Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  What Saint-Georges thought of the most overt professional rejection he experienced in France isn’t known; but he immediately began work on an opera, Ernestine, whose plot was taken from a popular novel by Mme Riccoboni and turned into a libretto by none other than Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, then a young officer who would go on to write Les Liaisons dangereuses. Their opéra comique met with a disastrous reception at its premiere at the Théâtre Italien in 1777, not helped by the antics of Marie Antoinette, who “ridiculed the performance more than anyone,” according to one critic. Saint-Georges wrote six operas altogether, two of which had some success. L’Amant anonyme, of 1780, a two-act comedy, seems to be the most nearly complete of his operatic works to have survived.6

  Saint-Georges, Banat surmises, probably had to cover the cost of his operatic failures himself. He sought the patronage of the House of Orléans, the branch of the royal family descended from Philip I, brother of Louis XIV. In 1778, Saint-Georges became the lieutenant of the Duke of Orléans’s hunt—he was said, according to Banat, to have the best seat in France—as well as music director of the duke’s wife’s theater. Saint-Georges’s operas were performed there first. Such “private theaters sponsored by the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie” had become increasingly important in the cultural life of the capital.

  It helped Saint-Georges that he was a Mason, Freemasonry being at the time anti-establishment and something of a musician’s union. In 1781, the Concert des Amateurs closed, succumbing to financial pressures, and Saint-Georges quickly reconstituted it on a somewhat smaller scale as Le Concert de la Lodge Olympique, the orchestra of the Masonic lodge that the young Philippe d’Orléans, a son of the duke, had installed at the Palais-Royal. When the duke died, in 1785, Saint-Georges took up residence at the Palais-Royal and joined the entourage of Philippe, who had succeeded to his father’s title. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun recalls in her memoirs how Saint-Georges’s playing the violin beguiled early-morning listeners in the palace gardens. Philippe, who actively favored populist causes, had increasing support from bourgeois and aristocratic reformers in France, and while in his employ, Saint-Georges became sympathetic to his ideas. Philippe engaged him as an envoy to George IV, Prince of Wales, who had expressed an interest in watching Saint-Georges fence.

  On a visit to London in 1787, Saint-Georges fought an exhibition match with the Chevalier d’Éon, a spy and a skilled fencer who had disguised himself as a woman when in the service of Louis XV in Russia. In England, d’Éon lived out his life in women’s clothes. When he crossed swords with Saint-Georges, in the presence of the Prince of Wales, he was in drag. Saint-Georges gallantly let the sixty-year-old “chevalière” win.

  Philippe was a great Anglophile, and he carefully cultivated a friendship with the prince, while the French royal court frowned on him for his political activity. He transformed the Palais-Royal, filling it with cafés that became the meeting places of advocates of free expression and critics of the monarchy. There, Saint-Georges met the radical writer Jacques Pierre Brissot, who in 1787, with the Marquis de Lafayette, the Abbé Grégoire, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and others, formed the Society of the Friends of Blacks, to work for the abolition of slavery. The committee did not work for long; it was soon overtaken by the Revolution.

  Marie Antoinette hated the Duke of Orléans, but Saint-Georges nonetheless remained loyal to him. Banat asks what kind of inner struggle Saint-Georges may have undergone before he turned against “that grand society which, even if only within certain limits, had accepted and nurtured him.” When the Bastille fell, Saint-Georges was again in England, as the duke’s emissary to the Prince of Wales at Brighton. On the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Philippe was back in Paris, and Saint-Georges was in the northern city of Lille, presumably acting as the duke’s agent on the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands.

  Saint-Georges fell ill and while convalescing wrote his last opéra comique. When he recovered in 1790, he quit the private service of Philippe to enlist in the National Guard as a captain. The debate on slavery in the Assembly decided him firmly in favor of the Revolution.7 In 1792, the Assembly formed a regiment of men of color and named Saint-Georges its colonel. He led his men skillfully; according to one contemporary account, he was “a good chief fulfilling perfectly his duty of Patriot.” But despite his apparent commitment to the revolutionary cause, Saint-Georges’s position was not secure.

