Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (57 page)

“I sit with Shakespeare,” Du Bois wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk
, “and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.
From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”
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I don’t know whether Philip ever sat with Balzac or Dumas, but he did live in the company of Shakespeare, and Dante, and Mendelssohn.

When I helped my mother clear out her house in the summer of 2001, she asked me to leaf through every volume on her bookshelves. I’m not sure what she expected, but among the treasures that had lain there forgotten for years, I found two books with Philip’s signature on the title page: an 1857 edition of Mary Cowden Clarke’s
Complete Concordance to Shakspere
and the first volume of Henry Wadsworth Long-fellow’s 1867 translation of Dante’s
Divine Comedy.
In addition to art, Philip was drawn to literature, and since he owned a piano for decades, it’s evident that he loved music as well. I’m surmising that Mendelssohn was a particular favorite: the composer wrote multiple pieces specifically for the piano; Philip and his friends named the music school they established after him; and last, I remembered that Mendelssohn had been one of my father’s favorite composers and that, according to my mother, he had courted her to the sounds of the Italian Symphony.

Shakespeare, Dante, Mendelssohn. Together, they add up to a well-defined fin-de-siècle sensibility: highbrow, nicely adhering to the prevailing aesthetic taste of the times while carefully eschewing the radical and the avant-garde.

Early in the century, Shakespeare’s plays had been intensely popular. Whether rendered as serious drama, as burlesque, or as episodes in dime novels, they appealed to a broad cross-section of Americans in search of entertainment. But, with the increasing consolidation of class distinctions after the Civil War, Shakespeare became an author reserved for the elite.
Author
, because it was now fashionable to assert that the bard was at his best when read, not staged. Performance “materializes Shakespeare,” one critic maintained, “and in so doing vulgarizes him. Intellectual good taste outside of the theatre spiritualizes him.”
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In contrast, Dante had initially been the exclusive province of American academics (Longfellow was a Harvard professor), who translated his works, critiqued each other’s translations, and published essays in scholarly
journals. It was only toward of the end of the century that the Italian poet filtered into the ranks of America’s reading public.

For his part, Mendelssohn entered the country’s—and New York’s—canon of classical music early in his career. It was his name that graced the choral society that performed at the Met’s opening in 1888. Putting politics aside for the moment, George Templeton Strong turned to music criticism. Inveighing against composers he found too newfangled, Strong insisted that “Wagner writes like an ‘intoxified’ pig,” and Berlioz “like a tipsy chimpanzee.” But he placed Mendelssohn in the company of Handel, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Weber, confessing that his enjoyment of their music was “among the greatest of earthly blessings.”
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Philip’s membership at the Met, his appreciation of Shakespeare, Dante, and Mendelssohn, put him on a par with men like Strong. My great-grandfather could justifiably lay claim to being socially elite, culturally highbrow, broadly cosmopolitan, and an active participant in the formation of the United States’ new postwar national identity. But these were mere external identifiers that couldn’t begin to account for the deeper meanings the arts must have had for him. Even more than art appreciation, reading and music were solitary activities cultivated mainly in the privacy of home. I imagine Philip’s soul thrilling as he played selections from Mendelssohn’s
Lieder Ohne Worte
on his piano. I feel him inspired by Mary Cowden Clarke’s comment in the preface to her
Concordance
that reading Shakespeare was a path to true self-development. And how could my great-grandfather not have identified with the narrator-protagonist upon turning to the first page of Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s
Inferno:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a dark forest,

For the straightforward path had been lost.

…

I cannot repeat how I entered there,

So full was I of slumber at the moment

In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,

At that point where the valley terminated,

Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,

Vested already with that planet’s rays

Which leadeth others right by every road.

ON A BALMY JUNE DAY
several years ago, I boarded the J train to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Armed with a map provided by the front office, I went searching for the graves of my forebears and their friends. The White family plot lay on flat land near a broad path surrounded by tall leafy trees. According to the printout, Philip purchased the plot in 1850, undoubtedly in anticipation of his mother’s impending death in 1853. Buried next to her were her children: Sarah Maria, Mary Thompson and her family, and Philip and his family. Others lay close by: the Hewlett/Lyons/Williamsons—Elizabeth, Albro, Mary Joseph, Maritcha, Harry Albro, but not Rebecca—as well as Crummell, Charles Ray, James McCune Smith, and their loved ones. Crossing the path and walking up a hill, I found the land that St. Philip’s had bought for its parishioners in the late 1850s. The Ray family plot, which included Peter Guignon, was notable for a tall obelisk that jutted skyward. Peter Williams was buried nearby in an imposing mausoleum.

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, New York’s black elite reunited in this burial ground. Their graves were physical reminders of their lives and commemorations of their deaths. More than the passing of individuals, however, they constituted the passing of an entire community and indeed of an era. Reading through documents of this end-of-century period, I felt a tremendous sense of nostalgia sweep over the still-living. In myriad ways, they were seeking to make the past come alive by celebrating the achievements of those not yet gone and commemorating the struggles and triumphs of the dead as a legacy for future generations.

