Looking for Mr. Gilbert

“The charm, one might even say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.”

On my last visit to George Alexander, Madelon Winston gave me the print of Gilbert’s daughter, Mary, taken in 1907, when she was two years old somewhere in Warren, New Hampshire. Judging from the shadows, the image was made a little after midday in summer. Mary is seated on the doorstep of an old farmhouse, dressed all in white, in a high-collared cambric dress that reaches to her ankles and a wide-brimmed white summer hat topped with a pompom. She has a pudgy-round rabbit face and is looking sideways, her head angled to the camera, and fidgeting. Her father, Mr. Gilbert, has positioned the camera low to the ground; he must be sitting in front of her, cross-legged, attempting to get the camera low enough to shoot upward so as to show the rise of the narrow, dark screen of the farmhouse door above her, contrasting the white of the pompomed hat that is balanced, top right, by a tiny white porcelain door pull. It’s an old place, wherever it is. Cracks on the sill, unpainted clapboards and uneven steps. Somewhere out there, behind Mr. Gilbert, the sun is shining, casting a short midday shadow. It was summer, also hot, judging from Mary’s clothes and the gleam of her rounded cheeks.

Later that same year, in summer, during one of my customary rambles, I met a white man in Warren who cut timber for a living. I showed him a copy of the photograph, but even though he knew the landscape of Warren, having grown up there, he couldn’t name the place. How could he; the photograph was a door frame like any other rural door frame in a thousand New England towns, dated only by the presence of screens, which did not come into use until the end of the nineteenth century. What was anomalous was the dark child in the white dress in rural New England.

“There weren’t many black people in this town in 1907, I can tell you that,” he said, scuffing the dust with his boot. “Weren’t many people even. It’s a dead end up here, all woods, abandoned farms, hills, a few ponds and the lake. But who’d want to spend a life here. I should have got out myself.”

I was in the region looking around to fit a wooded saddle of hills I had seen in other unidentified Brewster or Gilbert photographs taken in Warren in this same period, and had driven up through southeastern New Hampshire, passing through small, idle towns, some with deep green lakes beset with summer cottages. Village centers in the area were unremarkable, characterized mainly by musty convenience stores, a depot for snowplows and service trucks, and a vast surround of forests that have taken over the landscape since Mr. Brewster’s time. It’s a lonely, empty quarter now, the farms, or what there were of them, long since worn out, the farmgirls gone to the mills, the men to the anonymity of the West, those who stayed behind long since gone to their graves, and the houses gone to ground. Walking through the woods in this part of the world you come across the remains of their lives—sunken foundations, miles of stones walls running through wooded hills, a few errant apple trees back in the woods, and, saddest of all somehow, stands of daffodils still blooming in the long deserted dooryards where farm wives once spun their wool and linen.

Mr. Brewster used to come up to Warren periodically to visit Mr. Grover Allen, who had a farm nearby, a summer place where he would retire to watch birds. Gilbert must have come with him, perhaps on an extended visit, bringing his whole family with him this time, or perhaps traveling alone with Mary. Brewster, of course, favored backwaters of this sort, and retreated ever woodward when the motors came. He complained in his diary that aereoplanes were sometimes appearing in the sky over Cambridge. He quit going down to his riverside cabins when the motor-powered boats from the downstream boathouse began coming up the river, and quit Umbagog when the new visitors arrived with their motorcars and began driving over the summer roads, spewing dust everywhere. “Noxious beasts,” he called them.

The last time I saw old George Alexander the snow was long gone and the time of singing birds had come and the little flocks of English sparrows were squabbling in the hot dust below the privets. Mr. Alexander was more frail, but only slightly, and I spent only a short time with him before thanking him and then making my excuses. He had turned 100 that year, and I had sent him a little birthday gift and had promised to stop by to see him.

I was on another mission on that particular day to retrace a route periodically taken by both Gilbert and, less often, William Brewster from Cambridge over to Boston, via the Harvard Bridge, and on to Inman Square.

I began where, in the larger sense, Gilbert’s story also began, on the north slope of Beacon Hill. It was here that the first African Meeting House in the United States was established, built by freeborn blacks of Boston. It was also here, in these halls, where the first African American voices of liberation thundered, including that of the firebrand speaker Frederick Douglass, who recruited for the all-black 54th Regiment in the main hall.

This part of old Boston is one of the last places where you can still glimpse the lost world that characterized the city in the stiff years when Brewster and his Brahmin friends still held sway. The streets here are narrow and winding, some are still cobblestoned, and most of the buildings date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and have well-maintained front doors and lush, hidden gardens in private inner courtyards. With only a slight suspension of disbelief, you could be in Europe.

