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Biographical information on
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Reluctant Heir
An essay by Herbert Woodward Martin
Reprinted from the Winter 2002 Ohioana Quarterly
It is not an easy thing to be a look-alike because it smacks of being a
second. And most seconds are unfinished in some respects and are sold at
bargain prices. Certainly for me in my childhood, looking like Paul
Laurence Dunbar brought me nothing but a sense of being uncomfortable
about something I did not have the words to explain nor the wherewithal to
do anything about. I was too young, and beset with horn-rimmed glasses
and an uncanny face similar to the one that was in our literature book. Why
had I been tormented by the classmates who, from time to time, might call
me friend when I did not know this man? Many of these same individuals
assumed that, since I physically resembled this poet, I MUST be related to
him, and therefore had influence beyond my eight-to-ten years.
As far as each of my classmates was concerned, I simply had to put in a
request to my famous relative, and he in turn would put in a good word for
all of us by simply asking the teacher to cut this particular class some slack
and stop asking us to memorize poems. How could the teacher resist the
request of a famous man? He
might even go so far as to
demand that she stop assigning
his poems to be memorized and
recited. What did I know about
influence or power in those
days?
We were told, as children,
to do certain tasks and we did
them either in anger or frustration.
Those were the options.
But I suspect they were, for the
most part, accomplished. So I
memorized the assigned Dunbar
poems and hoped to live
another day. Soon all of that
frustration would disappear,
only to be replaced by something
else that was equally
aggravating. That is what
happened with me and my
beginning relationship with Paul Laurence
Dunbar. He remained a strong force in our
English literature classes in the South during
my elementary schooling.
When my family migrated north looking for
jobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar was no longer a
presence in the textbooks. The sixties were
about two decades off, and no one was protesting
anything in those days. Everyone sought to
preserve the tenuous peace. I suspect that
Dunbar disappeared from the literature books
because blacks were not happy with his dialect
poetry in the thirties, forties, and fifties; they
wanted to demonstrate that they could handle
the sophisticated demands of the English
language and maybe even write about subjects other than black equality.
Dialect symbolized something illiterate and second-rate. Nothing of his was
read in front of white audiences for fear of contributing to the stereotype.
Still, his poems were a powerful presence in the black churches on Mother’s
Day, Father’s Day, Children’s Day, church anniversaries, and a variety of other
social events like holidays and programs that recognized specific contributions
in the black community. It was in this venue that Dunbar still held sway.
After all, what did I know of the tradition in the black community that
operated well beyond my small segregated life for that matter, or as I later
found out, in the white community, as well? It was the tradition to memorize
and recite poems on all sorts of occasions. Everyone seemed to do it - blacks
and whites - and for the most part, revel in it.
The tradition, as I see it today, is a dying art. As a student, I cannot tell
you when my peers gave up pressuring me about our assignments. Either
they finally realized I was telling the truth about this writer to whom I had
no connection, that I had no influence, that I refused to help them, or that I
simply was becoming the odd one out. It all ended as a Southern draw, I
suspect. Dunbar, for all intents and purposes, as I said earlier, disappeared
from the textbooks.
In fact, there were no black authors in the literature books at all, and they
did not re-emerge until I was a sophomore in college. What I did not know
or perhaps realize was that Dunbar had effectively become a part of the
liturgy of the sermons in the Baptist and Methodist churches especially, and
I suspect he was quoted in the less-prominent Protestant and corner
churches, as well. He was quoted frequently by the pastor in the church my
family attended, often at the end of one of his rousing sermons intended to
resuscitate backsliders and sinners to rejoin the church. He would admonish
the congregation by reciting:
The Lord had a job for me, but I had so much to do,
I said, “You get somebody else - or wait ’til I get through.”
I don’t know how the Lord came out, but he seemed to get along;
But I felt kind o’ sneakin’ like; cause I knowed I done Him wrong.
One day I needed the Lord, needed him right away -
And He never answered me at all, but I could hear Him say
Down in my accusin’ heart, “Nigger, I’s got too much to do.
You get somebody else - or wait ’til I get through.”
Now, when the Lord has a job for me, I never tries to shirk;
I drops what I have on hand and does the good Lord’s work;
And my affairs can run along, or wait ’til I get through.
Nobody else can do the work that God’s marked out for you.
The pastor used the “N” word freely and received many shouts and
“Amens,” but he never once said that this poem he recited was one of Paul
Laurence Dunbar’s poems. In fact, he never gave Dunbar any credit at all.
