Paul Laurence Dunbar and the African American Elegy

A hush is over all the teeming lists, And there is pause, a breathspace in the strife; A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists And vapors that obscure the sun of life. And Ethiopia, with bosom torn, Laments the passing of her noblest born.--Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Frederick Douglass" 11. 1-6) Quietly, this stanza begins Paul Laurence Dunbar's long elegy for Frederick Douglass. Here, Dunbar's speaker solemnly utters sentiments that suggest Douglass's importance within the context of an American narrative of race. As well he prophesies a kind of racial deliverance toward which Douglass's political activities had moved the black race, indeed the black nation. Language, trope, and affect are sifted through a mother's loss, a loss felt by the black race, a loss felt (perhaps) by all of Dunbar's readers. The tension between individual and collective loss becomes important to how we read this early African American elegy, as Dunbar mines multiple literary and cultural traditions to find the language that befits his purpose of marking the passage of such a great black leader. With the skill of his dialect poems, he turns to established literary forms--imbuing them with racial pride and literary virtuosity. What he imagines as Douglass's passing is the trope of the death of the race's "noblest born," which he thematizes as both matrilineal and intergenerational. By figuring "Ethiopia" as Douglass's mother, an argument about racial identity ensues; the black race is that maternal essence that Douglass's presence had embodied. His absence, nonetheless, speaks to the urgency of racial identity: the Ethiopianism of this passage, to relish a term from Wilson Moses, speaks to an emerging sense of blacks as belonging to a black nation whose experiences are foretold in biblical prophecy. Blacks will triumph, as Biblical myth forecasts. Yet 1895, the year of Douglass's death, marks a bleak moment in black history. The work of the poem is to convince Dunbar's readers that the black generations from which Douglass's leadership issues will continue even without him. And Dunbar insists those generations will persist because of him: "still thy voice is ringing o'er the gale." Dunbar, in fact, is able to initiate a tradition of African American elegy. His poems of the late nineteenth century inspire a tradition that thrives even among poets writing today. While the year 1895 marks the death of Frederick Douglass, it marks the ascent of another, Booker T. Washington. Although we currently inherit Washington variously, particularly given the poignancy of W. E. B. Du Bois's critique of him in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), it is nonetheless the case that Dunbar wants to present an argument about racial leadership, avoiding the difficulties of the differing politics of Douglass, Washington, and Du Bois, for that matter. Even as he penned "Frederick Douglass" to mark the passing of this greatest of black leaders, his spacious, gracious elegies make room for a more problematic figure like Washington. If the overall thrust of the Douglass poem is to look forward, both of the poems "Frederick Douglass" and "Booker T. Washington" look backward. Given the place of autobiography in the emergence of an African American literary history, and given that both Douglass (in his works of 1845, 1855, and 1892) and Washington in his Up from Slavery (1901) privilege autobiography as a basic black epistemology, it is not surprising that Dunbar's Washington poem rehearses the details of Booker T.'s life. While Dunbar's poem "Frederick Douglass" emphasizes a more generalized racial past, his "Booker T. Washington" turns on the specificity of Washington's escape from slavery. Writing at the turn into the twentieth century, given the various structures of political social, and economic oppression that blacks endure, it seems especially apt to elegize Washington by re-writing his escape from slavery. Slavery, for Dunbar, is an over-determined signifier. …