Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow

The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore

Eleanor Alexander

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780814705322
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A New York Times Notable Book of 2002!

Sexism, racism, self-hatred, and romantic love: all figure in prominently in this scholarly-but nicely hard-boiled-discussion of the bond between the famous Paul Laurence Dunbar and his wife Alice. Eleanor Alexander's analysis of turn-of-the-twentieth-century black marriage is required reading for every student of American, especially African-American, heterosexual relationships."
—Nell Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Princeton University, Author of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol

"Rich in documentation and generous in analysis, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow advances our understanding of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American social and cultural history in compelling and unexpected ways. By exposing the devastating consequences of unequal power dynamics and gender relations in the union of the celebrated writers, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore, and by examining the hidden underside of the Dunbars' storybook romance where alcohol, sex, and violence prove fatal, Eleanor Alexander produces a provocative, nuanced interpretation of late Victorian courtship and marriage, of post-emancipation racial respectability and class mobility, of pre-modern sexual rituals and color conventions in an emergent elite black society."
—Thadious M. Davis, Vanderbilt University

"Eleanor Alexander's vivid account of the most famous black writer of his day, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and his wife Alice, illuminates the world of the African American literati at the opening of the twentieth century. The Dunbars' fairy-tale romance ended abruptly, when Alice walked out on her alcoholic, abusive spouse. Alexander's access to scores of intimate letters and her sensitive interpretation of the Dunbars mercurial highs and lows reveal the tragic consequences of mixing alcohol, ambition and amour. The Dunbars were precursors for another doomed duo: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Alexander's poignant story of the Dunbars sheds important light on love and violence among DuBois's "talented tenth."
—Catherine Clinton, author of Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars

" Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow debunks Dunbar myths...

Lyrics asks us to consider the ways in which racism and sexism operate together."
— The Crisis

On February 10, 1906, Alice Ruth Moore, estranged wife of renowned early twentieth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, boarded a streetcar, settled comfortably into her seat, and opened her newspaper to learn of her husband's death the day before. Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of former slaves, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed "the most promising young colored man in America," was dead from tuberculosis at the age of 33.

Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow traces the tempestuous romance of America's most noted African-American literary couple. Drawing on a variety of love letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographies, Eleanor Alexander vividly recounts Dunbar's and Moore's tumultuous affair, from a courtship conducted almost entirely through letters and an elopement brought on by Dunbar's brutal, drunken rape of Moore, through their passionate marriage and its eventual violent dissolution in 1902. Moore, once having left Dunbar, rejected his every entreaty to return to him, responding to his many letters only once, with a blunt, one-word telegram ("No").

This is a remarkable story of tragic romance among African-American elites struggling to define themselves and their relationships within the context of post-slavery America. As such, it provides a timely examination of the ways in which cultural ideology and politics shape and complicate conceptions of romantic love.

NOTES

Notes to the Introduction

1. Louis Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, VI, 1901–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), 388–389. Dunbar and Fortune’s drinking escapades were deemed injurious to racial advancement as well as an embarrassment to prominent African Americans like Washington who functioned as self-appointed moral arbiters of the “race.” See pp. 50, 345, 347–348. But in 1911, even Washington’s impeccable public character was questioned. An encounter in a New York “neighborhood of high class prostitutes” reached the newspapers, bringing humiliation and shame. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 430.

2. Harlan and Smock, Booker T. Washington, VI, 391. For a fascinating study of Fortune’s turbulent life, see Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

3. Dunbar’s first book was the poetry collection Oak and Ivy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1893). The book was actually printed and released in December 1892. However, since the printer did not expect to meet his stated 1892 deadline, 1893 was printed on the title page. See Jean Gould, That Dunbar Boy: The Story of America’s Famous Negro Poet (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958), 138.

Other works published by Dunbar by 1902 include poetry: Majors and Minors (1895); Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896); Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899); Poems of Cabin and Field (1899); Candle-Lightin’ Time (1901); novels: The Uncalled (1898); The Love of Landry (1900); The Fanatics (1901); The Sport of the Gods (1902); short-story collections: Folks from Dixie (1898); The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900); unpublished plays: Winter Roses (1899); Robert Herrick (no date); Old Elijah (c. 1900). For information on the plays, see Peter Revel, Paul Laurence Dunbar (Boston: Twayne, 1979), 97–98; and New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Calendar of the Manuscripts in the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature (New York: Andronicus, 1942), 139. Thorough listings of Dunbar’s works are found in Virginia Cunningham, Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), 267–276; and Eugene W. Metcalf, Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1975). By 1902, Dunbar had also been the lyricist for several of Will Marion Cook’s popular musical shows. For information on this aspect of Paul’s career, see Henry T. Simpson, The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–1910 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1988), 149, 153, 227, 240, 267, 291, 531.

4. Felton O. Best, “Crossing the Color Line: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872–1906” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1992), 171; citing an unpublished Dunbar essay on Denver in the manuscript collection, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dayton Public Library, Microfilm Edition, reel 7.

5. Paul describes elocutionists as “Dunbareans” in a letter to Alice Dunbar, April 8, 1901, in Eugene W. Metcalf, “The Letters of Paul and Alice Dunbar: A Private History,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1973), II, 874. Felton Best comments on “Dunbareans” although he does not use the term. See his “Crossing the Color Line,” 178.

Hereafter, Metcalf’s dissertation is cited as Metcalf, “The Letters.” The principals are cited as PLD (Paul Laurence Dunbar) and ARM (Alice Ruth Moore). After her marriage Alice is cited as AMD (Alice Moore Dunbar).

6. PLD to AMD, April 1, 1901, in Metcalf, “The Letters,” II, 883. It would be difficult today to find an African American community without a school, apartment house, bank, or some other institution bearing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s name; see, for example, Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 329; Charles M. Astin, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Roots and Much More (Dayton: Sense of Roots, 1989), 74–88; Geneva C. Turner, “For Whom Your School Is Named,” Negro History Bulletin 16 (May 1953), 188; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Dunbar National Bank,” The Crisis, November 1928, 370–387.

7. On Dunbar as the only African American participant in McKinley’s presidential inauguration, see Best, “Crossing the Color Line,” 182–183; and Tony Gentry, Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Chelsea House, 1989), 90. On Dunbar’s relationships with Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, see Benjamin Brawley, Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1967), 90–91. Dunbar also participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade on March 5, 1905. See Gentry, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 95.

8. The African American Judge Robert Terrell, husband of Mary Church Terrell, described Alice in this manner. See Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 378, note 89.

9. G. F. Richings, Evidence of Progress among Colored People, 12th ed. (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson, 1905), 419.

10. Richings, Evidence of Progress, 419.

11. Violets and Other Tales (1895) was the first book by young Alice Ruth Moore. The second, The Goodness of Saint Rocque (1899), bore the name Alice Dunbar. For a more thorough presentation of Alice’s writings, see Gloria T. Hull, ed., The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ruby Ora Williams, ed., An Alice Dunbar-Nelson Reader (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979); Ora Williams, “Works by and about Alice Ruth (Moore) Dunbar-Nelson: A Bibliography,” CLA Journal 19:3 (March 1976), 322–325.

12. Quoted in Metcalf, “The Letters,” I, 12–13.

13. On the image of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, see Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Negro and Public Opinion,” Voice of the Negro, January 1904, 31–32; Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Colored Girl,” Voice of the Negro, June 1905, 400–403; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971).

14. “A Southern Authoress,” undated, untitled newspaper i...