Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“The Caged Bird Sings: Paul Laurence Dunbar at the Library of Congress” (Peter Armenti, Library of Congress)

“The Legacy of a Caged Bird: On Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Paul Laurence Dunbar” (Vesper North, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• Three Poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar
• “Sister Josepha,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• “The First Successful Trip of an Airship,” A. I. Root
• “John Redding Goes to Sea,” Zora Neale Hurston

Buy the book
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
• More than 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $65.00

The new bookstacks in the Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress when it was completed in 1897, the year Paul Laurence Dunbar was hired as an assistant librarian. Photographer unknown. (Library of Congress)

Dunbar’s wife, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, later claimed that the shelving supplied him with the metaphor he used in “Sympathy,” his most famous poem: “The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. June and July days are hot. . . . The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!–a poet shut up with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.”

---

“We are now in the throes of feverish delight over industrial education,” asserted Paul Laurence Dunbar. “It is a good thing, and yet one of which we can easily have too much.” He warned against “the danger we court of going to the other extreme of educating the hand to the exclusion of the needs of the head.” The essay, titled “Our New Madness,” appeared in the August 18, 1898, issue of The Independent, a political weekly based in New York, and Dunbar argued that the overemphasis on skilled training not only proceeded from principles of racial inequality but also reinforced them:

You say: “But we can’t all be doctors and lawyers and preachers.” No, to be sure not, but let some of us be; for we cannot all of us be carpenters, tinners, and bricklayers. There has been here, of late, too great an insistence upon manual training for the negro. . . .

At this late day the negro has no need to prove his manual efficiency. That was settled fifty years ago when he was the plantation blacksmith and carpenter and shoemaker. . . . [But] there has not, in the history of this country, risen a single intellectual black man whose pretensions have not been sneered at, laughed at, and then lamely wondered at. If he was fair of complexion, they said that he derived his powers from his white blood. If he was convincingly black, they felt of his bumps, measured his head, and said it was not negro in conformation.

Dunbar’s essay aimed its ire at Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute; he acknowledged “the efficiency of the work being done there” but he was concerned that Washington’s focus in his public speeches on “industrial education” had been used to support the idea “that we must not have anything else.”

As if to prove Dunbar’s point, the essayist Charles Dudley Warner, president of American Social Science Association, delivered the keynote speech at the group’s annual convention in May 1900. With the title “The Education of the Negro,” the essay argued for the reduction or elimination of financial support of higher education for Black Americans and the reallocation of the funds toward more basic schooling for skilled careers—and Warner cited Washington in support of the idea:

[Slavery] taught the negro to work, it transformed him, by compulsion it is true, into an industrial being, and held him in the habit of industry for several generations. Perhaps only force could do this, for it was a radical transformation. I am glad to see that this result of slavery is recognized by Mr. Booker Washington, the ablest and most clear-sighted leader the negro race has ever had. . . . On almost all the Southern plantations, and in the cities also, negro mechanics were bred, excellent blacksmiths, good carpenters, and house-builders capable of executing plans of high architectural merit. Everywhere were negroes skilled in trades, and competent in various mechanical industries. . . .

Among the witnesses to the failure of the result expected from the establishment of colleges and universities for the negro are heard, from time to time, and more frequently as time goes on, practical men from the North, railway men, manufacturers, who have initiated business enterprises at the South. . . . We have been disappointed in our extravagant expectations of what this education could do for a race undeveloped, and so wanting in certain elements of character, and that the millions of money devoted to it might have been much better applied.

Warner’s premise was that the “development of a race” is “a gigantic task, and generations may elapse before it can in any degree be relaxed”; his evidence, such as it was, consisted of his anecdotal observations about the Black population of New Orleans and the racial breakdown of prison camps.

Deriding the speech as “an essay founded upon observation of the South from a car window,” Dunbar published a response countering Warner’s arguments in The Philadelphia Times. “If the Negro has been crowded out of the many occupations by the more vigorous races, was it because of their vigor, or because of the prejudice which preferred the alien to the citizen? Was it the vigor of the foreign miners in Illinois that drove the negroes from their work, or the prejudice of a narrow people which allowed it?”

