Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore

Chapter 2: To Escape the Reproach of Her Birth and Blood

T W O To Escape the Reproach of Her Birth and Blood Even before they met, an infatuated Paul Laurence Dunbar would write Alice Ruth Moore (1875–1935) that he loved her and had loved her since seeing her photograph in the April 1895 issue of the Boston Monthly Review magazine.1 His ardor sprang from what he saw in that picture. Clearly, judging by her clothing and demeanor, she was middle class. And by the prevailing standards for African American beauty, Alice was practically perfect. Paul saw in the photograph “a glorious face and dear upturned nose.”2 There were also long, thick auburn tresses and alabaster skin, “with the African strain slightly apparent,” wrote Alice of people of her hue.3 She looked just like a white woman; she was a beauty. Plenty of men admired Alice’s charms. “They say she is a sugah-lady, Jesus!” exclaimed one who knew her strictly by reputation.4 Another believed that any man making her acquaintance, “would surely have been undone, for . . . Alice Ruth Moore has glorious eyes” (emphasis in the original).5 At a Chicago stag party, yet another of Alice’s unknown admirers recited a poem that he dedicated to her loveliness; and in the nation ’s capital, two friends—Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall, “a colored Harvard boy,” and Frank Stewart—“rhapsodized over” her.6 Alice agreed with her admirers. Unlike Paul, who hated his looks, she was more than pleased with herself. When she peered in the mirror, she saw a Roman goddess, a “tall, broad-shouldered Juno.”7 Her ivory toned-skin and European features allowed her to pass for white, which she did, without difficulty or challenge, when she wished to attend cultural events labeled “for whites only.”8 In fact, this writer mistook Alice for a Euro-American. “Who is this white woman?” I asked on viewing an| 44 | oil portrait of her in an African American’s home. “That’s my Aunt Alice,” replied her niece, Pauline Alice Young.9 Alice relished the privileges her fair skin brought her. At nineteen years of age, she was a popular flirt, not unlike a similar character in one of her short stories who never “lacked partners or admirers. Dear no!”10 Paul knew about her reputation as a “pretty, bright butterfly, a flirt” before instigating their relationship.11 Subsequently, he would ask, “Are you flirting very desperately with anyone at present?”12 Two months before Alice and Paul eloped, she still had a reputation for being a coquette, much to Paul’s dismay. Alice captured this frivolous side in one of her least successful poems. A frustrated beau tells his coquettish friend: Of your sweet smiles, you laugh at me, And treat me like a lump of dirt, Until I wish that I were dead, For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt.· · · · · · · · · · · · You do not seem to know or care, How often you’ve my feelings hurt, While flying round with other boys, For I am jealous, and you’re a flirt. (Emphasis in the original)13 Alice’s diary confirms her immense popularity. Jimmie Vance and Jimmie Lewis adored her in 1892, she wrote.14 That same year, when “Bis Pinchback went away and life was all black,” she recalled in another entry, “exactly a month later, November 5, began my romance with Nelson Mitchell.”15 Falling in love (which Alice did often) and getting married were “natural” to women, she maintained, although she was one of the New Women who believed in careers and independence for her sex.16 In spite of feminist leanings, however, Alice adhered to the traditional ideals of romantic love and the accompanying rituals that elite African Americans espoused. These gender-based ideals had a patriarchal slant. They were embraced almost as consistently by elite African Americans as by mainstream middle-class Americans . This idealism focused on the subordinate place of women in society and the dominant position of men. To Escape the Reproach of Her Birth and Blood| 45 | Paul’s first letter to Alice, dated April 17, 1895, was received at her home, 1924 Palmyra Street, in Uptown, a desirable section of New Orleans . Alice described the neighborhood in one of her short stories as “semi-fashionable . . . far up-town from the old-time French quarter . . . [t]he sort of neighborhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are made and fashionable high...