LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
by Eleanor Alexander New York, New York University Press: 2001 928.1 ALE
“I was a timid, scared, rabbit sort of a child, but out of desperation I learned to fight.” -
Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson
"Because you love me I have much achieved,Had you despised me then I must have failed,But since I knew you trusted and believed,I could not disappoint you and so prevailed. " - Paul Laurence Dunbar, Encouraged (1913)
The marriage of two writers leaves more written traces of itself than other marriages. So it was with the marriage of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and journalist Alice (Ruth Moore) Dunbar Nelson (1875-1906). Their union, like others, was both a personal relationship and a creation of the larger society they inhabited, as Eleanor Alexander's book sensitively demonstrates.
He was a young Negro poet from a small town in Ohio, whose brief career (ended by a premature death from tuberculosis at age thirty-three) was meteoric and even unprecedented at the time. Oak And Ivy, published in 1892 attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, one of the most popular poets of the day. She was the daughter of a Creole seamstress in New Orleans, who graduated from college, became a teacher and also published a volume of poetry at twenty (Violets and Other Tales). Both of them were the children of former slaves.
The young Alice was a celebrated belle of black New Orleans society when Paul saw her picture in the newspaper and began a courtship by correspondence. The two eloped: in the event their marriage was brief, passionate, tragic, and brutal. Paul drank heavily and beat her. Alice left him, but eventually forgave his cruelty. Talented people are often stifled by convention, but these two had been grievously harmed by prejudice. Their hopes and fears clouded the air between them.
When Paul died, no one told Alice: she read about it in a newspaper while riding a streetcar in Washington, D.C. Alice remarried (twice) and became a mover of history. She was the organizer for the Middle Atlantic States in the women's suffrage campaign in the 1910s and in 1924 took the campaign to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to President Warren G. Harding himself.
And of course, you can read their own words.
GIVE US EACH DAY: The Diary Of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, New York, W.W. Norton: 1984 DUN
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, Charlottesville, University Of Virginia Press: 1993 811.4 DUN
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