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Lyons was never able to fulfill his writerly aspirations. Lyons asked his daughter to carry on his legacy. Although Maritcha was convinced that her “literary nephew” was better suited to the task, she dutifully complied, working from “the vast output of fugitive scraps” that Williamson had gathered over the years. The very title of her memoir, “Memories of Yesterdays, All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was—An Autobiography,” suggests just how eager she was to preserve the memories of her father’s generation. 12 Now it’s up to me.
    Had my grandparents, Cornelia White and Jerome Bowers Peterson, tried to emulate the example of their contemporary, Harry Albro Williamson? I’ll never know.
Scrapbooks
     
    “Colored men! Save this extract. Cut it out and put it in your Scrapbook, and use it at a proper time.” So reads the caption of an article titled “Black Heroes” published in the March 10, 1854, issue of
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
, the major black newspaper of the mid-nineteenth century. In writing these lines the author was exhorting his readers to save his article in a scrapbook as a way of keeping alive for possible future action memories of black soldiers who had bravely fought on the side ofthe Republic during the revolutionary war. The lines reminded me of the scrapbook pages in the Rhoda Freeman collection on which an anonymous owner had pasted Peter Guignon’s and Philip White’s obituaries as a memorial to these two men. It made me wonder whether even the small, personal act of keeping a scrapbook could also be a form of public history making.
    Scrapbooking is a household art with a long, time-honored tradition, popular to this day. Scrapbooks memorialize, preserving in physical form significant experiences the owner wishes to remember, savor, and maybe even leave as a testament to loved ones. What gets put in scrapbooks varies tremendously from owner to owner: flowers, locks of hair, ticket stubs, postcards, handwritten notes, clippings from newspapers or other publications. Items may range from public issues to community affairs to family and personal matters. In pasting these items in their scrapbooks, owners create their own versions of history, composing new narratives out of old recycled material. And since scrapbooks are not meant for publication, owners are not obliged to follow any particular set of rules but are free to create as they please.
    Thus, scrapbooks run the gamut from private musings to forms of history making that address a public need. For nineteenth-century black Americans, scrapbooks became a way to write their history, one in which they were the central protagonists, not the marginalized, despised, or forgotten. Telling their history from their own perspective, they allowed multiple voices—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension with one another—to emerge. Whatever their content, their scrapbooks, much like archives, reflected a sense of the evanescence of experience, a fear of forgetting, and a determination to preserve past events for posterity.
    Williamson’s family collection is a scrapbook of sorts. It’s filled with cards, letters, genealogical charts, newspaper clippings, and recollections from him and others written down by hand or in typescript—what Maritcha tellingly referred to as the “fugitive scraps” from which she composed her memoir. Following in their footsteps, I imagine this book as a kind of scrapbook that memorializes my nineteenth-century forebears, their friends, and acquaintances. I haven’t been able to accountfor all facets of their lives, so my narrative is made up of what I found and what I didn’t find in the archives, of what was remembered and what was forgotten.
    Like Morrison’s Denver, I’ve tried to endow the few scraps of memories I possess with blood and a heartbeat. But, unlike Denver, my memories are not those of a still living parent and grandparent but of distant ancestors who have bequeathed to me even