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 or transmuted into criminality in the print public. As much as Narrative at times works through this politics, the necessity of its existence also speaks to this politics’ failures. Yet, it was still a tool that they’d leverage even as they critiqued the capriciousness of their intended audience and virtue’s conceptual instability. By characterizing black relief efforts as economic exchange, Carey ensured that readers would interpret their work as private and self-serving instead of political and coming from a concern for the common good. This is why attending to the formal affordances of the parable of the Good Samaritan is crucial.134 The parable shifted fundamentally the meaning of neighborliness and community. It refuses to function on the terms that the lawyer brought to the conversation—how others can signal to the individual their membership in a preconstituted community. By reframing their efforts as representing the essence of the law and as a process of community building, Jones and Allen also reframe black Philadelphians as political subjects practicing citizenship.
As we have seen in this section, Narrative maps a similar trajectory. In Narrative’s first act, Jones and Allen described black Philadelphians eschewing the contracts they (Jones and Allen) negotiated on their behalf with Clarkson and the city to make their own contracts. Disagree with the terms, Jones, Allen, and Clarkson (and Carey) might, but they had a right to work on terms closer to fair market value, as did their white counterparts. When Narrative shifts registers to acts of neighborliness, it similarly shows black Philadelphians setting their own terms. In these cases, the terms appear as refusals to frame their efforts as purely economic transactions—the poor black man refuses the gentleman’s money and the black woman refuses the proffered “reward.” At the same time, the black woman also establishes a wider ranging social compact: I do not perform this act as a laborer seeking wages but rather as an equal member of a community in which mutual dependence and responsiveness is the guiding ethic. I render aid to you today recognizing that you will render aid to me later.135 Here, as elsewhere, Narrative does not rely on any single strategy but rather deploys multiple strategies that black theorizers will take up and revise well into the nineteenth century. These two moments offer images of black virtue and critiques of white avarice that ultimately suggest that virtue politics was never sufficient, not just because white Americans would continually misread black public acts but also because a polity based on this kind of performative citizenship would always be insubstantial, not “real.”
Experiments in Structural Neighborliness
In the preceding sections, I have contrasted the civic and narrative schematics of Carey’s Account and Jones and Allen’s Narrative to outline an ethics of neighborliness, a civic ethos animated by a sensibility made material or “real” through concrete actions. The neighborly focus on being useful to others, on being a good neighbor rather than finding the good neighbor, creates bonds between citizens independent of other forms of association—familial, racial, economic, national, and so on. While, as I have suggested, neighborliness ultimately manifests in concrete actions between individuals, its logics have implications for how civic institutions take shape. Neighborly practices ultimately produce neighborly institutions; the ethos and actions that characterize the neighborly citizen also characterize the neighborly state.
Jones and Allen’s Narrative contributed to a tradition of writing from Anthony Benezet, Granville Sharpe, Benjamin Banneker, and other antislavery activists drawing on the political resonances of neighborliness