extend boundaries over an increasingly diverse set of neighbors but rather the ability to make this extension on terms of equality.
Each case, the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jones and Allen’s Narrative, inverts audience expectations to reveal an ethics of neighborhood that foregrounds the citizen’s choice to be the good neighbor. This interpretation of the parable would not have been lost on those among Narrative’s readers familiar with popular biblical commentaries. A similar exegesis of neighborliness, if not necessarily applied to black people, appeared in William Burkitt’s Expository Notes (1789). For Burkitt, Luke 10:29–37 positions “real charity [as] an active operative thing given to the distressed, nor in compassionate beholding of them, nor in a pitiful mourning over them, but in positive acts of kindness towards them. The Samaritan here is an example of a real and thorough charity.”120 Burkitt’s emphasis on “real” and “positive acts” and his contrast to “compassionate beholding” and “pitiful mourning” reappear throughout Narrative in references to black citizens’ “real sensibility”: “Our services were the production of real sensibility;—we sought not fee nor reward, until the disorder rendered our labour so arduous that we were not adequate to the services we had assumed” they sought to “be useful,” and as a result, black citizens demonstrated “more humanity, more real sensibility” than their white counterparts.121 It suggests a degree of equality lacking in models of disinterested benevolence. This inversion moves beyond setting black virtue against white inhumanity toward redefining what it means to be a citizen or, in the parable’s terms, a neighbor.
Narrative answers Carey and the larger culture’s implicit query—who is my fellow citizen, who is the good neighbor—by reproducing some of Account’s key scenes from the perspective of people of a caste—“servant,” “negro,” “foreigner”—neglected in Carey’s Account. Through this staging, Narrative suggests that good citizens have a duty “to do all the good” they can toward “suffering fellow mortals,”122 that is, to approach others as equals not simply out of a desire not to offend but rather out of a position of proactive goodwill. Such contact, “conducted in a mode of good will” across social boundaries (between Samaritans and Jews, free African and white citizens, strangers, etc.), as Samuel R. Delany would later explain, “is the locus of democracy as visible social drama,” providing “the lymphatic system of a democratic metropolis.”123 In other words, Jones and Allen realized that this vision of and action toward others as neighbors (Narrative’s real sensibility) could create horizontal structures and day-to-day engagements more conducive to egalitarian citizenship than could contemporary notions of tiered civic republicanism.
The neighborly citizen understands that benevolence means more than appearing virtuous; it means mutual aid: collective action against needs that threaten individual competence, in the recognition that a threat to the individual is, ultimately, a threat to all. In the context of the fever, the implication of mutual aid in “suffering fellow mortals” should not be overlooked. Jones and Allen’s multiple references to those in need as “fellow mortals,” rather than distinguishing between themselves and the people they helped (as in Carey’s repeated “respectable” or “benevolent” citizens), suggest a sense of moral equality in the contingency of mortality and the “frailty of human nature,” an acknowledgment that circumstance is the only difference between those in present need and those currently able to meet that need.124 Everyone was susceptible to the fever—Gray dies of the fever and Allen and Alexander Hamilton (who lived just a few houses down from Allen) contract the fever but recover—making death or the threat of death the great equalizer and making the shared vulnerability much more visceral.125 If the fever itself offers an immediate social equalizer, the notion that no one can “survive on self-interested negotiation alone,” as Daniel Vickers posits of the early national backcountry context, suggests a more fundamental codependence and equality.126 This recognition of fellow mortality, of a shared condition, between individuals presupposes and affirms each individual as having equal moral worth regardless of prior social, political, or economic status. In this sense, Jones and Allen’s structure invokes less the Leviticus admonition to offer hospitality to strangers, as strangers, and more an ethos intended to produce ongoing relations of neighborhood.127
Neighborly citizenship happens in the day-to-day interactions between individuals, not as commercial agents but rather as members of a community collectively engaged in being “useful” to each other and sharing responsibility for their mutual well-being. Narrative illustrates this every-dayness through an “elderly black woman” who asks simply for “a dinner master on a cold winter’s day” as she “went from place to place rendering every service in her power without an eye to reward.”128 The kind of exchange represented in the woman’s movements across the city creates neighborhood rather than a market: a link between neighbors based on a “mutual relation,” as Jonathan Edwards explained some fifty years earlier, “equally predicable of both those between whom there is such a relation.”129 If we take seriously Narrative’s distinction between the woman’s request for dinner and her not having “an eye to reward,” the exchange—meeting a present need in return for security against a future need—reworks notions of obligation subtending gradual emancipation and reproduces the framework of societies like the FAS in which members contributed to a general fund against the needs of its collective membership or others. The poor black woman makes an informal contribution to the collective and acknowledges her mutual dependence with those to whom she makes her contribution in the same move. She did not owe white Philadelphians’ service but rather offered it freely.130 In so doing, she made a “master” into a neighbor. And while the woman’s example comes from a moment of extreme duress, like the Samaritan’s narrative, her actions in the crisis yield lessons for the postfever world.
Such a practice could serve as a bulwark against the atomizing market exchanges dominating the opening pages of Carey’s Account and the echoes of the slave market that haunt Jones and Allen’s Narrative. The elderly woman understands that while the “reward” may not be immediate or public, so long as the overall community follows the ethic of neighborliness, everyone benefits. This neighborliness corresponds with Thomas Paine’s figure of society as a “great chain of connection” created by “the mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other.”131 Such a dynamic form of association suggests a turn from the capitalist citizenship proffered by Carey to something approximating the classical republican notion of civic duty—recognition that being a good neighbor-citizen means sharing responsibility for the community’s well-being. Yet, it also builds on a late eighteenth-century sense of democratic voluntarism and equality that shrinks the scope of neighborliness from a distant “common good” and abstract humanity to everyday concrete individual relations.132 It parallels the openness of late eighteenth-century politeness and sociability but focused less on their middle-class or performative valences and more on the material usefulness of such gestures.
By reading Narrative through the parable’s familiar formula, then, we see real sensibility as a mode of neighborly citizenship, the good neighbor-citizen producing neighborhood through an immanent impulse not only to identify with the stranger but also to approach the stranger as a neighbor, as a fellow mortal of equal moral worth in a mutually dependent community.133 This account of black citizens during the fever not only shows the weakness of social status as an indicator of civic virtue but also offers neighborliness as a citizenship practice that creates horizontal relationships between citizens where civic republicanism would suggest hierarchy and allow abandonment. In this framework, the poor black man’s labor deserves as much “credit” as Girard’s, or rather, their efforts during the fever represent a common, neighborly citizenship that the white Philadelphians in Narrative’s vignette do not practice.
Narrative’s rhetorical play and shift to neighborliness suggest that Jones and Allen were aware of how unstable appeals to black virtue could be, how easily black virtue could be explained away