On the north side of the hill, where the Black Brahmins used to live, the streets drop riverward in a winding pattern, like a single-coursed labyrinth. On the south slope, from time to time, you can still see some of the old-fashioned proper Bostonians making some way along, dressed for their outings in tweeds, or summer whites and blue cambric shirts, bowties, and, in a bow to pragmatism, running shoes. There are many proper little English-styled shops in this district, with their wares exhibited neatly in front windows (too many little shops according to the Old Guard, and too many infiltrators as well). But they mix. They adapt to one another, as they always have.

This had been old home month for me in some ways. A few weeks before I went to see Mr. Alexander, I had gone down Ball’s Hill Road again to see if I could get Sanfred Bensen interested in coming to Brewster’s grave with me. I had been trying to get a good picture of the camera-shy Bensen and his nephew Colburn, but these two seemed impossible to photograph. They would formally compose themselves for each photo, glaring suspiciously at the lens, as if they truly believed, along with much of the preliterate world community, that the camera eye would penetrate their bodies and draw out some critical element of themselves. They were never comfortable; the light was always wrong; the background was too charged with the details of ramshackled sheds and the accumulated artifacts of their recent histories.

Sanfred was looking no less frail than he did when I first had met him. He must have been pushing 90 at least by that time. His old taped-up glasses had completely clouded over by this time, which made me think that he indeed must have been at least half-blind all along, since the tape didn’t seem to concern him. The difference that day was that he was sitting down on a rickety kitchen chair he had hauled out to the yard. I don’t remember ever having seen him sitting. I noticed that, like an old cat, he had found a good place in the sun.

“Good day to rest,” I said, when I saw him off his feet.

“Yes, well, at my age, one must rest now and again.”

Muffin the dog was curled up at his feet, licking one of her paws. To get Sanfred loosened up I offered to take some more pictures of her.

Sanfred liked the idea very much and, in the end, he hauled over an old wheelbarrow and got her to jump in. She wasn’t quite sure of the situation at first and began licking her chops and looking over at him, instead of me.

“Look at the camera, now, Muffin,” he said.

She sat, I squeaked, she cocked her head.

I snapped the shutter.

Bensen went back to his chair after that and since there was an upturned log nearby, I took the liberty of sitting down, and we chatted for a while. It was, as far as I can recall, the first time I had ever had the privilege of sitting down with this man.

As was his custom, he began talking about the old days with Mr. Brewster, and then he told me that he thought he was seeing a lot of birds that he did not remember seeing in Gilbert and Brewster’s time.

“There’s that big long-tailed one with the white wing bands. And the red one, the cardinal, we never used to see him back then. Never did see those little crested grays, as I call them …”

“The titmouse?”

“Yes, that one. He was never here. There are ever so many new things. But I think it was a livelier place in the days when Robert Gilbert was here, and when Dr. Brewster would come by and there were ladies in long skirts and big hats and everybody went out rowing on the river. He was a fine rower, Robert Gilbert—all the ladies asked to be taken in his boat, as I recall.”

“You’ve seen a lot, haven’t you, just from this one spot?”

“Oh yes, I think. It seems all the world is here. Or was. But then I still haven’t been to Mr. Brewster’s grave.”

“Well, the offer still holds,” I said. “I’ll take you over any time you like. The dog can come too.”

“Well, that would be very nice. Perhaps next week I could get free …”

He seemed to be a little sleepy—something I had never observed in this man—so I prepared to leave, telling him I would bring back the prints of Muffin and that we could arrange a time to go to Brewster’s grave.

The next week I printed the photos. Here was Muffin at her finest, looking loyally over at her master in one print, and in another her head cocked at the camera. In every print, though, there was a shadow of Bensen falling over the scene, something I hadn’t noticed in my rush to get the proper expression from the dog. It was a dark rounded streak that loomed in from the right and, as it turned out, it was portentous.

Many of the cultures that hold the camera in suspicion also revere the shadow of a person. It is believed to be a vital part of the individual, the visible image of the soul. If you step on someone’s shadow, or worse, somehow detach it from the body, that person will be injured or will die. Some ancient tribes even maintained special magicians who had the ability to make people ill by hacking at their shadows with a sword after they have passed. None of these traditions say anything about detaching a shadow from a person by means of a photograph. But a few days before I was planning to take the prints down to Ball’s Hill, I read in the local paper that Sanfred Bensen had died in his sleep.

