Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (4 page)

Jerome Bowers Peterson, circa 1900

I now realize that what my father had passed on to me was a legacy of silence. Psychoanalysts who study family histories might well conclude
that my father and his generation had unconsciously transmitted their unfinished business to mine. They were unable to put to rest whatever “shameful” family secrets they possessed, so these lingered on to haunt the younger generation like ghosts, leaving my sisters and me feeling empty and unsettled.

Cornelia White Peterson with her two older children, Philip and Dorothy, circa 1900

I’m hoping to put these ghosts to rest. On a personal level, I want to claim a form of belonging I’ve never had. On a broader social level, I’ve become so frustrated by the lack of historical accounts about the black elite prior to the Harlem Renaissance that I’m determined to fill this void. I can no longer ask questions of the older generation who have long since passed. But I want to recover a family history to pass on to the younger generation.

I began my quest with empty hands.

There was that one story my aunt had told about the Haitian Philippe Auguste Blanc, but it turned out to be false. There were the innuendos of dinnertime conversation: our ancestors had probably come from the Caribbean; who knew whether there had been slaves in the family. And there were silences.

Where had my family stored its memories?

I tried to think back to household rituals that I could interpret as commemorations of the past—special food preparations or holiday meals, the wearing of jewelry, prayers, sayings, or maxims—but nothing came to mind. Whatever special rituals my family might have once practiced had been assimilated into northern urban culture and become unidentifiable.

Perhaps my parents’ home was an archive that secretly housed memories of the past. In the summer of 2001, I helped my mother “break house” and move into a retirement community. The last room I tackled was my father’s study, which had been left undisturbed since his death. The room was dominated by one piece of furniture: a heavy desk with a roll-down top and many small drawers and compartments. I remembered that it had followed my father overseas and home again. It was in fact an archive. A small round label pasted on the bottom of one of the drawers informed me that the desk had belonged to Philip White. Looking further, I came across some items tucked away in one of the back compartments that my father had never shared with us: a photograph of Peter Guignon and one of Philip White; some books, copies of Dante and Shakespeare, with Philip White’s name inscribed on the frontispiece page; a family Bible. But that was all.

I wanted to ask relatives, but there were none. My father’s brother, Philip, died before reaching adulthood, my aunt never married. There was a cousin, also unmarried, but she too was long dead and had left no children. I contacted a collateral descendant in Brooklyn but he too knew nothing, and wasn’t interested. Another descendant found me through the Internet, but she was hoping that
I
would be the one to provide her with family information.

My dilemma was compounded by the fact that my family’s nineteenth-century neighborhoods had long since broken up. Over time, members of their original social circle had moved away and their descendants had disappeared. A request for members of early St. Philip’s families to step forward yielded no results. In dispersing, they had taken whatever memories they had with them. And most of the places that had once embodied these memories, that had borne witness to human lives and human events, had also vanished or been emptied of meaning. What places remained needed an interpreter to bring them alive.

I began haunting the city’s streets hoping to find some trace of my family’s nineteenth-century past. But time and “progress” had obliterated so much. Court buildings now stand on the original site of St. Philip’s. Vandewater Street, the location of White’s last Manhattan home, has disappeared and given way to One Police Plaza. A Pace University building has replaced his drugstore at the corner of Frankfort and Gold Streets. But here and there I did catch glimpses of the past. Philip White’s last home still stands at 312 Clermont Avenue in Brooklyn. The family graves still lie in Cypress Hills Cemetery; Philip and his family are nestled in a quiet grove; Alexander Crummell is close by, as is James McCune Smith; and Peter Guignon rests at the top of a small hill in the plot of his second wife’s family, the Rays.

Having reached a dead end, I turned to the archives, those storehouses of memories that have been painstakingly preserved on scraps of paper or in other forms, from paintings and photographs to digital images. Archives are man-made. Not all communities have the power to establish them since they require material resources—money, buildings, technologies of writing and preservation—as well as cultural resources, including literacy and historical knowledge. Those who have the means assemble, classify, and deposit what
they
deem worth preserving, discarding what
they
consider trivial, irrelevant, or even threatening to their way of life. They create history, determining what can be forgotten, and what must be remembered and passed on to future generations. Even
after archives have been assembled, they never remain static monuments but are imbued with a sense of impermanence. Materials get damaged, lost, sold, removed from their original site and forgotten, destroyed through political upheaval or just sheer carelessness.

What would I find? Not find? How would I be able to put together the scraps that I found? What could I make out of those I didn’t find?

I visited the Schomburg Center time and again, and haunted the city’s many other libraries, museums, historical societies, and memorials. I gradually realized that although much of New York’s black history was irretrievably lost, some of it was still there, buried but waiting to be found. I also discovered that despite any personal or cultural traumas nineteenth-century black New Yorkers might have suffered, many had made determined, if sometimes futile, efforts to commemorate their history.

