Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (46 page)

Following that information, the
Anglo-African
quoted some sentimental verse that referred to a tearful mother and father fixing their eyes on God while their boy’s face shined down waiting for God to bring them to him.
³⁴
Family tragedy had struck just as my great-great-grandfather had at long last achieved both personal and professional satisfaction and was in a position to help his beloved son do the same. Ironically, healthy ambition—the desire to uplift his family and provide for the next generation—backfired, bringing death instead of fulfillment.

Founded in 1834 as a manual labor school, Oberlin College modeled itself after the Oneida Institute in upstate New York. Its mission was to civilize and evangelize the western part of the country by providing all its students with a “useful education” and preparing the more talented for the ministry or teaching. To do so, Oberlin devised a two-pronged approach that included a Manual Labor Department and an academic curriculum that was eventually divided into three tracks, Preparatory, Collegiate, and Theological. Oberlin, its founders insisted, would cultivate the whole person, developing a sound mind in a sound body.
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Students were by and large the children of simple and unmonied farmers hailing from Ohio, New York, and New England. But they were neither exclusively male nor white. As evangelical Christians, Oberlin’s founders considered abolition part of their mission. Before the Civil War, the college was a hotbed of antislavery activism to which radicals
like the Tappan brothers threw their full support, financial and otherwise.

Black students were never very numerous, approximately 5 percent of the student population. As in the larger society, prejudice flourished among some white students. In response to an anxious letter from her family in Massachusetts, a female student wrote back reassuringly that “we don’t have to kiss the Niggars nor to speak to them without we are a mind to.” But teachers and administrators held fast to their principles of racial egalitarianism. According to one faculty member:

The white and colored students associate together in this college very much as they choose. Our doctrine is that
mind
and
heart
, not
color
, make the man and the woman too. We hold that neither men or women are much the better or much the worse for their
skin.
Our great business here is to educate mind and heart. … We believe in treating men according to their intrinsic merit—not according to distinctions over which they can have no control. If you are a young gentleman of color, you may expect to be treated here according to your real merit; and if white, you need not expect to fare better than this.
³⁶

As a student in the Preparatory Department, in class Peter Jr. sat next to young men who were all (or almost all) white. His teachers were white as well. He lived in an almost exclusively white world.

Oberlin wanted its students to be high-minded and serious. In the early years, leisure activities were few and consistently highbrow: lectures, dramatic readings, musical performances. As time passed, however, students found increasing ways to amuse themselves, and school officials became more tolerant. They socialized in one another’s rooms. Boys played cricket and baseball. Girls indulged in fashion. Mixed events—walks, picnics, sleigh riding, skating, horseback riding—were fast becoming the norm. Yet some prohibitions remained: close contact between the sexes, gaming (playing cards, checkers, chess), smoking, and drinking.

It seemed that Peter Jr.’s life at Oberlin was a pleasurable combination of study and fun in an atmosphere relatively unpoisoned by racial prejudice. So what happened? I finally found answers in the local Oberlin paper, the
Lorain County News.
They satisfied my craving for facts, but also troubled me. I quote in full:

FATAL ACCIDENT. Scarcely a week elapses but that some community is shocked by the report that one of its members has met with fearful death by the careless use of firearms. But the terrible warning, in the results of such carelessness, seems to be of no avail. We are obliged this week to add another to the fearful list of those who have been hurried to eternity—a life cut off in the prime of youth and summoned unprepared to another world. On Wednesday last, about one o’clock, Mr. Peter Guignon, a young colored man, of New York City, and a student in the Preparatory Department here, when about to start out on a hunting excursion with several associates, was shot through the head by the accidental discharge of a gun in the hands of a Mr. Wilson, his room-mate, and one of his best friends. It appears that the gun had been fired but a few moments before, and had been reloaded by Mr. Guignon without Mr. Wilson’s knowledge, and after several ineffectual attempts to discharge it again by some of the party, it was placed beside a door without uncocking it. Mr. W., who in the meantime had been up to his room for a few moments, returned, and making some jesting remarks to young G. about some cigars which he claimed were due to him, took up the gun, still cocked, and in a playful manner, threatened to shoot him if he did not repay the cigars. Scarcely were his words finished, when the gun went off, the charge passing through the left eye of the unfortunate youth, and lodging in the back of his head. He died instantly. A coroner’s inquest, under Esquire Bushnell, elicited the above facts and gave a verdict accordingly. The body was forwarded by express to his afflicted parents in New York.
³⁷

