B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (18 page)

But now I am getting ahead of the story, because at this point, when he has just begun the passionate project of his Negroana scrapbooks, Gumby himself had no intention of disappearing. Indeed, his entire activity seemed to guard against oblivion. Gumby arrived in Harlem in the earliest days of the New Negro push into the neighborhood. He established himself (or Newman established him) at 2144 Fifth Avenue almost immediately, for that is the return address supplied in correspondence related to the second chief occupation of his early years, the Southern Utopia Fraternity.

The S.U.F. was dedicated to the support and edification of
young college men from the South
for the purpose of helping themselves as well as all young men from Southern schools who come to New York seeking a larger experience
. The actual activities of the fraternity are not described in the materials Gumby pasted into a few of his scrapbook pages. It seems as though its mere existence, and the notice it garnered, were most important. Its founding was noted in local newspapers:
Young College Men from South Organize
. A subsequent mention announces the election of officers,
including the election of Gumby himself to the position of treasurer. The scrapbook preserves a bank draft drawn in Gumby’s name in the amount of five dollars
for S.U.F. premiere dance
. There are elegantly printed ephemera: the cover of a program to be held
Thursday evening, April the Sixth, Eight-thirty
announces that
Mr. Justice of the Fraternity will entertain Members and Friends of the Frat.
A small calling card expresses the Fraternity’s mission statement:
Its purpose is to bring into closer relation for mutual cooperative help ambitious young men from the various schools who spend their time wholly or in part in New York and vicinity.

The major document we have of the fraternal order is a letter, written by Gumby in 1917, which resembles the marching orders for a coup. In six pages of feverish prose Gumby solicits the aid of members for his faction:
It is now that your help is needed
, in order that our Fraternity may be launched on the waves of life.
The source of the controversy is not clear; he proposes amendments to the constitution and doing away with lengthy debating during meetings. He mentions that the fraternity needs its own clubhouse, because members are being snatched away by other groups that boast facilities.

With a level of detail that tells us much more about the character of Gumby and the other young men who comprised the Southern Utopia Fraternity than it does about their aims, Gumby fills several pages with purple prose about the status of the organization and the problems at hand:

The document reveals Gumby to be a young man of great feeling:
May the banner
, spouting greatness and glory beyond the expression of words… be carried on.
He was a young man of great feeling who could not spell:
These talks wer plain talks. We threw off all faulce forms of politenest or display of rhetorical phrases or sincear or fishy friensdhip
.

The high ambition revealed in Gumby’s hopes for the Southern Utopia Fraternity matched the hopes then being harnessed on the streets, which were just beginning to fill with blacks moving to Harlem from the South and from other parts of the city. As the migration reached its peak,
other organizations were formed
, including the Sons of Georgia, the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina, the Virginia Society, the Georgia Circle, and the Southern Beneficial League. While Gumby’s somewhat pompous document may not be an accurate reflection of the other groups, all connected the new Harlemites with their origins, while encouraging their aspirations in the North.

Before the occurrence of any of the events that historians use to fix the official beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, the Southern Utopian Fraternity was founded and failed. Or at least we can
assume it failed, because there are no further notices of its activities in Gumby’s scrapbook. His employment for the next period is difficult to pin down—at some point he worked for the postal service—but this is when his attentions turned even more toward scrapbook making. His brief memoirs note, rather vaguely, that
in the years from 1914
until America went into the first World War, I had the opportunity of going to several large cities in towns in this country and in Canada.
Gumby’s mission, on these tours, was to visit libraries to study
various methods of compiling and mounting scrapbook material.
Also during these trips, he scoured bookshops for items to add to his collection, such that he soon
became better known for my collection of choice books than for my scrapbooks.
In 1922, Gumby was registered in the latest edition of
Who’s Who in Book Collecting.

A typewritten bibliography lists some of the items of his collection, including an 1804 copy of
The Life and Achievements of Toussaint L’Ouverture
, a signed edition of
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,
William Lloyd Garrison’s
Thoughts on African Colonization,
and a 1900 title by W. E. B. DuBois,
College-Bred Negro.
Rare editions from the era of slavery were joined by contemporary productions that probed the history of Africa, the conditions of blacks in the South, and recent novels. When his collection began to outgrow his two and a half rooms on Fifth Avenue,
Gumby took out a lease
of the entire floor.

This expansion gave Gumby the opportunity to establish the Gumby Book Studio in 1925. It was intended

Nineteen twenty-five was the year that brought Alain Locke’s special Harlem edition of
Survey Graphic
magazine, which became the anthology
The New Negro.
It was also the year when Gumby’s fellow bibliophile Arthur Schomburg enjoyed success for the exhibit of his collection at the 135th Street Branch library. Locke’s anthology solidified his role as spokesman of the new generation of black artists, scholars, and aesthetes; Schomburg’s exhibit led to the acquisition of his collection by the New York Public Library. Alexander Gumby’s tea parties to celebrate his scrapbooks may not seem to match the achievement of those other men. He would have read Locke’s grand pronouncements and known that Schomburg had made a small fortune. His retrospective clamoring for some distinction of his own (
the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem
) may reveal some self-consciousness in comparison to the other heady undertakings of the era. But it also shows Gumby’s solid commitment to his enterprise. He was master of the very small territory that was his domain.

