Paul Laurence Dunbar and the project of cultural reconstruction.

Paul Laurence Dunbar presented a curious sight to the passengers who rode his elevator in the early 1890s. The clerks, craftswomen, and business managers of Dayton, Ohio, often saw the Century magazine in his hands (Matthews qtd in Martin, Foreword). (1) The occupants of that elevator were used to seeing elevator operators reading dime novels. But here was young Dunbar reading the Century, then the nation's preeminent magazine of culture. The New York monthly held, as one contemporary observed, a position of "undisputed primacy among American magazines" ("The Old Fashioned" 87). (2) The magazine could make an author's reputation instantly. For a poet of Dunbar's day, there was no surer way of forging a literary career than to publish in the Century. Against seemingly impossible odds, Dunbar not only broke into the Century, he also became one of the few poets enshrined in the magazine's literary pantheon.

The Century had the distinction of publishing three of Dunbar's poems in the year before Howells wrote his infamous 1896 review of Majors and Minors. (3) Thereafter, the Century championed Dunbar's career. The magazine published more Dunbar poems than it did any other poet during the decade of his productive career. (4) For Dunbar, the magazine was his most important literary outlet. He published more of his poems in the Century than in any other periodical. (5) The influence of the Century on Dunbar's career was immense. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the relationship between Dunbar and the Century editors who promoted his work. This relationship is vital not only for comprehending Dunbar's literary career, but also for understanding the racialization of US society around 1900. Dunbar's aesthetic was largely drawn from a cultural project initiated by the editors of the nation's premier magazines. The project's aim was nothing less than the formation of a national culture built out of regional local color literatures. But Dunbar's work exploded this project. The songs of this caged bird chattering and chanting in a literary dialect would, in a devastatingly tragic irony, transform the regional pretensions of the project into a US nationalism based, not in regional roots, but in purported racial essences.

Cultural Reconstruction

I the very years when Dunbar began publishing his own books of poetry in the early 1890s, the editors of the Century magazine were having trouble. For 20 years Richard Watson Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson, along with the editors at the other leading American magazines such as Harper's, the Atlantic, and Lippincott's, had been engaged in a massive attempt to change the course of US history and cultures. The fate of the nation, they feared, hung in the balance.

The Century's Gilder and Johnson had come to believe soon after the Civil War that the political reconstruction of the South had been a wrenching failure. Gilder and Johnson worried that the former Confederate states were as distant from the rest of the union by the early 1880s as they had been in 1860. To make matters worse, the rancor and clamor of post-Civil War political corruption threatened the country with collapse. Politics splintered the country into warring regional factions set against the ideals of sectional reconciliation. For men like Gilder and Johnson, the Civil War had become merely a prelude to future disaster. To counter the destructive divisiveness of politics, Gilder and Johnson spearheaded a project to invent a US national community. This project, which I call Cultural Reconstruction, sought to turn the ideal of national unity on its head: Instead of creating a unifying historical narrative of a single people, it would instead invent and reproduce regional difference. The goal of Cultural Reconstruction was to create a literary voice for each of the nation's regions and then bring those voices together in one great chorus in the pages of the monthly magazine--a cultural e pluribus unum. (6)

The greatest dilemma facing the project of Cultural Reconstruction was the paucity of capable southern authors. Gilder and Johnson devoted their magazine to the discovery and championing of writers from the former Confederate states. They published works as diverse as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes, and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, leading an onslaught that overran American literature with hordes of southern local color stories. (7)

Dialect writing was vital to the project of Cultural Reconstruction. Gilder and Johnson demanded authors who could write about a region of the country because they were born in it, raised in it, steeped in its mercurial essences. For them, the vital sign of a writer's authenticity was his or her ability to write in literary dialect. Facility with dialect served as proof to American readers and critics of the day that an author was intimately bound up in a locality's history and culture.

But by the mid-1880s, the Gilder and Johnson's project of Cultural Reconstruction faced a threat of their own making. They feared they were losing their southern audience. Siding in their hearts with the liberals in the fight over the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South, they had published a series of literary works and essays critical of southern race relations. Gilder and Johnson, in the midst of the ensuing turmoil, made a fateful decision. They published Thomas Nelson Page's literary sketch, "Marse Chan."

