Looking for Mr. Gilbert

“Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

On December 7, 1909, when he was 58 years old, Mr. William Brewster, at the urging of Caroline, had himself baptized at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge. He makes a short note of the event in his journals, a passing one-line statement. Previous to this service, in earlier years, he would rarely attend church, except at Christmas and again at Easter, and even then mainly to keep Caroline happy. Curiously, on many occasions it appears, he seems to have taken ill on Christmas or Easter and would be unable to attend, and sometimes the two of them would simply retreat to the Hotel Abbottsford on holidays, dine, and then read in their room by night.

Brewster was approaching 60 and aging fast, his multiple symptoms of neurasthenia catching up with him. He may have sensed somehow that the end was in sight, perhaps, and believed that it was necessary to prepare to meet his Maker. Although he never openly writes about the subject in his journals, I believe that his was a transcendental persuasion. If he experienced God at all, he saw him in the form of birds: God was a winged thing with feathers and Emerson and Thoreau were his prophets.

Mr. Gilbert, by contrast, always had a strong Christian faith, and increased his devotions as he aged. Around 1905, he and Anna switched from the Baptist church on Massachusetts Avenue to Saint Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, which was closer to home. The change also represented a move upward socially. Gilbert was becoming uncomfortable with the shouting and hollering of the southern blacks who were crowding into the pews at the Union Baptist Church—jumping to their feet to bark “Amen” with every other word the preacher shouted and clapping and swaying from side to side whenever they sang. The Episcopal service at Saint Bartholomew’s in Cambridge could be lively too on occasion, but here was a deeper, more intellectual faith, driven more by the book and a deep history than by the pure emotion of the spirit. Besides, he liked the music. The old traditional English hymns: “Nearer My God to Thee” and “Come! Oh Come! Emanuel” with its slow scythelike pace. The music suited his character.

In the first decades of the new century, he found he needed that old world order. There was a nasty sort of popular Negroid music moving uncomfortably close to the world of the Brahmins—white and black alike. Down in New Orleans, the likes of Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and someone with the off-color name of Jelly Roll Morton had taken the old minstrel songs, combined them with gospel shouts and the brassy rhythms of marching bands, and come up with a music known as “jass,” later transformed to “jazz.”

Upper-class whites and the white churches were, understandably, suspicious of this new music. By 1913, there were editorials in local newspapers and sermons suggesting that all of America (read all of young America) was falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro. Jazz and its evil sister, ragtime, were sweeping the country, and everywhere the primitive jungle morality of Africa was surfacing. For the white populace, the white poet Vachel Lindsay summed it all up with his rhythmic, pre-rap verses of his popular contemporary poem “The Congo,” with which he used to crowd the halls for his public readings:

“Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, barrel-house kings with feet unstable, sagged and reeled and pounded on the table. Pounded the table with handle of a broom … boomlay, boomlay boomlay BOOM.”

Nearly all middle-class homes in this period were in possession of a piano and at least one person in the family could generally play reasonably well. Sales of sheet music of new popular songs would skyrocket around the country as soon as they were published, with new tunes coming out furiously from the squalid little offices clustered around Times Square known as Tin Pan Alley. Even worse, the new music encouraged questionable, suggestive dances such as the turkey trot, the bunny hug, Bango Bingo, the shim sham shimmy, and, worst of all, the grizzly bear, a clasping syncopated embrace, body to body and cheek to cheek, “a vertical expression of a horizontal act” in the words of the old-school Brahmins.

All this was just as upsetting to middle-class blacks as it was to whites. It flew in the face of the image that all the reformers were trying to avoid. New York’s Adam Clayton Powell, the popular preacher, said that the new music and dances were suggesting that the blacks were a frivolous people, that all they wanted to do was have a good time. Like the minstrel shows from which jazz evolved, the music perpetuated the image of the free spirit, the happy slave, who, when he was troubled, just went out and danced and sang. Or worse, had illicit sex.

