Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (24 page)

Toussaint was highly skilled in his trade. He worked out of the salon he kept in his home, but the most lucrative part of his work came from his visits to elite households, where he cut and styled the hair of men, women, and children. As contract clients, they paid him a fixed
annual sum for weekly visits. Toussaint was especially talented at dressing hair for society events like weddings and balls. He kept up with the current fashion of curling women’s hair, but also set new trends, for example weaving flowers into an evening hairdo.
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It’s possible that at the Bérards’ and Guignons’ instigation, Toussaint agreed to help young Peter Guignon.

Peter Ray and Pierre Toussaint depended on white employers and patrons to make a living. Because they were skilled in their work—unique really—they commanded loyalty, a feat Peter Guignon was never able to achieve. Peter’s hairdressing shop was in the heart of the West Side’s black community. He undoubtedly drew most of his customers from the neighborhood, offering a variety of services such as cutting hair, shaving men, and curling women’s tresses. But here too Peter seems to have failed.

Peter’s name does not appear in any directories for the years 1854 to 1858. I realized that he had fallen on hard times when I found a short, formal letter written by Cornelia to Albro Lyons in December 1854 in the Williamson papers. The constrained tone of her missive is heart wrenching.

Mr Lyons

Sir

It is a matter of great embarrassment to me to keep you out of your money so long. But Peter has been rather unfortunate in having so much sickness and this is the reason that you have not had your money, as for myself I have none at present but as soon as my husband sends it, you shall have it without fail.

With respects,
C. A. Guignon

It sounds like Peter was too sick to work, and maybe even unable to provide for his family. Williamson recalled that in his youth he “often listened
to the story of how Elizabeth came to visit my grandparents … for two weeks, and, that visit lasted for 12 years; she was a very small child at the time.”
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Maybe the money Peter owed the Lyonses was for Elizabeth’s care.

Eventually, a solution was found. In 1858, Peter moved to Brooklyn and began working in the pharmacy that one of Cornelia’s brothers, Samuel, had opened in Williamsburgh (now spelled Williamsburg), but left vacant when he emigrated to Liberia. That’s where my great-great-grandfather could be found from 1858 until his death in 1885.

Purely by coincidence, Peter Guignon and Philip White ended up in the same career—pharmacy—but they came to it at different moments of their lives and through different paths. Peter was a man of forty-five, and got his job through marriage ties. In contrast, Philip was only seventeen years old when he began his apprenticeship in James McCune Smith’s pharmacy in 1840.

In the late 1830s Smith didn’t have a moment’s rest. From then until the moment of his death, he threw his energies into helping the black poor and working class. He opened a drugstore and medical practice on West Broadway, advertising in the
Colored American
services that included “Bleeding, Tooth-drawing, Cupping, and Leeching.” In addition to black patients, he also treated poor whites who could not afford to be finicky about the color of their doctor’s skin. Smith also took on more complicated cases, one of which he wrote up in a brief report titled “Case of Ptyalism with Fatal Termination.” In collaboration with a white doctor, Smith had undertaken the care of a young woman who had a chronic hacking cough, salivated profusely, and complained of severe lower abdominal pain. The cough and pain pointed to tuberculosis, appendicitis, or a problem with the ovaries. The swollen tongue and salivation suggested a reaction to pills containing mercury. Following the treatment of the time, Smith and his colleague attempted to reduce the swelling by blistering the back of her neck, applying leeches to it as
well as her throat, and cutting her tongue to let it bleed. Despite their efforts, the result was “fatal termination.”
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Smith was also kept busy as doctor of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Convinced that the city was not doing enough to care for impoverished black children, two Quaker women, Anna Shotwell and Mary Murray, founded the asylum in 1834. Both had inherited their sense of benevolence from older male relatives active in the Manumission Society. Despite their family connections, however, Shotwell and Murray faced an uphill battle. They created an all-female Board of Managers and were immediately criticized for overstepping the bounds of feminine propriety. Citing city policy, the municipal government refused to give them any funds. But success finally came in the early 1840s when the city donated a piece of land on Fifth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets to erect a new building; thereafter, the city and state governments as well as the Manumission Society began offering financial support. Until its destruction during the Draft Riots in 1863, the asylum sheltered a total of 1,257 orphans and half-orphans as well as neglected and abused children.
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As with the African Free Schools, the asylum’s relations with the black community were ambiguous. Although it had supported separate institutions when deemed necessary, the
Colored American
railed against the asylum’s segregated admissions policy as “contrary to the principles of the Bible, and at war with the best interests of our colored population. … They cast boundaries that are difficult to permeate.” Black leaders felt left out of its operations. They complained that the asylum had wrongly taken monies from a legacy that should have gone to their own Phoenix Society. They were suspicious of its continued association with the American Colonization Society. They were dismayed when the managers dismissed matron Rachel Johnson, one of the few blacks on staff, and wondered why a white woman was chosen to replace her. They were aggrieved that the asylum, like so many other white benevolent institutions before it, seemed only interested in teaching black children basic skills and then placing them in indentures as domestics or farm hands.
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Nevertheless, the white women who ran the asylum were genuinely
dismayed by the poor physical health of their black wards, particularly their susceptibility to infectious diseases like influenza, whooping cough, measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox. To set the black community’s mind at rest, in 1843 they hired Smith to be the children’s doctor. He worked tirelessly on their behalf, making frequent visits to the asylum and also taking them on country outings.

Because Smith was so overextended, he took George Downing’s advice and brought my great-grandfather into his pharmacy as an apprentice. Philip’s tasks, as Downing noted in his eulogy, were so varied that the young man ended up learning far more than he ever would have in a larger establishment.

