Caressed by the word: the lives and love of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. (tribute).

I didn't go looking for Paul Laurence Dunbar, but he found me anyway. It was in Los Angeles in 1972, one hundred years after his birth. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Harlick, had told us to pick a poet's work to read to the class. Mom suggested Dunbar's "In the Morning," about a father trying to wake his sleepy head son and rush him off to school. I was, at the time, an avowed poetry-hater. Yet I found myself enchanted by Dunbar's verses, such as these opening lines from "In the Morning":

   'Lias! 'Lias! Bless de Lawd! Don' you know de day's erbroad? Ef you don'
   git up, you scamp, Dey'll be trouble in dis camp.

Dunbar's easy humor captured me, his race pride in "Ode to Ethiopia" emboldened me, and his consciousness in "We Wear the Mask" awed me. Knowing he had come before, contributed to my becoming a writer.

About a year ago, I received an e-mail that led me to a University of Dayton website devoted to Dunbar. He was "the most famous Black writer in the world" during his lifetime, according to a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in a new book, In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Reading through Dunbar's biography on the website, I was saddened that his life was so short. Born in June 1872, he died of tuberculosis 33 years later. Of particular interest to me was the fact that he had once been married to a writer. Who was she? I wondered. How did they meet? Was it true love or an intoxicating spell that two word-weavers had cast upon one another?

In the library, I searched for answers in books by Dunbar, such as I Greet The Dawn, and books about him like Paul Laurence Dunbar, a biography by Peter Revell. I also read through books by Alice, reprinted in The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson Vols. 1-3, edited by Gloria T. Hull, and about her in Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, written by Hull. Finally, I found Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, a doctoral dissertation written by Eleanor Alexander while at Brown University. From these sources, I pieced together the story of Paul and Alice's lives and their love.

For a man who only lived into his early 30's and spent a fair amount of those battling poor health, Paul's many volumes of poetry, novels, librettos, essays, short stories and plays remain an impressive body of work. The child of former Kentucky slaves, he was born in Dayton, Ohio, and began writing poetry at around six-years-old. His mother taught him songs and stories she'd heard on the plantation, which he translated into a rich, rhythmic, dialect that made his poetry wildly popular, but ultimately caused him frustration as critics dismissed his standard English verse. For a time Paul was out of favor with later generations, who accused him of using dialect to pander to whites.

The only black in his high school class, Paul excelled as a member of the debating society, editor of the school paper, and literary club president. In 1892, at 20, he published his first book of poems, Oak and Ivy, and sold it to passengers on the elevator he operated in a downtown Dayton office building. He wanted a job more suited to his skills, but race proved too high a hurdle. Much of his income went to support his mother, who had split from his father when he was two; she'd raised her three sons largely alone.

Roughly 900 miles to the south in New Orleans, Alice Ruth Moore was as smitten by the word as Paul. Three years younger than him, she published her first book, Violets and Other Tales in 1895, when she was also just 20-years-old. She wrote mostly about customs in her local Creole community. Sometimes she wrote about mulattoes caught in the middle. Plots centered around: will she/won't she (get the man, keep the man, be able to stomach the man once she's got him)? Nature was also a focal point:

   I had not thought of violets of late The wild shy kind that spring beneath
   your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the
   fields in raptures sweet

Always industrious, Alice stacked up many achievements. She studied at Columbia and Cornell universities, among others. She was a teacher, played mandolin in a New Orleans orchestra and belonged to service clubs that championed fair treatment for blacks and women's right to vote. In 1899 she would publish her second book, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, but it was her picture and a poem by her printed several years before that first caught Patti's eye.

His wasn't the only heart she stole with her alabaster skin and auburn hair, and only the tiniest trace of Africa in her features. Here and there when it got her into tony places such as the opera or art museum, she passed for white, slipping easily through the doors of places where Paul, with his deep brown skin, full nose and lips, would have been turned away with a snarl and a slur.

The day Paul saw that picture and poem in a Boston magazine, he wrote Alice a letter and enclosed a love poem. For two years they corresponded. The missives might have continued, but when England summoned him to visit, he and Alice worried that his stay might be extended indefinitely. Who could wait that long? Not Paul and Alice.

