Read Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City for Free Online Page A

less than Sethe and Baby Suggs gave her. This absence of memory has weighed heavily on me.
    Reflecting on her method for writing
Beloved
, Toni Morrison explained how “I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and in what I find to be significant. … But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.” 13
    I’m not a novelist, however, and I can’t compensate for my family’s silences by writing fiction. Instead, I’ve turned to the archives. On a personal level, my research in the archives has been a form of memory work for me. Professionally, I’ve operated like a historian, working to make sense of the scraps I’ve found, selected, and brought together. I uncovered few personal documents that could give me insight into the feelings, psychological states of mind, or motivations of family members. Instead, I found information primarily in public documents: black newspapers such as New York’s early
Freedom’s Journal
and
Colored American;
Frederick Douglass’s
North Star
and
Frederick Douglass’ Paper;
the shortlived
Weekly Anglo-African;
and the postwar
New York Globe
(later the
Freeman
and
Age
), as well as white ones, notably Horace Greeley’s
New York Daily Tribune
and the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle;
records of meetings of the Philomathean Society, the Brooklyn Literary Union, and other organizations; proceedings of black conventions such as the state convention held in Albany in 1840; and acts of incorporation like that of the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children.
    Putting these scraps together, I’m hoping to fulfill my family’s legacy and write the history of the “gentlemen in black.”
Concentric Worlds
     
    This book is a partial history: partial because it tells only one part of nineteenth-century New York history; because it favors family history as a point of departure; because it is made up of fragmentary parts; because I am part of it as descendant, researcher, and narrator; because I have allowed my quest to find lost family memories to become part of my story.
    Each chapter title contains a date, a place, or an event of some importance to my great-great-grandfather, my great-grandfather, or one of their close associates. Similar to a clipping or a snapshot, that is the scrap I’ve chosen to paste in my scrapbook. I then let the work of memory, history, and archival discovery guide me through my narrative.
    Bit by bit, I widen my lens. I see Peter Guignon and Philip White as living within several circles, each wider than the last. The first was what Crummell called “the wide circle of the leading citizens of New York and vicinity.” Bound together by more than family ties, Guignon and White were part of a small class of educated blacks; pharmacists by profession, they were comparatively wealthy; they worshiped together at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, often joined the same organizations, and fought for the same political causes; they turned to the same group of friends, many of them Guignon’s former schoolmates, for succor and counsel. Taken together, these men, their wives, and their children constituted New York’s black elite, a social circle so tightly knit that they could almost think of themselves as a “family.” I have to confess that I see Guignon as an unremarkable member of this group. In contrast, Philip White’s individual achievements were quite amazing; he qualifies as “the first” in so many of his endeavors. Yet he could not have accomplished what he did without the help of Guignon’s former classmates, Patrick and Charles Reason, James McCune Smith, George Downing, Alexander Crummell. In his youth, they were his mentors. As he grew older, they became his intimate friends just as they were his father-in-law’s.
    The second