Factoring out race: the cultural context of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Bradley, David

I am always intimidated when asked to speak to scholars, possibly because I recall the evaluation of one of my tutors at the University of London: "As a scholar, Bradley is adequate, as opposed to brilliant." That was, in fact, polite British understatement; now, as then, I am a scholar of zero magnitude. I am a writer, and while my work at times treats literary issues, the treatise is not a form that I attempt. My remarks here are shaped by methodological assumptions which are at times quite different from the methodological assumptions of scholarship. Indeed, the essence of my remarks is a challenge to some scholarly conclusions which have gained credence due to a flaw in scholarly methodology.

I say this not because I lack respect for scholarship. Indeed, I not only respect it but am indebted to it. 'Twas scholarship that brought me from my Christian childhood and taught my soul to understand that there's redemption in examining evidence, interrogating assumptions.., and letting the chips fall where they may. 'Tis scholarship that allows me to understand that I write fiction in the American Realist tradition of Herman Melville and William Dean Howells. 'Twas scholarship that taught me, when I ventured into the genre now called "creative non-fiction" that truth often emerges more powerfully from factual accuracy than from literary artistry. 'Tis scholarship that provides me with that accuracy; without the work of scholars I would be unable to do my work at all.

And were I to begin with anything so scholarly as an "Explanation of Method and Procedures" it would be a quote from playwright Wilson Mizner: "If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research." I try to stop short of larceny, and to the extent possible acknowledge scholarly sources. And as I beg the lending of ears, declare, I come not to bury scholars, but to praise them--some of them, anyway. It is fitting I should do this here because I have never been more acutely aware of my dependence on scholarship than during the four years when I have been writing about Paul Laurence Dunbar.

My first Dunbar project was a treatment for a documentary film. The treatment form does not allow for footnotes, but an examination of my working papers references the work of such scholars as Lerone Bennett, Jr., Arna Bontemps, Joanne Braxton, James A. Emmanuel, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Gloria Hull Gossie Hudson, James Weldon Johnson, Jay Martin, Saunders Redding, Peter Revell, Darwin Turner, Lida Keck Wiggins, Kenny J. Williams, and Harry Wonham. My second Dunbar project was a series of three Introductions for The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Although the publisher, did not include footnotes, the text I submitted included about 150, and my working papers included many, many more.

One reason for the number of these latter citations was, I was collaborating with Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin. It was not the first time Professor Fishkin has risked reputation and sanity by working with me, and I have come to think of her as the Voice of Saint Jerome, the 4th-century Catholic cleric who spent years in a cave in Jerusalem studying Hebrew primary sources, the better to "clarify" the Latin Bible. I, on the other hand, am the Voice of David Farragut, the Civil War commander who said, "Full speed ahead~ Damn the torpedoes" Actually, what Farragut said was Damn the torpedoes! Captain Drayton, go ahead! Jouett, full speed!" Which correction exemplifies the scholarly precision on which Professor Fishkin has insisted.

Some would call it folly for a reputable scholar with a PhD in American Studies from Yale to have any dealings at all with a gonzo with an MA in United States Studies from a British Institute that is now defunct. I would call it noblesse oblige, and pray her peers will hold her blameless for any heresies in the Introductions in The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings, as well as anything I say today. To sample Malcolm X, all of the credit is due to Shelley Fishkin; the.., all the weirdness is mine.

Which is not to say she's not at all responsible for it. In fact, it was she who insisted I do the thing that inspired the overall weirdness, and eventually, these remarks. To wit, she suggested I examine a physical copy of Paul Laurence Dunbar's second volume of verse, Majors and Minors. (1)

Here I must apologize for presenting a summary of Dunbar's early publication history, which to this audience is Old News. But I am told the conference papers may be published, which means this one might be seen by one of my former writing students, any of whom would just love to catch the Old Man failing to establish the backstory.

Dunbar's first volume, Oak and Ivy, was printed by the United Brethren Publishing House, at the author's expense using borrowed funds, the author undertaking such publishing functions as editorial selection, promotion, and sales. Oak and Ivy earned the author enough money to repay the loan and introduced him to America's Negro intelligentsia.

It also earned the support of Dr. H. A. Tobey, of Toledo, who formed a consortium which funded a second volume, Majors and Minors (Wiggins 48). Although initial sales were disappointing, a copy reached the eyes of the influential reviewer William Dean Howells, whose lauding of Dunbar in his Harper's Weekly column made Majors and Minors sell like hotcakes and introduced Dunbar to the white American intelligentsia.