As I passed down Joy Street on Beacon Hill a man dressed in a seersucker suit, straw boater, and beaten-up topsiders waved me over and asked how I’m doing. I’d never seen him before, I don’t think, but I chatted with him, waiting for some clue to figure out who he was and how he knew me, then spotted a telltale reddened nose and a few streaky veins in his cheeks. Just an old Brahmin—a bit down on his luck.

Shortly thereafter, I passed a troop of mixed-race schoolchildren, headed for the Museum of Afro-American History, girls mostly, from some local private school. They were dressed in navy blue skirts and white blouses and they chattered intimately as they hurried along. The museum they were headed for is a national historic site now, managed by the U.S. Park Service. The personnel there dress in Smokey the Bear Park Service hats and wear police-like pressed gray uniforms. Somehow the accoutrements don’t match the venue.

It was here, in this place, that the ground was prepared for the continuing struggle for African American liberation. The original work was done by the second and third generations of transported Africans whose families had managed, by the grace of Puritan guilt, to have stayed together longer than any of the slaves on the big southern plantations. These people, along with the New England-based white abolitionists, were the creators of the myth of Boston as Negro Paradise, a legend so strong as to have reached the small remote valleys of western Virginia.

At the base of Beacon Hill, on the west side, you will come to another defining characteristic of this coastal town, the great artery that is the river Charles. There are two bridges over the Charles near Beacon Hill, the Longfellow Bridge, which has an unfortunate swirl of overpasses and traffic circles on its Boston side, and the slightly more sane Harvard Bridge, which lies upstream at the end of Charles Bank Park, which is part of a riverlong linear green space with promenades and walkways that originally extended for nine miles along both banks. In the middle of the bridge I stopped and looked back at the modern city with all its seething, twenty-first-century squalor and traffic and shining towers. From this vantage point, you can still see the works of the old Puritan idealism, the celebrated city on a hill—the green Esplanade, the gold dome of Bullfinch’s State House, the square towers of MIT on the left bank, the spired towers of Harvard farther upstream, the crew shells skimming below, the rocking sails of the oldest sailing school in the country at the yacht basin, and somewhere back on the Cambridge side, Memorial Hall and the old Victorian redbrick pile known as the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where Mr. Gilbert ended his days.

The Paris sojourn came to an end for Gilbert sometime in 1930. By 1931 he was back in Cambridge at his house at 66 Inman Street living with Mary and her current husband and also back at his post at the museum, painting the exhibits, combing out the fur on the lioness, and remounting the ferrets and the meerkats and the pangolins.

A Boston Herald reporter named Travis Ingham somehow got word of his work there and did a story on Gilbert for the August 23rd, 1931, edition. The story focuses on the ingenuity of Gilbert, who is identified with the slightly elevated title of assistant to the curator, Thomas Barbour. Gilbert is also cited in the story as an associate of William Brewster and is mentioned as coauthor of Brewster’s published study of birds of the Rangeley Lakes region, of which Umbagog is a part. There is even a photograph of him at work on one of the museum’s llamas, dressed casually on this occasion in a soft-collared white shirt and necktie and dark suit trousers. Other than this there is not much about Gilbert the man. The piece focuses primarily on Gilbert’s versatile techniques in caring for the exhibits—his use of coloration and, interestingly enough, the chemical formulas he devised for cleaning the fur of the mammals. There is nothing in the story about Robert A. Gilbert, the pianist and photographer, nothing about an inventive shoe polish mogul, who, for unrecorded reasons, fled to Europe and lived for a brief period as an ordinary human being rather than a “Negro.” But then it is likely the reporter did not ask.

Gilbert had resumed his role in the world drama on his return to America and was replaying his part, successfully disguised to the ruling white-skinned class of Cro-Magnons as “colored man.” This role is evident in the text of the news story. Gilbert is, in the racially tinted language of the period, touted as a brave hunter who stalks among the lions and the gorillas, a “fearless negro” who dares to touch the hairy arm of “Tarzan,” the huge five-foot-eight-inch gorilla.

Ever since I heard from the aging malacologist Richard Johnson that the Mr. Gilbert he remembered was little more than an old porter who shuffled around the museum touching up the exhibits, I had been intrigued by this apparent double life of Robert A. Gilbert. References to him in Brewster’s time invariably describe a versatile and competent well-attired “colored man” with good carriage and an aristocratic demeanor. What had happened to change the image? (If indeed it had changed. My primary white source on these last years was the memory of Richard Johnson alone. According to African Americans who remember him, he maintained his dignity to the end.)