There was in fact through all of this music the deep, throbbing undertone of sex, a suggestion of primitive fertility dances and unspeakable tribal practices. It was an exact reversal of the cold roast Brahmin, the unemotional, intellectual, orderly world of Mr. William Brewster and his wife Caroline and ERS. Whatever these people did, they did privately and with grace and civility. They read Emerson as their liturgy, sang stately hymns in the King’s English, and danced the Virginia reel—no hotjump barrel-house kings here, no Congos creeping through the black, with tattooed cannibals dancing in files, as Vachel Lindsay suggested.

The popular metaphor for this decline into the hot music, perverse dancing, petting parties, and all the other perceived vices of the age was the sinking of the great ship Titanic. Down with the old canoe, as the expression had it, went a whole culture. But the real end began in June of 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franny Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and finished in the mud of Flanders Field and Verdun.

Jazz was not the only offense in the years that followed the end of the Great War. Women began chopping off their long hair and skirts began to rise. First they advanced slightly beyond the ankle, then beyond the requisite six inches, then to seven and a half, eventually above the knees themselves. Wilder women rolled their stockings below their knees to reveal the actual flesh of their smooth legs. Necklines began descending even as the hemlines rose. But by then a flat boylike chest had come into vogue rather than the full bosom of Mrs. William Brewster and her tribe. It was the decline and fall of Olde England in America, and in the view of some concerned proper citizens it represented the triumph of the Negro.

After the war was over, homecoming soldiers were crowding the streets of port cities as the troop ships unloaded. There were so many victory parades that you sometimes had to plan your route through the city to avoid the great phalanx of tired soldiers, who had left the country as boys and returned as men, and broken men at that, men educated in the course of a single night in some cases, in the mud and filth of the trenches, with the Angel of Death sparking overhead in the form of bursting shells.

Although it was prohibited, the American soldiers had enjoyed the loose morals of France while they were between battles. When they came home they were supposed to board the trains and head back to Kansas to settle down into the tedious routine of the American way of life, which by 1919 prohibited, by mandate of federal law, the consumption of alcohol, and which held suspect any woman who wore too much makeup, or dressed in a manner that even vaguely suggested the existence of sex. What could they do but bring up the hemlines and bring down the house?

The malaise was worse, of course, if you were black. Following on the groundbreaking work of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment, black soldiers had been—reluctantly—allowed into the American military. There were some thirty African Americans on board the USS Maine when it sank in 1898 in Havana harbor, and the all-black 9th and 10th Cavalries, the Buffalo Soldiers, were the first to charge up the hill at San Juan in advance of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Full companies of black soldiers packed off with the Doughboys to Europe in 1918 and won their share of medals for bravery (although more of them were awarded by the French than by the Americans).

Bringing the African American soldiers over to Europe en masse, as they did, had the effect of engendering a little social problem not considered by American political and military officials. The Germans, having some experience in these matters, knew all about racism and began distributing flyers through the black fighting units, asking whether they enjoyed the same rights as white people did in America. But more of a problem were the French. The French citizenry seemed to have a particular liking for the black Americans, especially after the jazzband leader of the 39th Regimental Band, James R. Europe, entered Paris and marched down the Champs Élysées playing a hipped-up version of the “Marseillaise” with such a strange counterbeat rhythm and with so many wild and ranging improvisations and musical asides that the French hardly recognized the tune. They stood in confusion at first, then caught the idea, and after that, all across France, they began dancing and strutting in the streets. The long French affaire with American blacks had begun.

The French were not unfamiliar with Negro soldiers. They had Senegalese troops of their own in the field, who were wild and brave fighters and were often employed as shock troops in battle. When the non-French-speaking black Americans arrived and were quartered in the small rural villages, knowing the wildness of the Senegalese, the local peasantry was at first suspicious. They had already had their problems with white American soldiers. But American black people proved to be different. Little children liked them, of course, they liked all the soldiers, but they especially seemed to love these dark ones; you’d see the children riding piggyback with them around the villages and kissing their chocolate cheeks. Adults found the new recruits to be polite and friendly and noticed that, for some reason, they seemed especially grateful for the smallest kindnesses and seemed to genuinely appreciate French people. There was, of course, good reason for that. If a black person came into a café or a restaurant, the white waiter would point to a table and bring over a bottle. If you were on leave and needed a hotel room, the concierge would look over the guest book, select a room, and give you the key. A young white bellhop might even carry your bags up in the better hotels. And best of all were the women. Pretty village women with red lips, coiffed hair, and rosy cheeks were not opposed to dancing with a Negro. If she got to know you and you were polite, she might take you home to meet her parents, who would show you to a seldom-used front parlor and give you a tiny glass of fiery brandy and a little sweetcake and with the help of sign language and dictionaries attempt to hold a conversation. For an African American, such open-minded social treatment could not have been dreamed of back home.

