‘New Dunbar biography’

    

A biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar was published earlier this year, and its author will discuss his subject in a lecture next Tuesday at New York Society Library. Dunbar (click here) was a Mason and a highly regarded poet at the turn of the century. From the publicity:

Gene Andrew Jarrett

The Life and Times

of a Caged Bird

The New York Society Library

Tuesday, November 22

6 p.m.

Live and online.

Free and open

to the public.

Register here.

On the 150th anniversary of his birth, a definitive new biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history.

A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African-American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird“ that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he also was a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents’ survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage,  beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.

Beautifully written, meticulously researched, and generously illustrated, this biography presents the richest, most detailed, and most nuanced portrait yet of Dunbar and his work, transforming how we understand the astonishing life and times of a central figure in American literary history.

Gene Andrew Jarrett is the Dean of the Faculty and William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. He is also the co-editor of The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar and The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

     

I learned of this book and this event only a few hours ago, so I can’t say if this new biography reports Dunbar’s Masonic activities, but I asked the author about it via Twitter, and I’ll update this if I receive a reply. Dunbar was a great poet, so Masonic history or no, this speaking engagement will be worthwhile.

     

‘This day of all days’

   

GWMNM photo

The nineteenth of June in the United States is known as Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves finally brought to fruition in 1865. Last night, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Virginia was alit in colors of the Pan-African flag in tribute. Here’s why that’s wrong, even though benevolently inspirited.

Juneteenth is an American holiday that represents victory in the cataclysmic war that ended slavery here. (Slavery persists in Africa today, but no one is supposed to discuss it.) Americans suffered deaths and disfigurements in numbers that wouldn’t be seen again until the Second World War, and not seen again since. It had to be fought and won. The Civil War was existential. The colors displayed on the Washington Masonic Memorial, and anywhere else, for Juneteenth ought to be red, white, and blue. There is no reason why a Masonic landmark in this country should participate in supplanting America’s traditional universal symbols with those of divisional or otherwise limited identities. Don’t we get enough of that everywhere else?

Get with it, Memorial peeps! “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

I leave you with this poem by a Brother Mason from the nineteenth century. This was composed in 1890, when the poet was eighteen years old.

Emancipation

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Fling out your banners, your honors be bringing,

Raise to the ether your paeans of praise.

Strike every chord and let music be ringing!

Celebrate freely this day of all days.

Few are the years since that notable blessing,

Raised you from slaves to the powers of men.

Each year has seen you my brothers progressing,

Never to sink to that level again.

Perched on your shoulders sits Liberty smiling,

Perched where the eyes of the nations can see.

Keep from her pinions all contact defiling;

Show by your deeds what you’re destined to be.

Press boldly forward nor waver, nor falter.

Blood has been freely poured out in your cause,

Lives sacrificed upon Liberty’s altar.

Press to the front, it were craven to pause.

Look to the heights that are worth your attaining.

Keep your feet firm in the path to the goal.

Toward noble deeds every effort be straining.

Worthy ambition is food for the soul!

Up! Men and brothers, be noble, be earnest!

Ripe is the time and success is assured;

Know that your fate was the hardest and sternest

When through those lash-ringing days you endured.

Never again shall the manacles gall you.

Never again shall the whip stroke defame!

Nobles and Freemen, your destinies call you

Onward to honor, to glory and fame.

     

‘Hope.’

     

Hope.

Wild seas of tossing, writhing waves,
A wreck half-sinking in the tortuous gloom;
One man clings desperately, while Boreas raves,
   And helps to blot the rays of moon and star,
   Then comes a sudden flash of light, which gleams on shores afar.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson was born on this date in 1875 in New Orleans. She graduated from Straight University in New Orleans and worked as an elementary teacher. She was a Harlem Renaissance poet, journalist, short-story writer, playwright, and activist for civil rights and women’s suffrage. Her works include Violets and Other Tales (The Monthly Review, 1895) and The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899). She married Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898, though they later separated. She died September 18, 1935 in Philadelphia.

“Hope.” originally appeared in Violets and Other Tales.


Courtesy Academy of American Poets.

The Anchor and the Ark are emblems of a well grounded hope and a well spent life. They are emblematical of that Divine Ark, which bears us over this tempestuous sea of troubles, and the Anchor, which shall safely moor us in the peaceful harbor where the wicked cease from troubling, and weary are at rest.