Part of the change might simply have been old age; Gilbert had turned 70 when Johnson first met him. But Mr. Gilbert was a consummate actor. His first role, played out on the stage of the white world, was written by the dictates of the time and place in which he had to live. Whenever he appears in print, for example, Mr. Gilbert is identified, for all his talents, ambitions, intellect, and ingenuity, as a “colored” man. (Although to his great credit, in the many thousands of words in the writings of William Brewster, with all its hundreds of references to “Gilbert,” there is no way that a reader happening upon these documents without prior knowledge would know that Gilbert was black.) When he was around whites, Gilbert, knowing all this, played his role on the white man’s stage, and then exited left, to Inman Square, where he assumed another part.

We do not know what subtle mental or psychological changes took place in the psyche of this man at five in the evening, when he turned down Massachusetts Avenue, walked over to Broadway, straightened his shoulders, developed a slower and more regal pace, and entered onto Inman Street, as if crowned with laurels. Here he became Robert A. Gilbert, deacon of Saint Bartholomew’s Church, respected for his business ventures, known for his knowledge of birdlife, his travels, his photography, his association with the well-loved, well-known egalitarian white man William Brewster, and perhaps best known (and in the white world almost unknown to all but Caroline Brewster) for his piano virtuosity. Through his ingenuity, he had sent his children off to good colleges, in the case of his middle daughter, Emma, to Radcliffe, one of the finest educational institutions in the country.

In 1931 when he returned from Paris, Gilbert was 62 years old. His high forehead was balding by this time, he wore spectacles, and he would sometimes go about town wearing the new soft-collared shirts instead of his starched detachable collars. Gilbert still dressed in dark suits, though, and favored bow ties, and walked more slowly, straighter, and was up sometimes at night, when he would descend to the parlor and sit alone in the quiet house, thinking. For the next ten years Gilbert lived on his comfortable double role—now puttering around the museum, preparing his inventive dishes for Harvard’s visiting biologists, touching up the exhibits he himself had created back in the 1920s, and then by night and on weekends reassuming his true persona as pillar of the Cambridge black community. The world swirled around him. The Depression was worsening when he returned from Paris, bread lines had lengthened, black unemployment had soared. Back in Europe, in Germany, a nasty form of racial discrimination, vaguely similar to the current Jim Crow laws governing southern blacks in America, was surfacing. But Gilbert forged on, the invisible man, improving his Chopin, tending to church matters, and singing old hymns with his family on Sunday afternoons on Inman Street.

Then came the news of the German invasion of Poland. European racism spread. And then one Sunday afternoon in December of 1941, while he and his family were at home in the parlor, news of the attack on Pearl Harbor broke in over the radio. Gilbert was old. There was nothing he could do.

By this time his daughters had learned a thing or two about the world from their father and their schooling and were respected women in the colored social circles of Cambridge. Often in his last years, the whole family would sing together on Sunday afternoons, and little children such as Tom Allen and his friends, as well as adults, were invited in to sit and listen. His daughters eventually started the equivalent of a local finishing school at 66 Inman Street for the children of the neighborhood. The black children learned how to serve tea, speak a few words of French, and dance the waltz, and even learned the fox-trot, which by 1930 had been around long enough to become acceptable, having been replaced by a wilder and more suggestive style of music and dance.

In these years, Mr. Gilbert would customarily leave the house at eight o’ clock in the morning, after his normal breakfast of toast, cornflakes, and coffee. He could be seen proceeding down Inman Street toward Broadway, where he would turn left, and, still straight-backed, make his way westward toward Harvard Square and Memorial Hall, where he would turn right and head for the staff doors of the museum on Oxford Street. Periodically, when the weather was fine, he would continue on through Harvard Square and walk down Brattle Street. He would rest in the park opposite the Longfellow House, enjoying the view of the river, and then wander up the street and make a circuit around his old haunts at 145 Brattle on the corner of Sparks Street.

Elizabeth Simmons, aka ERS, had died by this time, and Caroline had sold the house after her husband’s death and had moved in with a niece in Boston. Gilbert would get Christmas cards from her, but her handwriting grew wavy and, in March of 1924, Mr. Gilbert read that she had died. He attended her funeral at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, and assumed a seat in the back. He was recognized and greeted by several of the parishioners, who, knowing of Caroline’s fondness for this small, formal man, shook his hand warmly and claimed to understand that this must be a blow to him as well, and how much Caroline would have appreciated his attendance. But the conversation churned mainly among the white women, and the only other people he knew there were the two Swedish maids who had once worked for the Brewsters, and who wept quietly in the back of the church during the service.