White American officials saw the danger in all this. They segregated the troops; they issued proclamations to the French citizenry instructing them to avoid socialization with Negroes, which, with a Gallic shrug, the French commanders and the village mayors tore up. Besides, the French generals needed soldiers and were indifferent to color. In one instance they trained the American blacks with the French troops instead of segregating them.

There were two black divisions in France by 1918, the 92nd and 93rd New York, later joined by the 370th U.S. regiment of the all-black Illinois National Guard, which arrived to fight under French command. After one horrendous assault that lasted for 191 days, the French government awarded a black unit known as the Hell Fighters a record number of citations and medals.

None of this went unnoticed by W. E. B. Du Bois, who was in France at the time and reporting for his journal The Crisis. Word began to spread, stories of fraternization abounded, and there was a widely publicized letter circulating in the American black community from a French village woman who, among other words of praise for the black troops, said that villagers were honored to have a black person at table. She ended her evocation of village life with an unforgettable line: “Soldiers … you will always live in our hearts.”

News of all this had gotten out even before the war was over. Those who read The Crisis—mostly an intellectual, more elevated crowd—became curious, and after the war black writers and painters began to flock to Paris. The musicians, especially the jazz musicians, were already there; some had never gone home after the war.

When it was over the black regiments sailed home along with the other soldiers and, with James Europe leading them, black troops marched down Fifth Avenue to tremendous cheering. That event turned out to be an anomaly, however. All through the eastern United States the Great Migration had begun. The boll weevil devastation of the cotton crop, the failure of the old tenant system, the poverty, the poor, worn-out red soils, all were conspiring to evict the former slave families from the only American earth they had ever known. The Dixie Flyer and similar rail lines were jammed with people headed for Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and, to a lesser extent, Boston. Earlier, African Americans had been able to find work producing war supplies in the northern factories, but when the war was over, blacks were the first to be laid off. Race riots and lynchings began. In July of 1917 in a race riot in St. Louis, forty blacks and eight whites were killed and entire black neighborhoods were burned to the ground. This was followed by the famous Silent March down Fifth Avenue, organized by W. E. B. Du Bois’ group, the NAACP. In a strangely surreal and peaceful demonstration, thousands of men, women, and children marched silently through the city to the sound of muffled drums.

As the layoffs in the factories grew after the war, the tensions increased, the lynchings mounted, black soldiers were hanged wearing their uniforms, and by 1919 there had been more than twenty-five race riots across the country, ranging from Tennessee all the way west to Nebraska. And all the while, brewing in the mind of those blacks who had been overseas, was the lure of France. Paris began to replace Boston as the Negro paradise.

Back home in Cambridge, Gilbert knew of all this, of course, although he did not join the huge crowd of Boston blacks who flocked to the streets in 1915 to protest the Boston screening of D. W Griffith’s blatantly racist Birth of a Nation. He did boycott the movie, however—not that he was much of a moviegoer. He knew all about the freedom American blacks had experienced abroad; he knew also about the lynchings, and the race riots, and the restrictive controls of the Black Codes. What he did not know was that he too might need Paris someday.

It was a custom of the children of Cambridge to go out caroling in the neighborhoods of Brattle Street in the early part of the century. On Christmas Eve in 1915, a group of them crossed the lawn at 145 Brattle Street, collected themselves below the front door, and sang “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The French doors of the upper balcony opened slowly and, according to an account of the night written up by one of the participants, a beautiful old couple emerged, dressed in white bedclothes, their white hair glowing in the backlight, and their faces dimmed in the sad spirit of the age, as if in remembrance of youth and wild nature. With the clear, hard stars shining above, and the jingle of bells from one of the passing sleighs cracking the night air somewhere on the hill behind the house, the carolers struck up “Silent Night.”

