Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City by Carla L. Peterson Read Free Book Online

nineteenth-century black Americans. My most intimate glimpses of my great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather have come ironically enough from their scrapbook page memorials. I learned to read between lines and between items. I came to realize that four of the poems placed to the left of Philip White’s obituary were in fact indirect commentaries on what my great-grandfather had cared about so passionately in life. “Why Johnny Failed, Good for a Boy to Learn” speaks of the difficulty of educating black children. “To Trinity” is a paean to the mother church that gave birth to St. Philip’s. “References” pays homage to a dead man whose life had centered not so much on public affairs as on the “little home … and wife and children three.” And “If We Only Understood” is a mysterious plea not to judge a person’s external appearances “knowing not life’s hidden forces.” The scrapbook page, I realized, memorializes both a public and private life.
    I’ve written
Black Gotham
out of a sense of obligation to the dead, to give a face to those left faceless by acts of trauma and erasure. I also feel I owe something to my family and my community—not only blackAmericans but Americans nationwide. In writing a new and different version of African American history that challenges the ones we’re so used to reading, I’m hoping to find a usable past for a nation that 150 years after emancipation still has a long way to go in solving its racial problems.
Black Gotham
is meant to be an act of reparation, an act to repair the tears of memory—tears in the sense of both sorrow and rupture.

PART ONE
Lower Manhattan
1795–1865
     

CHAPTER ONE
Collect Street
    CIRCA 1819
     
    WHERE TO START? I STARED at the two obituaries and settled on that of the older man, my great-great-grandfather Peter Guignon, hoping to find information about
his
parents. But Alexander Crummell’s references to his friend’s background were circumspect. “Peter’s mother,” he wrote guardedly, “was a native of the West Indies and came thence to the city of New York and resided there until her death.” The sentence raised more questions than it answered. What part of the West Indies did Peter’s mother come from? Who was his father and what was his racial identity? Further information came to me in stages and to this day remains woefully incomplete. I uncovered a brief notice of Peter’s death in the
Brooklyn Eagle.
The deceased, it noted, “was born in Bayard Street in 1814, his parents having come from Hayti.” 1 Although I now knew Peter’s parents’ place of origin, the obituary prompted even more questions. Why and how had they come from Haiti? Were they living together on Bayard Street? Were they the household listed in the 1820 census as composed of the free white James Guignon residing in the Sixth Ward with a free white woman and male child under ten? But Peter was not white, so his mother couldn’t have been either. Was James Guignon living with a light-skinned black woman? Were they married? Was he passing her and their son off as white? Why did Crummell make no mention of him?

    Peter Guignon
     
    A chance introduction to a historian at a conference led to a discussion of my dilemma. To my astonishment, some months later Iopened my email to find that she had sent me copies of records she had happened upon in the archives of St. Peter’s Church in Lower Manhattan. The most significant document was a bann of marriage dated February 1811, which read in part:
Alexis Duchesne has been born at Laon in champain, & Sophie Guignon Was born in the Ile of St Domingue. This marriage was celebrated after Three Successive publications of the bans. Witnesses have been the Following, who have signed their names, Viz: Jean Baptist Gunian, Joseph Pierre Bérard, Pierre Guignon, Jacques Guignon Et autres. 2
     
    The bann placed the Guignon clan in the same social circle as the Bérards, who are well known in the historical