"Marse Chan" was immensely popular in both the South and the North throughout the mid-1880s and 1890s, despite the fact that it was written almost completely in "Negro" dialect. In the story and its sequels, "Marse Chan" and "Meh Lady," Page made aged freedmen reminisce of the supposedly halcyon days of slavery with lines like: "Dem wuz good ole times marster--de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac'! Niggers didn' hed nothin' 't all to do,--jes' hed to 'ten' to de feedin', an cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do. ... Dyar warn' no trouble nor nothin'" (Page, "Marse Chan" 935). (8) Page's work became the basis for a whole new school of "darkey" literature that threatened to rip away Cultural Reconstruction's goal of regional unity and replace it with the harrowing specter of racial division. In an effort to recover the liberal foundations of Cultural Reconstruction in the mid-1890s, Gilder and Johnson began looking for a black author to speak from within the African American experience. Just at that moment, Paul Laurence Dunbar sent them a poem.

Dunbar's Search for Authenticity: Region versus Race

The defining dilemma of Dunbar's literary life was having been born and raised an urban black in the then western state of Ohio. In the project of Cultural Reconstruction, a writer's legitimacy to speak sprang from his or her association with a regional culture. But race disturbed and complicated Dunbar's "westernness": Blackness, in Cultural Reconstruction, was Southern and rural, not western and urban. At the same time, Dunbar's westernness complicated his blackness. It put him in close contact with numerous whites and allowed him to develop intimate contacts across the color line. In his youth, for example, he was friends with the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilber. This unique background led Dunbar constantly to confront the question of the source of his identity. What defined him more: his race or his region, his blackness or his westernness? Dunbar's "marginal" status would cause him to struggle with the question of identity throughout his short life, both personally and professionally. It forced him simultaneously to employ and reject the regionalism of Cultural Reconstruction.

In his early career Dunbar could hardly speak with racial authority. Nor could virtually any other American of his day. American racial identities were in a whirlwind of flux in the 1890s. New sources of immigration, for example, destabilized conceptions of whiteness, particularly in northern and western cities. The problem of formulating a black cultural identity in the 1890s was especially acute. Festering white racialism unsettled any nascent black identity forged by northern free blacks earlier in the century. While the vast majority of African Americans were rural southerners, the urban black middle class largely disdained a heritage built on rural roots, and thus had to reach beyond regional sources for identity. Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois thus began searching for racial traits (rather than regional ones) on which to create a positive black identity. (9) But this shift from the regional to the racial was fraught with ambiguities for an artist like Dunbar.

This struggle between two competing sources of identity goes far in explaining Dunbar's well-known ambivalence toward his dialect poetry. (10) The great irony is that Dunbar learned dialect not as a native language, but much as an ethnologist--and in a way rather similar to the white writers of "Negro" dialect literature. He certainly heard the cadences of black southern speech growing up in Dayton. Numerous refugees from the former slave states settled there after the Civil War. But these voices were a small part of his aural world. His white friends spoke a Hoosier dialect, if they had any accent at all. And his black friends came from upwardly mobile urban families anxious to erase from their speech any markers of rural racial or lower-class status. Dunbar's mother was one such urbanite. According to one of Dunbar's Dayton associates, his mother "spoke no dialect, nor did his friends" (Conover 186).

Living in Dayton separated Dunbar from the rural black South. His experience of the South came through stories. Dunbar's father told of his escape to Canada and of his war experiences. Dunbar's mother told of slavery days, sometimes revealing the dark sides of the plantation world but more often recalling lighter moments of her antebellum life. If she sometimes confided to her son the bitterness and sorrows of her bondage, she told him more about the Aunt Dosheys and Uncle Ikes, Christmas celebrations, and dancing to fiddles and banjos. These stories were as close to the South as Dunbar got until he was almost 30.

As his career progressed, Dunbar experienced both a social and a regional distance from the mass of rural and lower-class blacks. He alluded to this alienation in his first letter to his patron Henry Tobey in the summer of 1895. Dunbar hoped to study "my own people" to prove that "we are more human than African." But this goal was not a project of speaking for the black race from personal knowledge. Rather, Dunbar sensed he did not know black people as a race. He knew he would eventually have to travel south in his quest, but in the meantime he wanted to explore the great northeastern cities "where I might see our northern Negro at his best, before seeing his brother in the South. ..." (11) The shifting references of his pronouns (the intimate "we," the racially all-inclusive "our," the separating "his") suggest a man thoroughly ill at ease with a black racial identity. Dunbar's intimate, lifelong connections with whites further agitated his racial identity, from his intense 1896 affair with Maud Wilkinson to his long friendship with Ohio politician and author Brand Whitlock. (12)

