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

Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life Of An African American.

by John Hanson Mitchell Shoemaker & Hoard, February 2005 $26, ISBN 1-593-76026-4

"... Positive obsession. Using it is like aiming carefully in archery," Octavia Butler once wrote. Her words apply well to this well-aimed work, the result of nearly three decades' research by the author into the life of one of "history's supporting cast," an African American named Robert Alexander Gilbert, who lived from the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries.

Mitchell was researching another book in the mid-1970s when he stumbled upon a photo of Gilbert among 2,000 antique glass plate negatives stored at an old estate. He first assumed that the photos, mainly of birds and landscapes, were the work of William Brewster, a wealthy white Bostonian and renowned ornithologist. A tip soon led Mitchell to believe the photos were really the work of Brewster's servant, Gilbert, and the author began his long quest to expose the black man's life.

The book spans generations and continents. Along the way, we learn about Gilbert the photographer, naturalist, curator, musician, world traveler, gourmet cook, estate manager, entrepreneur, family man, churchgoer and upper middle-class resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photography is the book's main motif, and it works beautifully, capturing the author's passionate yearning to break through the surface of these black-and-white images and learn more about his subject and the world he lived in. The author's keen, honest, sometimes humorous observations, delivered with a graceful, lyrical style, show just how valuable an outsider's perspective can be.

Mitchell, editor of the Massachusetts Audubon Society's journal, Sanctuary, wanders far afield sometimes in recounting his conversations with some odd birds. But his explorations also provide cameos in Gilbert's story by characters such as James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, Countee Cullen, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and others--an impressive supporting cast itself.

Eric Addison is managing editor of US Black Engineer & Information Technology.