Putting Oberlin’s racial idealism into practice, Peter appears to have been part of a tight-knit group of young men, mostly all of whom were white. The camaraderie among them seems genuine enough. Their leisure activities—hunting, smoking, joking around—betoken the kind of intimacy forged in boarding school, where students are thrown together in dormitories and classes for long stretches of time.

I found it ironic that the cause of the joking and subsequent tragedy was over cigars. For better or for worse, Peter Jr. had been brought up in a family where cigars were a part of daily life. His grandfather had worked his entire life in the Lorillard tobacco company. His father was in the cigar business for some years and, as his testimony at his brother-in-law’s inquest made clear, Peter Sr. was himself a cigar smoker. Yet at Oberlin College smoking was frowned upon as a stimulant and considered a violation of temperance principles.

Another death, another inquest, but this time with different players and a different outcome. The victim was a young black man, the perpetrator white, and the verdict accidental death. I’m fully prepared to accept the jury’s verdict. Nevertheless, the scene of a white boy threatening to shoot a black boy, even in jest, even over unpaid cigars, sends chills down my spine. I can’t blame Maritcha for her reticence.

CIRCA 1875

ACCORDING TO THE CITY
directories, Philip White moved his home from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn in 1870, but maintained his pharmacy in its same location until his death in 1891. The date puzzled me. Why hadn’t my great-grandfather left in the aftermath of the draft riots, which had traumatized so many in his community? Did he believe that the protection of his neighbors and the kindness of local businessmen during the riots meant that his safety was assured for years to come and that he could continue building up his drugstore business without worrying?

If Philip hadn’t moved in 1863, why not in 1867, the year he married Elizabeth Guignon? Did he not want to provide a new home for his new bride? As with Peter, I know nothing about their courtship. In 1867, Philip was a middle-aged man of forty-four and Elizabeth a young woman of twenty-five. Why did Philip wait so long to marry? Did he delay starting a family out of professional ambition? Why did Elizabeth marry a man almost twenty years her senior? Was theirs a love match? How did it come about?

In one of his reminiscences, Harry Albro Williamson remembered his grandparents’ story of how Elizabeth, as a small child, came to visit for two weeks but stayed for twelve years. The census tells us that in 1850 Elizabeth was living with her father, stepmother, and their new baby on Greenwich Avenue. I’m not sure whether that twelve-year period would have been before or after that, or whether it was really that long.
Elizabeth might have gone to live with the Lyons family in Seneca Village right after her mother’s death when the still struggling Peter felt unable to care for her. Or Peter and Cornelia might have decided to leave Elizabeth in Manhattan when they moved to Brooklyn in the mid-1850s. If so, she would have been living on Vandewater Street right down the block from her future husband. Whatever the case, Elizabeth had ample opportunity to meet Philip, given the many different interests that brought him together with her father and uncle on a regular basis—St. Philip’s, meetings of the Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children, agitation on behalf of black male suffrage.

Hoping that city maps might provide me with clues, I went to consult one and found my answer. It was the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. When we think of the bridge, we tend to focus on the technological skill required for its construction. We stand in awe of the heroic efforts and tragic deaths of its two chief engineers, John Roebling, who died from an infection developed after an accident crushed his foot, and his son Washington, who suffered a crippling attack of “caisson disease” that left him paralyzed and unable to leave his room. We applaud its completion and the grand inaugural ceremony held in 1883.