Dunbar's conception of rural life was the romantic vision of the city-bred middle class. His work often portrayed rural black life in idyllic terms. An early poem, "Goin' Back," described an aged freedman's joy at returning to his old Kentucky home after decades in the city. (13) A later essay urged rural blacks to put up with "the restrictions" of southern life and remain on their farms. There, Dunbar believed, blacks experienced "purity, simplicity, and the joy of life" ("The Negroes of the Tenderloin" 43). (14) Until they could "show greater capabilities for contact with a hard and intricate civilization," Dunbar advised, "I would have them stay upon the farm and learn to live in God's great kindergarten for his simple children!" ("The Negroes of the Tenderloin" 43). (15)

Dunbar was also regionally alienated from the South. The South that Dunbar knew into early adulthood was an imagined South. The rosier stories of slavery that Dunbar's mother told him meshed quite easily with the plantation portraits by Thomas Nelson Page, which Dunbar read in the Century magazine. Writing to his future wife in April 1895, Dunbar evinced the widely held conception that white writers of Negro dialect were more like regional historians than conjurers of racial stereotype. He asked her "whether or not you believe in preserving by Afro-American--I don't like the word--writers those quaint old tales and songs of our fathers which have made the fame of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Ruth McEnery Stuart and others! Or whether you like so many others think we should ignore the past and all its capital literary materials" (Martin and Hudson 428). Five years later, even as he began to resent Page's racial politics, he could still consider Page an objective historian of the Old South. (16) In an article for Harper's Weekly on "Negro Life in Washington," Dunbar leaned heavily on Page to describe an elderly "Negro gentleman": "he moves briskly along, like a character suddenly popped out of one of Page's stories. He waves his hand in salute, and I have a vision of Virginia of fifty years ago" (32). But this vision is as removed from actuality as Page's romantic South, if not more so.

Dunbar: Poet of the Century

The project of Cultural Reconstruction virtually demanded that, if Dunbar hoped to become a black poet, he would have to do it as a southerner. "Negro" stories, by the mid-1890s, had little literary legitimacy for readers if they were not of and by southerners as well. (17) Dunbar's turn to Negro dialect and southern black folk settings demonstrates that he understood this. But this decision to become a Negro dialect poet transformed Dunbar from a poet of the human experience into what several contemporaries termed "the poet laureate of the black race." This transformation is clearly revealed by a comparison of the poems he published in newspapers and magazines before and after his first appearance in the Century.

Of the 13 poems Dunbar published in periodicals before his first Century poem, none was in Negro dialect. (18) Ten were in standard English, two were in Hoosier dialect, and one was in German dialect. What is more, none of the so-called standard English poems had a racial theme. All were about nature, love, and other traditionally romantic subjects. In the three years following the publication of his first Century poem, 1896 through 1898, Dunbar published 34 poems in national magazines. Twenty-four of these were in Negro dialect. Of the remaining 10, three were on themes related to black life. Thus, in those two years Dunbar became a "Negro" poet. That is, before his first Century poem, Dunbar published nothing on black life in periodicals. But between 1896 and 1898, 80 percent of his poems were concerned with African American themes, and the vast majority was in Negro dialect. (19)

Gilder and Johnson were deeply enamored of Dunbar's Negro dialect poetry. Through October 1898, they accepted 13 Dunbar poems. Ten were in Negro dialect, and all but one addressed African American life. Dunbar was frustrated by this pattern, as his noted ambivalence regarding dialect poetry suggests. He was even more frustrated that Gilder and Johnson did not place his dialect poems in the body of the magazine but in a section in the back, called "In Lighter Vein." Granted, Dunbar often had distinguished company there (Harris's "Uncle Remus" tales, for instance). But Dunbar yearned for the artistic validation that would come from the Century editors publishing his standard English poems and placing his dialect poems in the body of the magazine.

Gilder and Johnson's placement of his poems in "Lighter Vein" does not suggest either a callous disregard for Dunbar's work or tokenism. First off, Gilder and Johnson were little affected by the surging race prejudice tearing through the 1890's US. Gilder could take the Russian Jew Emma Lazarus as a poetic protege, defend Italian immigrants against racist attacks, entertain Chinese and Japanese artists in his home, and revile the white southern fear of racial equality as "a humbug and a fraud" (Gilder to Grady 71). Johnson was the child of abolitionist Quakers, had dined with Frederick Douglass in his grandfather's house, and had played with neighborhood African American children while growing up in Indiana. Gilder and Johnson had worked hard to secure a literary contribution from Douglass to the Century when they became the magazine's editors in 1881 (Douglass 125).

