Reflections on the Archive: Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Some thirty-five years ago, even in order to read black American women’s writing from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one would have to search out their work in archives that preserved rare and out-of-print books, periodicals, and newspapers. Thanks to the dedicated work of William Andrews, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Frances Smith Foster, Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull, Nellie McKay, Claudia Tate, Jean Fagan Yellin, and many others, scholarly editions of works by African American women writers like Alice Dunbar-Nelson are now accessible to scholars and students alike. What remains challenging is that very few personal papers from early black women have been preserved, hindering our understanding of their works and lives. To write a biography of “any person of color, or a woman of any stratum,” notes Sojourner Truth biographer Nell Irvin Painter, one “cannot stick to convention, for conventional sources mostly are lacking” (289). Similarly, in her 2015 book on William and Ellen Craft, two of the most famous escapees from slavery in American history, Barbara McCaskill recounts the difficulties she faced because much of the archival source material for the pair is either partial or missing: “no personal correspondence between the couple has been uncovered, nor have letters, diaries, journals, or other published or unpublished reminiscences” (11). Even for later, highly literate and educated African American women writers like Anna Julia Cooper and Georgia Douglas Johnson, much has been lost. Mary Helen Washington discovered to her chagrin that love letters written to Cooper by her former ward had been discarded by a grandniece (xxxvii), and Hull records that “Johnson’s voluminous papers were summarily dumped on the day of her funeral” (16). As Lois Brown and other scholars have lamented, much remains unknown and perhaps irrecoverable about significant periods in Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s life. When she found that Hopkins’s papers at Fisk University are contained in only one box, Brown was compelled to ask, how could scholars “grapple with the seeming silences—these rhetorical ruptures and biographical caesuras—that all too often define the early African American canon and history?” (131).

The archival resources for Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born Alice Ruth Moore in 1875, provide a striking exception to the general rule that the personal papers of black women born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are scarce, thanks to the careful preservation of her papers by her niece Pauline A. Young who was a professional librarian. But preservation is only part of the story. From early on, Dunbar-Nelson acted as her own archivist. In a letter to her then husband Paul Laurence Dunbar, she describes plunging “into a trunk full of letters” in order “to assort, arrange and compile them” (qtd. in Metcalf 553). Of the two thousand letters received since she left New Orleans, she tells him, she burned five hundred that “were worse than worthless” (qtd. in Metcalf 553). Yet she saved almost every letter to and from Dunbar, including those that reveal intimate details about their sexual history. From her early twenties until her death, Dunbar-Nelson continued with the practice of saving not only correspondence, even of a very personal nature, but also manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and other things she deemed important. In 1984 the University of Delaware Library acquired this extraordinary personal collection.

The Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware fill thirty-two boxes and comprise more than twenty-five hundred items, among them manuscripts of Dunbar-Nelson’s published and unpublished works, including poems, short fiction, essays, speeches, lectures, dramas, and novels. The collection also contains her diaries, notebooks, and scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings, one devoted to reviews of her work, another to her 1915 suffrage campaign, and still others to her newspaper columns. She also kept records of the books she read, teaching notes, and a scrapbook she compiled on blacks in America. In addition, this archive preserves her extensive professional and personal correspondence, including her letters to and from Dunbar during their courtship, marriage, and estrangement, and letters from notables such as Victoria...