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.But those images should also in-clude a depiction of Hewlett on stage, under the influence oflaughing gas, of his surreptitious slipping of the watch into hispocket at the inquest, of his court appearances and imprisonment,the assemblage ending with Hewlett on stage in Port of Spain, in-corporating an English rendition of the Marseillaise into hisacting out of the role of Othello.Yet the actor has an at oncelarger and more symbolic burden to bear.If the successes of theblack theater company and of Hewlett in the 1820s were part ofthe cultural convulsion that so electrified black New York as thehated institution of slavery wound down, a sign of alternative pos-sibilities for relations between the races, then the closing down ofthe company and the later decline of Hewlett also signaled theeclipse of those possibilities as nervous whites, recoiling from therealities of black freedom, preferred disenfranchisement, segrega-tion, riot, and minstrelsy.Not until the Harlem Renaissance of acentury later would a similar level of attention be paid to AfricanNew Yorker actors, indeed to African New Yorker life.In the end,then, and for all the promise of his early years on stage in NewYork, and the dignity of his decline, Hewlett s failure is depress-ingly familiar.But then this is a story of black New York, and talesof dreams deferred do not have happy endings. NOTESINTRODUCTION1.Ralph Ellison, The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The AmericanArtist and His Audience, in John F.Callahan, ed., The Collected Essays ofRalph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), pp.515 19.2.As is well known, in the 1990s the great playwright August Wilsondenounced colorblind casting.See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The ChitlinCircuit, in Harry J.Elam, Jr., and David Krasner eds, African AmericanPerformance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), pp.132 48.New York Times, June 3, 1999.3.James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum,1968 [orig.1930]), p.80.4.Everyone working in New York theater history is indebted toGeorge Odell s remarkable multivolume compilation of sources.Histhird volume includes many of the National Advocate references to theblack company.See George C.D.Odell, Annals of the New York Stage.Vol.3, 1821 1834 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), pp.3437, 70 71, 224, 228, 293, 536, and 594.As well, the account, based onWriters Project material but not published until much later, in RoiOttley and William Weatherby, The Negro in New York: An Informal So-cial History, 1626 1940 (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp.72 73, seemsto be the basis for the common mistake of dating the theater s end at1829.Basing their research mostly on the material in Odell, several writ-ers concerned with black theater have given brief versions of this earlytheatrical endeavor.See Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Al-dridge: The Negro Tragedian (Washington D.C.: Howard University Press,1993 [orig.pub.1958]), pp.28 47; Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A 228 NOTE TO PAGE 5History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachu-setts Press, 1984), pp.11 16; Samuel A.Hay, African American Theatre(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.5 14, 16 17, 13638.See also William Over, New York s African Theatre: The Vicissi-tudes of the Black Actor, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 3(1979): 7 14; Jonathan Dewberry, The African Grove Theatre andCompany, Black American Literature Forum, 16 (1982): 128 31.Even asoutstanding an example of what is possible in theater history, The Cam-bridge History of American Theatre, a volume of almost 500 pages of text,deals with the black actors in a few dozen words.See Don B.Wilmethand Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre.Vol 1, Beginnings to 1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).For brief mentions of the black actors in recent African American histo-ries see, for example, Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: AfricanAmericans in New York & East Jersey, 1613 1863 (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1999), pp.197 98; James Oliver Horton andLois E.Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest AmongNorthern Free Blacks, 1700 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press,1997), pp.160 61 and 164.And in recent New York histories, see Paul A.Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 17631834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), pp.15657; Anthony Gronowicz, Race & Class Politics in New York City before theCivil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp.89 91;Edwin G.Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York Cityto 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.487 88.Morerecently, three very well researched studies have been completed.SeeMarvin Edward McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Be-have at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentleman of Colour:A History of New York s African Grove/African Theatre (Ph.D.diss.,Northwestern University, 1997) and George A.Thompson Jr., A Docu-mentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni-versity Press, 1998).George Thompson has been an indefatigable re-searcher and has managed to dig up and publish all manner of materialthat was hitherto completely unknown.Without Thompson s research, Iwould still have published this book, but, particularly in the post-1835material, it would have looked rather different.And as this book was be-ing sent off to the publisher another well-researched article was pub-lished: Michael Warner with Natasha Hurley, Luis Iglesias, Sonia DiLoreto, Jeffrey Scraba, and Sandra Young, A Soliloquy Lately Spoken atthe African Theatre: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City,1821, American Literature, 73 (2001): 1 46.Lastly, several years ago NOTES TO PAGES 7 17 229Carlyle Brown wrote a play about the African Company.See CarlyleBrown, The African Company Presents Richard III (New York: DramatistsPlay Service Inc., 1994).1.THE END OF SLAVERY1.The Sun, August 26, 1834.2.New York American, Oct.1, 1827.3.New-York Herald, March 29, 1815.On voting restrictions, see Al-exander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy inAmerica (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp.54 60.4.New York American, Feb.25, 1826.For how important it was forrunaway slaves trying to pass as free to tell a story well, see DavidWaldstreicher, Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture,and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth Century Mid-Atlantic, William and Mary Quarterly, 56 (1999): 243 72
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