  France was caught up in the Great Terror. Philippe Égalité, as the duke had become known, his secretary, Laclos, and Saint-Georges were denounced to the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, and Philippe Égalité, who had voted for the execution of the king the previous year, was guillotined. Though Saint-Georges had been a loyal soldier, he was stripped of his command following Marat’s assassination and imprisoned at Hondainville. The reasons for his arrest were never made clear, but, as Banat writes,

  under the new law, Saint-Georges could have been considered suspect … for any number of crimes.… As a former gendarme of the king and ci devant chevalier, he belonged to the nobility: he had consorted with the queen, now awaiting trial; with the Duke of Orléans … now under arrest; with the Prince of Wales, an enemy of France.… He could have been arrested for any of those reasons.

  He was freed after eleven months but never restored to his regiment. His extant letters are addressed to the Revolutionary bureaucracy, futile petitions to have his honor satisfied and his salary paid.

  After the Terror, in 1796, Saint-Georges accompanied a commission sent to Saint-Domingue to confront André Rigaud, a mulatto who, while Toussaint L’Ouverture was fighting the English, was enslaving blacks and whites alike in the territory under his control. Saint-Georges may have hoped that he could do something at last about slavery, but he found savage racial strife and “a maelstrom of hatred,” as Banat writes, between mulattoes and blacks. The envoys narrowly escaped with their lives. Back in Paris, many of his close friends had perished on the guillotine. Overwhelmed by the Revolution, Saint-Georges stopped writing music, but the last mention of him in the Paris press indicates that he was still leading an orchestra. A civil war in Haiti, “the War of the Knives,” had broken out as Saint-Georges lay dying in Paris in 1799. No one knows where he is buried.

  2007

  ON YOUR OWN IN RUSSIA

  After the Decembrist uprising of liberal officers in Russia in 1825, the imperial government restricted where the young Alexander Pushkin could go and what he could publish. In 1827, he began The Negro of Peter the Great, a novella about his great-grandfather Ibrahim Hannibal that he left unfinished. It is not among Pushkin’s best work, but it was his first attempt at fiction in prose.

  Pushkin’s story begins with Hannibal, the tsar’s Moor, having been sent in the early eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to Paris to further his military education. The libertine court of the regent, the Duc of Orléans, treats him as a tantalizing freak. After an unhappy love affair, he returns to St. Petersburg, where his promotion at court is swift. Nevertheless, when the tsar chooses a bride for him, her family is distraught that she is to be sacrificed to “a black devil,” “a bought negro.” They are not consoled by the legend that Hannibal is a sultan’s son, captured by Turks and taken in captivity to Constantinople, where the Russian ambassador rescued him. Hannibal hopes that marrying into the nobility means that he won’t be a stranger in his adopted fatherland any longer. A friend from his Paris days cautions that with his thick lips and woolly head, Hannibal shouldn’t expect fidelity from a wife. Pushkin abandons his subject at that point.

  Recent biographers agree that Abram Gannibal, as he’s called in Russian, came originally from what is now Eritrea, but, contrary to Pushkin’s story, he was brought, by way of Amsterdam, to Russia in 1703, where he caught the tsar’s attention. Peter had purchased a number of blacks himself when in Amsterdam in 1697 to bring back to Russia as artisans. Peter stood as Gannibal’s godfather in 1707. That Gannibal was given an education is an early example of an Enl
ightenment-era experiment. It proved that black people possessed the necessary mental powers. But Gannibal’s fortunes declined after Peter’s death in 1725. He spent three years working on fortifications in Siberia, a type of exile, and was briefly arrested in 1729. He resigned from the military in 1733 but returned under Peter the Great’s daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, who made him major general of fortifications in 1752.

  Gannibal’s first marriage, to a Greek sea captain’s daughter, was a disaster. His divorce took twenty years. He married bigamously the daughter of an army officer from a German family, by whom he had eleven children. One of his granddaughters was Pushkin’s mother. Gannibal retired from public life in 1762, just before Catherine’s coup, and died in 1781, when thought to be in his early nineties. Though Gannibal had known Voltaire and Montesquieu and excelled at mathematics, Vladimir Nabokov, in a lengthy note to his translation of Eugene Onegin, dismisses the notion that Gannibal was anyone exceptional, characterizing him as a typical career-minded, wife-flogging Russian of his day.

