B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (19 page)
Authors: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Support from the benefit and other friends provided enough money to pay for Gumby’s storage expenses for a short while, but eventually he fell behind in his payments and an auction was arranged to sell his belongings. Facing this newest difficulty, Gumby was aided by a friend who offered to take care of the debt in exchange for
certain first editions
and his Americana scrapbooks. The friend, who
did not want any of the scrapbooks of Negro items,
offered to keep them in his home until Gumby could retrieve them.
But when Gumby left the hospital in 1934, he contacted his friend and found that
our gentlemen’s agreement
had not been strong enough to assure the collection’s security.
His books were stored in a cellar without any protection. Friends and family of the steward had been allowed to take whichever of the rare books they desired. Meanwhile, Gumby’s Negroana scrapbooks were languishing in more than a dozen cases in a low-lying part of the cellar. A watermark on one trunk gave the first clue of their condition. Two cases of scrapbooks were completely ruined, only
paper mud and mildew inside
. Gumby was able to save some of the items from within those books, and the rest he took to the inadequate lodgings he’d rented for six dollars per week after his release from the hospital.
On the ruins of his scrapbooks, Gumby intended to rebuild.
I decided to remove all Negro items
from scrapbooks that were not essentially Negroic and to add them to the Negro collection, as that part had suffered the least damage. While I was doing the revamping, I got the idea of making this part of the collection a far-reaching historical items of Negroana, with each one of its volumes so fine and selective
in its makeup that no other collector could ever hope to equal it.
Yes, things have been different
since I came back from out there.
A 1934 article in the
Amsterdam News
that declared Gumby’s
comeback
has the collector looking
reflectively
at the walls of his new rented room on 126th Street.
Out there
is the sanitarium, and it is not far-fetched to wonder whether Gumby’s assessment of things that were different included—in addition to his own circumstances—the changes that had taken place in Depression-era Harlem, at the end of the not-yet-coined Renaissance.
No, times are not what they once were
.
His cheer returns when speaking of his new plans.
I have an idea and I’m going to put it over.
The article does not mention the sorrow of the lost items, but instead describes his dream to display the 160 scrapbooks, 3,000 books, and rare prints and paintings that comprised the remains of his library. Having
no where to display them in a proper atmosphere where people genuinely interested may come and browse them,
Gumby was consumed by a vision:
Now, I believe that there should be some place in Harlem
where all of this… could be made available to the people who wish to make use of them for research work. It should also be a place where the talented Negro artist, poet, author, actor, journalist and musician could gather and meet in mutual friendship and exchange of ideas with contemporaries—a place where he would not be expected solely to sing spirituals or create art and poetry of a strenuously Negroid and grotesque sort, a place free of religious bigotry, political ballyhoo, social and academic snobbery, a place where artists of all races could meet and mingle freely for art’s sake, expressing their own individualities.
Gumby’s art center would provide a social and research facility for artists and intellectuals of all races, including a theatre, an art studio and gallery, instruction in the arts, a scholarship fund to support study in Europe and events
charged at all times
with a bona fide artistic atmosphere
. He also hoped it would help elevate what he saw as the dismal quality of work being produced at that moment:
I have not the slightest doubt
that such an art center would have a constructive effect upon our present-day so-called Negro classics and semi-classics, now being manufactured almost exclusively from backwoods, cornfield, and waterfront material
.
An autobiographical essay Gumby wrote some two decades later for the January 1957 edition of the
Columbia Library World
makes no mention of his art center dream. By then, Gumby was again working at Columbia and had arranged for his scrapbooks to become part of the Special Collections department of the university’s Butler Library. A brief article appeared in the
Columbia Daily Spectator
to publicize the holdings. Gumby’s ambition was now more modest, or possibly toned-down and misreported by a student journalist who perhaps could only see Gumby’s creation in terms of what it meant for white observers.
I want the white people
to judge themselves on the Negro problem by reading both sides of the question,
Gumby said of his collection. The reporter noted,
Mr. Gumby hopes that his history of the Negro… will stimulate interest in Negro history and culture and act as a basis for greater cooperation and understanding among the races
.
An anemic account of Gumby’s scrapbooking activity is given, along with mentions of the highlights of the collection now housed in the library. These included nine volumes on Joe Louis, three volumes on lynchings, and scrapbooks on Booker T. Washington and jazz. Gumby is said to be currently
making scrapbooks on Columbia
, the Negro and Communism, and many personalities such as Dr. Bunche
. Gumby was also occupied with cataloguing
his collection. No details are given about the fate of Gumby’s rare books and other items. Perhaps he retained them, never having established the art center of his dreams. Or perhaps he’d had to continue selling them off, in order to survive.
The remains of Gumby’s scrapbook collection are still at the Rare Books and Manuscripts department of Columbia’s Butler Library, but the holdings have been photographed and put on microfilm; special permission is necessary to handle the pages he painstakingly compiled. Gumby relinquished his collection with the agreement that it would be put on regular display, but that hasn’t happened. The scrapbook pages are promoted more as secondary sources on the celebrated figures and important topics that Gumby catalogued, rather than seen holistically as the brilliant and strange production of the man himself.
