The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, eds. Gene Andrew Jarrett and Thomas Lewis Morgan (Ohio University Press, 2005). Hardcover, 560 pages. $59.95.

 One’s satisfaction in reading the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar is directly proportional to one’s ability to negotiate Dunbar’s own negotiations of audience. What does this mean, you ask? It means that Dunbar, who many have called the nation’s first widely successful African American writer, was quite cognizant of the racist literary world he was writing in, and that he sometimes capitulated to it in order to get published, and that he sometimes challenged it in aesthetically and politically revolutionary ways. Approaching the stories from this perspective allows us to appreciate their many layers and possible impact on audiences, without damning Dunbar for finding ways to get his work out into the world.

Dunbar’s nuanced strategies are presented in the first comprehensive collection of his published and unpublished stories, aptly titled The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and edited by Gene Andrew Jarrett and Thomas Lewis Morgan. “One hundred years after his untimely death, we are still only beginning to understand what Paul Laurence Dunbar achieved during his life,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes in the Foreword (ix).

Fishkin continues, “Dunbar was a commercial writer, an author who sought to sell his work in the marketplace. Yet he was also a self-aware writer who understood that his work was entering a highly charged and often offensive cultural conversation about African Americans that was going on around it. Was it possible to write commercial fiction that also redirected that conversation in productive ways? To what extent could a black writer at the turn of the century destabilize stereotypes – about black writers, and about black people generally – and still find a lucrative market for his fiction? (ix).”

These are fascinating and provocative questions, which are definitely played out in the interplay between the stories and their critical and commercial reception (explored masterfully in Jarrett and Morgan’s introduction). Whether we need 103 opportunities (the number of stories in the collection) to explore them is another matter. There is something to be said for thoroughness, but the stories’ main themes, of religious redemption, plantation life, and family/romantic relations get a little bit repetitive by the end. Cherry picking, however, is one of the greatest past-times of the collection reader, so if you approach The Complete Stories in this manner, you will be richly rewarded. Dunbar was a fine writer of prose – not just poetry – and the stories come to life off the page, even if the White characters sometimes feel a little too redeemed, and the Black characters a little too ignorant and docile for our Twenty-first Century tastes.

In “The Colonel’s Awakening,” for instance, we learn that a Black servant and his wife have stayed on the plantation long after Emancipation, in order to continue to take care of their White master, who lives largely in the world of his mind, the shock of his son’s death in battle being too much for him to bear. In the middle of the very short story, the Black servant says, “‘Lawd he’p him not to wake up den, ‘ca’se he ol’, but we needs him. I do’ know whut I’d do ef I didn’t have Mas’ Bob to wuk fo’,’” (27). Every Christmas, we learn, the two servants deliver presents that they tell the Colonel are from his family and friends, but are actually from them, in order to continue the charade of the Colonel’s “dream.” This is, of course, what every mainstream White reader would want to hear at the turn of the century – that Blacks were thankful for the treatment they received from Whites, that they were helpless children, and that they could never survive outside of the master/slave relationship. The story’s entire focus on the master’s life and situation and not the servants is also problematic, but emblematic of the plantation story genre at this time.

Even as stories like “The Colonel’s Awakening” may irritate us, Dunbar finds his redemption in masterful pieces like “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope.” The depth of Black characters in this piece – about a Black preacher who relocates to a small, impoverished town in the South, where he faces his greatest challenge – showcase Dunbar’s impressive skills. In one particularly moving passage, Dunbar explores the preacher’s deep conflicts about working for the betterment of his people: “There were moments when he felt, as every man, however brave, must feel at times, that he would like to shift all his responsibilities and go away from the place that seemed destined to tax his powers beyond their capability and endurance. What could he do for the inhabitants of Mt. Hope? What was required of him to do? Ever through his mind ran that word-old question: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He had never asked, ‘Are these people my brothers?’ (16).

Dunbar’s descriptive powers are also notable, as this passage from “Anner ‘Lizer’s Stumblin’ Block” illustrates: “His conversion kindled the flame of the meeting and set the fire going. You have seen corn in the popper when the first kernel springs up and flares open, how quickly the rest follow, keeping up the steady pop, pop, pop; well just so it was after this first conversion,” (7).

The “Negro dialect,” standard for Dunbar’s era, can also challenge the contemporary reader, but the more you read it, the easier it gets, so struggle onwards. All the other basic elements of story, such as plot, structure, point of view, compelling themes, and characterization are fundamentally sound in these stories, and will carry you through other difficulties.

While The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar may not be a leisurely summer read, it is an important one. The stories in the volume are complicated, entertaining, offensive, and moving. They reveal a turn-of-the-century America struggling mightily with its creative and political capital, as well as its contradictions. Ralph Ellison once said that Black writers are the conscience of the nation. Here, Dunbar reveals that we are also its striving, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wayward children.