Mr. Gilbert, who was a religious man, might well have burst into tears had he stepped out of the bird museum that night to listen. It was the beginning of a dark season for him.

Two months earlier, in October, his 16-year-old son Robbie, his firstborn, had came down with a serious chest cold. Gilbert was away with Brewster the following evening, and on October 8th, quite suddenly, Robbie died of acute lobar pneumonia. There was a brief personal notation in the journal of Mr. William Brewster marking the occasion:

“Oct 8th: Rain. Dull. Gilbert motored to Cambridge to find that his only son, Robbie, had died just before he got there after a brief illness of which he [ie Gilbert] first learned last night.”

For some years during this period, Gilbert’s wife, Anna, had been suffering from Graves’ disease, a malfunction of the thyroid that left her fatigued and nervous. As a result, she was generally debilitated much of the time, and when the symptoms increased, she was sent to a specialist and diagnosed with Addison’s disease, which is an illness of the kidneys indicated by some of the same symptoms. This was in 1918, and although Boston was a major medical community then, as it is now, it is possible that, since she was black, she did not have the best of care. She grew progressively worse, and was in and out of the hospital on several occasions, at great expense to Mr. Gilbert. It was during this period that he came, hat in hand, to Caroline and explained the situation of his finances and his wife’s condition, and received, via her intervention and perhaps her explanations, possibly even her pleas, the funds from Mr. Brewster to cover her medical expenses.

It was all to no avail. On June 5th in 1919, after prolonged illness, she died at the age of 48, leaving Mr. Gilbert alone with his three teenaged daughters, Mary, Emily, and the youngest, Edyth, who was only 13.

By the middle of that month, though, perhaps seeking forgetfulness, Gilbert was back at work. He went out to October Farm and collected strawberries and brought them back to the ailing Mr. Brewster, who seems by this time to have been spending most of his days in his bedroom above his junglelike yard.

One of the most useful characteristics of Robert Gilbert as an employee was that you never had to tell him what to do once he knew what was needed. He fixed the cars without being asked, he would run into Boston to purchase his own choices of Victrola records for Mr. Brewster and Caroline without being told specifically which records to purchase. He came home with recordings of Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli, and Antonio Pini-Corsi, the perfect choices for the old couple. He also managed the staff at October Farm, quelling the riotous drunks, and was so essential as an assistant that he would be present at interviews of prospective employees and was asked to pass judgment on them. He would work alone in the museum on little chores, without Brewster’s knowledge. He taught himself to type; he ordered photographic supplies before they ran out; he prepared the skins of birds he or Brewster had collected in the field, and he was often out in the field on his own, recording birds, especially in Brewster’s later years. He would return to report sightings, many of which were entered in the Brewster journals, which were later culled for publication in Brewster’s three posthumous books.

From what I can determine from the minimal entries, 1919 ushered in a fine and flowering spring. The migratory birds had returned early that year, the jungle was flourishing with birdsong and fruit, and the apple trees at October Farm were flowering well and promising a rich crop for the end of summer.

In cruel contrast, in the human community, Mr. Brewster’s world was slipping. He was “suffering terribly”—much nausea—all through the winter of 1919. His political ally and sometime acquaintance, Teddy Roosevelt, died in early January. His family friend “Lizzy,” whose last name never appears in the diaries or journals, had an attack of heart failure; several old friends had succumbed; Caroline’s nephew, Robert Jefferson, was killed on Hill 47 along the Dardanelles, and Caroline herself was ill and temporarily living separately from Brewster. He had moved out to October Farm that spring and saw more of ERS than he did his wife. In the evenings, ERS sat by his bedside reading to him from David Copperfield, and he slept alone at night in the old creaking ghost house, served by a Mrs. Burbank who brought him his paltry meals.

