Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American

This remarkable and memorable book recounts a very personal spiritual quest - lasting several decades - to discover, intuit and imagine the life of an African American intellectual (Mr Gilbert) who lived mostly in New England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book's interest is both historical and character-based; since it is partly factual and researched, and partly novelistic and invented. The writing is beautiful: Mitchell is one of the best prose stylists around. I have never come across anything quite like this book - it stays in the mind. It seems to have the qualities of a possible cult classic.

Robert A. Gilbert (1870-1942) was probably the first African-American landscape photographer. Author John Hanson Mitchell sets out to prove this fact after finding thousands of glass plates initially attributed to William Brewster (1851-1919) , the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. For it turns out that Brewster had a "factotum" -- Mr. Gilbert, an employee who accompanied him on photographic excursions throughout New England, and who actually took the photos and developed the images. The search for Mr. Gilbert begins. Several interlocking histories emerge: Mr. Gilbert's life, William Brewster's life, the origins of the Audubon Society, the aristocratic circles of the Boston Brahmins, and the lifestyles of the Southern blacks who migrated north after the Civil War. Each chapter opens with one of Gilbert's b & w photos, giving us just a taste of his work. What a teaser! We want to see them ALL! Hopefully, MassAudubon will someday hold a showing of more of these wonderful bucolic scenes from the beginning of the last century. Another underlying story here is the relationship of the researcher with his subject. Mitchell is the kind of investigator who knows that the answers he wants cannot be provided by the Internet or through interlibrary loan. Sometimes you just have GO and ASK. He may be a soft-spoken observer, but he has no qualms about going anywhere, doing anything, and talking to anybody who may be able to provide clues in his quest for the truth. His own re-creations of Mr. Gilbert's life take him from the valleys of western Virginia to the mountains of southern New Hampshire, from the streets of Boston to Paris. He watches, he listens, he analyzes. And he gets lucky in meeting a few folks who either knew Mr. Gilbert or at least knew someone who did. This book provides a great escape into another life in another time. It's also noteworthy in its focus on an average African-American man who wasn't famous in his day, but did good work and should be given credit for it.