On the eve of his trip in February 1897, they were finally in the same place at the same time: the New York home of writer Victoria Earle Matthews, a fellow club member of Alice's and friend of Paul's. She was hosting his send-off party. Alice slipped away from Boston, where she taught school, to attend.

In her dissertation, Alexander renders the scene: "That night, Paul and Alice escaped from the illustrious crowd into the Matthews' study. Paul proposed; she accepted and promised to learn to love him." He gave her a slim gold band that once belonged to his mother, and she gave him violets, her favorite flower. "They talked of having babies, [and] vowed to keep the engagement a secret ..."

Alice never returned to Boston, instead staying on and getting a teaching assignment in Brooklyn. When Paul returned several months later, he visited her there occasionally and they got to know each up-close and personal. Set to marry in June 1898--the following year--they eloped three months early. He was 25 and she was 22. Paul sped things along by suggesting that it was in Alice's best interest to marry sooner, because, though he would try to be true, he was a hot property and he wasn't making any promises.

Her fiance's pressure put her in a tricky position: either Alice left her class in the middle of the school year, or she jeopardized her opportunity to become Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar, with all the perks that went with it. She grabbed the gold ring.

For a time, the couple enjoyed their celebrity, a' la Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Alice made sure Paul commanded top dollar for his performances, once responding to a request for him to speak: "Fee Fifty," and then on second thought, doubling his usual charge: "Fee one hundred dollars," she told the telegram messenger. Paul helped Alice's career just as she'd hoped, bringing her on with his publishers. He had friends in high places, from the flight pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, to Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Alice was tickled at Paul's well-heeled associations, and she settled quite comfortably into the house he bought in Washington, D.C. next to famed educator Mary Church Terrell and husband, Robert, a judge. But Paul didn't mix enough with their black "talented tenth" neighbors to suit Alice's tastes: "We owe it to ourselves to create and maintain an unquestioned, looked-up-to social position," she implored him. Paul worried that his new bride cared more about his renown than she did about him. "Could you still love me ... If I were a failure?" he asked. "If instead of a laurel to wear I should come ... with a grief to share, darling would you share it?"

They shared it all right. She didn't complain in public, but in her fiction she wrote more than once about a woman married to a literary light who cheats on her and whose highball "glass was never empty." Paul's marital woes didn't necessarily spill into his writing, but he was running ragged, cranking out the work and traveling constantly to provide for them. Freelance writers, they were as preoccupied with earning a living as they were with poetry.

Then there were their mother-in-law troubles. Her mother thought Paul was too dark and too involved in minstrel shows. His mother thought Alice was too uppity. The tension mounted after Paul moved his mother from Dayton to Washington, D.C. to live with them. His drinking didn't help. Initially, he used alcohol to quell the symptoms of tuberculosis, as a doctor had advised him to do, but the drinking became a nasty habit.

Whether it was the booze or Paul's somber moods, their fighting sometimes escalated to violence. He exploded. She endured. But in January of 1902, they had a horrible row, and she swore off of him. She was 25 and he 29. The last four years of his life, they never laid eyes on one another again. After their split, she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she read about his death in a newspaper. She didn't make it to Dayton for the funeral.

Alice's departure effectively ended their marriage, but she never parted with Paul's name, though she wed twice more and took several women lovers besides. Remaining Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar in public--and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in private--carried with it the Midas touch of celebrity. Still she struggled, dogged as she wrote in her published diary, Give Us This Day, by bounced checks, unpaid mortgage bills and creditors.

Yet, she never slowed down, once traveling to the Harding White House to protest the life sentences meted out to black soldiers who'd fought in a race riot. She edited, along with her third husband, Robert J. Nelson, a progressive newspaper for a couple of years, and continued to write essays, stories, and even film scripts until her death of heart problems in 1935, ending a full and eclectic life that spanned 60 years.

Once upon a time, two writers found love through the word. Lyrically, Paul and Alice embraced one another. And on paper, they were the perfect couple.

For more on the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, go to www.bibookreview.com.

Pamela Johnson writes in this issue about Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first poet she ever loved. She contributes frequently to Essence magazine, and her most recent book is Tenderheaded: A Comb Bending Collection of Hair Stories. Johnson is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College. Johnson's tribute to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar begins on page 71.