Howells's column has caused much critical controversy. Had we but world enough and time I would defend Howells's ideas and rhetorical strategies, but at my back I hear time's winged chariot hurrying near .... Actually, it's the conference-appointed timekeeper. Suffice it, then, that Howells further promoted Dunbar's career by agreeing to write an Introduction to a third volume, which encouraged Dodd, Mead, to undertake what became Lyrics of Lowly Life. Although Dodd, Mead, handled most publishing functions, and probably chose the title, Dunbar again was responsible for editorial selection.

At times it probably seemed to Dunbar that the progress of his career was glacial. In fact the speed was more like that of an avalanche, and the artistic effects as dangerous. While I no more claim to be a poet than I do to be a scholar, I will rely on a description of the lyrical poetic process from what would seem an unassailable authority, William Wordsworth, in the Preface to the Second Volume of Lyrical Ballads:

 ... all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
 feelings:.., it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
 tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
 reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
 kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
 gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In
 this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood
 similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever
 kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by
 various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever,
 which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be
 in a state of enjoyment.

Not being a poet, I won't pretend I understand all of what Wordsworth is saying. What I do understand him as saying is, good poetry takes time. A lot of time. Indeed, a lot of free time, to accommodate all this spontaneity and recollection in tranquility and contemplation and reaction. And what I also understand is that, between the publication of Oak and Ivy and Lyrics of Lowly Life, Dunbar, as author, just didn't have that time.

Therefore Dunbar, as editor, in assembling each volume, included new-or unpublished--poems, and also some poems published in previous volumes. For those who demand precision, scholars inform me that Lyrics of Lowly Life included 20 poems from Oak and Ivy and all the poems from Majors and Minors (which already included 11 poems from Oak and Ivy) plus some additional material, and that only 11 of the 105 poems in Lyrics of Lowly Life had not been previously published (Revell 185, 56; Martin and Hudson 26). Less precisely, I would say that both Majors and Minors and Lyrics of Lowly Life could have been accurately subtitled New and Selected Poems.

Some might say this process lacked purity. Most writer's would say it makes sense, aesthetically and economically, as the poems Dunbar retained from volume to volume were arguably his best, and each volume was distributed to a different market; the only buyers of Lyrics of Lowly Life short-changed were the relative few who had purchased copies of Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors. Still this process allowed a misunderstanding that would problematize--there's a good scholarly term--the way Dunbar would, and indeed could, be seen, in the twentieth century.

Obviously, the process generated a set of "Lost Texts." Professor Fishkin would have me use the more precise term "Hard-to-Find Texts," but I'm a writer; so I'll go with the hyperbole. Every writer's oeuvre contains works whose existence can be historically documented but whose text cannot be found and so is unavailable for critical analysis--manuscripts or fragments which were never published, or which were published in ephemeral media--e, g. weekly newspapers, church bulletins, school literary magazines--that were never archived. Historical scholars may perhaps find references to these texts, and so be able write about them, but literary scholars cannot find a text, and so, cannot actually read them.., until and unless somebody finds a copy in Aunt Addie's attic.

Some of Dunbar's early poems fit this scenario, having appeared in the Westside News, a newsletter printed by Wilbur and Orville Wright, and distributed to Dayton's white community, or in The Tattler, also printed by the Wrights, but edited by Dunbar, and distributed to Dayton's black community. The problem was exacerbated by the process by which Oak and Ivy begat Majors and Minors and Majors and Minors begat Lyrics of Lowly Life. It was not resolved by the publication of The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1913, as Dodd, Mead included only those poems it had previously published; The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar wasn't. Fortunately many of the Lost Poems were "found" in 1993, and published as "Added Poems" in the University of Virginia Press's Collected Poetry, edited by Joanne M. Braxton.

The opportunity to read those poems had a profound effect on my thinking as I did my portion of work on Other Essential Writings, so Professor Braxton too is partly responsible for my weirdness. Still Professor Fishkin is most responsible. Because when Professor Fishkin suggested I examine a physical copy of Majors and Minors I said that, as far as my writerly conscience was concerned, reading all these obscure Lost Poems was scholarly due diligence enough. But Professor Fishkin insisted and more, provided a copy from the Stanford Library, and in so doing so led me to a surprising discovery: there were no "minors" in Majors and Minors.