Gilbert lived in a past of his own invention by this time, based mostly on his memories of the outings at Concord, the wide-ranging journeys into the wilderness of the rivers above Lake Umbagog, Paris, sojourns in England to see Caroline’s nephew, and to northern France, where someone with a camera eye very much in the style of Robert Gilbert took an extant print of La Verne Castle.

Sometimes, after-hours in winter, Gilbert would linger in the museum halls, lulled by the new steam-heating system and the smell of mothballs and formaldehyde. He paced the halls, reviewing the half-lit cases, flicking off the lights one by one as he passed, his leather shoes creaking and the polished wood floors groaning beneath his step. Down the halls of African mammals he went, blackening the lights on the lions, the zebra, the giraffe, and the great mountain gorilla in its corner case, its hairy arms forever beating its chest, teeth forever bared, all animation halted on the forested slopes of Zaire on a day in 1926. Gilbert moved on to the halls of marsupials wherein lay the platypus, the tree possums, the kangaroos, also frozen in attitudes of a life once lived. And then, finally, the bird halls and the memories of Brewster himself, each mounted specimen, each thrush and vireo, each Lapland longspur, a memory, a story, a whole history of himself—hundreds of birds, long dead and now affixed with small, oaktag labels inscribed with his own hand, indicating the species, the sex, the date of capture, and the conditions under which the bird was found.

Maybe he stayed on some nights after all the lights were flicked off, allowing other reveries to drift in as he paced the dark halls; maybe he heard some old echoes there of Caroline at the keyboard, or the voice of Mr. Brewster. And perhaps, on such nights, alone in the empty halls surrounded by the afterlife of African beasts and American songbirds, some buried memory of his father, the Old King, and Grandma Fanny surfaced, and there came to him the smell of honeysuckle and persimmons and the scented mountains of the valley of Broad Creek.

On the Cambridge side of the Harvard Bridge I clipped off the main thoroughfare of Massachusetts Avenue and laid a course for the museum through the warren of little streets between the river and Cambridge Common. The route passes the A. J. Spears Funeral Home on Western Avenue, which is black-owned and one of the oldest gossip centers in this part of Cambridge. Ardis Spears, who took over the business from her father some years ago, had offered a wealth of information on the past, since most of Gilbert’s generation ultimately had utilized the services of the business. The funeral home has, perforce, excellent records—who was married to who, the number of children the couples had, and who died when, and where they are buried.

Ardis Spears is a large, smooth-skinned warm woman whom we had talked to periodically, and after a little doorstoop chat she ushered me into her inner office. It was a hot day, about ninety degrees, but all the Venetian blinds were down, the slats half-lifted so that there was a brownish yellow summer light infusing the room with an almost artificial glow. On the walls were a painting of Jesus at prayer, kneeling in shafts of light, and another of him receiving a poor lamb to his bosom, and there were photographs of old Mr. Spears, and group portraits of other relatives. We talked, as usual, about the old days around Cambridge. Like most of our informants, Ardis was too young, at 75, to know the players in this story, but she knew all the people who remembered the main characters, in fact it was she who supplied us with most of their names.

One of my great regrets in this quest was that for a while I lived not far from one of the most literate chroniclers of the world of Gilbert’s generation in Boston, the novelist Dorothy West. She was the youngest member of the Harlem Renaissance and, along with a number of highly respected short stories, wrote a book called The Living Is Easy, all about the struggles and familial complications of members of the rising black middle class in the city. She ended her days in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, where I lived for a short time, and although we never met, she and I shared a number of acquaintances, mainly through the Vineyard Gazette, for which she wrote a society column. I never met Mary Gilbert either, who was still alive in the 1990s while I was beginning to get serious about finding her father. I also missed by only a few years some of the participants in the Eateria who would certainly have known Thomas Barbour and would have remembered Gilbert.

Other than Sanfred Bensen, my closest call to meeting an adult associate of William Brewster came through the great-grandson of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts, not far from the headquarters of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and just down the hill from the famous environmentalist Paul Brooks, who first published the most popular version of the Brewster methods of field observation, Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds. I had learned that Garrison, the younger, who was about 95 when I met him, had joined the Nuttall Club as a very young man and would have known Mr. Brewster. So I arranged to pay him a visit.

