Window Into Time : Jackie Napoleon Wilson’s collection of 19th-Century photos shows facets of black life too long ignored.
I know this truth to be self-evident:
The gentle face, the dewy eyes, the beatific presence of the unnamed madonna among the rare 19th-Century photos in the collection of Jackie Napoleon Wilson belong to my grandma Hattie; to someone’s Aunt Betty; to someone else’s mother, May.
This tintype, circa 1860, is believed to be the earliest existing image of a married African-American mother with her sleeping child. What it is not is “idealized.”
Critics of popular culture often describe as idealized depictions of African-Americans that do not conform to stereotypes--as in “The Cosby Show” or in “To Sleep With Anger,” an underrated film that captured everyday reality down to the morning light on a mahogany dresser much like the one my grandmother polished weekly with lemon oil.
The neighborhoods and domestic settings in many of Spike Lee’s films also embody the essence of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the life behind the veil,” which separates the actuality of black life from perceptions of it. So too do these rare glimpses of African-American lives from the collection of Wilson, a 46-year-old attorney and amateur painter.
It is a collection that includes the earliest forms of photography, dating from the 1830s, when a camera allowed light to etch an image on a chemically treated sheet of copper, iron or glass. Each image was one of a kind, with no negative. And yet these ephemera survive six score and 10 years later.
An image that old, taken from its gilt-edged frame and embossed leather case, appears reproduced and projected on a wall in Wilson’s museum-like parlor: “Civil War Soldier and Companion.”
This tintype of a black infantryman and a lovely young black woman, circa 1862, “is highly unusual, no matter what the race. It was rare to see soldiers with a wife or woman,” explains Wilson, who has amassed hundreds of these images in 15 years, mainly through private transactions now that he has exhausted the nation’s antique stores.
Moving from the slide projector to the enlarged tintype, he gently strokes the image on the wall and elaborates: “Most photos of Civil War soldiers were taken at encampments by itinerant photographers, although this one was taken in a studio, probably in the North.”
Perhaps he was a soldier on leave, Wilson muses in a barely audible voice. Perhaps, gauging the quality of tenderness between the couple, she is his sister: “She is very well dressed--perhaps a little overdressed.
“She might have borrowed that dress,” he says suddenly with force, and imagines her running to a friend to ask the loan of the perfect outfit for an occasion she instinctively knows will be held for posterity. “Ah,” he finally whispers, “who knows?”
Wilson flashes a new image on the wall--one of an antebellum Southern family that “Gone With the Wind” never portrayed. “This could be all one biological family,” he asserts, pointing out the white and “mulatto-looking” children in an ambrotype titled “Group Portrait in a Kitchen Garden.”
It seems, he says, “that this was not meant for display, but possibly as a photo of endearment for the master. His wife is not in the picture. When you look closely at an enlargement of this, there is a striking similarity in the features between the black and white children. . . . You know, these masters forced black women.”
In contrast to such real-life drama is the equally real, but less familiar, image of a well-to-do African-American couple and their extended family in “Wedding Scene.” This tintype, taken in the North before the Civil War, “has an English feel about it. We could not help but be influenced by them,” says Wilson. “Look at the three dogs in the picture; that was a sign of some wealth. And they are perfectly still--you could tell these were dogs acclimated to the family. They look like Brittany spaniels.
“I used to show dogs,” he adds in a hushed but excited voice, then excuses himself, heading for the kitchen. He does not entertain often and admits to being “a bit of a recluse.” But he is a gracious host, preparing tea and serving cake--delighted at the attention his collection is beginning to receive.
Moving around his large old house filled with Americana of all sorts--American Indian art; Civil War memorabilia; oil canvases of his own work; a hodgepodge of other people’s paintings, and the ubiquitous African-American images--he is light on his feet, his slight frame clad in the vintage clothing that is his trademark. Such taste in clothes is often attributed to eccentricity when one is rich; it is a necessity when one is poor.
“My mother had 11 children,” says Wilson, named for his uncle, a world welterweight boxing champion in the 1940s. His father gave him the middle name Napoleon, and that was about the extent of his contribution. He deserted the family when Wilson was 4.
“Over a five-year period, we lived in a storefront, an attic and a basement,” Wilson says. And from time to time, “my mother would give me a quarter and send me to secondhand stores to buy a pair of shoes”--probably stirring his passion for collecting old things.
“I would observe the entire store, see these old things of quality,” he says. “I never had toys, but I would look at the old toys in the store--dolls with black outfits on. They were probably antique, at least to my mind’s eye. I could not purchase them because the prices were high--a dollar, which was a lot of money.”
Eventually, “going into secondhand stores gave me a sense of relief from”--he pauses--”things that were normal.”