Second, Gilder and Johnson saw Dunbar's work as counter to the deviltry wrought by Page's appropriation of the black voice (and their role in publishing it). But their poetic principles were highly exacting, and they believed that Dunbar, early in his career, had not achieved his full potential. Thus, they treated Dunbar as they did numerous other poets (Emma Lazarus, for example). They worked closely with the young poet to hone his bardic skills in such difficult forms as the sonnet. (20) Indeed, so delighted were the Century editors with Dunbar's early successes they accorded him a rare honor: they invited the young black poet to their offices and feted him handsomely. By June 1887, Dunbar felt sufficiently acquainted with Gilder that he could write the Century editor: "I have grown to look upon you not only as an editor but as a friend" (Dunbar to Richard Watson Gilder).

Only in November 1898 did the Century editors place a Dunbar poem--a sonnet in standard English!--in the body of the magazine. From that year until 1905, Gilder and Johnson published 17 more Dunbar poems. Two of these were standard English poems placed in the body of the magazine. The rest, too, although written in Negro dialect, increasingly appeared in the body of the magazine.

This trend reveals that the Century editors had capitulated to the racialization of US society. For them, Dunbar was a poet of the black race, not the region of the South. Tellingly, the 1898 sonnet was on a black theme. It was a paean to Harriet Beecher Stowe: Although she was white, the poem celebrated her significance for the freed slaves (Dunbar, "Harriet Beecher Stowe" 61). Thus, even as the Century editors were championing Dunbar's work, they had come to see him as a black writer rather than an American author who sometimes wrote black.

Gilder and Johnson seem to have been aware of this distinction. About 1900, for example, they began to question their use of black figures in dialect poetry. By then, of course, the virulence of white racism had become painfully clear in the race riots of the previous two years, beginning in Wilmington, North Carolina, in November 1898, and ending in New York City in August 1900. Johnson wrote Dunbar to ask whether the Century used "the Negro" too often for comic material. The poet said no, commenting, "There is a larger moral quality in his character just as there is in that of the Irishman, and I cannot see that a laugh when one laughs with them, hurts either one or the other" (Paul Laurence Dunbar to Robert Underwood Johnson).

Dunbar's response is odd. He had clearly begun to chafe against dialect literature by this time. And given the menacing racism of the late 1890s, it seems difficult to account for the comic use of the Negro character in a magazine whose audience was largely white. At best, Dunbar here was conceiving of humor as a form of sympathy that asked readers to identify with the subject of the comedy. At worst, Dunbar feared losing one of his most important literary outlets and responded in an ambiguous way (how does one distinguish between "laughing with" and "laughing at," especially in the racially charged atmosphere of 1900?). Either way, Dunbar used the occasion to push his desire to publish a serious, standard English poem in the pages of the Century.

After responding to Johnson's question, Dunbar informed the Century editor that he had written "a couple of serious pieces" in response to "the present turmoil" (Dunbar to Johnson). One in particular caught Johnson's eye: "The Haunted Oak." The poem, a powerful attack on lynching, took the point of view of the tree from which the tortured body of a murdered black man hung. Through this device, Dunbar spared no member of the white society that countenanced lynching. He singled out the judge, the doctor, and the minister as the men who legitimated such illegitimate justice. Johnson accepted the poem and then published it in the December 1900 issue of the Century (Dunbar, "The Haunted Oak" 276).

"The Haunted Oak" represented the pinnacle of Dunbar's poetic career at the Century. The 16-stanza poem was by far the longest that Dunbar published in the magazine. (It was also one of the longest poems the Century ever published.) But in terms of altering the course of Dunbar's career toward a greater appreciation of his standard English work on non-race themes, the poem was too little, too late.

In the years following 1898 until his 1906 death, Dunbar published upwards of 200 original poems in magazines and newspapers across the country. The great majority were in Negro dialect. None was in Hoosier or any other "white" dialects. A handful was in standard English. Virtually all were on themes of black history or black culture. Dunbar had come to lose all hope of being a regional voice in the national chorus envisioned in the early formulation of Cultural Reconstruction. By 1901, Dunbar was widely hailed, not as an American poet, or a western poet, or even a southern poet. For those searching to establish black culture, he was the "laureate of his race," "the expression of a racial genius," "the historian of his race," "the voice of a race" ("Dunbar's Poems"; Nelson; "The New Slavery"). For those who clung to the darkey stereotype, Dunbar was a black threat: "I used to read Dunbar quite a lot," W. E. B. Du Bois heard a white Texas woman say, "until I found out he was a nigger" (Du Bois, "Possibilities" 3). Dunbar had become trapped in a prison-house of literary dialect. (21)