Dunbar’s criticisms of Washington and Warner echoed arguments voiced during the same period by W.E.B. Du Bois. For his part, Washington opted not to respond directly to either critic; instead, he made the strategically friendly suggestion to the two younger men that they share the stage one evening in Boston and, after a couple of postponed attempts, Washington, Du Bois, and Dunbar appeared together at Tuskegee’s fundraising event at the Hollis Street Theater in March 1899. Du Bois read one of his stories; Dunbar read several poems, and Washington delivered a version of his usual speech on racial uplift. By all accounts, it was a successful evening—although the two guests apparently upstaged their host, whose hoarse voice and obvious exhaustion undercut the aim of his pitch. Dunbar never abandoned his support for classical education, but the evening was one of a series of olive branches he and Washington extended to each other, leading Dunbar to write several positive articles about Tuskegee, a sonnet dedicated to Washington, and even a song that would eventually be published in celebration of the school’s twentieth anniversary. The differences between Washington and Du Bois, however, would deepen, culminating in the latter’s full-throated denunciation of the Tuskegee founder in The Souls of Black Folk.

When Dunbar published his initial criticism of Booker T. Washington, he was an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, a job he had to relinquish at the end of 1898 because of various illnesses. While living in Washington, D.C., Dunbar observed and experienced the prejudices and obstacles arrayed against Black activists and leaders who had benefited from the very kind of liberal education Warner would have denied them. When his next story collection, The Strength of Gideon, appeared in 1900, he included alongside his popular dialect stories several tales about politics and race relations, including “A Council of State,” about a convention of African American political leaders; “The Tragedy at Three Forks,” focusing on a white girl who commits a crime for which two Black men are lynched; and our Story of the Week selection, “Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker,” a satirical tale targeting both certain politicians who take for granted the loyalty of Black voters and an overconfident Alabama job applicant who misguidedly places his trust in the patronage mill.

Notes: In John Bunyan’s allegorical work The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Vanity Fair is a bustling marketplace filled with worldly goods and pleasures, temptations and distractions.

*   *   *

It was a beautiful day in balmy May and the sun shone pleasantly on Mr. Cornelius Johnson’s very spruce Prince Albert suit of grey as he alighted from the train in Washington. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Sister Josepha

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“Evergreen Words to Live By, from Alice Dunbar Nelson” (Katie Yee, Literary Hub)

“A Creole Activist in the Age of Jim Crow” (Carolyn Kolb, 64 Parishes)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Ozème’s Holiday,” Kate Chopin
• “A Matter of Principle,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Felipa,” Constance Fenimore Woolson

Buy the book
The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century
• More than 100 short stories
• 51 different writers
• Two-volume boxed set
• 1,641 pages
List price: $85.00
Web store price: $65.00

“St Anthony’s Garden”: view of garden from Royal Street behind St. Louis Cathedral, French Quarter, New Orleans, 1916, oil painting by American artist Robert W. Grafton (1876–1936). From the booklet Souvenir of New Orleans—The City Care Forgot, published by the St. Charles Hotel, 1917. (Wikimedia)

---

“You will pardon my boldness in addressing you, I hope, and let my interest in your work be my excuse,” Paul Laurence Dunbar began a letter to Alice Ruth Moore in April 1895. “I am drawn to write you because we are both working along the same lines and a sketch of yours in the ‘Monthly Review’ so interested me that I was anxious to know more of you and your work.” The sketch in question was “At Eventide,” one of several stories about the Creole residents of New Orleans that nineteen-year-old Moore had published in newspapers and magazines during the previous months. She almost certainly recognized Dunbar by name—one of his poems had appeared in the previous issue of the Monthly Review—yet she nevertheless set the letter aside and waited a month to respond.

The Monthly Review had included a photographic portrait of Moore alongside her story, and Dunbar seems to have already been smitten with her. Yet his first letter posed a question that might have been seen as a challenge: “I want to know whether or not you believe in preserving by Afro-American—I don’t like the word—writers of those quaint old tales and songs of our fathers . . . or whether you like so many others think we should ignore the past and all its capital literary materials.” He referred specifically to Joel Chandler Harris, of Uncle Remus fame, and other white authors whose folktales featured plantation dialect and characters. Dunbar himself included such dialogue and types in his poems and tales—but they were entirely absent from her story. “I should like to exchange opinions and work with you if you will agree,” he added.

Moore didn’t hold back in her response:

You ask my opinion about the Negro dialect in Literature? Well, frankly, I believe in every one following his heart. If it be so that one has a special aptitude for dialect work, why it is only right that dialect work should be made a specialty. But if one should be like me, absolutely devoid of the ability to manage dialect, I don’t see the necessity of cramming and forcing oneself into that plane because one is a Negro or a Southerner. Don’t you think so? Now as to getting away from one’s race—well I haven’t much liking for these writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It’s too much like a quinine pill in jelly—I hope I’m not treading on your corns. Somehow, when I start a story, I always think of my folks (characters) as simple human beings, not as types of a race or an idea—and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.

