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Introduction

Paul Laurence Dunbar is a gifted poet and a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance whose work was read by both blacks and whites in turn of the century America. He is the son of the former slaves. He was born in Dayton Ohio and attended the public schools of that city. As a child, he was taught by his mother to read and he absorbed her in turn with homespun wisdom as well as the stories told to him by his father who had escaped from enslavement in Kentucky and served in the Massachusetts 55th Regiment during the Civil War. Thus, while Paul himself was never enslaved, he was one of the last of a generation to have ongoing contact with those who had been. Dunbar was steeped in the oral tradition during his formative years and he would go on to become a powerful interpreter of the African American folk experience in literature and song. He would also champion the cause of civil rights and higher education for African Americans in essays and poetry that were militant by the standards of his day.

Beyond his literary achievements, Dunbar helped to dispel the myth that Africans in America were unable to be educated and he was also know as “Poet Laureate of the Negro race.” Controversial and thought- provoking, he often praised African-Americans, rather than attack Europeans, in much of his work.

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Dialect Writings

Dunbar’s poetry gave voice to the regular folks of the 18th and 19th century with lessons on life that ring true even in today’s present situation. Dunbar has lef a powerful prose for us to enjoy (Wintz, 1988). His beautiful poetry was treasured internationally over 100 years ago and still carries a positive message of hope, courage, and self-determination especially to other poets and as well as to the new generation who love literature, music, history and theater.

Although Paul has also produced novels, short stories and a large number of poems being written in conventional English, he is best known for his adoption verse of what was presented as the language or in other words “dialect” of the black southern folk. Indeed, he has been viewed by some commentators as an artist who used negative stereotypes of his own people to satisfy a white audience, and there are still who suggests that his work lacks substance. In his lifetime, Dunbar was generally considered a glowing symbol of African-American literary artistry and an apt representative of his race and a close reading of his poetry reveals him to be far more than an unimaginative purveyor of anti-black images. Additionally, several modern readers are aware of the essays on American race relations and other contemporaneous issues that Pal published at the height of his popularity (Wintz, 1988). It is perhaps no wonder that from shortly after his death through the mid-twentieth century, his name was associated with numerous respected institutions in the African-American community. Practically gone now are the various Paul Laurence Dunbar Literary Societies that flourished throughout the country, but the schools and housing projects bearing his name still exist in many cities.

Furthermore, on cannot overemphasize the fact that Dunbar lived during a period when the access allowed blacks to major white publications was extremely limited. Although there were a number of important African-American periodicals in existence as well, for the ambitious black author eager to make his or her mark on the mainstream literary landscape (Hedges, and Yarborough, 1988). All too often, however, editors of the magazines such as Century and the Atlantic Monthly which constituted the height of success expected African-American writers dealing with black material to follow the conventions of what has been termed the Plantation Tradition which dominated the literary representation of black life and culture in the late nineteenth century. When coupled with the popularity of dialect verse of all kinds at the time, these conventions exerted tremendous pressure upon aspiring African-American authors .The state of American poetry at the turn of the century explains, to some extent, the diverse, occasionally conflicting formal strains in Dunbar’s work. If, on the one hand, his dialect poems reflect his adoption of stylistic strategies of both James Whitcomb Riley and also the Plantation Tradition writers, on the other hand, he modelled his conventional English poetry after the popular sentimental magazine verse of his day. Ultimately, neither approach was conducive to a realistic rendering of either the psychology or the vernacular expressions of African-Americans. (One should also keep in mind that Dunbar was born and raised in the post-Civil War North and thus had little firsthand knowledge of southern life generally and none of slavery.)

Dialect Poetry a Hindrance or a Benefit to African-American Writers?

Two of the most significant elements in the black experience around the turn of the century were the steady deterioration of the race’s social and political position in America, and especially in the South, and the steadily growing exodus of blacks from their homes in the rural South to the industrial cities of the South and North. The effect of these developments on black history must not be underestimated (Martin, 1975). Besides the obvious changes evidenced by the growth of black ghettos in northern cities and the resurgence of black militancy in the face of an apparently unremitting chain of racism, violence, and injustice, there was also a more subtle shift of attitude among blacks. By the 1920s few black intellectuals still believed that the future of their race lay in the South (Hadler, 1988). As they turned their attention northward and focused their hope on the emerging black communities in northern cities, however, they also were turning their backs on their southern heritage.

The basic political experience of blacks at the turn of the century was that during the two decades following the end of Reconstruction they had witnessed the systematic erosion of the rights they had achieved under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and through the various acts of Congress and the Reconstruction governments in the South (Martin, 1975). Although in the half century following emancipation a number of blacks successfully accumulated property and acquired an education, most remained poorly educated and mired in rural poverty. Even those who had achieved some material success saw these accomplishments threatened by the growth of segregation and racial violence. Supreme Court reinterpretations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments left blacks defenseless against the segregationist enactments of southern legislatures (Wintz, 1988).

