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Paul Laurence Dunbar & the Poet
Why Dunbar will always be my favorite poet
Birth of a poet
It was in the third grade, at Jesse LaSalle Elementary, just around the corner from my house in Washington D.C. that I first encountered Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Black poet. Mrs. Lewis was my teacher. The entire class was assigned homework. Select a poem, any poem, commit that poem to memory and then read it in front of the class. Thinking back, I didn’t think much of it though I was quite shy and didn’t speak well in public before an audience.
After a short search through literary paperbacks my father kept in the house, I selected the poem, ‘We Wear the Mask’ by the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. My father had many black literature books in the house, and I picked the poem from one of those books. My best friend at the time, Ronnie Beavers, selected a Dunbar poem as well, ‘Negro Love Song.’ He came over my house and we went through all the books together.
I can still to this day remember reading the poem. It took me hours to memorize it to the point where I was fearless. The poem is short anyway and it has a catchy rhyme pattern that makes it easy to commit to memory. I was nervous but too young to know how much.
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —…