Gumby’s scrapbooks went on view
for Negro History Week exhibitions in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. In the course of such travels, parts of his collection inevitably went missing. But mostly his activity happened outside of institutions. The production of scrapbooks is a private endeavor, rather different from the intellectual heroics of his contemporaries. It requires papers, scissors, and paste, as well as lots of time to pore over materials. It doesn’t happen on street corners or on barstools or at meetings. Crucially, the art of the scrapbook is an act of preservation
rather than creation. It is accomplished through juxtaposition and accretion. Within the pages of his scrapbooks, Gumby assembled a mass of information on the history and achievements of black people that was something like that mass accumulating within the boundaries of Hurston’s Harlem City. He focused on the most exceptional and the most beautiful, rather than on the most wretched or the most “authentic.” And Gumby completely ignored the mundane.

His perspective brings to mind the opening pronouncement in Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
in which she describes the ambitions of women who
forget all those things
they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth.
Gumby’s dreams, what he remembered and what he failed to remember, reached their fullest expression through his rather feminine, peculiar occupation. He was building a diorama while his contemporaries engaged in the outward, upward, excavating, campaigning activities more typically associated with the race man. The interior nature of Gumby’s vocation and his private, idiosyncratic interaction with history is perhaps another reason why his memory is scarcely kept.

But at least for a while, Gumby lived a charmed existence. Pictures of him inside the book studio (preserved in one scrapbook) show the handsome Gumby flashing an inviting smile as he sits with legs crossed, taking coffee in a dressing gown. His table is covered with a crisp tea cloth, and his coffee service looks like quality china—at least one source remembers it as
Spode
. Other pictures show different views of his residence: a long chamber with a low ceiling seems to be the room with the plate-glass window that I had seen from the street. His walls were lined with shelves specially fitted to house his oversized scrapbooks; various pictures hang above a piano.

In April 1929, an article celebrating Gumby appeared in the
“Who Is Who” column of the
New York News
.
In December 1929
, the
New York Times
published an article about him, “Negro History in Scrapbooks.”
That same month
, Gumby’s lover lost a fortune in the stock market crash and was laid low by a
war ailment,
which might be a polite term for nervous breakdown. Gumby’s activities would henceforth not be as well funded.

Despite this misfortune, the first part of 1930 was full of activity at Gumby Book Studio. The studio gave a Sunday afternoon tea hosted by a debutante group called the Primrose Patch, at which
Maurice Hunter, artist’s model
, gave some interpretive poses; O. Richard Reid gave a talk on art; Theodore Hernandez and Thomas Corbett sang.
The studio’s fifth anniversary was celebrated with another tea given by a Miss Willie Branch, in which she performed “The Gypsy Maid,” “The Maniac,” and “Hagar.” A report on the event declared,
While much cannot be said
for the vehicles which Miss Branch included in her repertoire, her interpretation of them was noteworthy. One could only wish that Miss Branch had chosen lighter and more pleasing themes instead of the morbid and melodramatic ones mentioned above
.

On the occasion of his anniversary, the
New York News
heralded Gumby’s efforts.
Not only does Mr. Gumby
seek out the great things that has
[
sic
]
been done, but also the seeds of things that will be great in the future. Thus his studio is a laboratory for the youth of the race, struggling in art, music, poetry or other creative expression
.

In 1930, Gumby also launched
a publication to serve as a printed laboratory.
Gumby’s Book Studio Quarterly: A Journal of Discussion
appeared, bearing cover articles including “A Plea for Intolerance,” by George S. Schuyler, and “The African Origins of the Tango,” by Arthur Schomburg.

But at the end of May 1930, a small notice appeared in the
New York News:

This was a hopeful program for the future. In reality, according to his own memoirs, after his friend’s illness Gumby had to sell some of his rare editions in order to keep the studio going. When he closed
for the summer and alterations,
he put his belongings in storage.

This closing of the studio began a tragic chapter.
The loss of my Studio
and the fact that I was overworked combined to send me to the hospital I remained there for four years
. Near the beginning of his convalescence, in 1931, a benefit was held at the Renaissance Ballroom. The organizing committee was led by the artist Augusta Savage and included Bessye J. Bearden (mother of the artist Romare), the society columnist Geraldyn Dismond, and actress Rose McClendon, among others.
An advertisement for the benefit
listed a number of prominent patrons sponsoring the event, including Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Arthur Schomburg, and Bill Robinson. Entertainment was furnished by
principals of the Cotton Club Revue and Noble Sissle
among other
Harlem Night Club Stars.
Gumby himself was not well enough to attend, but a page in his scrapbook preserves items announcing the event—including a scrawled message sent by a friend as she prepared for the party. It is full of a socialite’s breathless flutter
:
Dear Gumby, Just to say hello
and that I’m thinking of you, we are expecting a great affair tonight we shall all be thinking of you—everything is working fine, hope you can read this I’m so excited. Love, Alta
.