"A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement": Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb

It was during this time that Webb had a brief relationship with The New Era, which billed itself as "a Colored American National Journal" and began publication in January of 1870 under editor J. Stella Martin (Bullock 53). Webb's contributions to the paper--two novellas ("Two Wolves and a Lamb" and "Marvin Hayle"), three articles on racial prejudice, and two poems--were all published between January and April of 1870. The last installment of "Marvin Hayle," which appeared in the April 21 issue, was his final publication in the newspaper, which corresponding editor Frederick Douglass took over later in 1870 and renamed the New National Era. The relative synchronicity of Webb's withdrawal from The New Era and Douglass's greatly expanded role with the paper should give us some pause, especially when we note that Douglass's coverage of Mary Webb's readings was amazingly scant when compared with that in other abolitionist periodicals and that he never seems to have mentioned The Garies. Hopefully, further researc h will uncover the relationship--or lack thereof--between Webb and Douglass.

Of Webb's New Era work, the novellas have received the most critical attention. However, that fairly scant attention has generally taken the form of cursory dismissals, in part because both novellas deal with upper-class white life in London, Paris, and Cannes and have no significant Black characters, and in part because, as Phillip Lapsansky notes of critics of The Garies, contemporary critics of the novellas confuse Webb's "acceptance of American middle class values with the lack of black identity and culture" (29). [16] But, as Reid-Pharr has begun to demonstrate, the positioning of a specific kind of Black nationalist project in The Caries within the schema of the

American middle class is a political gesture of great import; in many ways, it says, as Douglass did to Stowe, "the truth is ... we are here, and here we are likely to remain" ("Letter to Mrs. Stowe"). Rather than, as pioneering researcher Arthur Davis contends, suggesting an "escape" from the racism around him "through travel and writing romantic high society stories" (29), Webb's placement of two novellas of cultured, high-society, white European life in a paper boldly subtitled "a Colored American National Journal" shows that a Black writer and Black readers can claim these subjects while--and, indeed, as part of--developing a Black consciousness. This certainly seems to be the way in which the editors of the New Era saw the novellas, for they boldly proclaimed in their first issue that they would feature "a well-written ORIGINAL TALE, of considerable interest, by Frank J. Webb, Esq., a colored man, author of the somewhat famous book entitled 'The Garies,' published in London in 1858, with prefaces by Lord Brougham and Mrs. Stowe, and extensively read in England and this country" (3).

Taken in dialogue with one of Webb's New Era poems, "None Spoke a Single Word to Me," which details the speaker's lonely wanderings "midst the throng" of "men and matrons" (2) and, specifically, as Reid-Pharr notes, the denial of "the sign that would mark inclusion into this scene of bliss: 'None spoke a single word to me'" (xvi), the novellas' white focus seems even more clearly radical. As Reid-Pharr notes, this poem calls for an integrated public sphere, even as it and much of Webb's other work call for an emergent, Black nationalist private sphere.