Later that year, Moore published her first story collection, Violets and Other Tales. After Dunbar had read the book, he compared her to George Washington Cable and Grace King, who were famous for their Louisiana Creole tales:

Your determination to contest Cable for his laurels is a commendable one. Why shouldn't you tell those pretty Creole stories as well as he? You have the force, the fire and the artistic touch that is so delicate and yet so strong.

Do you know that New Orleans—in fact all of Louisiana—seems to me to be a kind of romance land. Its very atmosphere must teem with stories and its streets and by-ways be redolent of dramatic incident that lingers as a sort of perfume from a fragrant past.

Dunbar and Moore corresponded for two years before they met in New York; they were married in March 1898 and moved to Washington, DC. The following year, Alice Dunbar published her second collection of Creole tales, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, with Dodd, Mead, & Company—her husband’s publisher. The Dunbars’ marriage proved to be contentious and worsened after Paul was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctors recommended whiskey, but the “cure” led inexorably to alcoholism and caused him to became violently abusive. They separated in 1902; Paul died four years later at the age of 33. Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at Howard High School for many years. Her second marriage, to another teacher, was a short-lived disappointment with a man twelve years her junior, but in 1916 she found happiness in marriage with journalist Robert J. Nelson, giving her the name by which she is known today: Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Until the year before her first marriage, Alice lived with her mother and older sister among the community of mixed-race Creoles in the French quarter of New Orleans. “Alice was born with reddish-blonde curls which darkened to red to auburn and was fair enough to ‘pass’ for white,” notes Akasha Gloria Hull, the scholar largely responsible for bringing Dunbar-Nelson’s work back in print in the 1980s. Alice’s mother had been enslaved on a plantation in Opelousas, Louisiana, and moved to New Orleans after the war; her father was a seaman, probably white, possibly Creole, who apparently left the family when Alice was a toddler. In “A Creole Anomaly,” an article she wrote for Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated in 1895, she described her neighbors with the local term, “Gigi (pronounced gay-gay). . . . The term has frequently been misused to denote any creole, but properly speaking, it belongs to those tinged with African blood. . . . The Gigi may be white or colored. It is difficult to tell one from the other.” In his book Black New Orleans, John W. Blassingame quotes Union soldier Silas E. Fales, who observed in 1863 that “it is hard telling who is white here, the Creoles are blacker than some of the mullatos.”

The ambiguity of racial identity for the Creole characters in Dunbar-Nelson’s stories led a number of critics in recent decades to argue that she “camouflaged the issue of race,” that she “spurned that racialized element of her identity,” or that she “shaped her tales of Creole life for white audiences.” In “Sister Josepha,” which we reprint below as our Story of the Week selection, the reader realizes that the lead character is not white only through descriptive hints (“brown hands,” “tropical beauty”) and and by what the other nuns do not say about her. In Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, as in the Gigi community, it is often “difficult to tell one from the other.”

Yet, as Caroline Gebhard notes in a recent article, Alice “presumes that readers already read her work as ‘black.’” In the 1890s and early 1900s, most of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories, essays, and poems appeared in Black newspapers and magazines; The Monthly Review, for example, advertised itself as “the only illustrated periodical published by Negroes in this country.” Dunbar-Nelson’s first collection, Violets, was issued by the Review’s book publishing arm and was promoted widely and almost exclusively to Black newspapers, which in turn printed virtually all the reviews of the book. As early as November 1896, The Enterprise, a newspaper for Black readers in Omaha, Nebraska, honored Moore and Dunbar as “two widely known lyrists of the race” when each of them had a poem in the inaugural issue of the AME Church Review. “Dunbar-Nelson knew she would be read as a Black author and never tried to pass in print,” Gebhard concludes. “To read Dunbar-Nelson’s fictions as addressing only white readers, which the accusation of passing implies, is to dismiss the fact that Dunbar-Nelson’s first and most loyal readers were African Americans.”

