[During his lifetime, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American,
was among the most famous poets in the United States. It is one of the
great paradoxes of the early Jim Crow era. This biography sheds new
light on the writers life and work.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE LEGACY OF A CAGED BIRD  
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On Gene Andrew Jarrett’s “Paul Laurence Dunbar”
November 17, 2022
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ During his lifetime, Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American, was
among the most famous poets in the United States. It is one of the
great paradoxes of the early Jim Crow era. This biography sheds new
light on the writer's life and work. _

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_Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird   _ 
Gene Andrew Jarrett
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691150529

The man who is strong to fight his fight,
     And whose will no front can daunt,
If the truth be truth and the right be right,
     Is the man that the ages want.
Tho’ he fail and die in grim defeat,
     Yet he has not fled the strife,
And the house of Earth will seem more sweet
     For the perfume of his life.
— Paul Laurence Dunbar, “For the Man Who Fails”

THE DUNBAR Hotel is a cultural landmark of Black heritage in Los
Angeles, though it didn’t always bear the name of writer Paul
Laurence Dunbar.

Originally the Hotel Somerville, opened in 1928 by John and Vada
Somerville, it made a mark by hosting Black luminaries, including Lena
Horne, Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. Du Bois, even as
tough economic times made its survival precarious.

Like the hotel named for him, Dunbar experienced his highs and lows
— having tasted success, ruin was always nipping at his heels. Gene
Andrew Jarrett’s _Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a
Caged Bird_ offers a raw, unadulterated portrait of the writer’s
short yet full life. In his time, Dunbar published 12 collections of
poetry, four novels, four short story collections, and various
libretti and essays. More than Dunbar’s sheer volume of work, his
unique ability to reach across racial lines garnered him attention and
continues to make him relevant today.

Dunbar’s mother, Matilda, was an escaped enslaved woman from
Kentucky, with “no education except what she picked up herself,”
as he recounted. Matilda would regale Dunbar with stories in his
youth: he “attributed the tenor, the music, the ethos of his poetry
about the lives of his parents, about their circle of friends, to his
memory of these voices.”

The book presents more than Dunbar’s legacy. Jarrett emphasizes the
timelessness of Dunbar’s work as a reflection of the human condition
but also hones in on the challenges that Black people experienced
specifically during Reconstruction. As Dunbar wrote in his essay “Of
Negro Journals,” “[T]he head of Slavery was cut off,” and the
“‘monster’ became a ‘Hydra.’”

Early in his career, Dunbar struggled to gain widespread recognition.
But then, famed critic William Dean Howells received a copy of
Dunbar’s second poetry collection, _Majors and Minors_. Jarrett
notes that, according to historian Van Wyck Brooks, Howells was the
only critic in “the history of American literature who has been able
to create reputations by a single review.” While Howells praised
_Majors and Minors_, he could not do so without turning to “the
mythical caricatures of minstrelsy to describe Paul’s phenotype and
physiognomy, the language of which seeped into his assessment of the
poetry.” Howells wrote:

He calls his little book Majors and Minors; the majors being in our
American English, and the Minors being in dialect, the dialect the
middle-south negroes and the middle-south whites; for the poet’s ear
has been quick for the accent of his neighbors as well as for that of
his kindred.

Howells cites the Majors as when “Paul was ‘least himself,’ or
when he was least the ‘pure African type.’” Though Dunbar’s
dialect poetry was lauded, he struggled to receive equal praise for
his non-dialect work. Indeed, some “reviewers contended that readers
likely would favor the dialect of the slave or the regional bumpkin
over the high, though unfortunately ‘imitative,’ language of the
Romantics” from the “Negro poet.” Dunbar later said Howells’s
praise “cost and catapulted his career in equal measure.”

While _The Life and Times of a Caged Bird _isn’t the first biography
on Paul Laurence Dunbar, it offers immense detail and newly discovered
information. Jarrett complements the narrative with excerpts from
Dunbar’s collected works and also draws upon letters, journal
entries, and other biographical sources. He cites a biography of
musician Will Marion Cook (Dunbar’s friend and collaborator), noting
Cook’s first impression of the man:

[I]n his rusty black suit (in which you could see your face and
figure) was a sight to behold. Of less than medium height —
perfectly formed, and smooth black skin he inherited from his mother
(also a beautiful black) — a brow noble in proportions — and eyes
that were soft, glowing, [and] eloquent […] He was a mess — I mean
a mess of good looking [fellow] except the mouth … the mouth which
was ugly — uglier than mine — and that’s a record.

