Looking for Mr. Gilbert The Reimagined Life of an African American

by Mitchell, John Hanson

• ISBN13: 9781593760267
• ISBN10: 1593760264
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-13
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

Thirty years ago in the attic of an old estate in Massachusetts, John Hanson Mitchell discovered over two thousand antique glass plate negatives. He was told that the photographs had been taken by nineteenth–century ornithologist and conservationist William Brewster, but as a result of a tip from a Harvard research assistant, he began to suspect that the images were actually the work of Brewster's African American assistant, Robert A. Gilbert.



So begins the author's journey. From the maze–like archives at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Virginia countryside and haunts of American expats in 1920s Paris, as well as the rich cultural world of blacks in nineteenth–century Boston, Mitchell brings sharp focus to the figure of Mr. Gilbert, a quiet, unassuming Renaissance man who succeeded as best as he could beneath the iron ceiling of American racism. Told with Mitchell's trademark grace and style, the fascinating story of this "invisible man" deepens our understanding of the African American past as well as the history of American photography.

Author Biography

John Hanson Mitchell's work is focused on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located about thirty-five miles north-west of Boston. Mitchell has used this anomalous landscape of rolling hills, farms, forests and encroaching suburbs to explore his continuing interest in natural and human history and the whole question of place in human cultures, both native and European. Best known of this series of books is the first, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile, a New York Times Editors' Choice. The latest book in the group is An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden. All of these books have been collected together in a series known as The Scratch Flat Chronicles.

Table of Contents

The African Charioteer	3	(12)
Attic Archeology	15	(20)
Entr'acte	33	(2)
Down in the Valley	35	(18)
Self-Reliance	53	(28)
Entr'acte	79	(2)
Rare Birds	81	(17)
Negro Paradise	98	(12)
Memento Mori	110	(14)
World Enough and Time	124	(14)
North Country	138	(22)
Entr'acte	158	(2)
After They've Gone	160	(14)
A Journey Through the Memory House	174	(21)
Gilbert's Ghosts	195	(16)
Ain't We Got Fun	211	(16)
A Night at the Dingo Bar	227	(24)
Gone Are the Days	251	(24)
Epilogue: The River	275	(4)
Postscript	279	(1)
Acknowledgments	280