Again, I apologize for establishing backstory; but.., well, it's a Writer. But since its inception, the field of Dunbar Criticism has been beweeded by the notion that Dunbar was a bit.., embarrassed by his black brethren and sisteren. Actually, all but the most radical race-oriented rhetoric of Dunbar's era, including that of the aforementioned Negro intelligentsia, reflected the assumption that the mass of black folk needed to rise "up from slavery," as the title of a ghost-written 1901 "autobiography" of the Great Exemplar of Elevation, Booker T. Washington phrased it.

But some critics--specifically, some Negro critics--believed they detected evidence of a more pathological attitude in Dunbar's discourse, on the basis of which they argued he was, at least, twisted by Du Boisian "Double Consciousness," and perhaps was fatally warped by Freudian self-loathing. Some found this evidence in "The Poet," an eight-line expression penned three years before Dunbar's death, in which he lamented that "the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue" in preference to poems which "sang of life, serenely sweet, / With, now and then, a deeper note ...." These scholars interpreted the phrase "broken tongue" as a reference to Negro dialect, and an indication of Dunbar's negative view thereof. But for most of these critics "The Poet" only provided confirmation; the primary evidence was located in the title "Majors and Minors." Here, as the critics read it, Dunbar was saying the poems couched in standard (actually, Romantic English) were "major" while poems couched in Negro dialect were "minor." The implication was that Dunbar was ashamed, of his black brethren and sisteren, and possibly of his own black self.

That notion overgrew the field of Dunbar Criticism like kudzu. In her Introduction to the Collected Poetry Professor Braxton summarized:

 The central debate conceming Dunbar's poetry had begun to emerge
 when his second collection, Majors and Minors... was reviewed by
 William Dean Howells in the June 27, 1896, issue of Harper's
 Weekly. Howells's review drew wide attention to Dunbar, but it also
 limited the appreciation of the work of the twenty-four-year-old
 poet by declaring that the "Minors" . . . were his real strength,
 and that there was nothing "especially notable" in Dunbar's
 standard English verse "except for the Negro face of the
 author."... With these words, Howells dismissed Dunbar's
 traditional verse and set the direction for future Dunbar
 criticism, "a line," in the words of Benjamin Brawley, "slavishly
 adhered to by reviewers ...." (xvi)

Professor Braxton went on to abstract the argument of Charles T. Davis:

 Davis suggests that Dunbar's own use of the term Minors to describe
 his dialect verse suggests "problems about the poets attitude about
 the use of dialect." One of Dunbar's failings, Davis suggests, is
 that he "never fully understood that he had to make a decision
 ...." Dunbar, Davis contends, lacked self-assurance where his
 dialect poems were concerned ...." Because of his cultural
 ambivalence, Dunbar "could not bring himself to perform the act of
 will ...." This confusion distinguishes Dunbar from the generation
 of Negro artists who followed him, who were bold in their claims
 about the artistic value of racialized cultural materials, where
 Dunbar remained apologetic. (xvi)

Now writers just hate it when critics get all psychoanalytical, especially when they insinuate some poor writer had problems which adversely affected his or her work. It's sometimes true, but it's also true that some critics have problems which adversely affect their work. And whereas a writer's problems tend to be self-contained, the critic's problems tend to be contagious. As Dunbar himself complained: "One critic says a thing and the rest hasten to say the same things, in many cases using the identical words..." (qtd. in Braxton xvi-xvii). Admittedly, he meant reviewers rather than scholars, but his complaint is somewhat accurate with respect to latter. For while scholarship is supposed to advance, it tends to do so only on the basis of prior conclusions--on the basis of what T. S. Kuhn would call a critical paradigm. Even radical dissertations begin with a review of the extant literature.

But while I share my fellow writers' frustrations with this critical methodology it seemed to me that when it came to Dunbar the problem was not one of style but of content. It seemed to me Dunbar's black characters displayed a range of world views he would never have imagined, much less perceived, had he believed Negroes--even the masses--were intellectually, emotionally or culturally impoverished. It seemed to me he presented complex emotional states--e. g., love, loss, longing--in both Romantic English and in dialect--and not only in Negro dialect. It seemed he did not depict "Negro Life" so much as the lives of Negroes, and too often showed those lives brimming with joy to have harbored anything like loathing. And it seemed to me that, while any successful writer might lament that his prosperity derived from works he himself less valued, no writer would couch his own epitaph in a form he considered "minor."

In short, it seemed to me these critics were full of feces.