With his nuanced portrait of the writer, Jarrett endeavors to tackle
Dunbar’s complicated legacy, never shying away from or attempting to
sugarcoat problematic aspects of his character. Amidst the social
turmoil in and outside of Dunbar’s life, a love story spreads across
the pages, balancing the book’s melancholic overtones: “In April
1895 Paul came across the photograph of a woman in the _Monthly
Review_.” He had been so taken with the light-skinned Black woman
that he wrote her a rather bold letter. But while her beauty appealed
to him, they formed a kinship over writing. “I was anxious to know
more of you and your work,” he wrote Alice Ruth Moore.

Like Dunbar, Moore was brilliant, well educated, and ambitious. After
two years, they finally met in person. After three, they were married.

Moore represented something Dunbar could never achieve: lightness of
skin. “Not coincidentally, within many African American communities,
social stature rose in proportion to the lightness of skin color,”
says Jarrett. “His insecurity over his own looks and finances meant
he believed he remained at a disadvantage.” Dunbar’s insecurity
was a third wheel in their relationship, causing rifts in otherwise
peaceful moments and irreparable fractures that would bring ultimate
separation. Jarrett writes:

In print and in person, turbulence described the six years and nine
months of their relationship: infatuation and love, admiration and
encouragement, but also suspicion and frustration, exasperation and
fury, as well as intimidation and violence.

There’s a filmic quality to Jarrett’s descriptions, and it carries
through as he details a pivotal moment from the dawn of Dunbar’s
renown,

an invitation to recite poems at Toledo’s West End Club, an
exclusive society of white men that met regularly and welcomed
edifying lectures and entertaining recitals. Paul was probably the
first African American to speak before the members of this newly
formed club, a fact not lost on him when he agreed to come the evening
of Wednesday, April 19, 1893.

Prior to the recital, W. C. Chapman “was slated to deliver a talk on
the Negro in the South.” Chapman attended under the impression
“that he had been spreading his advocacy of white supremacy only to
a roomful of fellow Anglo-Saxon men” and had been utterly ignorant
of Dunbar’s presence. Chapman’s thesis was that Black people
“could not achieve the heights of dignity and intellection so prized
by the wider world.”

After Chapman’s speech, Dunbar made his way to the front of the
room. “I shall give you one poem which I had not intended reciting
when I first came here,” he declared before uttering the opening
line of “Ode to Ethiopia”: “O Mother Race!” He continued
through the closing stanza:

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards which from thy root shall spring,
And proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia’s glory.

Jarrett writes: “A roar of applause trailed Paul as he departed the
room.”

Dunbar struggled to find comfort in his celebrity. Early on, “the
publicity perturbed him; it made him both upset and nervous. ‘I feel
like a man walking a slack rope above thousands of spectators, who
knows himself an amateur and is every moment expecting to fall.’”
The tragedy of Dunbar was that he was chasing something his ill mental
health would never allow him to achieve.

Signs of Dunbar’s mental health first manifested as early as high
school. His poem “Melancholia” opens:

Silently without my window,
     Tapping gently at the pane,
     Falls the rain.
Through the trees sighs the breeze
     Like a soul in pain.
Here alone I sit and weep;
Thought hath banished sleep.

The “melancholic strain” of his writings made itself known to his
readers, generating concern for Dunbar.

Jarrett writes that “[t]he alcoholic came to be diagnosed as
diseased” — and this disease plagued Dunbar just as it did his
father. He “would come to ensure that liquor was always on hand to
help him cope with his struggles, physical and mental.” It was a
secret disease that only Dunbar’s most intimate relations would come
to know and that Moore would be victim of.

As Dunbar’s life progressed, his rise in celebrity was matched by an
increase in inner turmoil. His drinking would only worsen, vices would
multiply, and overall health would plummet. Dunbar’s insecurity,
paired with his alcoholism, challenged the stability of his
relationship with Moore. He was aware of his disease — he admitted
to her — though confession did nothing to curb it. His alcoholism
forced its way into the most intimate parts of their lives. “‘My
feelings […] have been a strange admixture of remorse &
exultation,’ he confessed [to her in a letter.] ‘I know that I
done wrong, very wrong. My course has been weak and brutal. I have
dishonored you and I cannot forgive myself for it.’”