Beyond the meadow and the apple orchards, on the other side of the river in these years, the new noisome devices known as “aereoplanes” had begun appearing like vulturous omens, circling over the Great Meadows near his former sanctuary at Ball’s Hill. Earlier that year a marauder had broken into two of the cabins by smashing the padlocks on Gilbert’s cookhouse door and forcing open a window. Whoever it was stole Brewster’s old Smith & Wesson revolver and all the bed pillows, and then went around battering the locks on the log cabin, attempting to break in. The act had soured the place. What’s more, the boathouse downstream in Carlisle, the same one that brought the canoes of chattering Asians up the river to Mr. Bensen, had introduced motorboats, which made a racket on the river and disturbed Mr. Brewster’s peace whenever he was at the cabins. He was even forced to fight an early version of the typical environmental battles that now so commonly flare up in the town of Concord. In this case it was the development of a pig farm on the opposite shore of the river. Brewster was rich enough to have solved the problem by buying the land outright if necessary, but for some unrecorded reason the farmer gave up on the idea and pulled out.

Slowly, Brewster’s journal entries become shorter and more sporadic. On certain days in 1919 they consisted of mere notes:

“May 2nd. Hermit thrush singing near Pulpit Rock.”

“May 5th. One of my mean days. Spent most in bed.”

“May 12th. Not feeling well.”

“May 29th. I see nobody save Gilbert and members of my family.”

That winter, Mr. Brewster had recorded one of the longest entries in the twenty-five years of his journal keeping. His Irish terrier “Timmy” had come to his sickroom on the evening of March nth, jumped up on the bed and cuddled close to his thigh, licking his hand. Brewster covered him, as was his custom, with a red blanket, “and thus we lay together, as we have so often done before, until Nurse came back and took him away in her arms. That was the last I saw, or shall ever see, of him on this earth.”

The entry that followed the next day gives the details. A small boy brought word to Gilbert that a brown dog had been run over by a “motor truck” on Craigie Street. The boy thought the dog might belong to the house. Gilbert went out and found Timmy lying by the curb. He was still alive, but did not seem to know Gilbert, and soon died.

Then came the troublesome business of informing the old man, who lay in his sickbed on the second floor. Gilbert told Caroline, who broke the news to Mr. Brewster.

“Thus perished the very dearest dog I have ever had,” Brewster wrote in his diary.

Read all this as metaphor—the unexpressed love that passeth all understanding. His was not a class that permitted the outward display of emotions. And yet, for all his meticulous note keeping, his separate bedroom from his wife, his punctuality, his concern for his rents, his exact notations of the arrivals and departures of trains to Concord, and, most especially, his detailed observations of the behavior of birds in the wild, there beat within him a warm, humane heart that would permit expression of an abiding love for the silent, unquestioning loyalty of dogs.

A few nights after Timmy’s death Brewster had an intensely realistic dream, also revealed in uniquely personal detail in his diary.

He dreamt that Charon was ferrying him across the River Styx and that as they approached the dark shore, he saw Timmy there, waiting to greet him: “he was wagging his tail and smiling, loving eyed, and when I landed, he whirled around and around many times just as he always would do when eager to pass or nose his way through a door or gate.… All this seemed very real.”

It was to be real indeed.

On June 14th, back on Brattle Street, he wrote a short entry about the strawberries Gilbert had brought back from the farm. The next day, a Sunday, he slept most of the morning and only got up and dressed in the afternoon, sitting by the chamber window looking out over his “Jungle” of native plants that he had personally transplanted to the yard from the wilds beyond. It was the last entry in his journal.

A month later, in his upstairs room, on the night of July 11th, with Caroline and Nurse in attendance, leaving behind the works of his time—his books, his bird museum, his voluminous journals, houses, servants, accounts, stocks, rentals, as well as his wife, ERS, and his many male friends and his loyal valet—he went down to the dark shores of the underworld. In the dimmed light, he saw Charon’s ferry ahead of him, waiting by the banks. Mr. Brewster climbed on board and sat grimly in the stern sheets, staring back at the fading banks, watching his past recede as Charon poled slowly across the river.

One hopes that if the gods were just, he found Timmy on the other side.

Mr. Gilbert went home alone that night. His son was long in his grave. His wife was dead. His employer was dead. His daughters were living elsewhere at the time and his house was large and empty. And now, suddenly, it was no longer necessary for him to rush off to tend to anyone but himself.