Dunbar's dialect poetry performed a vital if aesthetically suicidal task in the era of Jim Crow's caustic ascendancy. By revealing that black authors could write "Negro," Dunbar unmasked the racist stereotype of the African American perpetrated by white authors such as Thomas Nelson Page. But Dunbar could only legitimate this act of unmasking by adopting for himself the metastasizing conception of race as an identity prior to all others. Dunbar, Samson-like, brought the regionalist pretensions of Cultural Reconstruction crashing down on himself. His dialect poetry was the sign that US national identity by 1900 was no longer constructed through the production of regional unity, but through the production of racial difference.

Works Cited

Alexander, Eleanor. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow. New York: New York UP, 2001.

Blight, David. Race and Reconstruction: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Brown, Sterling. Negro Poetry and Drama. Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937.

Buck, Paul. The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.

Conover, Charlotte Reeve. Some Dayton Saints and Prophets. Dayton, OH: United Brethren, 1907.

Douglass, Frederick. "My Escape from Slavery." Century 23 (November 1881): 125-31.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "The Conservation of Races." 1897. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. Ed. David Levering Lewis. New York: Holt, 1995. 20-28.

--. "Possibilities of the Negro." Booklovers Magazine 2.1 (July 1903): 3.

--. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. "Dunbar's Poems." Washington Times. 2 Apr. 1899. Clipping in the Dunbar Papers, OHS, microfilm, reel 4.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993.

--. "Goin' Back." Dunbar, Collected 202-03.

--. The Hapless Southern Negro." Denver Post. 17 Sept. 1899. Martin and Hudson 43-45.

--. "Harriet Beecher Stowe." Century 57 (November 1898).

--. "The Haunted Oak." Century 61 (December 1900): 276-77.

--. Letter to Jean Blackwell. by James Covington, the husband of Wilkinson's great niece. 11 June 1956. Dunbar Papers, Schomburg Library.

--. Letter to Richard Watson Gilder. 1 June 1897. Richard Watson Gilder Papers, New York Public Library.

--. Letter to Robert Underwood Johnson. 26 June 1900. Century Papers, New York Public Library.

--. Letter to Dr. Henry A. Tobey. 13 July 1895. Martin and Hudson 431.

--. Letter to Maud Wilkinson. 24 Oct. 1896. Dunbar Papers, Schomburg Library.

--. "The Mission of Mr. Scatters." Collier's 26 (30 Mar. 1901): 14-16.

--. "Negro Life in Washington." Harper's Weekly 44 (13 Jan. 1900): 32.

--. "The Negroes of the Tenderloin." Martin and Hudson 40-43.

--. "To the Eastern Shore." Collected 316-17. Gilder, Richard Watson. Letter to Grady. 15 May 1885. Richard Watson Gilder. Ed. Herbert F. Smith. New York: Twayne, 1970.71.

Hudson, Gossie H. "Dunbar: Dialect et la Negritude," Phylon 34.3 (1973): 240.

--. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Regional Heritage of Dayton's First Black Poet." Antioch Review 34 (1976): 439.

Jameson, Frederic. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

John, Arthur. The Best Years of the Century. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981.

Johnson, James Weldon. Along This Way. 1933.

Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

--. Foreword. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: Biography Through Letters." Martin, Singer.

--. and Gossie H. Hudson, eds. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

Metcalf, Eugene. Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N J: Scarecrow P, 1975.

Nelson, James Poyntz. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Leader(June 1900), clipping in the Dunbar

Papers, OHS, microfilm, reel 5.

"The New Slavery," Truth (2 Mar. 1901), clipping the Dunbar papers, OHS, microfilm, reel 5.

"The Old Fashioned Americanism of Richard Watson Gilder." Current Literature 47 (January 1910): 87.

Page, Thomas Nelson. "Marse Chan." Century 27 (April 1884): 932-42.

--. "Meh Lady: A Story of the War." Century 32 (June 1886): 187-206.

Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880-1960. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997.

Riley, James Whitcomb. Undated speech. Riley Papers, Lilly Library, Indiana University. 179-80.

Scott-Childress, Reynolds J. Cultural Reconstruction: Nation, Race, and the Invention of the American Magazine, 1830-1915. PhD Diss., University of Maryland, 2003.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993.

Stronks, James B. "Paul Laurence Dunbar and William Dean Howells." Ohio Historical Quarterly 67.2 (April 1958): 95-108.