  Pushkin’s father came from a family of august lineage. Consequently, Pushkin had little trouble throwing his African ancestry back at his critics. His contemporaries described him as having curly hair and a Negro profile. He wrote with passion against Negro slavery in America. To be descended from Peter’s favorite perhaps added to Pushkin’s recklessness. An enemy in the central censorship directorate complained, “Why in the world is Pushkin so proud of being descended from that Negro Hannibal whom Peter the Great bought for a bottle of rum at Kronstadt?”

  In Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought, in 1986 (a study unusual for its time), Allison Blakely notes that there had been villages of black people along the western slopes of the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea, maybe going back to the time of Turkish slave routes. These communities had vanished by the mid-1970s, when anthropologists who’d read reports about them from the 1930s went looking for them. But Asiatic blacks are not what we think of when we consider the black presence in Russia. Black people in European Russia came primarily as servants, especially in the eighteenth century, when Russians copied the fashion in Western Europe for the rich to have black attendants. Blakely adds that the tiny black population in imperial Russia would have been made up of sailors and entertainers as well.

  Nero Prince, a black American, was reported to have been among the Muscovites who in 1812 set fire to the city in order to drive out Napoleon. Prince, a free black, came from Marlborough, Massachusetts. He sailed as a cook to Russia in 1810, where he became a footman in the imperial household. Prince figures in histories of black Freemasonry in the United States, having been elected grand master of the Prince Hall Lodge in Boston in 1808. His considerably younger second wife, Nancy Gardner, scarcely mentions him in her memoirs, though they had been presented to the tsar and tsarina in 1824. He died in St. Petersburg in 1835.

  Born in 1799, Nancy Gardner married Nero Prince to escape her family. Her mother had been widowed three times, and Nancy had six siblings to help take care of. In St. Petersburg, she ran a boardinghouse and made linen for infants. Because of ill health, she returned to the United States in 1833. She would go on to become an abolitionist who fell out with other abolitionists, a missionary who did not get on well with her fellow missionaries, and a believer in women’s rights who opposed women’s groups. Her short book A Black Woman’s Odyssey Through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850) contains vivid recollections of events that she witnessed in St. Petersburg: the flood of 1824—“I grasped again, and fortunately got hold of the leg of a horse, that had been drowned. I drew myself up, covered with mire”—and the Decembrist revolt the following year—“The bodies of the killed and mangled were cast into the river, and the snow and ice were stained with the blood of human victims; as they were obliged to drive the cannon to and fro in the midst of the crowd, the bones of those wounded, who might have been cured, were crushed.” Nancy Prince inaugurated a minor literary tradition, that of the black American haven seeker in Russia.

  In the twentieth century, communism attracted many black Americans. Black pilgrims to the Soviet Union included the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, who lived for two years in Lenin’s Moscow and left disenchanted with the Revolution. Langston Hughes, on the other hand, never got over the experience of traveling around what he considered desegregated, classless Russia in the early 1930s. While McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison broke with the Party, some may forgive Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Paul Robeson their Stalinist sympathies even after 1956, on grounds that the dream of a liberated, advanced society pitted against Western racism could be a blinding one. Moreover, both Wright and Ellison as young men took Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as their antecedents so that they didn’t have to deal with the racism of most nineteenth-century American fiction by white writers and the inferior quality of nineteenth-century African-American fiction that they knew about. Turgenev and Herzen believed that the agitation against slavery in the United States helped define the argument against serfdom in Russia.

