B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

  So well did those able men of uncommon ability create the parts, that its ghost has forever since walked among those that were associated with the move.

  Tis the haunt of that ghost that has forced this body of men to seize all credential of the S.U.F. and attempt to place a body round its ghost by riveting the parts together with amendments to the constitution, that the ghost may cease to wander and dewing [sic] honor to those that created the ghost.

  The document reveals Gumby to be a young man of great feeling: May the banner, spouting greatness and glory beyond the expression of words… be carried on. He was a young man of great feeling who could not spell: These talks wer plain talks. We threw off all faulce forms of politenest or display of rhetorical phrases or sincear or fishy friensdhip.

  The high ambition revealed in Gumby’s hopes for the Southern Utopia Fraternity matched the hopes then being harnessed on the streets, which were just beginning to fill with blacks moving to Harlem from the South and from other parts of the city. As the migration reached its peak, other organizations were formed, including the Sons of Georgia, the Sons and Daughters of North Carolina, the Virginia Society, the Georgia Circle, and the Southern Beneficial League. While Gumby’s somewhat pompous document may not be an accurate reflection of the other groups, all connected the new Harlemites with their origins, while encouraging their aspirations in the North.

  Before the occurrence of any of the events that historians use to fix the official beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, the Southern Utopian Fraternity was founded and failed. Or at least we can assume it failed, because there are no further notices of its activities in Gumby’s scrapbook. His employment for the next period is difficult to pin down—at some point he worked for the postal service—but this is when his attentions turned even more toward scrapbook making. His brief memoirs note, rather vaguely, that in the years from 1914 until America went into the first World War, I had the opportunity of going to several large cities in towns in this country and in Canada. Gumby’s mission, on these tours, was to visit libraries to study various methods of compiling and mounting scrapbook material. Also during these trips, he scoured bookshops for items to add to his collection, such that he soon became better known for my collection of choice books than for my scrapbooks. In 1922, Gumby was registered in the latest edition of Who’s Who in Book Collecting.

  A typewritten bibliography lists some of the items of his collection, including an 1804 copy of The Life and Achievements of Toussaint L’Ouverture, a signed edition of The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization, and a 1900 title by W. E. B. DuBois, College-Bred Negro. Rare editions from the era of slavery were joined by contemporary productions that probed the history of Africa, the conditions of blacks in the South, and recent novels. When his collection began to outgrow his two and a half rooms on Fifth Avenue, Gumby took out a lease of the entire floor.

  This expansion gave Gumby the opportunity to establish the Gumby Book Studio in 1925. It was intended

  for my personal use, to entertain my friends, and as a place in which to master the art of making scrapbooks. It should have been called “The Gumby Scrapbook Studio” as it was intended, but at the time I thought the name a bit too long. Soon other friends formed the habit of visiting the Studio, and they in turn brought their friends who brought their friends, regardless of race or color, those who were seriously interested in arts and letters. The Studio became a rendezvous for intellectuals, musicians, and artists. I daresay that the Gumby Book Studio was the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem.

  Nineteen twenty-five was the year that brought Alain Locke’s special Harlem edition of Survey Graphic magazine, which became the anthology The New Negro. It was also the year when Gumby’s fellow bibliophile Arthur Schomburg enjoyed success for the exhibit of his collection at the 135th Street Branch library. Locke’s anthology solidified his role as spokesman of the new generation of black artists, scholars, and aesthetes; Schomburg’s exhibit led to the acquisition of his collection by the New York Public Library. Alexander Gumby’s tea parties to celebrate his scrapbooks may not seem to match the achievement of those other men. He would have read Locke’s grand pronouncements and known that Schomburg had made a small fortune. His retrospective clamoring for some distinction of his own (the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem) may reveal some self-consciousness in comparison to the other heady undertakings of the era. But it also shows Gumby’s solid commitment to his enterprise. He was master of the very small territory that was his domain.

  Gumby’s scrapbooks went on view for Negro History Week exhibitions in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. In the course of such travels, parts of his collection inevitably went missing. But mostly his activity happened outside of institutions. The production of scrapbooks is a private endeavor, rather different from the intellectual heroics of his contemporaries. It requires papers, scissors, and paste, as well as lots of time to pore over materials. It doesn’t happen on street corners or on barstools or at meetings. Crucially, the art of the scrapbook is an act of preservation rather than creation. It is accomplished through juxtaposition and accretion. Within the pages of his scrapbooks, Gumby assembled a mass of information on the history and achievements of black people that was something like that mass accumulating within the boundaries of Hurston’s Harlem City. He focused on the most exceptional and the most beautiful, rather than on the most wretched or the most “authentic.” And Gumby completely ignored the mundane.