Notes

(1.) See also Riley.

(2.) See also John; Reed; and Scott-Childress.

(3.) The Century was not the first nationally circulating magazine to publish Dunbar. Munsey's published his poem "The Land o' Used to Be" two months before his first poem in the Century. It is possible that he had earlier published another poem in a national magazine. He reported in a letter of November 29, 1892 that he had received two dollars from "a child's publication in New York" for a poem. Metcalf, however, lists no such publication in his extensive bibliography of Dunbar's work. It is possible the magazine in question bought the poem, but never printed it.

(4.) Between 1895 and 1906, the Century published 30 of Dunbar's poems.

(5.) This claim is based on a count of works listed in Metcalf, Dunbar: A Bibliography.

(6.) For more on the project of Cultural Reconstruction, see Scott-Childress.

(7.) The classic work on this phenomenon is Buck. Two more recent discussions of it are Silber and Blight.

(8.) See also the equally popular "Meh Lady: A Story of the War."

(9.) See, for example, Du Bois's "The Conservation of Races" and The Souls of Black Folk.

(10.) See, for example, Dunbar to Helen Douglass, 22 Oct. 1896, in Hudson, "Dunbar: Dialect et la Negritude" 240; Johnson 160; Stronks 104; Hudson, "Paul Laurence Dunbar" 439; Martin and Hudson 262.

(11.) See letter to Dr. Henry A. Tobey, 13 July 1895. Dunbar's sentiments were very close to those of his character, Howard Dokesbury, in the story "The Ordeal at Mt. Hope." Dokesbury, a minister of southern black parentage, goes south to help "his people" but experiences an acute alienation from the rural folk. In a moment of crisis he asks himself questions that could easily have been Dunbar's own: "did he know his own people? Was it possible that they could be so different from what he had seen and known? He had always been such a loyal Negro, so proud of his honest brown; but had he been mistaken? Was he, after all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?" (Martin and Hudson 72-73).

(12.) See Dunbar to Maud Wilkinson. See also accompanying letter to Jean Blackwell of the Schomburg Library. Note also that Dunbar's wife, Alice Moore of New Orleans, was both exceedingly light skinned and highly disdainful of darker-hued blacks (among whom, ironically, Dunbar was counted). On Alice Dunbar's dislike for dark-skinned blacks, see Alexander 62-67.

(13.) Dunbar originally placed the poem in his first collection Oak and Ivy, but he did not include the poem in any later collections, perhaps too aware of the poem's similarity to the Stephen Foster song. He repeated the formula in a later poem, "To the Eastern Shore." Both poems are in Braxton.

(14.) Dunbar repeated his warnings to stay on the farm in "The Hapless Southern Negro."

(15.) Dunbar explored this theme of rural blacks moving to the city in his novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902).

(16.) Dunbar was ambivalent about Page, as with so many other things. See his disparaging comments about Page in the New York Commercial Advertiser, 14 Feb. 1899 (Dunbar Papers, OHS). For more on Dunbar's poetic debts to Page, see Brown 35ff.

(17.) Indeed, throughout Dunbar's career, even when he discussed black experience in the urban North, his black characters virtually always were southerners who set out from the South. Moreover, after the publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life in 1896, Dunbar published only two more Hoosier dialect poems in his next volume of poems, and none thereafter.

(18.) Again, these counts are based largely on the lists of Dunbar poems provided in Metcalf.

(19.) A similar emphasis can be seen in the short stories Dunbar managed to publish in magazines after establishing his name as the poet of the black race. The bulk of his published stories were in the plantation tradition of Page, while one set of stories concerned white Ohioans, and only one of Dunbar's stories about tensions along the color line appeared in a magazine, "The Mission of Mr. Scatters," in Collier's in 1901.

(20.) See the letters of August 1898 regarding an unnamed sonnet, on which Dunbar labored, in the Gilder Papers, New York Public Library.

(21.) The allusion here is, of course, to Nietzsche's figure of "the prison-house of language" that Jameson uses in The Prison-House of Language to denote the power of language to mediate historical experience and determine the play of power through culturally constructed forms of expression.

Reynolds J. Scott-Childress is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. The editor of Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, Scott-Childress is currently at work on a book titled "Cultural Reconstruction: The Northern Production of Southern Culture," which examines the ways in which late 19th-century Northern magazine editors and intellectuals largely determined the possibilities and limits of figures, icons, and myths traditionally thought to be pure expression of Southern authors and artists.