Escaping the Cage

Review of "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird," by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Book review

ESCAPING THE CAGE

Review of Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, by Gene Andrew Jarrett (Princeton University Press, released 2023 in paperback)

Gary L. Geipel

In a dramatic film of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s life—and there should be one—the screenwriter surely would set the first scene in the elevator of the Callahan Bank Building in Dayton, Ohio, circa 1892. Through the metal grating, we would see a slight, very serious-looking 19-year-old elevator operator who reads or writes between trips, never speaking unless spoken to, while bursting quietly with ambition. The elevator’s up-and-down lurches would foreshadow the short but improbably eventful life of the budding writer at the controls, perhaps as a narrator recites a line from one of his future poems: “I know what the caged bird feels, alas!”

The source material and necessary ethos for such a film—or at least for a much-needed re-entry of Dunbar into American discourse—now exist thanks to Gene Andrew Jarrett, the William S. Tod Professor of English at Princeton University. Released last year in paperback, Jarrett’s Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, is an accessible and powerful biography nearly 14 years in the making.

Dunbar is all here in Jarrett’s labor of love: the elevator operator; the poet capable of subtle literary allusions who never attended college; the co-publisher of a community newspaper with his high-school friend Orville Wright (yes, that one); the performer of his own writings whose recitation at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair outshone a speech by the great orator Frederick Douglass; the compulsive traveler who wrote his first novel mostly in London; and, oh yes, the son of former slaves who became the first commercially successful black writer in U.S. history.

Dunbar published 14 poetry books, four novels, four short-story collections, and numerous essays in an active career of barely 18 years before his death from tuberculosis in 1906. He also wrote the lyrics of the first all-Black Broadway musical, In Dahomey.

Admit it, as I did several years ago: you know very little about Dunbar despite all of that. Jarrett gamely asserts that “academic and public interest” in his subject “has steadily risen”—but it must be a shallow curve from a low base. Rightly unconcerned that anyone else would show up on a recent Saturday morning, a National Park Service employee left his desk to give me an impromptu tour of the Dunbar House Historic Site in Dayton. The nearby “Wright-Dunbar Interpretive Center” dispenses with alphabetical order to attract visitors in the name of the aviators who grew up nearby. And hundreds of tickets went unsold for events honoring Dunbar in 2022 on the 150^th anniversary of his birth. This is sad and strange.

Dunbar’s life was not a tale of pervasive discrimination or a morality play, which may be enough to obscure his extraordinary legacy in a culture that prefers caricatures. Dunbar received a public-school education almost unimaginable to Americans of any race today—leaving Dayton Central High School with a knowledge of Greek and Latin, ancient history, English literature, and civics in addition to the physical sciences. Far from being shunned by a racist white establishment, he rose to prominence after early, active mentorship from white authors, critics, and philanthropists. And Jarrett does not ignore the alcoholic and philanderer who abused his wife, Alice Moore Dunbar, then a celebrated writer in her own right. Nor does he pass over Dunbar’s occasional condescension toward less-educated blacks, which survives in in the occasional cringe-inducing correspondence.

Such uncomfortable details are the keys to insight, and Dunbar’s life could inspire the kinds of nuanced discussions of race and American life sorely needed among high school and college students. Where education was concerned, for example, Dunbar rejected artificial limits—regardless of whether they were set by skeptical whites or resigned blacks. As Jarrett documents, Dunbar initially opposed the industrial education model of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, with its emphasis on learning skilled trades. In an 1898 essay titled “Our New Madness,” he lamented that Tuskegee would perpetuate a notion that blacks were not up to “appreciation for the beauty of art, science, and literature.” Dunbar changed his views on Tuskegee considerably after a later visit and became an admirer and friend of Washington’s. But he was not wrong to worry about the effects that false assumptions could have.

The glowing 1896 Harper’s Weekly review of an early poetry collection that established his national reputation also argued that Dunbar was the “true singer” of black America whose greatest contributions would remain his dialect poems in the vernacular of the antebellum South. Such pigeonholing troubled Dunbar immensely, but Jarrett also makes clear that he took it as a challenge. Three of Dunbar’s four novels mainly feature white characters and the other, The Sport of the Gods, portrays complex human beings on both sides of America’s haunting racial divide. It is an austere masterpiece of the American canon that deserves much wider attention. Dunbar’s depictions of social dysfunction, black anger, white guilt, and awkward reconciliations in the novel have much to tell us today.

You should certainly read Dunbar’s novels but do read Jarrett’s biography first, for it finally gives Dunbar what he longed for: treatment as a man in full. Jarrett is a literary scholar when we need him to be—providing essential context by quoting Dunbar’s work extensively. He contributes as a historian, too, especially on the lives of post-Reconstruction black families, late-nineteenth-century public education, the print-shop origins of the Wright Brothers, and the endlessly fascinating Chicago World’s Fair. Mostly, Jarrett is the truth-telling friend that Paul (as he calls him throughout) still needs.

Dunbar quickly escaped the elevator cage in Dayton on the strength of his own efforts. May Jarrett’s effort spring Dunbar’s legacy from its undeserved cage of obscurity.

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Gary L. Geipel is a communications consultant, a professor of strategic studies at Missouri State University, and a Senior Associate at the National Institute for Public Policy. He is a member of the Heterodox Academy and writes on the challenges of post-truth and the importance of civil discourse.