Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (27 page)

Nobody, absolutely nobody, was exempt from adhering to these social norms. The phrase “careful watch over our own demeanor” could be interpreted as the black elite’s desire to regulate the behavior of the masses. But it also referred to their belief that respectability was a means of social advancement for all. By behaving respectably, they would prove to racists like Bobo, who maintained that blacks were permanently fixed by nature in an underdeveloped, primitive state, just how wrong they were. Through education, hard work, and perseverance they would show that blacks were capable of the same achievements as whites.

Infractions incurred harsh penalties and could lead to ostracism, even from one’s own family. In combing through Williamson’s genealogical charts, I came across a reference to Elizabeth Hewlett’s
brother, James, my great-great-great-granduncle. Williamson’s notation is tentative, handwritten rather than typed, and it claimed a failure of memory, almost as if the genealogist didn’t want to acknowledge the man on paper: “which of the above James Hewlett was related I do not now recall, but it was the custom to place, in the early days, a ‘play actor’ in the circle of very undesirable folks and in accordance with that sentiment, Hewlett was practically disowned by his family.”
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James Hewlett as Richard III in imitation of Edmund Kean, engraving by I. Scoles (Portrait Prints, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University)

The details of James Hewlett’s acting career are fascinating but incomplete. Here too, it seems that it was racial politics—not natural primitiveness—that hampered Hewlett’s career. He was a member of the African Grove Theater formed by William Brown in 1821. Initially, the African Grove was simply a “tea garden” in Brown’s backyard where black New Yorkers congregated for musical events and social activities. Once the theater company was formed, it played in different rented downtown locations until Brown opened his own space on Mercer Street in 1822. From then until the early 1830s, Hewlett performed with Brown’s company, and also in many other venues—close to home at the Military Garden in Brooklyn, somewhat farther afield in Philadelphia, Saratoga, and Alexandria, Virginia, and even across the seas in London and South America. Hewlett aspired to be a pure Shakespearean actor; he played the lead role in
Richard III
and also gave solo performances of scenes from
Othello.
Much like other budding actors of the day, he honed his craft by imitating famous Shakespearean performers like Edmund Kean. Some of Hewlett’s other roles were more explicitly subversive, however, indirectly hinting at the subordination and resistance of minority groups: the Native American warrior chief in the ballet
Pantomine Asama
, the insurrectionist leader of
King Shotaway; or the Insurrection of the Caribs
, the anticolonial lyrics of nationalist Scottish ballads.
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Black New Yorkers flocked to performances at the African Grove Theater. So it might not have been Hewlett’s acting or even his politics that his family found so offensive; Grandmother Marshall might have enjoyed watching her brother in the roles of Richard III or King Shotaway. But racism made theatergoing a dangerous activity. From the start, white New Yorkers were hostile to Brown’s enterprise. They complained about noise from the tea garden. They objected to the theater’s
staging of Shakespeare’s most popular play of the day, and they resented Brown’s aggressive recruitment of white customers. In 1822, conflict burst out into the open. The police raided the theater during a January performance and arrested the actors. A group of rowdy whites followed suit in August, storming the theater and causing a riot. Hewlett seems to have escaped bodily harm, although Brown was severely beaten.
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It’s also true that Hewlett could single-handedly stir up plenty of bad publicity that must have made his family cringe. First, there were uncomplimentary reports (possibly true, possibly not) about his performances that smacked of the stereotype of the childlike, primitive black. Pamphleteer Simon Snipes insisted that when Hewlett sang ballads, he translated the lyrics into black dialect, reciting lines like “is dare a hart dat nebber lu’d,” for example. British actor Charles Mathews, who had befriended Hewlett while touring the United States, also satirized him in public. Returning to London, Mathews created a show based on his American trip in which he mocked Hewlett’s “strange” and “ludicrous” alterations to
Hamlet
, which included his singing of “a real Negro melody” at the end of the performance. Hewlett responded by publishing a rebuttal in a local newspaper, defending his own acting abilities as well as the right of blacks to perform Shakespeare. Although a laudable act of self-defense, the letter also opened Hewlett up to more bad publicity.
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Then there were Hewlett’s repeated problems with the law. In some cases he was a victim or mere bystander. When he decided to open a scouring shop (drycleaners) in 1823 to make ends meet, a competitor named Cox beat him up. In 1825, Hewlett took a position as a ship steward, and was obliged to testify in court after a passenger was accused of repeatedly assaulting the only other passenger on board. But in later years, Hewlett turned perpetrator. In 1835, he again signed up as a ship steward. While still in port, he was arrested and convicted of stealing various articles from the ship—including several bottles of wine and porter—and served a six-month sentence. In 1837, he was accused of seducing and abandoning a white woman, and was sentenced to one month’s hard labor. Later that same year, he was caught stealing a watch from the house of a man who had just died, and was returned to prison. Despite his pleas, “Gentlemen, don’t put me in the newspapers;
it will hurt my character,” his misdeeds were widely reported in the press.
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After this episode, Hewlett disappeared from public view. I searched in vain for mention of him in the newspapers and then, in desperation, turned to death records. In the coroner’s report for 1840, I came across a reference to one “Hewlett, colored,” who died by drowning on May 25. I have no way of knowing whether this was my great-great-great-granduncle. If so, how did he drown? Was this a final act of disgrace?

To recover the daily life of an “enterprising black” from lost memory, I want to imagine my great-grandfather going about his work, errands, and visits in Lower Manhattan one day in the early 1850s. In his walk, he traverses territories that are variously strange and familiar; at times he’s an alien, at others right at home. Yet in thought, action, and purpose, he’s deeply bound to the many communities to which he’s connected through familial, social, and professional ties.