As a writer, I was willing to say that. But I was collaborating with a scholar who might be tarred and feathered in my stead. Moreover, the project was in essence scholarly; scatological dismissal was inappropriate to the form. Accordingly, I developed a theory.

That theory was based in part on the connotations "major" and "minor" have in music theory--i, e., a musical expression in a major key would be expected to arouse euphoria in the listener, while the same run of notes in the associated minor key, would be expected to arouse dysphoria, even alarm. The terms have congruent poetic equivalents; e. g., in poetry, an elegy is defined as a serious and somewhat melancholy expression, and the same term, in music, denotes a mournful piece--in other words, an elegy is, in both poetry and music, minor in character. To apply musical notions was appropriate, as Dunbar referred to his poems as songs and his work as singing--in fact, he so did in "The Poet."

My theory was also based in part on a close reading of the phrase from that poem; "jingle in a broken tongue." In my reading of the expression, the significant term was not "broken tongue" but "jingle" --which is, in basic definition, a verse crafted more for easy recollection than for intellectual complexity, a few lines intended to be catchy rather than pithy. Dunbar wrote many jingles, some in Negro dialect, some in non-Negro dialect, some in Romantic English. His complaint was not that the world noted and remembered his jingles, but that the world more noted and longer remembered what were often intended as "occasional" expressions (e. g. poems written for Christmas) while little noting nor long remembering expressions intended to endure. There was nothing essentially racial about this--ask any white novelist who's been paid to write a screenplay--and while the words "broken tongue" do seem to racialize Dunbar's frustration, they appeared at the end of a line and so could have been shaped as much by the demands of poetic form as by critical meaning; sometimes you're trying to make a statement; sometimes you're just tryin' to bust a rhyme. That, anyway, was my theory, and I thought it a pretty good one, which made me more resistant to Professor Fishkin's insistence that I look at some old book. Why mess up a theory with data? But when I did as she insisted I saw that theory was unnecessary. Because Paul Laurence Dunbar did not use the term "minors" to refer to his Negro dialect verse.

By the time these remarks are published, if indeed they are, a facsimile of the original volume should be available online thanks to Wright State University, so the following claim will be easily verifiable. That is: that the volume Majors and Minors, as originally printed, had two sections. The first section was also titled "Majors and Minors." The second section was titled "Humor and Dialect." These sections were clearly separate; each had its own decorative half-title page. With one exception, none of the poems in the "Majors and Minors" section are written in any kind of dialect. That one exception is in Scottish dialect. All the Negro dialect poems are in the section headed "Humor and Dialect."

Were I a scholar, I would seek documentable explanation. Since I am a writer, I will simply speculate that the duplication of volume title and section occurred because at one point Dunbar planned to publish his second volume of poems exactly as he had his first, probably with the lyrical title Majors and Minors, conforming with the pattern established in Oak and Ivy. Had this hypothetical volume comprised the poems published in the section "Majors and Minors," it would have been about the same length as the first volume and so could have been produced using the same printer and within the range of Dunbar's known Line-of-Credit. But more generous financing became available in Toledo and this made possible a larger volume. To create a volume of greater length Dunbar augmented the planned text with poems he intended for a third volume, for which he had only about half the usual number of poems, and a descriptive working--as opposed to lyrical--title, "Humor and Dialect." The result was an actual second volume which juxtaposed two very different sorts of poems.

That this should have been so long misapprehended can perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Dunbar's reiterative production process, while producing few "Lost Poems," did produce two "Lost Volumes." The publication of Majors and Minors made Oak and Ivy obsolete. The publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life made Majors and Minors obsolete. Now, of course, they are "rare books." But in 1897--and for many years thereafter--they were just "old books" and most copies were, if not discarded, then not carefully preserved.

The real question, of course, is, who did label the Negro dialect poems "minor." The answer seems to be no one. The statement that comes closest to the gist of the idea can be found in Howells's brief review, in which he said: "that "if his Minors had been written by a white man, I should have been struck by their very uncommon quality; I should have said that they were wonderful divinations." Here it seems Howells is referring to the Negro dialect poems, and it seems that he assumes that these were Dunbar's "Minors," although at the time he'd had no contact with Dunbar.

But speculations aside, it is clear the volume title, Majors and Minors, cannot be said to indicate Dunbar's attitude towards Negro dialect poems. The section titles do not even suggest that he found Negro dialect poems necessarily humorous. Perhaps the reverse.

