Paul Laurence Dunbar: “When Malindy Sings,” The Sport of the Gods, and Black Lives Matter

At a time when the Black Lives Matter movement is drawing much-needed attention to systemic racism, a persistent thread that runs through social media is that these issues have been raised repeatedly, across generations and over many decades, only to be ignored. Public intellectuals, historians, novelists, and literary scholars such as Koritha Mitchell, Deborah McDowell, and Kenneth Warren, among many others, have written about the suppression of Black voices and bodies, from the institution of Reconstruction peonage and Jim Crow laws to the white liberal delaying tactic of gradualism that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called out in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Students reading nineteenth-century realism can connect this silencing of Black voices with the career of Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose dialect poems were greeted as “authentic” rather than as sophisticated literary performances, creating a reputation that overshadowed his non-dialect poems and fiction. To take two brief examples, reading The Sport of the Gods in the context of “When Malindy Sings” encourages students to understand Dunbar’s trenchant commentary about the silencing of Black voices.

The response to Dunbar’s poetry illustrates the methods of this silencing in the literary culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) published his first volume, Oak & Ivy, in 1893, but Majors and Minors (1895) made his reputation when it received a favorable notice from W. D. Howells, the “Dean of American Letters” and arguably the most influential literary critic of the era. Howells reviewed the book in the 27 June 1896 issue of Harper’s Weekly, later revising his review as the introduction to Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). In his introduction, Howells gives qualified approval to Dunbar’s “poems in literary English,” but he lavishes praise on the “dialect pieces” which he mistakenly took to be the “Minors” of Dunbar’s title, calling them “literary interpretation of a very artistic completeness.”¹ But as Gene Andrew Jarrett explains, Howells was as struck by “Dunbar’s phenotype and physiognomy” as by his verse.² The bulk of Howells’ review and later introduction consist of Howells praising Dunbar not primarily for what he has achieved but for who he is: “the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically” (280). In categorizing Dunbar primarily as a dialect poet, Howells used his authority to pigeonhole as well as to publicize his talent, and as Dunbar himself noted, “I see now very clearly that Mr. Howells has done me irrevocable harm in the dictum he has laid down regarding my dialect verse.”³ By elevating one of Dunbar’s voices and dismissing others by comparison, Howells consigns Dunbar to being read through the lens of what Jarrett calls “black minstrelsy.” In “black minstrelsy,” white audiences were conditioned to see “minstrelsy performed by blacks, as realistic [and] an avant-garde cultural performance of racial authenticity” (37). Readers of “When Malindy Sings,” like the audiences who had heard Dunbar recite his work earlier in his career, were primed to see this form of ethnic caricature as realism.⁴

Despite these constraints, the message of “When Malindy Sings” is transgressive in its assertion of Black music. The speaker, a servant, boldly commands a young white “Miss Lucy” to put her music book with its “lines an’ dots” away because she lacks the natural ability to make the “soun’ come right,” as Malindy does.⁵ Throughout its nine stanzas, Dunbar develops the contrast between melodious Black music flowing from the heart and rigidly constrained performances of printed music. Even when Malindy sings such conventional “lines an’ dots” hymns as “Rock of Ages” (l. 40) her song soars above and silences not only other human musicians, such as the fiddle and banjo players, but also the robins, larks, and mockingbirds who pause in their songs to hear her. Telling Towser, the dog, and Mandy’s wailing child to hush, the speaker can hear Malindy’s song as it echoes through hills and valleys and toward heaven, or “the...