As if fearful of forgetting, the black elite cultivated the past with great determination. An 1889 article in the
New York Age
praised the revival of old customs—the return of the spinning wheel, the reproduction of Grandmother’s home cures, the restoration of quaint tapestries, rugs, and furniture. Families and community members paid homage
to those still alive. Every March, John Peterson’s former students—and there were many—held a birthday dinner in his honor. They also sought to give the dead a place among the living. In 1890, Albro and Mary Joseph Lyons celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, where they made sure to honor the memory of their best man, James McCune Smith, by placing his portrait in a conspicuous place for all to see.
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An undated photograph of the Downing family depicts George Downing, now the patriarch of the family, seated in a parlor surrounded by three female family members. Every inch of the room, the walls, the tables, is taken up with portraits of those loved ones no longer—and yet still—with them.

George Downing and family (Museum of African-American History, Boston)

Indeed, members of the black elite knew that their greatest responsibility was to preserve the memory of events long since over and people long since dead. They looked back on the nineteenth century from a broad historical perspective, eager to compile, analyze, and record
the history of Africans in America. Writing from Baltimore, Bishop Harvey Johnson informed readers of the
Freeman
of his city’s creation of a “race Historical Society” where “race relics and works” would be kept for reference and sale. New York’s black elite was keenly aware of how many relics had already been lost. In his 1865 sketch of Garnet’s life, James McCune Smith had lamented that the mayhem of the draft riots, “among other disasters, has caused the destruction of nearly all the printed minutes of conventions—our Alexandrine library—from which some of the noblest pages in the history of our people could have been selected.”
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Undaunted, black Americans proceeded to record their history. The
Globe
gave extensive coverage to George Washington Williams’s magisterial
History of the Negro Race in America
published in 1883. In his review in the
Age
, my grandfather Jerome B. Peterson emphasized the book’s vast sweep. Beginning with early African civilizations, Williams’s history continued to the present, and included biographical sketches of contemporary eminent black men and women. As editors of the
Age
, Peterson and Fortune repeatedly advertised the sale of “race literature, old and new”; in addition to Williams’s volume, these included Frederick Douglass’s
Life and Times
, Garland Penn’s
The Afro American Press and Its Editors
, Crummell’s
Africa and America
, Booker T. Washington’s
Future of the Negro Race.
Alongside book titles, Peterson and Fortune also listed paintings of deceased activists; one of the most popular was a life-size bust portrait of Douglass.
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The black elite commemorated in forms other than the printed word. This meant holding ceremonies to honor past institutions and events: annual celebrations of the founding of the African Society for Mutual Relief; commemorations of Emancipation Day and the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment; observances for past abolitionists and their achievements. Whites who had helped in the cause were not forgotten. Portraits for sale of John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe hung next to Frederick Douglass. When Henry Ward Beecher died in 1887, black Brooklynites thronged to a memorial service at the Bridge Street A.M.E. Church. Philip was chairman of the event and, seemingly forgetful of his former indifference to the antislavery cause, commemorated Beecher with stirring words. “We have met to mourn the
loss of one of the great men of the world,” he declaimed. “The older people here will remember that when Mr. Beecher presented himself to the people of Brooklyn there was only one thing in the minds of the American people, and that was slavery. The man who took the highest ground on that question was Henry Ward Beecher.”
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Aware of the evanescence of rituals as well of the word, whether spoken or printed, the black elite turned to more durable forms of commemoration. Some efforts were successful, others not. George Downing’s suggestion to erect a monument in memory of John Brown came to naught. Honoring President Grant, who died in 1885, was another matter. Black New Yorkers gathered for a memorial service. T. McCants Stewart delivered a long oration in which he rehearsed the late president’s life from his humble beginnings to his generalship and presidency, comparing “our Great Commander” to the biblical David, Oliver Cromwell, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and George Washington. But the black elite also participated in a more permanent memorial to the president. Grant had asked to be buried in New York, and the city’s white elite took on the challenge of erecting a “grand memorial temple” in his honor patterned after Hadrian’s tomb. A Grant Monument Committee was formed, and black Brooklynite Richard Greener was made secretary. Greener raised substantial funds among the black community and, after twelve years of building, Grant’s tomb was opened in 1897.
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It was, however, the death of beloved friends and family members that affected the black elite most profoundly. Some occurred close to home, others in faraway places. The venerable patriarch Thomas Downing died shortly after James McCune Smith in the city where he had made his fame and fortune. In a moving tribute written some twenty years later, George Downing recalled how his father had been honored by a large funeral procession, which “spoke of the universal esteem in which he was held.” It was composed, Downing continued, of “fellow-citizens from all classes … with humility upon their countenances, to pay respect to the generosity, virtue and general goodness that was true of him whose death they mourned, for he had a kind heart for all.” Philip Bell died on the other side of the continent, in San Francisco, where he had settled in 1857 and founded his own newspaper, the
Elevator.
Even in the 1860s, Bell seemed nostalgic for the old days and filled
his newspaper with articles about the antislavery struggles of yore. Despite the distance and the lapse of time, when Bell fell sick in 1888 and found himself in dire need of money, the African Society for Mutual Relief answered his call and took up a subscription for him. He died the following year.
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