Now to be fair to all those critics to whom Professor Braxton refers, Dunbar probably was embarrassed by reviews that called him "prince of the coon song writers," and probably did complain that he could not sell poems not written in dialect, and certainly complained that "Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he has laid down regarding my dialect verse." (qtd. in Redding 42). But such commercial and artistic concerns are hardly evidence that Dunbar felt ambivalent, much less negative, about dialect, about people who spoke in dialect. The alleged distinction between "major" and "minor" is one Dunbar himself never made.

I tell this story not to bash scholars--indeed, I hope it illustrates the importance of visiting primary sources and original texts, rather than relying exclusively on prior scholarship, no matter how widely held. Were I to say anything, it would only be that, if a mere writer can look at an old book for two minutes and see the flaw in so much prior scholarship, a few scholars should perhaps feel a bit abashed.

But I tell this story to illustrate that, whatever problems writers may have that might adversely affect their work and whatever problems critics may have that might adversely affect their work, American society surely has a problem that has adversely affected all our work.

You know one I mean. What W. E. B. Du Bois called "the problem of the twentieth century.., the problem of the Color Line... the question as to how far differences of race.., will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization." In fact, this has been the Problem of every American century. It was a problem in the eighteenth century when, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, whites needed "a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people." It became a literary problem when Jefferson provided that obstacle by claiming blacks were inferior in body and in mind, asserting in part: "never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of a plain narration .... Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.--Among the blacks is misery enough, god knows, but no poetry." It was a problem in the nineteenth century when white racists needed powerful excuses to deny "these people" their citizenship and civil rights. It became a literary problem when they trotted out Jefferson's pathetic prevarications to do that dirty job and more honest thinkers, black and white, sought to counter the argument using "Negro Literature."

It became a problem for Dunbar when some of those honest thinkers, although they admired and appreciated his art, saw in it and in Dunbar's black--as opposed to mulatto--genes the best evidence that even if what Jefferson said was once true, it was true no longer. But that is not to say it was Dunbar's problem; all he wanted to do was sing his songs and make his living by his pen. It was America's problem.

In the twentieth century critics would try to make it Dunbar's Problem. As one of their most perceptive, Darwin Turner, repeatedly complained, "emphasis upon [Dunbar] as a symbol has tended to obscure the actual image of the man and his work (Turner, "Paul" 1-13; "Poet" 59)." Although critics would ascribe to him the mental torture of Double Consciousness described by his friend Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: "two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body," they would not, by and large, allow him the understanding and ambition which Du Bois also described: "He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..." (Souls). Or, as a writer might put it, to be a Negro, an American, and a writer.

Rather than allow Dunbar to be a writer who, like every writer, desires, again in Du Bois's words--"to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation," and most pressing problems were issues of craft and commerce, they read him as a Race Man and crucified him on a Cross of Black (Souls).

My problem, in working on Other Essential Writings, was how to get shut of all that. My problem was to try to imagine what might have been said about Dunbar had race not been a factor. Some of the results are reported in the various Introductions, particularly the General Introduction, the Introduction to Poetry and the Introduction to the Novel. And if this sounds like I am trying to hustle books.., what can I say? Like Dunbar, I'm a writer, hoping to make my living with my pen and I'm also trying to save time.

My first idea--and this is one of the weird aspects of Other Essential Writings--was to look at Dunbar as a product of a vast tract I call Trans-Appalachia, the post-Frontier entity that was achieving wealth, influence, and cultural importance at the end of the nineteenth century. Its symbol was The World's Colombian Exposition, where Dunbar appeared, in the same auditorium, albeit at a different time, as another young man, Frederick Jackson Turner, who offered an offbeat hypothesis about the historical significance of the Western frontier.

Dunbar had a strong western identity. His debut to the world of letters took place at a conference of the Western Association of Writers, where he read a poem extolling the power of the West. Three of his four novels were set in Trans-Appalachia, one in Colorado, and in that novel he anticipated tropes that would show up in the allegedly prototypical western novel, Owen Wister's The Virginian.

Another idea was to see Dunbar as a writer, working within extant European and developing American literary traditions, rather than as an advance man for some sort of "Negro Literature." As William Dean Howells and, more recently and exhortatively, Professor Braxton, noted there is a connection with Robert Bums. But there are also precise textual connections with the unlikely-seeming likes of Oliver Goldsmith, William Blake, and James Whitcomb Riley. Although I did not have space to argue this in Other Essential Writings, there was also a connection to Wordsworth, which explains and arguably justifies the process by which Dunbar's first three volumes of poetry were produced. Unfortunately, I don't have time to argue it now, but, in fact, it should go without argument that any young poet writing in English in the 1880s was to some extent influenced by Wordsworth. The strongest connections I see, not surprisingly, are between Wordsworth's oeuvre and poems in Oak and Ivy, particularly "A Summer Pastoral," "Nutting Song," "A Drowsy Day," "Evening," Dunbar's first poem entitled "Sympathy."