In that same 1957 memoir, Gumby basically concedes this vision of his scrapbooks’ future, saying,
Whether or not I have succeeded
, I do sincerely hope the collection will be useful for serious historical research, and an abiding incentive to those who try to make scrapbooks on any subject
. This hope was elsewhere stated somewhat differently when, in December 1929, a
New York Times
article noted:
“
My greatest ambition
,” remarked Gumby, his brown face beaming with the patient enthusiasm of the collector, “is to write the history of the negro in scrapbooks. Perhaps there are others who will come later to put what I have collected into a more concise form.”
A page on the microfilm preserves
Gumby’s personal book plate
. His name, L. S. Alexander Gumby, is written in a calligrapher’s copperplate hand on a prominent scroll. The words
EX LIBRIS
support the composition from the bottom of the frame. Flowers and foliage festoon the perimeter, while the center is occupied by
the muscular figures of two men. One has his back turned against the viewer and his face turned away; the other is positioned slightly below the first, reaching across in assistance. Together they lift a giant, partially opened book, grimacing under the labor.
Eventually I passed 2144 Fifth Avenue when the front door of the lamp repair shop was open. Music played from a speaker above the threshold; outside was a shallow tub filled with water in which two small turtles swam. To the side of the door, a small potted plant was in bloom. This tableau, and the fact that I was walking with a male friend, beckoned me toward the place I had for so long avoided. Inside, I found the proprietor of the shop. He was at work, repairing a table that was turned on its side. The wall of the storefront was lined with shelves that held dozens of lamps of all sizes and designs. I told him I was glad he was open, because my house was full of broken lamps I had never managed to fix. This was true, but seeing that I had nothing with me that would bring him immediate business, the owner must have known that I was merely making conversation. He did not react much beyond a remote
Oh?
before continuing with his task. Since he didn’t turn us out of the store immediately, I looked all around the shop. Besides the shelves of lamps, the walls were covered in a metallic paper whose pattern looked like something from the 1970s. There were also scattered artifacts that drew my attention, a poster of Malcolm X, an antique-looking jug that advertised a southern brand of whiskey. Like a visitor to a curiosity shop, I marveled aloud at each object, exclaiming in a manner that the owner must have found irritating. Continuing my attempt to make conversation, I told him what a nice plant he had outside, and said it looked like a jasmine. Without looking up, he said he didn’t know what it was. I told him I was pretty sure it was a jasmine because I
had one at my house that never blooms, and he offered just as little interest as before. Discarding all niceties, I told the owner I’d always been curious about this shop because it was the same building where a man named Alexander Gumby had lived. Did he know anything about that man?
He stopped working, patient with my intrusion. He didn’t know anything about Alexander Gumby, but I must have the wrong place because this space had been a lamp-repair shop for many years, and before that it was a hardware shop. When I told him I was certain it was the same address, and that Alexander Gumby had lived upstairs, he said,
Nope, no way,
and went back to his business with the upended table. I conceded that maybe I had the wrong place, and thanked him for his time. I told him I liked the jazz he was playing through the speaker above the door. He smiled at that, and then my friend and I were gone.
Not long after, I passed 2144 Fifth Avenue again. The lamp shop was closed, as it had been so many times I’d passed before. But things were different. The windows of the upper floors—including the large plate-glass window which had been Gumby’s Book Studio—those windows whose darkness had halted my approach—were all covered with wooden boards.
Recently, I began to record my dreams. It was not an effort at self-help or psychoanalysis; the idea was to have a catalog of the realms I sometimes visit at night, often repeatedly. The landscapes in my dreams combine certain elements of some places I’ve been: the gently undulating hills of the English countryside; the winding waterways of southern India; the steely gray and rich green of the Scottish highlands; the angular spires of cypress trees in Tuscany; and the flat horizon and open skies of the West Texas high desert—where one isn’t able to hide. Added to this topography is
a distorted version of my everyday scenery. Of this territory I wrote in my notebook,
I arrived in a dream Harlem. Things were much different.
In this dream Harlem, I visit a library whose magnificent architecture is a more appropriate shrine to Schomburg’s endeavor than the forbidding red brick fortress where I spend so many waking hours. It is located on one corner of a dream version of Marcus Garvey Park. The hill of Mount Morris still commands the center, but the plaza formed by the streets around the park resembles some squares where I’ve lingered in London’s Bloomsbury. Inside the dream library is a magic volume that solves all the enigmas that follow me from the real library into my sleep. In this dream Harlem, the avenues are even wider and more grand. I visit elegant lounges that have mahogany fittings and floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the avenue—striped silk curtains billow in the breeze. In that dream Harlem, that nowhere Harlem, I reach the campus of City College by ascending the face of a ragged cliff many times more treacherous than the steps of St. Nicholas Park. In these settings unfold various plots of which I am not exactly the author.