Notes: The expression told her beads refers to the practice of reciting the prayers associated with each bead of the rosary. “O Salutaris” is a hymn (“O Salutaris Hostia”) by Thomas Aquinas. “Kyrie Eleïson, Christe Eleïson,” Greek for “Lord, have mercy, Christ have mercy,” is a line in the invocation for divine mercy in the Eucharist liturgy of the Latin Mass. “Confiteor, Deo omnipotente” (Latin: “I confess, God Almighty”) is the beginning of one of the prayers that can be said during the Penitential Act at the beginning of Mass of the Roman Rite. The translation of the sentence in French uttered next by Sister Josepha is “I confess to God Almighty—that I have sinned in thought—it is my fault, it is my fault, it is my most grievous fault.”

*   *   *

Sister Josepha told her beads mechanically, her fingers numb with the accustomed exercise. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

“The First Successful Trip of an Airship”

A. I. Root (1839–1923)
From Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Interesting Links

Wright Brothers: Documents and Photographs (Wright State University)

Wright Trivia (Wright Brothers Aeroplane Co.)

“Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Wright Brothers Friend” (Richard Stimson, Wright Stories)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Three Poems,” Paul Laurence Dunbar
• “Flying—A Dream Come True!” Ida M. Tarbell
• “The Day I Sprouted Wings,” J. Herman Banning
• “The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root

Buy the eBook
Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight
Sixty selections, ranging from the era of balloon flight to the Space Age

The Wright Flyer II flying close to the ground, with Wilbur Wright piloting. This flight, covering a distance of 784 feet in 22 3/4 seconds, occurred on August 13, 1904, a month before A. I. Root visited Huffman Prairie. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

---

When he was in eighth grade in 1886, Orville Wright—the son of a minister in Dayton, Ohio—cofounded a printing firm with his friend Ed Sines. Orville’s brother, Wilbur, eventually joined the business, which survived for more than a decade and published, among other projects, a local weekly called West Side News. In 1890 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Orville’s high school classmate and a close friend, suggested starting a newspaper for the city’s African American residents. The Wrights and Sines agreed to print it, but the Dayton Tattler didn’t find enough readers to cover the costs and it folded after a few issues. In a bit of odd historical coincidence, however, the first edition of the Tattler included the prominent headline “Airship Soon to Fly” over an article about a dirigible test flight.

The two most famous members of Dayton Central High’s Class of ’90 didn’t actually graduate in 1890. Orville Wright dropped out of school his senior year, after the death of his mother, and Dunbar received his diploma in 1891 because he had to retake a math class. “I was the only Negro in the class [of 27 students] and apparently popular,” Dunbar recalled. “My chums encouraged me. My teachers encouraged me.” His first biographer learned that Paul helped Orville with his writing assignments and Orville returned the favor with math lessons.

Paul, Orville, and Wilbur shared an obsession with books that amply supplemented their high school learning. Paul loved poetry, particularly the works of Keats and Shelley. Historian David McCullough notes that Orville’s favorite was Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, while Wilbur preferred histories—when he wasn’t reading books on science and engineering. “It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill,” Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute (the author of Progress in Flying Machines) after he first began his investigations in aviation history.

Fast forward to the winter of 1903–04, when Dunbar and the Wrights returned from their travels and reunited in Dayton. On December 17, the still-unknown Wright brothers had successfully (and secretively) flown their first gas-powered, heavier-than-air vehicle near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In Dayton they planned to create a second, more robust version of the Wright Flyer, and a local banker agreed to let them use his pasture, a marshy area known as Huffman Prairie. Although rumors and reports about the Wrights’ activities had begun reaching the press, no eyewitness accounts had been published; indeed, many of the early articles were wildly inaccurate, while other reporters were understandably skeptical. In May the brothers allowed members of the local press to attend a test flight, but rain, followed by a lack of the headwind needed to help launch the plane, kept it grounded. Four days later, after most of the reporters had lost interest, the brothers finally got off the ground—twelve feet up for about ten yards before crashing. Somehow word reached The New York Times, which reported that “Great secrecy was maintained about the test, and but few witnessed it,” under the headline “Fall Wrecks Airship.”

The first eyewitness account of a successful flight, then, was not in a newspaper or a science magazine, but instead in an apicultural publication called Gleanings in Bee Culture. Its editor, Amos Root, had been hearing the rumors for months and happened to be at Huffman Prairie on September 20, 1904, when he watched the Wrights’ first time landing the plane at the point where they took off. Root’s readable, astonished, buoyant account about the invention is presented as our Story of the Week selection, in which he credits the success in large part to the wide range of the brothers’ reading and education.

