Love by Return of Post

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

Spring, eighteen ninety-five. In Dayton, Ohio, a young poet opens a Boston magazine and finds a piece by a schoolteacher from New Orleans. Next to it, her photograph.

Her name was Alice Ruth Moore. She was nineteen. He was Paul Laurence Dunbar, twenty-two, and he wrote to her at once.

Now, a man writing to a pretty stranger needs a pretext. His, say those who’ve read the letters, was terribly literary. What did she think, he asked, of using dialect in literature? She answered politely, and a little coolly. Fine, if you have the gift for it. She, for one, did not.

It was enough. Two years of letters followed. In February eighteen ninety-seven, at a farewell party before he sailed for England, he proposed.

Her family disapproved. So on the sixth of March, eighteen ninety-eight, the two young writers married in secret, in New York.

It did not end well. Paul drank, and the drinking turned to violence. Early in nineteen-oh-two he beat Alice so badly she needed hospital treatment. She left him, and never went back. He died of tuberculosis four years later, aged thirty-three. They never divorced. She went on to a long career as a writer and activist, Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

And here’s what’s hard to shake. Around the time those first letters crossed, he published a poem. We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

He meant the face Black Americans had to show a hostile world. Read it now, and you hear the letters too.