But what seemed to me the strongest idea was a connection between Dunbar and Robert Louis Stevenson, based to some extent on art--both men penned their own epitaphs, and the texts have certain similarities--but mostly on the fact that both faced certain death from the dread killer of the day, tuberculosis. Understand: Dunbar was not just writer who died young. He was a young writer who knew he was dying, and who did a great deal of writing--with death increasingly imminent. What came to me as I worked on the introduction to that last novel for The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings was, well, let me simply quote myself:

 Perhaps it is only that now, as then, race is so much a part of our
 lives and our national reality that we find it ever important to
 assess how Dunbar responded or did not respond to racial issues.
 And of course he did often respond. One could reasonably suppose
 that The Sport of the Gods was in some sense inspired by the Lake
 City Atrocity... and not suppose that Dunbar was more affected less
 by the awareness that each year a hundred or so black Americans
 would fall prey to white mobs than by the awareness that a hundred
 and fifty thousand Americans would fall prey to M. Tuberculosis.

That's not an exact quote from the published version but.., well, you know editors. All my ideas came down to a set of challenges. To place Dunbar in a broader, less localized American/Negro context. To see him not through the warped lens of his racialized era, but through a less warped lens--perhaps even that of our own time. To see him as separate, albeit not separated, from the horrors of his own time--Social Darwinism, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, lynching, and all the other "nadir" mess. To in a sense rewrite the equation of Dunbar's life and work with American's Problem taken out of the expressions: with race factored out.

In her Introductory Paper Professor Braxton asked us here to try to set aside--and I paraphrase, perhaps inaccurately--some traditions and methodologies, if only temporarily. To me, as a writer, a black writer and an American writer, this seems a vital request. For as we--scholars, writers, all Americans-have failed to solve the Problem of the twentieth century in the twentieth century, we must now deal with the problem in a metastasized form. The good news is, we should be able to do it.

The best scientific reality in Dunbar's day, to again quote Du Bois, was: "That there are differences between the white and black races is certain, but just what those differences are is known to none with any approach to accuracy" (Dusk 598). We do now know, with scientific accuracy, that there is absolutely no difference in innate capacities, that the variations of DNA within the so-called racial groups is greater than the variation between those groups. We know, as Du Bois could only hope and suspect, that, to use his words, "races, which... are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist." are only so defined (Dusk).

So then, the question for the twenty-first century: how far differences of race ... will continue to shape--and inevitably limit--our thinking about all artifacts of human civilization, including culture, particularly American culture; including art, particularly American art; including literature, particularly American literature; including, specifically, the writing of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Works Cited

Braxton, Jeanne M. Introduction. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ed. Jeanne M. Braxton. Charlottesville: Uof Virginia P: 1993. ix-xxxvi.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn. 1940. Huggins 549-802.

--. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Huggins 357-548.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, and David Bradley, eds. The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Modern Library, 2005.

Huggins, Nathan I., ed. Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Library of America, 1987.

Jefferson, Thomas. Query XIV, Notes on the State of Virginia. 1781.28 Nov. 2006. <http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/jefferson_notes.html>.

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

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

Redding, J. Saunders. "Portrait Against Background." Martin, Singer 39-44.

Revell, Peter. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Turner, Darwin T. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Rejected Symbol." The Journal of Negro History 52 (January 1967): 1-13.

--. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Poet and the Myths." Martin, Singer 1-13.

Wiggins, Lida Keck. The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Washington, DC: Austin Jenkins, 1907.

Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 1800.28 Nov. 2006. <http://www.bartelby.com/39/36.html>.

Note

(1.) Since the events here described a digital representation has become available, courtesy of Wright State University, at http://www.libraries.wright.edu/special/dunbarlpoems/majors and minors.

David Bradley earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA from the University of London. A professor at Temple University from 1976 to 1997, Bradley is currently Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. He is the author of two novels, South Street(1975) and The Chaneysville Incident (1981), which won the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award. A recipient of fellowships from the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, he recently published The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, co-edited with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. His works-in-progress include "The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race, History, and America" and a novel-in-stories, "Raystown."