It would be years, in fact decades, before I would discover that these words
belonged to Dunbar. That discovery would come while reading Joanne
Braxton’s new edition of the poet’s poems, in which she attributes this
work to Dunbar.
Only recently have I come to believe that many of Dunbar’s poems simply
entered into the fabric of the culture. They were black works of art, and as
such, they were not unlike the spirituals in their originality; they were
treasures in the black community and did not need crediting. Ownership
was and is still indigenous to the culture; the blues, the spirituals, the work
songs, the old-fashioned sermons that instructed the community belonged
to them collectively.
Then when I left the South, Dunbar and his poems disappeared. In high
school he was nonexistent, and only in college, as I mentioned before, did
he reassert himself, but not strongly enough to make me want to commit to
memory his poems. That particular moment came when the distinguished
poet Margaret Walker came to Dayton, Ohio, to a conference I had organized
in 1972 to celebrate Dunbar’s birth. She read Dunbar with such
exquisite flair and sensitivity that you could have heard the proverbial pin
drop because she was absolutely riveting. She put the younger poets to
shame, and she, at least as far as I am concerned, taught me how to read and
how to comprehend Dunbar.
Several years earlier, I was talking with Allen Tate, and he suggested to me
that I ought to pay attention to some of the older poets who had gone
before me, as well as to the writers in my own generation. When I heard
Margaret Walker read - perhaps recite is a better word - I knew I had
encountered what I later termed “my old guy.” Everyone in the audience
was so affected that they seemed to stand as one body and cheer and cheer.
Walker made the dialect come alive; it sang and it danced, and we as an
audience saw the validity of what Dunbar had done. Pure and simple, his
achievement was nothing to be ashamed of and certainly nothing to hide
under a bushel.
This was the significant juncture for me. In the days after that reading, I
remember going back to Dunbar’s poems. I had been fortunate enough to
find a rare hardback copy of his collected poems in Vermont, where I was
working on a degree in drama. Slowly and methodically, Dunbar became a
part of the American literature courses I taught and a significant representative
of the African American writers that I taught. Soon I was reading him
aloud and demonstrating to my students what Margaret Walker had shown
us that evening in October of 1972. It was not easy uncovering those old
wounds. In fact, I
have often questioned
aloud why Dunbar, as
it later seemed, chose
me and the gifted
critic Jay Herbert
Martin from California
to host the two
conferences that
celebrated the centenary
of his birth. The
answer I came up with
is that both of our
surnames are Martin,
and if my memory
does not fail me, the
critic’s two first names
are Jay Herbert, and
my first two names are
Herbert Woodward. I am sure as anyone can ever be that Dunbar in the
other world pulled both those Herberts out of the air and thereby destined
us to run those two conferences. By the end of the conference, I had the
distinct feeling that it was Dunbar, and not my peers, who was picking on
me. If the truth be told, I could easily have done without both instances of
trial by fire and water.
I cannot say, however, that it has all been tribulation. What initially
started out in numerous Black History Week Celebrations as an aid to my
own students has now turned into readings across the United States and as
far west as Hawaii and as far east as St. Croix. I have read Dunbar in the
United Kingdom and in Hungary and in 2003 will read Dunbar in Alexandria,
Egypt. But let me speak from another perspective of my good fortune
with this author. While teaching my first seminar on Dunbar some time in
the late seventies, I discovered that he had written a number of plays, but
they were nowhere to be found. That bit of knowledge set me on a literary
quest to try to locate those literary works. It was a decade of searching that
led me to other works which have never been collected.
I located a number of dramatic fragments that Dunbar had left unfinished.
Next I found several one-act plays that he had written. I knew he had
written an opera libretto for the African British composer Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor (ed. note: not to be confused with the English poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge). My manuscript collection was growing. After many
inquiries at various libraries around the country, I was successful in locating
Dunbar’s only existing full-length play, Herrick. Its subject is aspiration; it is
loosely based on the life of the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick.
What is astounding to me about this play is that is has no black characters. I
have come to believe that the poet was working himself out of the dialect
pigeonhole he found himself locked in near the end of his career. Besides
Herrick, I then located some fifteen essays, forty-three published and
unpublished poems, the lyrics from the two musicals he wrote with
Clevelander Will Marion Cooke, and six published but uncollected short
stories. A seventh story was shown to me by a former head librarian at the
University of Dayton. That story was “Ole Conju’in Joe.”