Lecture of the MM°

     

‘The Mystery’

     
The Mystery

I was not; now I am—a few days hence
I shall not be; I fain would look before
And after, but can neither do; some Power
Or lack of power says “no” to all I would.
I stand upon a wide and sunless plain,
Nor chart nor steel to guide my steps aright.
Whene’er, o’ercoming fear, I dare to move,
I grope without direction and by chance.
Some feign to hear a voice and feel a hand
That draws them ever upward thro’ the gloom.
But I—I hear no voice and touch no hand,
Tho’ oft thro’ silence infinite I list,
And strain my hearing to supernal sounds;
Tho’ oft thro’ fateful darkness do I reach,
And stretch my hand to find that other hand.
I question of th’ eternal bending skies
That seem to neighbor with the novice earth;
But they roll on, and daily shut their eyes
On me, as I one day shall do on them,
And tell me not the secret that I ask.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar

I did not know Dunbar (1872-1906) was a Freemason when I decided to share his poem here, but Bro. Google reflects light in all directions, and it turns out not only was Dunbar a brother, but there’s a remarkable story about his initiation and his lodge. In Along this Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933), the author writes of the time he and Dunbar were made Masons. Excerpted:


Paul returned to his home in Washington early in the spring. He always spoke of his stay in Jacksonville in high terms. Before he left, the Negro Masons decided to organize a lodge of young men, and in honor of Paul, name it the Paul Laurence Dunbar Lodge. The lodge was organized, and Paul and twenty-five or thirty more of us were one night initiated and carried through the first three degrees of Masonry. The Negro Masons of that day in Jacksonville were a horny-handed set. The Odd Fellows lodges were made up of white collar workers, but the Masonic lodges were recruited largely from the stevedores, hod carriers, lumber mill and brickyard hands, and the like. The initiation was rough, and lasted all night. One of our young friends was lame for a number of weeks on account of a fall to the floor while being tossed in a blanket. I was made Worthy Master of the lodge, but it did not take me long to see that being a good Mason demanded more time than I should be willing to devote to it. The first time that I had to “turn out” with the lodge, arrayed in regalia, settled the question definitely.


Imagine being initiated, passed, and raised in a single night, and having a lodge named in your honor! That is Paul Laurence Dunbar Lodge 219 under the MW Union Grand Lodge in Jacksonville, Florida. Another lodge named for Dunbar is found in Brockton, Massachusetts.

Google also shows how Dunbar’s poetry was included in several publications of several mainstream grand lodges. In the January 1916 edition of the Grand Lodge of Iowa’s Quarterly Bulletin, an all-around delight to read, we see the last stanza of his “The Poet and His Song”:


Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,
My garden makes a desert spot,
Sometimes a blight upon the tree
Takes all my fruit away from me;
And then with throes of bitter pain
Rebellious passions rise and swell;
And so I sing and all is well.


Amid the Report on Foreign Correspondence in the pages of the Grand Lodge of Nebraska’s proceedings for 1922, there is a report from the Grand Lodge of New Mexico that makes the point of specifically recording how its grand master “quotes Paul Lawrence [sic] Dunbar’s lines, on ‘The Lord Had a Job for Me.’” But it seems the actual title of that poem is “Too Busy.” This is found in the anthology titled The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar edited by Joanne M. Braxton (1993).

Ever on the lookout for pipe poetry, I can’t resist concluding this edition of The Magpie Mason with Dunbar’s “A Companion’s Progress,” also found in the Braxton book, which puts its first publication at August 21, 1901 in a periodical called St. James Gazette.


My stock has gone down and my tailor has sent
To request that I settle my bill;
My landlady asks with a frown for her rent,
And there isn’t a cent in the till.
The governor storms and my mother’s in tears;
There’s a coldness betwixt me and Nell,
But I’m utterly dead to regrets and to fears,
For my meerschaum is colouring well.

At first I had fears of what looked like a crack,
And my breath came in gasps of alarm,
But oh, how the joy of my heart flooded back
When I found that ’twas nothing to harm.
And so ever since I have nursed it with care,
With thrills that my heart cannot quell,
And I’ve bored all my friends to relate the affair
That my meerschaum is colouring well.

Magpie file photo

A meerschaum pipe I saw at the New York Pipe Show in 2014. It was colored artificially, but true meerschaum pipe lovers prefer to turn the white mineral into progressively darker hues of brown by patiently and personally smoking the pipe over a long period of time. It is a delicate substance, ergo the poet’s fear of cracks.

Gotta share this one with my pipe club on Facebook.