Following his assault on Moore,

[g]uilt, depression, and thoughts of suicide gripped Paul. Images of
Alice “lying there bandaged and bruised and sore” haunted him. His
remorse reached a turning point. The gravity of her condition was now
crushing _him._ “I have been criminally careless and a brute
besides,” he wrote. He wavered between his own commitments to life
and death. “If I were brave enough or coward enough I would do the
only honorable thing a man can do in such a case, but while I am not
afraid to die, I am afraid to take my own life.”

Dunbar is neither a hero nor a villain in this story — such binary
terms cannot render his character justice. He was a man with an
illness in a time that lacked the capabilities to heal him. Moreover,
Jarrett illuminates how racist attitudes permeated the Black
population during Reconstruction. Dunbar’s elevated status made him
an Olympian among Black people, and his marriage to Moore brought him
as close as he could be to the elite class. On this subject, Moore
wrote an essay, with a note of self-consciousness: “[T]he
‘Negro’ meant ‘those whose complexions were noticeably dark,’
whereas the ‘mulatto’ were ‘always a class apart, separated from
and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of
white blood in their veins.’”

Dunbar, at times, belittled members of the lower class in his letters,
calling them “n***ers” and bemoaning having to perform for them.
Dunbar knew what it was to be both disenfranchised and privileged: he
was a man of two worlds, not quite fitting into one or the other
entirely. He did not live as a white man did but experienced
advantages most Black people weren’t afforded — particularly in
adolescence. Of this, Jarrett writes:

In 1890 less than 1 percent of the country’s entire population —
around 203,000 students — attended high school, and only 11 percent
of this group finished coursework or graduated in the 1889–1890
academic year. Only the most privileged, the most ambitious, the
luckiest, or all of the above made it to and through the American high
school. Just two decades removed from slavery, most African American
families […] did not expect their children to attend high school.

Despite his prejudiced attitudes, Dunbar found ways to lift up the
Black community throughout his career. He wrote the libretto for
_Clorindy_, a musical with a full Black cast that appeared on
Broadway. His 1902 book _The Sport of the Gods_ was praised for taking
“the Negro where Harriet Beecher Stowe left him in slavery.” Black
leaders heralded him “to be among ‘the few bright particular stars
which may be held up as beacons for the whole race.’”
Unfortunately, Dunbar’s contributions would be limited by the time
allotted to him. “In the nineteenth century, more people died from
tuberculosis in the United States than from any other illness”—
the illness that would claim Dunbar’s life. On February 9, 1906, he
died at the age of 33.

“So we have really only been married three years to-day,” Moore
wrote, “and what years they have been, too. Years of sorrow and
years of joy and pain and gladness all intertwined like a many hued
garland. I am glad that I am yours.” Even when she remarried, she
retained the name Dunbar. Though they had a tumultuous relationship
that led to an acrimonious separation, they never divorced. She
lamented not being invited to be with Dunbar in his final days — in
fact, she wouldn’t learn of his death until five days after. Despite
all he put her through, she still loved him and bore no ill will.

Jarrett recounts the eulogy of Brand Whitlock, a close acquaintance of
Dunbar and mayor of Toledo:

There was nothing foreign in Paul’s poetry, nothing imported,
nothing imitated; it was all original, native and indigenous. Thus he
becomes the poet, not of his own race alone — I wish I could make
people see this — but the poet of you and me and of all the men
everywhere.

Nine years after Dunbar’s death, Moore, now remarried, published the
essay “The Poet and His Song.” In it, she wrote that one “must
delve beneath the mere sordid facts of life and its happenings” to
“get a correct idea” of the “poet laureate of his race.”
Jarrett does not ask that we overlook or forget but rather that we
consider the whole of a person. Moore knew what it was to admire and
admonish Dunbar. She knew him — she wanted the world to know him.
Jarrett knows him, and anyone who reads _Paul Laurence Dunbar: The
Life and Times of a Caged Bird_ will know him, too, and be better for
it.

¤

_Vesper North is a writer, artist, professor, and assistant editor at
_TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics_. Their work has been featured
in _Ouroboros Magazine_ and will appear in the fall issue of
_Meditating Cat Zine_._
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* Poetry
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* African American literature
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* Reconstruction
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* The Gilded Age
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* Racism
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* biography
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