Caressed by the word: the lives and love of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson - tribute

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2002 by Pamela Johnson

I didn't go looking for Paul Laurence Dunbar, but he found me anyway. It was in Los Angeles in 1972, one hundred years after his birth. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Harlick, had told us to pick a poet's work to read to the class. Mom suggested Dunbar's "In the Morning," about a father trying to wake his sleepy head son and rush him off to school. I was, at the time, an avowed poetry-hater. Yet I found myself enchanted by Dunbar's verses, such as these opening lines from "In the Morning":

   'Lias! 'Lias! Bless de Lawd! Don' you know de day's erbroad? Ef you don'
   git up, you scamp, Dey'll be trouble in dis camp.

Dunbar's easy humor captured me, his race pride in "Ode to Ethiopia" emboldened me, and his consciousness in "We Wear the Mask" awed me. Knowing he had come before, contributed to my becoming a writer.

About a year ago, I received an e-mail that led me to a University of Dayton website devoted to Dunbar. He was "the most famous Black writer in the world" during his lifetime, according to a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in a new book, In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Reading through Dunbar's biography on the website, I was saddened that his life was so short. Born in June 1872, he died of tuberculosis 33 years later. Of particular interest to me was the fact that he had once been married to a writer. Who was she? I wondered. How did they meet? Was it true love or an intoxicating spell that two word-weavers had cast upon one another?

In the library, I searched for answers in books by Dunbar, such as I Greet The Dawn, and books about him like Paul Laurence Dunbar, a biography by Peter Revell. I also read through books by Alice, reprinted in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Vols. 1-3, edited by Gloria T. Hull, and about her in Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, written by Hull. Finally, I found Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, a doctoral dissertation written by Eleanor Alexander while at Brown University. From these sources, I pieced together the story of Paul and Alice's lives and their love.

For a man who only lived into his early 30's and spent a fair amount of those battling poor health, Paul's many volumes of poetry, novels, librettos, essays, short stories and plays remain an impressive body of work. The child of former Kentucky slaves, he was born in Dayton, Ohio, and began writing poetry at around six-years-old. His mother taught him songs and stories she'd heard on the plantation, which he translated into a rich, rhythmic, dialect that made his poetry wildly popular, but ultimately caused him frustration as critics dismissed his standard English verse. For a time Paul was out of favor with later generations, who accused him of using dialect to pander to whites.

The only black in his high school class, Paul excelled as a member of the debating society, editor of the school paper, and literary club president. In 1892, at 20, he published his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy, and sold it to passengers on the elevator he operated in a downtown Dayton office building. He wanted a job more suited to his skills, but race proved too high a hurdle. Much of his income went to support his mother, who had split from his father when he was two; she'd raised her three sons largely alone.

Roughly 900 miles to the south in New Orleans, Alice Ruth Moore was as smitten by the word as Paul. Three years younger than him, she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales in 1895, when she was also just 20-years-old. She wrote mostly about customs in her local Creole community. Sometimes she wrote about mulattoes caught in the middle. Plots centered around: will she/won't she (get the man, keep the man, be able to stomach the man once she's got him)? Nature was also a focal point:

   I had not thought of violets of late The wild shy kind that spring beneath
   your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the
   fields in raptures sweet

Always industrious, Alice stacked up many achievements. She studied at Columbia and Cornell universities, among others. She was a teacher, played mandolin in a New Orleans orchestra and belonged to service clubs that championed fair treatment for blacks and women's right to vote. In 1899 she would publish her second book, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, but it was her picture and a poem by her printed several years before that first caught Patti's eye.

His wasn't the only heart she stole with her alabaster skin and auburn hair, and only the tiniest trace of Africa in her features. Here and there when it got her into tony places such as the opera or art museum, she passed for white, slipping easily through the doors of places where Paul, with his deep brown skin, full nose and lips, would have been turned away with a snarl and a slur.

The day Paul saw that picture and poem in a Boston magazine, he wrote Alice a letter and enclosed a love poem. For two years they corresponded. The missives might have continued, but when England summoned him to visit, he and Alice worried that his stay might be extended indefinitely. Who could wait that long? Not Paul and Alice.