Normal for him was the Army, which drafted him in 1966; working on the assembly line at the Chrysler factory in Detroit; then college and law school using his GI benefits.
“I thought lawyers were intellectuals,” Wilson says. “I thought they exuded justice.” Now, “I don’t believe so.” His legal work is devoted to representing indigents in Detroit’s traffic court.
The past is a welcome relief from that. Still, Wilson remained quiet about his finds for years, seeming content to know that he had rescued these images of long-dead black men, women and children from oblivion. Their faces hung in his dimly lit parlor, sat in tiny burnished metal frames on his mantle or lay in the stillness of a bank safety deposit box.
He allowed several photographs to be displayed at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1983, but some people dismissed them as “not important.” Some publishers, approached about a book on the collection, said no one would be interested in pictures of unknown, insignificant blacks.
Actually, these photos “are a window into time,” Wilson counters. Suddenly animated, he mentions that a representative of the Smithsonian Institution is coming to examine the collection for a possible exhibition in Washington.
“Remarkable” is how Ellen Sharp, curator of graphics for the Detroit Institute of Art, describes Wilson’s collection. The institute possesses no 19th-Century photographs of blacks; “people didn’t value” such pictures and didn’t save them, she says.
In contrast, New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Studies has about 20,000 images of 19th-Century African-Americans. But Deborah Willis, the Schomburg’s former curator of photography and prints, calls Wilson’s collection strong and intelligent.
“Any images that survive that are positive are distinctive,” says Willis, now collections coordinator for the Smithsonian’s planned national African-American museum. “Not those that show Negroes as alligator bait, as stereotypically lazy, but those that give a positive portrait of the normalcy of life.”
Even when examining relatively benign images of blacks--for instance, “I’ve come across a lot of collections of entertainers,” she says--”they lose the social and political life of our community. Wilson has an intelligent way of collecting. He was looking for, and found in the portraits, the broad spectrum of African-American life.”
And despite the abundance of black images in mainstream American culture today, normalcy continues to be a revolutionary concept when depicting blacks. The distortions persist because the culture of racism long ago became an autonomous force in America, separate from its economic origins as a rationalization for slavery. Visual propaganda in the service of white tribalism has been one of its mainstays.
At times, for example, significant efforts were made to produce degrading images of blacks that served racist propaganda, often using retouched cut-and-paste compositions or staged photos. An infamous example of the latter is on display, in full historical context, at the DuSable Museum in Chicago: the 1897 “Honey Does Yo Lub Yo Man,” purporting to depict a black wedding.
In contrast to the real thing--Wilson’s antebellum wedding-scene portrait--this impostor shows a bedraggled-looking old black man in a worn overcoat, dirty jeans and muddy boots presiding over the wedding ceremony. The bride wears a soiled dress, while the groom is old enough to be her father and appears drunk. Signs on the wall proclaim: “De Lawd Lub De Churfel Giver” and “Lebe Yo Razzer at De Do.”
Compared to the stereotype, all we know of Wilson’s “realtype” is that it was taken “up north” somewhere by an anonymous photographer. Searching for truths obscured by the systematic distortion of the black experience has made the notion of invisibility a mantra in African-American culture (“Nobody Knows My Name”; “The Man Who Cried, ‘I Am’ ”; “Invisible Man”). Indeed, the “veil” that DuBois described at the start of this century still hangs heavily, tougher than the Iron Curtain.
But an America unveiled puts the lie to the distortions and reveals a fabric of complex relationships. Wilson sounds this theme as he projects the image of a Civil War-era tintype on his parlor wall: a full company of Union soldiers with a runaway slave boy.
“This picture shows that there were those who were willing to fight for our liberation. They knew us to be chattels who ought to be let go,” he says. “People who had a conscience knew slavery to be a stain on the nation that would visit them again.”
Of course, there’s still a lot of denial about the brutality and consequence of slavery in America and, Wilson asserts, “that’s why there are not a tremendous number of photographs of slaves.”
It would be a mistake not to connect the dots when one looks at these images, to fail to see where blood, culture, political history--frequently all three--tie the subjects of these pictures to every other American.
And the connections are not merely at the margins: What is called African-American is a central theme in the shared American identity.
One is reminded of the recent evidence strengthening the claim that the voice of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” was inspired by a 10-year-old African-American boy named Jimmy.
“This shows a real black root in a white consciousness,” one literary scholar claimed. The actor Hal Holbrook, who for 38 years has played Twain, told one interviewer he had sensed a black strain in Huck’s voice but never knew for sure.
“It’s almost like the truth about something is so clear,” he said, “that you look right through it.”
Perhaps, among Wilson’s photos, one can find a face to put to that “voice” and the true faces of those that nurtured it.
