirty-two. He swept her off her feet. On 5 November 1885 they were married — she Pennsylvania Dutch and practical, he half Greek and half Irish, raised in England, seasoned by two Atlantic crossings. They were opposites in almost every way. They stayed together for forty-eight years, until death.

The flour dust gave James asthma. Two infant daughters died in fourteen months. Around 1898, James travelled north to Bethany Township in Gratiot County, Michigan, and bought a farm. He came a year ahead of his family to prepare the place — and found the beautiful white oak trees stripped by timber thieves when they arrived. He simply began clearing. It was the last move he would ever make.

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The Michigan Years

The Man at the Hearth

To his children, James Daniel Hearn was a presence more felt than known — small, dark-eyed, dark-mustached, deeply olive in colouring, his Kytherian mother written plainly on his face. He wore strong glasses all his life. Every evening, when the farm work was done, he came inside and read until after midnight. He loved poetry, played the accordion, taught his son Lloyd to play chess, and drew deer — careful, accomplished drawings that hung on the walls of the old home.

He showed love in actions, not words. He was the first farmer in the Bethany area to grow soybeans and the first in his area to own a Model T Ford. He never spoke of Greece or Ireland or England — never told his children where he had come from. That whole history was sealed away inside him like a letter that was written, folded, and never sent.

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The Brothers

The Brother He Never Met Again

The silence between the brothers was not indifference on either side. Lafcadio had been hunting for James for years — he had friends in Paris trying to get upon his brother's track. When contact was finally made around 1890, Lafcadio's letters came back urgent and searching — firing questions about their mother's name, their shared childhood, the marks Rosa had pressed onto both boys as babies in the old Greek Orthodox fashion. After a lifetime of not knowing, Lafcadio wanted everything at once.

Photographs travelled back and forth across the Pacific. When Lafcadio received a photograph of James's baby daughter Grace, he wrote that he could almost swear it was his own child — the child had the eyes. Rosa Cassimati, the dark-eyed woman from Kythera whom neither brother could clearly remember, was looking back at Lafcadio from a photograph of his niece in a Michigan farmhouse, forty years and half a world away.

At one point James had offered to pay Lafcadio's expenses to come and visit him in Ohio. The year he made that offer was the very year Lafcadio departed for Japan. On the eve of his sailing, Lafcadio wrote: "It pains me that I could not see you." He never returned.

On 26 September 1904, Lafcadio Hearn died in Okubo, Japan. James was fifty-one, working his farm in Gratiot County. The brother he had never managed to see again was gone. The letters stopped. Whatever James felt in the days that followed, he kept it, as he kept everything, entirely to himself.

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The Long Ending

What He Left Behind

James Daniel Hearn died on 14 June 1933, in Bethany, Gratiot County, Michigan. He was seventy-eight years old. He was laid out in the black parlour of the old farmhouse on the green velveteen sofa, and buried in Saint Louis, Gratiot County, not far from the fields he had worked for three decades.

Of all of them — Rosa dying in darkness on Corfu, Charles swallowed by the sea, Lafcadio lost in the luminous distance of Japan — it was patient, persistent James who put down roots and held, who left living descendants behind him in the American earth. He never spoke Rosa's name to his children. But what he buried did not stay buried. It is surfacing now, in these pages.

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Life at a Glance

Origins & Childhood

• 1854Born, Cephalonia, Ionian Islands, Greece
• c.1854–57Raised in Greece by his mother Rosa
• 1857Sent alone to England; baptized at Saint George the Martyr, London, 12 July
• c.1857–71Dr. Stewart's boarding school, Alton, Hampshire, England
• 21 Nov 1866Father Charles Bushe Hearn dies, Gulf of Suez

Two Crossings, Three Trades

• 1871First crossing — caught in the Great Chicago Fire en route to Madison, Wisconsin
• c.1876–78Second crossing — tobacco farming, Poquonock, Connecticut
• 1878Arrives Gibsonburg, Ohio; buys part interest in flour mill

Ohio: The Mill and the Marriage

• 5 Nov 1885Marries Cora Belle Brubaker, Sandusky County, Ohio
• 1886–88Deaths of infant daughters Maude and Lillie
• 1889–1894Births of Grace, Lottie Gertrude, James A., and Ethel E.

Michigan: The Final Chapter

• c.1898–99Buys farm, Bethany Township, Gratiot County, Michigan
• c.1890Correspondence with Lafcadio Hearn begins — letters now at Harvard Houghton Library
• 26 Sep 1904Brother Lafcadio Hearn dies in Okubo, Japan
• Jan 1923Interviewed by Henry Tracy Kneeland, Atlantic Monthly (pp. 20–27)
• 14 Jun 1933Dies of dropsy, Bethany, Michigan — age 78

Surviving Children

• Grace M. Hearn  ·  1889–1962
• Lottie Gertrude Hearn  ·  1891–1983
• Ethel E. Hearn  ·  1894–1977
• Mae Hearn  ·  1899–1975
• Lloyd Hearn  ·  1901–1987  ·  recorded interview preserved in family archive
• Gladys Yvonne Hearn  ·  1905–1988

Sources: Ancestry.com records  ·  US Federal Census 1900–1930  ·  Michigan vital records  ·  Atlantic Monthly, January 1923
Margery Bebow family letters (1999)  ·  Lloyd Hearn recorded interview  ·  Harvard Houghton Library, HOLLIS: alma990098277770203941

— Bradford C. Hearn
Great-great-grandson of Rosa Antoniou Cassimati
Great-grandson of James Daniel Hearn
Great-grand-nephew of Lafcadio Hearn — Koizumi Yakumo
lafcadiohearn.org

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