On the other hand, Levine, who is an African-American writer himself, uses his own dialect. Such language is an effective device which would found some readers unquestioningly accepting the authority of the speech. The use of non-standard language to represent the African-American voice is now standard practice in scholarship (Wintz, 1988). This “Remus orthography” is so pervasive it has become invisible and is read unchallenged. Nervous asides like Levine’s “Note” are exceptional, and I have found no real analysis of the history of non-standard orthography and its relationship to the African-American voice. In broad strokes this essay will sketch out that history and its intimate ties to both American political and European intellectual histories. For scholarship that would have its subjects “speak for themselves,” representations of voice play a central role. It is important, though often painful, to unpack the history that lives behind such representations.

Like the American Folklore Society, the American Dialect Society and its journal Dialect Notes were logical forums to discuss African-American language. Throughout the 1890s, the Dialect Society launched stubborn membership drives; appealing to the expected interests of educated Americans, the directors envisioned an army of amateur dialectologists with notebooks, slips of paper, and a keen understanding of the official American Dialect Society phonetic alphabet. While these specialized journals doubtless lured some readers away from the popular magazines, they never attracted the following of gentlemen-scholars as enjoyed by their continental analogs (Hadler, 1988). In 1865, language became a subject of general concern; it worked as a guide and gauge of etiquette and status. “In post-Civil War America, the emphasis was on language as a means of social advancement and a test of social fitness.” After the war, words (and their misuse and mispronunciation) were sanctioned marks of cultivation; published guides and vocabulary lists abounded. What had changed? Most historians see the preoccupation with language and rhetoric as an effort to foist class upon an inherently classless society (Martin, 1975). And it is true that changes were occurring within the United States. Immigration brought increasing numbers of non-Anglo-Saxon Europeans into the nation; printing innovations were making newspapers and magazines more than local productions; the telegraph allowed for immediate communication; and rail and water routes were eroding the frontier and allowing for relatively easy transportation. Yet these were all ongoing processes and did not come to some magical epistemological consummation in 1865. The fundamental transformation of that year is obvious and it was obvious to contemporary observers: Reconstruction had brought African-Americans into national politics (Wintz, 1988). Also pointing to class-consciousness, Kenneth Cmiel marks 1865 as a watershed for the popular obsession with language and rhetoric. Cmiel correctly notes that the popular demand for rhetorical tutelage made “scientific” philology impractical for the two decades following the war. Magazines and popular tracts overwhelmed and eclipsed more academic work. Yet the basic tenets of philology had already taken root in American academics, and the specialized philological journals survived long after the popular magazines folded throughout the first decades of the twentieth century (Hedges, and Yarborough, 1988). Philology was pre-served and would find life in the fledgling disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. As early as the mid- 1880s philology was returning to the intellectual vanguard, and it is in the mid-1880s that those organizations best equipped to analyze African-American language were established(Hadler, 1988).

While all non-Anglo-Saxon peoples were associated with particular literary dialects, portrayals of African-Americans were the most common. In the years following the war Nettels notes that, “popular literary magazines published hundreds of stories, anecdotes, sketches, poems, and installments of novels portraying black characters speaking in dialect.” She continues, “The writers of dialect verse established the literary conventions governing the portrayal of black characters and their speech”. These historians recognize that 1865 marked changes in both the representation of the African-American voice and popular linguistic concerns (Wintz, 1988). No one has drawn connections between the two shifts, perhaps because such connections were not made explicit in contemporary works. Only with an understanding of the role language has played in the political and social definition of America do these relationships become clear.

Dialect was believed to vividly re-create the particular creolizations of English that had proliferated regionally across the American continent; these creolizations were presented as unaffected, “artless” versions of an over conventionalized Standard English. In most narrative texts dialect was presented as dialogue interspersed within a Standard English narration. Poetry was often presented wholly in dialect, however, as was the case with many of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems. Occasionally a magazine would attempt to present a short story wholly in dialect (Ramsey, 1999).

Bibliography:

Hadler, J. (1998). Remus Ortography: The History of the Representation of the African-American Voice. Journal Article: Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 35

Hedges, E. and Yarborough, R. (1988). Paul Laurence Dunbar. College HMCO

Martin, J. (1975). A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead

Ramsey, W. (1999). Dunbar’s Dixie: Critical Essay. The Southern Literary Journal, September 22, 1999

Wintz, C. (1988). Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. Houston, TX: Rice University Press