The Swann Galleries' auction of African-Americana, which takes place in New York in February each year, is a marketplace for the printed artefacts generated by over two hundred years of black history. There are film posters, books, album covers; further back, bills of sale for slaves. This year's auction included a brochure from a Charleston estate sale of 1859, offering '229 Rice Field Negroes, An Uncommonly Prime and Orderly Gang'. From the 1830s came a silk handkerchief, an Abolitionist keepsake from England, with a picturesque and sentimental vignette of a black mother rocking her baby under a palm-tree; the inscription is 'Negro woman who sitteth pining in captivity'. In a 19th-century oil on canvas, a young half-clad black man gazes pensively out of the frame, towards some distant shore of his imagination. The portrayal is described as 'respectful', is dated 1823 and is perhaps the work of a black artist: an unidentified person from the dusty past, still awaiting the attention of scholars who will offer him a grand entrance into history.

LRB 8 August 2002 | PDF Download