He was a small, frail old man with watery blue eyes and a weak handshake, but he seemed perfectly lucid and we talked about birds by way of introduction. Then he mentioned the famous Peterson Field Guides, edited by Brooks, and said he owned a signed first edition of the book and went to get it from the shelf. It wasn’t where he thought it was, so he went looking on another shelf. Then he rummaged through his desk, and then a table by a south-facing window that was littered with books, and then he went into the kitchen and began looking for it in the cupboards, among the dishes, and when he didn’t find it there, he looked under the sink. Then he informed me that Roger Tory Peterson had been to visit just this morning, which was curious, since Peterson had died four or five years earlier. Then Mr. Garrison said the book was on a shelf in the study and went to get it in the same place where he had begun. After that his nurse came in and said that it was time for him to take his medicines and have his lunch, indicating to me that he needed a rest.

“This was one of his good days,” she said as she led me to the door.

Outside the Spears Funeral Home the sun was blasting down and I put in for a break at a strange Ethiopian café that sold, among other choices, espresso, American tuna fish sandwiches, hamburgers, sushi, and a wide selection of East African dishes. I ordered an Italian soda and sat at an outdoor table, watching the street pass.

All the world seemed to cross here in our time. Along with students of various Asian and European nationalities, there were people from Central and South America, as well as Russians, Middle Easterners, black women of undetermined African nations in long white robes and head scarves, and even a few of the remnant of Irish, the original inhabitants of this old neighborhood. These latter were all older and looked stolid and very white in the hot July sun.

While I was sitting there, on the other side of the street a man in a gorilla suit emerged from the back door of a church, unlocked his bicycle from an iron rail, and pedaled off toward Central Square.

No one even watched him pedal by.

On the other side of the street, an older Asian man in black Chinese slippers stopped two young black boys and asked them something. After they answered they trotted off, their heads together, glancing back at the old gentleman. He must have asked a senile question. He asked the next person, an older white man who held the Asian man’s elbow as he answered and pointed westward, making zigzags with his right arm. Then the Asian gentleman asked a third person, a middle-aged black woman, who enfolded his right hand in hers while she stood talking with him.

While I was watching this interchange, the Queen of Sheba strode by. She was an exquisitely beautiful Ethiopian woman with smooth dark skin, high cheekbones, long dreadlocked hair fixed with white cowry shells, and large golden hooped earrings. She was wearing a light shift that revealed the power of her muscled legs and she walked with graceful long strides, her shoulders squared and her chin uptilted. In contrast to the gorilla man, everyone turned to look after she passed—women, young men, old men, and even the doddering Asian man.

Ardis Spears would probably know who she was.

On my route again, I saw a modest black limousine turn onto Cottage Street and recognized the driver from a photograph George Alexander had shown me. He was the son of Ardis Spears. In the photograph of Mary Gilbert’s wedding he is the one escorting the 8o-year-old bride from this same vehicle. He was older now and heavier, and I may not have recognized him except that I was recently introduced to him by his mother. He works for the funeral home and attends many of the services. So does Tom Allen, Mr. Gilbert’s old neighbor, who took up the work after he retired from the postal service.

At the Broadway intersection, I decided to change course. It was late by now, the museum would be closing up, so I turned right and went down to Gilbert’s old homestead instead. On Inman Street Tom Allen was out in his side yard poking at something with a rake.

By this time I did not have to reintroduce myself and we chatted on about the heat, and the changes in the neighborhood—one of his favorite subjects—and then the old days, and then, finally, the Gilbert family.

Tom Allen still rides his bicycle at least twelve miles a day, and chops the air energetically when he talks. He and George Alexander were the last living individuals I met who have any memory of Robert A. Gilbert, and virtually every one of them agrees to the word with the written descriptions of this man: including the attempted disparaging characterization of Gilbert at the hands of Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was, in sum, the last gentleman.

January 7th of 1942 was a bitterly chill day in Boston. Extreme cold had been gripping New England for almost a week, and on the seventh the thermometer plummeted to the lowest point in six years. The Charles River froze over, ice appeared in the inner harbor, and strange flights of Iceland gulls appeared on the outer islands, according to the records of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Photos of Boston Harbor taken during this cold spell show fishing vessels, in from Georges Bank, their rigging and deckhouses iced over with salt spray so that they look for all the world like ghost ships or messengers from some unearthly world of ice spirits.

Things had changed in Gilbert’s Inman Square neighborhood by 1942. The young men had disappeared from the streets and were overseas fighting in another war. At the museum, Thomas Barbour was personally questioning in his journals the ultimate meaning of his obsession with the study of obscure species of frogs and snails while men were slaughtering each other around the world. There were some new faces working at the museum, including a new Russian lepidopterist named Vladimir Nabokov, who would periodically attend the luncheons at the Eateria. (No mention of Gilbert in his journals, however.)