  Between Pushkin’s great-grandfather and the black American agricultural workers from the South who settled permanently on collectives in Uzbekistan in the 1930s, the black presence in Russia would appear to be limited to the exceptional visitor. The black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge made sensational tours of Russian cities in the mid-nineteenth century. Thomas Morris Chester, a black journalist and noted Civil War correspondent, sent home his impressions of Russia when on a fund-raising tour there in 1869 on behalf of former slaves in the United States—he dined with and reviewed troops with the tsar. Langston Hughes remembers in his second autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), that he met Emma Harris, “the mammy of Moscow,” a black singer born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1875, who got stranded in Russia after the 1905 Revolution. She became a friend of Maxim Gorky’s and somehow also knew Stalin. In 1933, she finally went back to the United States, where she died in 1937.

  The Soviet Union was a contentious issue in African-American history in the twentieth century, but few thought much about blacks in Russia before 1917. Until recently, blacks in Europe were a marginal, unpopular topic, and Russia was by no means its starting point. The Russian Empire had no African or Caribbean colonies, and it was one of the most distant places black Americans could go when they wanted to get away from American Jim Crow. Those blacks who found their way to Russia had to be exceptional in some way, because there was little support where they came from for their going there. You were on your own, which was precisely the point.

  In The Black Russian (2013), Vladimir Alexandrov tells the extraordinary story of how Frederick Bruce Thomas fled the post-Reconstruction American South and became Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, a millionaire entrepreneur of Moscow’s nightlife to whom Nicholas II granted citizenship in 1915. His parents, Lewis and Hannah Thomas, “emerged from the anonymity that typified the lives of most black people” in northwestern Mississippi when in 1869 they, former slaves, became landowners and “had to interact with the white power structure.” Hannah may have died giving birth to Frederick in 1872, and Lewis then married a woman named India, who, unlike him, was literate. As farmers they did extremely well. Their success was the cause of their ruin.

  In 1886 a jealous white neighbor swindled them out of their land. Instead of being frightened off by his threat of mob death, they filed suit. The case dragged on for three years in a county chancery court, and in 1889 the Thomases won on all counts. When the Mississippi supreme court took up the case the following year, the Thomases had signed away much of their property to cover their expenses and had moved to Memphis because of the fury of white landowners that a black landowner had won against a white man in a very public property dispute.

  In 1890, Frederick Thomas was eighteen years old, working as a delivery boy in Memphis. His stepmother ran a boardinghouse. When his father intervened in a domestic dispute of a couple who rented rooms there and reported the husba
nd to the police, the boarder retaliated, murdering Lewis Thomas in his bed, in front of his wife, with an ax. The murderer, in turn, was gunned down by police. Frederick Thomas’s widowed stepmother pursued his father’s land claims in the Mississippi chancery court, where the state supreme court had returned the case, even after the death of the white landowner who had cheated them. In 1894, the case was decided. Thomas’s stepmother had already mortgaged most of the land to which she retained title and had to pay compensation to the mortgage holders. She died in the mid-1890s. Thomas never spoke of his father’s murder, Alexandrov writes. In later years, he would say that he left Memphis in 1890 because he wanted to travel.

  In Chicago, he became a waiter at the Auditorium Hotel, “the most important new building” in the city. The Panic of 1893 was worse in Chicago than it was in New York, where he became “head bell boy” at a fashionable Brooklyn hotel. Then he was valet to an owner of vaudeville theaters. At every step, Alexandrov is careful to explain that these were not menial positions, that service of this elevated kind required real skills. But Thomas had something else in mind and in 1894 sailed for London in order to study singing. Frederick Thomas at this point is much like the narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), who is encouraged by a sympathetic white employer to find his freedom abroad. The difference is that Johnson’s hero is musically gifted, while Thomas was rejected by the conservatory he applied to and gave up trying to have a musical career. In 1895 he left for the Continent.

  Thomas picked up French quickly and worked his way as a waiter from Paris, through Brussels, Ostend, and on to the Hôtel des Anglais in Cannes. When he applied for his first passport at the American embassy in Paris in 1896, he said he was traveling for two years, evidently considering it prudent not to admit he had no intention of ever returning to the United States. He was back in Paris in 1897 but was soon again off to Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Leipzig, before taking a big job at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. He was on the road again in 1898, finding work in Venice, Trieste, Vienna, and Budapest.