Going Up

A Poetry Tale about Paul Laurence Dunbar, told by Hello Doggo.

What do you call a poet with a stack of unsold books, a box that goes up and down, and a captive audience?

A businessman.

Paul Laurence Dunbar finished high school in Dayton, Ohio, in eighteen ninety-one. He was clever, he was already publishing poems, and he was Black in eighteen ninety-one America. So he got a job running the elevator in the Callahan Building. The lift, to you and me.

His first collection, Oak and Ivy, left him owing the printer about a hundred and twenty-five dollars. So he sold it to his passengers. A dollar a copy. And nobody can storm off between floors.

Now, the part that sounds made up.

One of Dunbar’s school friends was Orville Wright. Yes — THAT one. Before the brothers ever went near an aeroplane, they ran a print shop, and in eighteen ninety they printed Dunbar’s newspaper for Dayton’s Black community, the Tattler. It lasted three issues.

And here we wander into legend. The story goes that Dunbar left a verse on the wall of the Wrights’ shop. Orville Wright is out of sight, in the printing business. No other mind is half as bright, as his’n is.

Don’t go looking for the original, mind you. It comes down to us from biographers, not photographs. But it’s far too good to leave out.

So the next time someone presses the button for you and smiles… be polite. He may have a book to sell you.