Back in Gilbert’s old haunts in Paris, in 1942, Nazi officers crowded into the Montmartre bistros and clubs, calling for the best champagnes and the wildest shows. By 1929, with Wall Street spiraling, the American party had started to break up in Paris, the would-be writers had given up and gone home, the successful ones went off looking for other adventures. Although the American black musicians had stayed on after the Depression hit France in 1931, they all fled the city with the coming of the Germans. Jazz had been banned as degenerate music by the Nazis, and blacks were subjected to some of the same regulations that attempted to control French Jews. In spite of restrictions forbidding Negroes from performing in nightclubs and theaters, or moving between zones, some stayed on in other parts of France or went south through Vichy and then took ship for the repressive but relatively safe sanctuary of America. A few simply went underground in Paris. One older black expatriate actually stayed on at his old job at the transport offices, working under the nose of the German officers.

As 1942 opened, the Japanese were undertaking terrorist raids throughout the Pacific. In the Philippines, their machine gunners had leveled seven defenseless villages, and on January 7th Franklin Roosevelt called for fifty-six billion dollars for the war effort, and the Office of Price Management was predicting a twenty-five percent increase in the income tax. Most Americans were willing to support whatever it took to smash the enemy.

That morning, huddled in his robe and a muffler, Mr. Gilbert took a breakfast of buttered toast and coddled eggs, but feeling tired, and unwilling to face the cold, decided not to walk to work. He spent the day puttering around his darkroom, playing the piano, reading A Farewell to Arms, written by the burly man he believed he had once encountered in the Dingo Bar. But he took two naps that day and was still tired at dinner. In fact he told Mary he did not feel well, and did not eat much. He knew the symptoms of flu, he said, and calculated that he had something gnawing at his ankles, as he used to say, and retired early.

As was his custom, before he got into bed he knelt at the bedside, folded his hands, and said, as a matter of rote, his customary prayer—“If I should die before I wake,” he concluded, “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

When the paganistic William Brewster was languishing and near his end, his prophetic dreams were based on pre-Christian imagery: He dreamed of the River Styx, the dark shore beyond, with his companion dog awaiting his arrival.

We do not know what dreams or visions Mr. Gilbert experienced in the last, tired days of his life. Perhaps, as with so many older displaced southern blacks, as he dozed in his chair he was dully aware of a vague, sweet scent of flowering trees and shrubs, filtering down from the green hills above the valley of Broad Creek, and perhaps he heard again the trill of the cardinal, the Carolina wren, and the warbling nightsong of the mockingbird. Gilbert died alone, in his sleep, and since he never woke, we, of course, have no way of knowing what hallucinatory reveries passed before his dimmed eyes. But given the hymns, the prayers, legends, and painted images of his deep Christian faith, we might imagine what he would have expected. You can see images of his final hour on the walls of Ardis Spears’ funeral home, in religious leaflets and illustrated editions of the Bible.

Sometime late in that last night, when all was quiet in the house, when the delivery wagons of Mr. Weisman did not pass, and the city slept, perhaps he opened his eyes and saw that the sky over Cambridge had parted; the overcast pall of winter clouds had pulled back like a curtain to reveal a clear golden light, brighter than the desert sun. Out from the goldleafed clouds, in a glistering chariot drawn by white steeds, he would have seen a company of angels, all in white, passing through a cerulean sky. The driver is a woman with loosed hair, and as the chariot heaves across the heavens, she glances down, sees Mr. Gilbert in his bed, and turns the heads of the white horses earthward. The chariot arcs across the firmament, slows, and swings low, crossing over the Harbor Islands, over the spiky towers of Boston, over the Charles, and as it passes over Inman Street, the angels bend and hoist the fragile dark frame of Robert Alexander Gilbert aboard, comforting him in their arms. The thrashing horses, held in check by the charioteer, snort and throw back their heads, anxious to be off. Then, urged by the angel at the reins, they bunch into a full gallop and mount higher and higher into the blue rift and disappear into the light.

The winter clouds of New England filtered and spun after the chariot passed, the curtain drew closed, and night returned to Cambridge.

Mary found the shell of his soul in the morning when he did not appear for breakfast.