Not quite thirty, Philip was the very embodiment of respectability. His recent change of residence portended upward mobility. Without explanation, I handed three Manhattan home addresses to a young librarian in the Map Room at the New York Public Library. He tracked them on his map, looked at me and commented: “This is a story of social ascent!” and then added, “a map tells more than a thousand words.” What the librarian had just identified were Philip’s home addresses: 23 Grand Street, where he lived from 1847 to 1849; his residence in 1850, which was at 81 White Street; and his final Manhattan address at 40 Vandewater Street, where he moved in 1856, remaining there until migrating to Brooklyn in 1870.

Knowing that he had a busy day ahead of him, Philip rose early.

As he was getting ready, he reflected on his good fortune. The 1850 census had valued his drugstore at four hundred dollars, and he had just moved with his mother and younger sister Sarah Maria into a new home on White Street. True, he had exchanged one simple wooden frame dwelling for another, but there were several upscale brick and
stone houses in surrounding streets. Like much of New York, Philip mused, this was an area of contrasts. Broadway was close by with its many public buildings, the International Hotel, Palace Hall, a Lutheran Church, the Apollo Rooms, and others. But just a few blocks to the east lay black Broadway, Church Street, and its many offshoots, that Bobo had so derisively portrayed. His next move, Philip promised himself, would be to a brick house, and, if lucky, closer to his store.

Philip decided to walk through the Five Points to get downtown. The neighborhood was just as squalid as when Charles Dickens had visited it in 1841, probably even more so. Poverty was still endemic and crime still rampant. The area was now largely Irish, but Philip noted the increased number of Jews on Orange Street who ran “fences,” shops from which they bought and sold stolen goods—clothes, hardware items, jewelry, watches, and the like. Philip was well aware that if he peered into the rear of these shanties he would see living quarters where entire families, huddled together, cooked, ate, and slept. At night, a different kind of selling would be going on. The saloons would open, drunks and prostitutes would flood streets and alleys, and the sale of liquor and sex would continue until morning.
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Philip remembered that the Five Points had once been the center of black life where families lived in close proximity to community institutions. But now both people and institutions were dispersed throughout the city. Only the African Society for Mutual Relief remained on Orange Street and St. Philip’s on Centre Street. In just a few years his beloved church would follow the movement of its parishioners and relocate uptown. Black homes now stood in most of the city’s wards, but they congregated mostly in the West Side’s Eighth Ward, and also to the south in the Fifth, and to the north in the Ninth, Sixteenth, and Twentieth.

As he hastened his steps toward his drugstore, Philip wondered whether he should not follow James McCune Smith’s example and take on an apprentice. On the spot, he decided to advertise for one. The offices of the
Daily Tribune
, which the black community used as a local paper ever since the demise of the
Colored American
, were on Park Row, only a few blocks from his store, so he could easily stop there first. The street housed all the city’s major newspapers, Greeley’s
Tribune
, Bennett’s
Herald
, Webb’s
Courier and Enquirer
, and the new upstart, the
Times.
With the technological developments in printing, these presses had been forced to expand upward in structures as high as five stories and outward by taking over adjacent buildings. The area was crammed with people; typesetters, press operators, bookkeepers, and reporters scurried back and forth while the ever ubiquitous newspaper boys hawked their wares. Treading carefully, Philip finally arrived at his destination. His ad was brief and direct: “Colored Boy—Wanted, an intelligent, well educated Colored Boy, 14 or 15 years of age to learn the Drug business. Apply to
PHILIP A. WHITE
, cor. Gold and Frankfort sts. N.Y.” Philip smiled in satisfaction as he realized that
he
would now be mentoring a younger man just as Smith had mentored him ten years earlier.
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Turning east into the Fourth Ward, Philip reached his drugstore. On the corner of Gold and Frankfort Streets, the store was located in an area known as the Swamp, which lay south of the Five Points and extended all the way to the East River. Under the Dutch, the Swamp had been a marshland called the Greppel Bosch. Now it was even more congested than the Five Points. By 1861 the Fourth Ward was considered the most densely populated place on earth, containing 290,000 inhabitants per square mile.
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Many of New York’s old merchant class had gotten their start in the Swamp. Most especially, it had been home to the leather industry where merchants tanned hides in yards and stored them in immense warehouses. The now deceased Jacob Lorillard had built his tannery on Ferry Street close to William Kumbell, who was still in business. Another deceased leather merchant, Abraham Bloodgood, who had been Pierre Toussaint’s landlord in the early days, had lived on Frankfort Street, close to where Philip’s drugstore was now located.
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But plenty of poor people—mostly Irish—also inhabited the Swamp. Living in appallingly overcrowded conditions, they were chronically ill, suffering from malnutrition, lack of ventilation, poor sanitation, and lung problems like tuberculosis made worse by the fumes emanating from the tanning yards.

In the four years that Philip had been part of the Swamp community, he’d gotten to know the residents and felt that they were slowly learning to trust one another. Although he craved economic security,
Philip remained strongly committed to his role as a healer, and he gave away medicine to those too poor to pay. Such charity had been absolutely necessary during the 1849 cholera epidemic, when suffering and death were literally at his doorstep. And, for now, their simple expression of thanks was payment enough. In turn, Philip was grateful to the many businessmen in the Swamp who appreciated his industriousness and charitable disposition and went out of their way to bring him trade.
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