While Orville and Wilbur Wright were on the verge of acquiring fame and fortune, Dunbar was already an international literary celebrity: the popular author of several hundred poems, one hundred short stories, five novels, and the lyrics for the groundbreaking hit musical comedy In Dahomey. At the height of his fame, however, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Doctors recommended whiskey and a stay in the Colorado mountains to help him recover from his illness, but the “cure” led to drunkenness and depression, exacerbated by the disintegration of his marriage. His peripatetic schedule—moving from Colorado to Washington to New York to Chicago, with interruptions for cross-country travels for readings and lectures—weakened him further. After returning permanently to Dayton, he bought his mother a beautiful new home (now a museum) and moved in with her. He continued to write at a frenzied pace, but his health did not improve. In February 1906 Wilbur Wright conveyed sad news in a note to Chanute, “Paul Laurence Dunbar was buried today. The funeral was at Eaker Street M.E. (Colored) Church. He was Orville's classmate in High School.” He was only thirty-three years old.

Note: Darius Green was the star of a popular children’s poem, John T. Trowbridge's “Darius Green and His Flying Machine” (1867), about a young boy who attempted to fly by constructing wings and leaping from a window.

*   *   *

Dear friends, I have a wonderful story to tell you—a story that, in some respects, out-rivals the Arabian Nights fables—a story, too, with a moral that I think many of the younger ones need, and perhaps some of the older ones too if they will heed it. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Three Poems

Signs of the Times, Compensation, & When Malindy Sings
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
From American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

Paul Laurence Dunbar archives (Wright State University)

William Dean Howell’s introduction to Dunbar’s Lyrics of a Lowly Life (Archive.org)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban Seasonings,” Ana Menéndez
• “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain
• “Story in Harlem Slang,” Zora Neale Hurston

Buy the book
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century
Over 1,000 classic poems by nearly 150 writers | 2,149 pages
List price: $80.00
Web store price: $60.00

Paul Laurence Dunbar on horseback, c. 1900. (Ohio History Collection)

---

Born in Dayton, Ohio, seven years after the end of the Civil War to two former Kentucky slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was initially educated by his mother, who encouraged his early interest in literature. (His father, who escaped to Canada before the war and served with the Massachusetts 55th Regiment, divorced his mother soon after his birth and died when Paul was only twelve.) Dunbar was the only black student in his class at Dayton’s Central High, where he was editor of the school paper and the class poet. While he was still in school, he founded a paper, the short-lived Dayton Tattler that supported the Republican Party and covered the concerns of African Americans. The friend and classmate who operated the printing press was none other than future aviator Orville Wright.

Over the next few years, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator and, briefly, as a clerk to Frederick Douglass in Chicago. In 1893 Dunbar self-published his first collection of poems; he hand-sold every copy, and earned back his investment. Two years later, this time sponsored by white patrons, his second book, Majors and Minors, was published by a regional printer and eventually fell into the hands of William Dean Howells, the influential editor, novelist, and critic. Howells wrote an appreciation in Harper’s Magazine, praising Dunbar as “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically.” (Many commentators made much of the fact that Dunbar’s ancestry was wholly African rather than multiracial.)

The review made Dunbar suddenly—and unexpectedly—famous. Overwhelmed with gratitude, the young poet wrote Howells:

Now from the depths of my heart I want to thank you. You yourself do not know what you have done for me. I feel much as a poor, insignificant, helpless boy would feel to suddenly find himself knighted. . . .

In the collection that Howells reviewed, the “majors” were the poems written in standard English; the “minors” were dialect pieces, many of them humorous. When Howells revised his essay for the introduction of Dunbar’s third book, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), he made clear which he preferred:

In nothing is his essentially refined and delicate art so well shown as in these [dialect] pieces. . . . Some of [the poems in literary English] I thought very good, and even more than very good, but not distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry. What I mean is that several people might have written them; but I do not know any one else who could quite have written the dialect pieces.

The result of Howell’s recommendation was popular demand for Dunbar’s trademark dialect poems; he soon found it difficult to publish anything else. Nevertheless, before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, he managed to publish a dozen volumes of poetry, four collections of short stories, and four novels, and he wrote the lyrics for In Dahomey, a minstrel- and vaudeville-influenced comedy that was the first full-length Broadway musical composed and performed by African Americans.

Below we present three of Dunbar’s poems: the Thanksgiving poem “Signs of the Times,” which a contemporary reviewer described as “an excellent example of Mr. Dunbar’s roguish humor”; “Compensation,” a superlative example, in two short stanzas, of his verse in non-dialect English; and one of his most famous poems, “When Malindy Sings,” a tribute to his mother, Matilda.

*   *   *

If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.