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Afterword
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
134 afterword it is possible to trace Samuel Johnson’s descendants into the early twenty-first century. I began that quest in an effort to find living descendants, with the hope that they might share some family stories that would help round out the document-based narrative . No such luck, although somewhere out there is a Ulysses P. Malvan, Samuel Johnson’s great-great-great-great-grandson, and if he would like to contact me, I would be over the moon. Although unable to get in touch with living descendants, I still found the hunt for them worthwhile. Thanks to the miracle of searchable Census and other records through Ancestry.com, I was able to gather a good deal of information. What I learned helped put Samuel Johnson’s story in context and also suggested the persistence of a set of Johnson-Malvin-Elkins family values. Among those values is a strong commitment to family. Samuel Johnson would have been happy to know that his grandchildren kept close ties with one another after both Lucy and Sandy Elkins died.The Census takers usually found at least two of them together in the same house in the 1870s, 1880s, and 180s. In that era Lucy and Sandy’s sons Jasper and Jerome owned a successful blacksmithing and wheelwright business on L Street in Washington, and it appears that Jerome taught his nephew the trade, for the nephew later became a wheelwright too. The next generation — Lucy and Sandy’s grandchildren, Samuel Johnson’s great-grandchildren—seem to have had a harder time of things. The apparent downturn in the family’s fortunes coincided with the nadir of American race relations around afterword 135 the turn of the twentieth century. Many of Thomas Thornton Withers Malvin’s children died in their infancy or youth, and a good number of that generation who survived had few or no children of their own. All three of Robina Elkins Cossey’s Ohiobased children were childless into their forties (based on the latest Census records available). The jobs that Johnson’s descendants held in the 110s, 120s, and 130s put them in the lower or middle class: waitstaff like their great-grandfather, a fireman at the gasworks, a secretary, a couple of clerks, a seamstress. Some of them had moved into the ranks of white-collar workers, but they all rented rather than owned the homes in which they lived, and often took in boarders to make ends meet or were themselves boarders in others’ houses.Their lives were obscure, and their fates difficult to uncover. They did not form ties with important local elites, and they did not come to the attention of white patrons. One exception was Jasper’s musician son, William C. Elkins, who along with his brothers Hanson and Henry headed to New York in the early twentieth century. They did not make it big, but William C. Elkins got close. He apparently supported himself as a working musician, and contributed in an important way to the birth of African American musical theater. (He too, however, did not own his home and his wife took in boarders.) Elkins performed in 103 in the show In Dahomey, which was “the first fulllength musical written and performed by blacks to be booked into a Broadway house.” Bert Williams and George Walker, the two leading African American performers in New York, produced and starred in the show in an effort to take control of the on-stage image of black people at a time when blackface minstrelsy was common. In Dahomey was a hit, and Williams and Walker chose Elkins to direct the choral music for their next show, Abyssinia, in 106. William C. Elkins continued to perform and direct music for thirty years. Elkins’s biggest contribution to American music and performance history came with the formation of the Elkins-Payne [44.202.90.91] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:34 GMT) 136 afterword Jubilee Singers, who sang African American religious music, an early form of gospel, and made a number of recordings in the 120s. Listening to the Elkins-Payne Jubilee Singers on those old recordings, one senses that they, like other groups of that type, performed for white as well as black audiences. Jubilee singing started as a way to popularize black musical styles among white people and to raise money for Fisk University, the home base of the first jubilee...