I had collected over a period of ten years what I thought might be a book
that would enhance Dunbar’s literary reputation. All of the material I had
collected would serve as the basis for In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and
Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio University Press,
2002). After all, he had, in about a decade and a half, produced his entire
literary output. What struck me as even more peculiar was that, even though
critics hinted at Dunbar’s dramatic output, no one had ever considered or
written about these particular works. Perhaps the reason was because they
were unavailable, and they certainly were not in one place. But with the
publication of In His Own Voice, that situation has been rectified.
These days I feel as though Dunbar and I have come full circle and that
we have resolved our early differences of child and famous man. This
relationship was ordained somewhere else, and I don’t think either of us had
much say in the matter.
I think Margaret Walker kept Dunbar and his work alive by reading him
to her students and to a variety of audiences. Now I try to do the same by
having fun with all of his poems. The dialect poems are especially dear to
me. They are literary works and are not meant as an insult. They represent
an approximation of the way language might have been used. That is what
truly touching poetry does; it approximates the truth not only in thought
but language and action as well. It is a credit to Dunbar’s creative sensibility
that he was able to capture on paper the tone of voice, the accurate emotion,
the correct gesture, as well as drawing different personages along the way.
He was also able to make prophetically rich Standard English poems as in
“He Had His Dream”:
He had his dream and all through life,
Worked up to it through toil and strife.
Afloat fore’er before his eyes,
It colored for him all his skies:
The storm cloud dark
Above his bark,
The calm and listless vault of blue
Took on its hopeful hue,
It tinctured every passing beam -
He had his dream.
He labored hard and failed at last,
His sails too weak to bear the blast,
The raging tempests tore away
And sent his beating bark astray.
But what cared he
For wind or sea!
He said, “The tempest will be short,
My bark will come to port.”
He saw through every cloud a gleam -
He had his dream.
This poem seems to me to anticipate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr., even though Dunbar was dead twenty-three years before Dr. King was
even born. Dunbar’s playful “A Negro Love Song” also seems to anticipate
the rap and hip-hop music of
the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
In the end, I suspect I find
myself defending Dunbar’s
reputation of being an alcoholic
and a wife beater and
trying to fend off many of
what I believe to be meanspirited
critics. It may be that I
am overzealous in protecting
Dunbar the man, but in doing
so, I protect Dunbar the poet
and his reputation. Dunbar
was all too human and subject
to the woes and ailments of
the flesh as many of us are. He
was also subjected to the
racism of the time, and he
seems to have subverted or
suppressed the problems that
many of my contemporaries took to the streets of the United States to
protest. We have also moved into a period where we are more comfortable
viewing our heroes and heroines with all of their flaws and warts. None of
this seems to detract from their larger abilities to write, to dance, to act, to
sing, or to play a variety of sports. Confronting these revelations tells us
that, though they dared to be great, they were only human and not gods.
We can readily wonder about their particular talents and the mystery
attached to those gifts, but it is no longer divinity with a capital “D”
walking in our neighborhoods.
Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of those heroes we like to keep on a pedestal,
though he was human and thus had many flaws. We need not judge him
on those counts; heaven is there for that purpose. He probably did love
Alice, but I suspect that there were tensions in their marriage. What marriages
don’t have tensions? The Brownings suffered as did the Schumanns.
We are all human and given to small jealousies. The Dunbars suffered a
similar fate, I suspect. It is clear that neither Mrs. Dunbar nor the Moores
thought the marriage between Alice and Paul would be a successful one,
although there is some evidence that the elder Mrs. Dunbar did finally come
around and give her blessing.
Something further might be said, too, about Dunbar’s drinking. He drank
and ate onion, I was told by the late critic J. Saunders Redding, to cure his
tuberculosis. This home remedy only made matters worse, and it found its
way, subsequently, into the daily newspapers that he came to his readings
inebriated despite the fact that he always succeeded in rousing his audiences
to cheers. He finally did get the attention of a remarkable physician who
sent him to Colorado, where he proceeded to recover from that devastating
nineteenth-century malady. He thought after awhile that he was cured and
came back to the inclement weather of Dayton, where he found himself too
weak to return to the dry air of Colorado, and so he succumbed to tuberculosis
in Dayton on February 9, 1906.
For me, personally, although I resisted Dunbar in my childhood, our recent
journeys have been fruitful ones and the association continues full swing, for
I truly believe that none of the honors I have received recently would have
come my way without the life and work of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
 Herbert Woodward Martin is a prize-winning poet and performer, actor and playwright. He began portraying Paul Laurence Dunbar as a way of helping his students celebrate
both Black History Week and the excellent work of the Dayton poet.
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