Yet the process of building the bridge was long and tedious. Although the state legislature first considered a proposal for a bridge over the East River in 1857, it was not until 1866 that a bill was approved. Construction became imperative after the river froze over during the harsh winter of 1867, forcing suspension of ferry services; approximately five thousand people walked over the ice to get to the other side. The first order of business was to build the unsuspended approaches and anchorages leading up to the bridge’s span. On the Manhattan side, this required clearing six blocks between Chatham and Water and Frankfort and Duane Streets. According to a contemporary observer, iron and masonry ascended some 1,560 feet “from Chatham Street, over North William and William Streets, over Rose and Vandewater Streets, over Cliff and Pearl to Cherry Street.”
¹
Philip’s drugstore on the corner of Frankfort and Gold was saved, but his home on Vandewater Street was demolished.

So it was urban renewal that forced the newlyweds to move. Perhaps
it was just as well, since the Swamp was fast deteriorating. Many of those who saw their property destroyed were local tradesmen like Philip—butchers, grocers, and the like. But some were notable New Yorkers—among them the landlord William Astor, John Jacob’s son, and the Smull brothers, who were leather tanners. Some buildings had been important sites, such as George Washington’s first executive mansion, at 1 Cherry Street. Nevertheless, like most port areas, Manhattan’s anchorage was seedy, housing disreputable hotels and saloons where prostitution and gambling were common activities. Building the bridge offered the opportunity, as one commentator put it, of “ridding the area of its infamous associations.”
²

Unlike the Rays and the Guignons, Philip and Elizabeth did not settle in Williamsburgh but moved into a house at 358 Pearl Street, between Myrtle and Willoughby Streets, in a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood close to the downtown area. I’m guessing that the ever independent and practical Philip felt no need to live near his relatives but chose this location primarily for business reasons. In the 1870s Brooklyn’s industry, manufacture, and commerce continued to expand at a rapid rate. Shipyards lined the East River, as did warehouses that stored anything from ice, flour, and tobacco to coal and lumber. Farther inland there were oil works, flint and glass manufactures, and white lead works. To the east, Brooklyn Heights sat on a bluff overlooking the river; even then it was the city’s most prestigious address and home to prosperous merchants like the shipping magnate A. A. Low. Philip’s neighborhood was located somewhat to the south in today’s Borough Hall area. He was in fact quite close to City Hall, once Brooklyn’s architectural jewel but by the time of the Civil War overshadowed by the massive Kings County Court House erected to the rear.
³
Maps and censuses of the period indicate that frame houses lined Philip’s block and, to an even greater degree than Peter’s Williamsburgh neighborhood, were inhabited by a mixed population of Germans, Irish, Italians, and even Cubans.

Just as important for Philip, Pearl Street was within a short distance of the ferries. Before the bridge was finished, he was one of the 250,000 to 300,000 daily commuters who depended on the city’s ferry system. Philip needed only to walk a few blocks west from his home to
Main Street and, paying his fare of two cents, catch the Catherine Slip ferry that would deposit him on the Manhattan side not far from his drugstore. After the bridge was built, the commute became even easier.

Philip was an undisputed leader of New York and Brooklyn’s black elite. He was professionally successful and financially secure. He was a pillar of St. Philip’s and a founder of many of the community’s new institutions. His family stood at the center of elite social life.

Even if the building of the Brooklyn Bridge had not forced the newlyweds to move, their growing family would have. Philip and Elizabeth had three daughters, born in rapid succession: Ellie Augusta in 1868, my grandmother Cornelia Steele in 1869, and Katherine Maria in 1870 (a fourth daughter died in infancy in 1873). As with Peter, I was told virtually nothing about Philip or his family. My oldest sister recalled that many years ago she asked our aunt Dorothy what her mother was like and whether she had a photograph of her. Dorothy apparently paused, walked into her bedroom, and came out with a photograph that she thrust in my sister’s hand. It was a photograph, not of Cornelia, but of her tombstone. Years later, the bitterness the daughter felt toward her mother had not subsided. Cornelia’s life story was buried with her in her grave and Dorothy was not about to dig it up.