but no slave-son could ever run a printing establishment of any worth. This broad-nosed, thick-lipped devil does walk too tall, they concluded.
Although the Platen press did sometimes find itself employed when negroes from the dry goods store, the boarding house or the masons did eagerly request their small handbills printed by Messrs Kinsman above all other, it was the volume work from those wealthy white men who owned the wharves, the warehouses, the ships and the plantations that the teeth of his presses wished to bite upon.
So Thomas Kinsman attended St Peter’s Church upon Sundays. There those white men, outraged, bemoaning and under duress did have to greet him within a begrudging Christian fellowship. And during the long-long sermons Thomas sketched their faces and wrote their names secretly within a little book as he offered up a prayer to his creator God; ‘One,’ it began, ‘Let just one of these white men of business come with good work—just one—and I will see that the others follow.’
And Thomas will grin to tell you that the Lord then worked in a mysterious way. For, five weeks later, upon a rainy Friday morning, Isaac Cecil Levy, a Jew who had never once attended the church, entered in upon Thomas’s office. He required, he said, a press for the first edition of a newspaper he was to publish which was to be called The Trelawney Mercury.
And the compositors clicked, the readers read, and the pulling of the presses began. For the next edition Thomas Kinsman proposed to Isaac Levy, that they might print a supplement containing eight extra pages, on which people could pay to place their advertisements. And so The Trelawney Mercury and Advertiser was born. And, Thomas will joy to tell you—perhaps with the aid of a column of neat figures—that very profitable did it prove.
Soon newspapers, almanacs, legal blanks, auction catalogues, handbills—official printing of all sorts—flowed in and out of the print office of Messrs Kinsman and Co. upon Water Street. His workers even started a club for their mutual improvement, for which Thomas supplied the books, drawing materials, papers and candles. It met at sundown, cost a half-penny to join, with a farthing fine for any who strolled in so late that, ‘Cha, them miss the whole t’ing again.’
With six men compositing, two apprentices, eight at press, five readers, an overseer and clerk in the office, within two years Thomas was required to find bigger premises on which to hang his sign!
So here we have Thomas Kinsman—a gentleman, a printer of high repute, a wealthy black man of commerce who wears shiny shoes and a scarlet tie. When called to do his duty within a jury of the court, as was required of someone of his standing, he sat in quiet fury listening to one of the most feeble, unworthy and unjust cases—where a starving person was to be punished for trying to feed themselves with the food that lives abundant about them—whilst staring upon the most pitiable, begrimed and wretched negro woman he had ever beheld. When, all at once, he began to recall a long-ago essay written by Jane Kinsman concerning a July. A July of Amity. July, once a house servant upon the sugar plantation of Amity. July, a slave girl. July, a slave girl who abandoned her baby to a stone outside a Baptist manse. July! July! And it was then that Thomas Kinsman raised himself slowly from out his seat.
But of course Thomas Kinsman said nothing of any of this on that day that he first stood before his mama. He just tipped his hat and demanded to take July home so he might see her fed.
And that, reader, is what he did.
When first July beheld the house upon King Street where Thomas Kinsman did reside, she tried to run from that black man in a scarlet tie. She believed his charity to be a trick. He desired a servant to scurry and run. One morsel of meat within her mouth and for ever a broom held in her hand. No, no, no, she would never serve again. But the room he led her into was not the kitchen, nor the outhouse, but a withdrawing room that was lavishly lined with books; from the ceiling to the floor, the solemn hues of leather-bound volumes stamped with gold rippled along every wall of that place. He did not offer her some wobbling broken-down wooden chair upon which to sit, but a fancy padded seat with a