The death of Mr. Gilbert did not go unnoticed in the white community. Students who worked at the museum knew Gilbert well and remembered him in an obituary in the student paper, the Harvard Crimson. In particular, a 1932 graduate named William Harrison felt compelled to announce his passing to “Harvard men of several generations.” He used, as did so many of the encomiums, the language of the day—praising “this ingenious Negro’s skill” and his “courtly manners and instinctive courtesy.”

The Boston Herald lauded his work at the museum and his long association with Brewster, and also made it quite clear in the lead sentence that this talented man was “a Negro.” Interestingly, two of Gilbert’s obituaries compare him to the unnamed black man who taught Charles Darwin the art of taxidermy. Only one of the papers, the black-owned Boston Chronicle, made no mention of his race.

Services for Mr. Gilbert were held on Saturday, January 19th, at the A. E. Long Memorial Chapel in North Cambridge. As he would have wished, the ceremony was subdued, a display of flowers, Episcopal hymns, and a reading from The Book of Common Prayer. But there were tears at the end of the service. With the organ backing her in slow cadences, Mary sang his old favorite, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and no one present refrained from taking out their handkerchiefs.

He was interred at Cambridge Cemetery beneath the stone where his wife and son and Anna’s aunt lay buried. There were many friends and family members there that day, and although there is no record of this, it is my guess that no white people were in attendance, inasmuch as there were none left alive who remembered Gilbert in his finest years when he tramped the fields and forest paths with the likes of William Brewster and his company of sharp-eyed ornithologists.

After her father died, Mary stayed on in the house with her current husband, Carl Williams, and lived there for the next fifty years. None of Mr. Gilbert’s daughters ever had children, but the sisters would continue to meet at the house on Inman Street over the years and became, as was their father, a part of the black middleclass community of Cambridge. The Gilbert sisters were known throughout the town, even into North Cambridge, which had a growing population of island people and had developed a separate cultural and social system of its own, with different churches and different community leaders.

Many of the young black men of Cambridge had joined the military and gone off to the fight by the time Gilbert died. But the struggle for black equality was hardly over in these years. On the same front page of the Boston Chronicle announcing the passing of the “Famed Harvard Zoologist” Robert A. Gilbert, there was a news piece about an order from the War Department calling for the death penalty for white and “colored” males and females who engaged in sexual relations, whether voluntary or not. After a vociferous protest from the NAACP, the order was withdrawn, the article said.

I asked Tom Allen again about his mother and her friendship with Mary Gilbert and about the Sunday afternoons at the house after her father died.

“Oh, they carried on all right,” he said. “But it wasn’t the same. The old man, you know, he was like some old preacher. You see him coming, you straighten up. Got looser in there, I think, after he died. My mother and Mary used to laugh a lot. Then Mama died, then old Mr. Williams, Mary’s husband died. And then along comes George Alexander. I didn’t know him very well, though, just read about them getting married in the papers. Eighty years old. There was a picture of them kissing. That was good times. Then Mary dies. She wasn’t even that old either. Only eighty-two.”

“That’s young, isn’t it?” I said. I had Tom in mind, he was closing in on eighty himself.

“These days, yeah. Me, I figure I’m just going to live until I die.”

After Mary’s death, George Alexander, who was too old to live alone by then, sold the house and moved in with his foster daughter, Madelon Winston. Mary’s sisters had predeceased her, and when Mary died, in 1992, the Robert Gilbert genetic line, nurtured for a thousand generations through the rise and decline of the great kingdoms of Dahomey, the slave raids, the squalid holding pens on the beaches of Ouida, the Middle Passage, five generations of American slavery, and on up into the relative freedom of Boston, where the line could have established an American identity for itself, after all this, that singular genetic code passed from existence.

“After old George moved out an antique man from somewhere in New Hampshire came down here and bought the entire contents of the house,” Tom said. “Mr. Gilbert’s old piano, dining room table. Chairs. You name it, he bought it. Now they’re who knows where. Then one day I see a dumpster out in front of the house. They thrown everything that was left in that thing,” he said.

“His personal photographs?”

“Yeah, probably. Photos. Books, files, letters about I don’t know what. I seen them. Everything what was left—all went in that dumpster.”

“You mean all his letters, his pictures too?” I asked.

“Everything. Truck come the next day and hauled it all off and that was the end.”

He paused and looked down the street to the former Gilbert mansard-roofed house. A spotted dog at the end of a long leash emerged from a driveway a few doors down from the Gilbert place followed by a tall white woman in jeans and dark glasses. They turned left and moved down the street away from us, then disappeared around the corner of Cambridge Street.

“I guess that’s the way it goes,” Tom said.

“A whole life,” I said.

“Hey. A whole generation,” he said.