  His perspective brings to mind the opening pronouncement in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which she describes the ambitions of women who forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Gumby’s dreams, what he remembered and what he failed to remember, reached their fullest expression through his rather feminine, peculiar occupation. He was building a diorama while his contemporaries engaged in the outward, upward, excavating, campaigning activities more typically associated with the race man. The interior nature of Gumby’s vocation and his private, idiosyncratic interaction with history is perhaps another reason why his memory is scarcely kept.

  But at least for a while, Gumby lived a charmed existence. Pictures of him inside the book studio (preserved in one scrapbook) show the handsome Gumby flashing an inviting smile as he sits with legs crossed, taking coffee in a dressing gown. His table is covered with a crisp tea cloth, and his coffee service looks like quality china—at least one source remembers it as Spode. Other pictures show different views of his residence: a long chamber with a low ceiling seems to be the room with the plate-glass window that I had seen from the street. His walls were lined with shelves specially fitted to house his oversized scrapbooks; various pictures hang above a piano.

  In April 1929, an article celebrating Gumby appeared in the “Who Is Who” column of the New York News. In December 1929, the New York Times published an article about him, “Negro History in Scrapbooks.” That same month, Gumby’s lover lost a fortune in the stock market crash and was laid low by a war ailment, which might be a polite term for nervous breakdown. Gumby’s activities would henceforth not be as well funded.

  Despite this misfortune, the first part of 1930 was full of activity at Gumby Book Studio. The studio gave a Sunday afternoon tea hosted by a debutante group called the Primrose Patch, at which Maurice Hunter, artist’s model, gave some interpretive poses; O. Richard Reid gave a talk on art; Theodore Hernandez and Thomas Corbett sang. The studio’s fifth anniversary was celebrated with another tea given by a Miss Willie Branch, in which she performed “The Gypsy Maid,” “The Maniac,” and “Hagar.” A report on the event declared, While much cannot be said for the vehicles which Miss Branch included in her repertoire, her interpretation of them was noteworthy. One could only wish that Miss Branch had chosen lighter and more pleasing themes instead of the morbid and melodramatic ones mentioned above.


  On the occasion of his anniversary, the New York News heralded Gumby’s efforts. Not only does Mr. Gumby seek out the great things that has [sic] been done, but also the seeds of things that will be great in the future. Thus his studio is a laboratory for the youth of the race, struggling in art, music, poetry or other creative expression.

  In 1930, Gumby also launched a publication to serve as a printed laboratory. Gumby’s Book Studio Quarterly: A Journal of Discussion appeared, bearing cover articles including “A Plea for Intolerance,” by George S. Schuyler, and “The African Origins of the Tango,” by Arthur Schomburg.

  But at the end of May 1930, a small notice appeared in the New York News:

  The Gumby Book Studio, 2144 5th Avenue, which has been the center of many brilliant musical and poetical recitals and exhibitions for the past five years has closed for the summer and alterations. It will re-open in the fall with a full line of current books, magazines, newspapers, music, rare books, pamphlets and manuscripts relating to the race. It will be the market place and barter mart of race art and letters for the literati of America.

  This was a hopeful program for the future. In reality, according to his own memoirs, after his friend’s illness Gumby had to sell some of his rare editions in order to keep the studio going. When he closed for the summer and alterations, he put his belongings in storage.

  This closing of the studio began a tragic chapter. The loss of my Studio and the fact that I was overworked combined to send me to the hospital I remained there for four years. Near the beginning of his convalescence, in 1931, a benefit was held at the Renaissance Ballroom. The organizing committee was led by the artist Augusta Savage and included Bessye J. Bearden (mother of the artist Romare), the society columnist Geraldyn Dismond, and actress Rose McClendon, among others. An advertisement for the benefit listed a number of prominent patrons sponsoring the event, including Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Arthur Schomburg, and Bill Robinson. Entertainment was furnished by principals of the Cotton Club Revue and Noble Sissle among other Harlem Night Club Stars. Gumby himself was not well enough to attend, but a page in his scrapbook preserves items announcing the event—including a scrawled message sent by a friend as she prepared for the party. It is full of a socialite’s breathless flutter: Dear Gumby, Just to say hello and that I’m thinking of you, we are expecting a great affair tonight we shall all be thinking of you—everything is working fine, hope you can read this I’m so excited. Love, Alta.

  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; speci
al 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?