In the nineteenth century, black New Yorkers lacked the means to create their own archives. New York’s white elite had them. In 1804, wealthy merchant John Pintard joined forces with ten friends to form the New-York Historical Society. Pintard had been intimately involved in the great events that shaped the city’s history. During the revolutionary war, he was commissioned to help alleviate the lot of American prisoners held captive by the British. He later became a merchant, accumulating a considerable fortune in the East India trade (before losing it by taking over a friend’s debt). He served in the state legislature and the New York City Corporation, while many of his colleagues were lawyers and politicians. According to Pintard and the other founders, the New-York Historical Society’s mission was “to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular.” Acutely aware of the fragility of historical records, Pintard insisted that their first step must be “to rescue from the dust and obscurity of private repositories such important documents, as are liable to be lost or destroyed by the indifference or neglect of those into whose hands they may have fallen. For,” he continued, “without the aid of original records and authentic documents, history will be nothing more than a well-combined series of ingenious conjectures and amusing fables.”
⁸

Pintard maintained that the society would limit itself to “collecting
and preserving whatever may be useful to others in the different branches of historical inquiry.” What was Pintard’s definition of “useful”? Who were the “others” who would find the preserved documents useful? We can get a sense of the answers to these questions by perusing the advertisements that the founders placed in local newspapers in which they requested donations of biographical memoirs, newspapers, magazines, accounts of imports and exports, and material related to early Indian settlements. They made no mention of the experiences of New York’s black population. This doesn’t mean, however, that black history is entirely absent from the society’s archives. True, its founders didn’t seem particularly interested in it, undoubtedly finding it “useless,” hardly worthy of historical inquiry, or perhaps even inconveniently contradictory to the history of the city they envisioned. Nevertheless, traces of black life do surface, albeit couched within a white context, located on the margins of white history, and presented from a white perspective.

Yet black Americans never countenanced abandoning the preserving and telling of their history to white elites. Due to their straitened circumstances, the older generation could only engage in sporadic and scattershot efforts—newspapers that were short-lived, annual commemorations that were eventually abandoned, planned memorials that never came to fruition. It would be left to members of the next generation—those born in the postwar nineteenth century and endowed with greater financial resources, levels of formal education, cultural sophistication, and broader social networks—to begin the work of preserving, institutionalizing, and committing to print the collective memories of early black New Yorkers.

Take James Weldon Johnson, for example. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, Johnson spent many childhood summers visiting family in Brooklyn. Educated at Atlanta University, he lived in the southern United States and Central America for several years before moving permanently to New York. Once there, Johnson quickly advanced to the forefront of black political activism as a high-ranking official with the NAACP and contributor to the
New York Age.
A prolific writer, in the early 1930s he published a memoir,
Along This Way
, and the seminal history
Black Manhattan.

In the book’s preface, Johnson insisted that his ambitions were limited. He was not attempting to compile “in any strict sense a history” but simply to “etch in the background of the Negro in latter-day New York, to give a cut-back in projecting a picture of Negro Harlem.” Yet fully one-third of
Black Manhattan
concentrates on early black life in the city, before the emergence of Harlem as a neighborhood and a cultural movement. I wonder whether Johnson’s turning back to the distant past might not have been impelled by his own failure to learn anything about his father’s family. “Here I am again confronted with my lack of foresight,” Johnson lamented in his memoir; “I know nothing of my father’s early life and of his background, aside from the meager facts just stated. I never heard him speak of his childhood and what lay back of it and beyond it; and I never questioned him.”
⁹

Despite his humble disclaimers, Johnson was in fact something of a historian. At the end of his preface he thanked all those who had helped him, eyewitnesses, research assistants, and last but not least he added: “I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness for source material to THE ARTHUR A. SCHOMBURG COLLECTION.” Johnson was referring to the energetic bibliophile who had devoted his life to establishing a library and archive of black history and culture. Born in 1874, Schomburg came to New York from Puerto Rico in 1891. He quickly integrated himself in the city’s black community, meeting Johnson in 1905. Some six years later, Schomburg helped establish the Negro Society for Historical Research. Like Pintard a century earlier, the society’s founders resorted to the word “useful” to describe their mission. They were “to collect useful historical data relating to the Negro race, books written by or about Negroes, rare pictures of prominent men and women, … letters of noted Negroes or of white men friendly to the Negro, African curios of native manufacture, etc., etc.” This material would be useful, indeed indispensable, to writing the history of the black race and teaching it to black people. Within a year, Schomburg had amassed some three hundred books and documents, and with Johnson’s help compiled a
Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry.
When the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library decided to create a separate space to house its material on black history and culture, they
enlisted Schomburg and Johnson’s help. Soon thereafter, Schomburg agreed to add his library to this initial effort. In 1927, the Schomburg Collection was born. It contained approximately three thousand books, eleven hundred pamphlets, and many prints and manuscripts.
¹⁰

Like Johnson, I too must acknowledge my debt to Arthur Schomburg. After mining the Schomburg archives, I came to two conclusions: first, that I could actually find documents pertaining to my family; and second, that despite the lapses of my parents’ generation, there had been a powerful impulse to memorialize New York’s black history, embodied in Arthur Schomburg and his collection. What gave me the courage to pursue my quest was my early discovery of the scrapbook pages containing the obituaries of Peter Guignon and Philip White. The
New York Freeman
and
Age
, I realized, had cared enough about these two men to memorialize them in print; an individual, still unknown to me, had cared enough to create scrapbook pages commemorating their lives and deaths; historian Rhoda Freeman had cared enough to preserve these pages in her research collection; and the Schomburg Center had cared enough to house her collection in its archives.