The duties of a clerk under such circumstances were numerous, exacting and varying; his reading became limited to the “Dispensatory” and similar technical books; his practice included the various forms of work nowadays distributed among a set of employees, from porter at one end to first clerk at the other. This was, however, of no little advantage to the ambitious young clerk; he had to face emergencies, to assume responsibilities, and to take risks without instruction; the stock had to be kept up, prescriptions compounded, while the trade over the counter was incessant in its transactions. Many preparations that to-day may be purchased were at that time home made, and the treatment of minor ailments came legitimately within the sphere of the duties of a druggist.
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Philip entered the field of pharmacy at just the right moment when exciting new developments in the properties and use of drugs were taking place. Up through much of the 1830s, U.S. physicians had based their treatment of disease on drastic “depletive” remedies. During
the early epidemics of yellow fever and the 1832 outbreak of cholera, they ministered to the ill by means of bleeding, sweating, vomiting, blistering, and purging. To dispense the cathartics and emetics that physicians demanded, pharmacists chose from among those drugs that were thought to be most efficacious. Rhubarb made a good strong laxative; ipecacunha was a popular emetic; opium served as an analgesic and sedative; and calomel, a mercury compound, was a great favorite because, depending on dosage and length of treatment, it could be used as a laxative, stimulant, sedative, or tonic.

The 1840s marked a critical turning point in medical treatment. Advances in chemistry were creating a more sophisticated understanding of drugs and their effects on the body. Until this point, scientists simply knew that certain plants had medicinal properties from which one could derive drugs. Now alkaloidal chemistry allowed them to identify the active agent in plants and extract it: narcotine could be obtained from opium, iodine from marine algae, emetine from ipecac, and so forth. As a result, the development of alkaloids and other chemical entities allowed physicians and pharmacists to forgo the use of crude drugs. They also began shifting toward more “supportive” treatments, letting go of drastic measures in favor of restoring the body’s natural balance. While they continued to prescribe many of the same drugs, they did so in much smaller doses.
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Determined to keep up with these advances, Philip assiduously studied the Dispensatory. Along with the United States Pharmacopoeia, it was the pharmacist’s bible. Philip probably used the 1833 Dispensatory compiled by two eminent Philadelphia physicians, which incorporated all the latest pharmaceutical findings. It introduced the new drugs, described how they operated on the body on a scientific, rather than a trial-and-error, basis, and underscored the importance of variables such as temperature and solubility. Since Smith advertised Shaker herbs, Philip also needed to study Shaker catalogs that listed as many as 170 plants—whiteroot, bugle weed, Indian hemp, thimble weed, belladonna, poppies, valerian, and the like—many of which were not recognized in the Dispensatory.
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Philip worked long hours fulfilling tasks that, as Downing noted,
ranged across a wide spectrum of pharmaceutical duties. As the renowned Philadelphia pharmacist Edward Parrish later remembered, in this era “in many instances the hands that received and opened the case of rhubarb, opium or assafoetida fresh from off the ship, in turn dispensed these remedies in pill-box or vial to the suffering invalid.” The apprentice, he noted wryly, “enjoyed a wholesome development of muscle through wielding the ponderous pestle, handling the sieves and working the screw press.” To make up pills with a cathartic action, for example, clerks had to powder drugs like sodium bicarbonate, tartaric acid, Rochelle salt, and aloes in large mortars. If an enema was called for, they were obliged to prepare the enema apparatus themselves. They needed to find a supply of bladders, then tie a pipe securely into the neck of each, and finally send it out with the irrigation solution.
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Downing insisted that Philip’s apprenticeship in Smith’s pharmacy made him “more self-reliant than he could have possibly become in the same time in a larger store, with more clerks and an apparent increase in facilities. Here he formed his habits of application, of industry, and his perseverance and steadiness were developed and strengthened.” In these early days of trade and entrepreneurship, clerks—regardless of their race or ethnicity—were encouraged not only to learn technical knowledge and business savvy but also to abide by the virtues of hard work and honesty. There existed what could be called a clerk’s culture that promoted moral and righteous living or, in the parlance of the day, the cultivation of character. These same values were the bedrock of the black community. Indeed, Philip might well have accompanied George Downing, one of the Reason brothers, or even his future father-in-law several years earlier to Philomathean Hall to listen to James Fields’s lecture, “Decision of Character.”

To one at all versed in reading prominent traits of character, nothing is more interesting, than the discovery of the germ of a prompt and decided character in a young man or woman just starting in life, honestly determined by industry, integrity and perseverance, to earn a position among their fellow men, at once honorable and useful.—Self-reliant, yet diffident of their real abilities, they early win the respect and confidence
of every good and true benefactor of the world, and find on all sides, friends to cheer and comfort them.
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Fields’s language here eerily foreshadows Downing’s a half century later.

Without question, Philip possessed a “decided character,” because his next move was a bold one. In 1842 he applied and was accepted to the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, from which he graduated in 1844, being, as his obituary in the
New York Age
proudly proclaimed, “the first man of our race to receive a diploma from that institution.”
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Like Ray and Toussaint, Philip took advantage of white patronage, albeit in the form of an institution rather than an individual. I believe his motivations were many: the sheer pleasure of studying pharmacy; his aspiration to excel as both a healer and a entrepreneur and thus earn a position “at once honorable and useful”; his determination to build up contacts among white businessmen whose acquaintance might stand him in good stead in later years. Maybe memories of his father, that “stern old English gentleman,” as Downing called him, convinced Philip that with hard work and discipline he could achieve any goal he set for himself.