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Title: Anne Spencer in Garden
Source: Courtesy of the Anne Spencer
House and Garden Museum, Inc.
More informationAnne Spencer was a poet, a civil rights activist, a
teacher, a librarian, and a gardener. While fewer than
thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was
an important figure of the black literary movement of the
1920s—the Harlem Renaissance—and only the second African
American poet to be included in the Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). Noted
for iambic verse preoccupied with biblical and mythological
themes, Spencer found fans in such Harlem heavyweights as
James Weldon Johnson, who commented on her "economy of
phrase and compression of thought." In addition to her
writing, Spencer helped to found the Lynchburg chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She
was also an avid gardener and hosted a salon at her
Lynchburg garden, which she called Edankraal, attracting the
major stars of the Harlem Renaissance. Her former residence
is now a museum that is open to the public.
Spencer was born Annie Bethel Scales Bannister to Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah Louise Scales on February 6, 1882, on a farm in Henry County. Both parents were of mixed lineage. Her father, born a slave in Henry County in 1862, was of black, white, and Seminole Indian ancestry. Her mother was born in 1866 on Reynolds Plantation in Critz, in neighboring Patrick County. According to Spencer's biographer, J. Lee Greene, Sarah Louise Scales "was an illegitimate child; her mother was a former slave and her father a wealthy Virginia aristocrat … well known in American aristocracy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." Rumors passed down in the Spencer family have long suggested that Sarah's father was a Reynolds, which would have made her a close relative of R. J. Reynolds and J. Sargeant Reynolds.
Soon after Spencer was born, her family left their Henry County farm for Martinsville, where her father opened a saloon. When Bannister's fervor for financial security clashed with his wife's investment in morality, the couple separated. In 1886, Scales took Anne with her to Bramwell, West Virginia, but was unable to care for her. First, she placed Anne in the foster care of William Dixie and his wife, a prominent black couple in Bramwell. Then, in 1893, wanting a better education for her daughter, Scales enrolled the eleven-year-old in the Virginia Theological Seminary and College (now Virginia University of Lynchburg).
Title: Anne Spencer with
Husband and Grandchildren
Source: Courtesy of the Anne Spencer
House and Garden Museum, Inc.
More informationAlthough Spencer left Bramwell barely literate, when she
graduated from the Virginia Theological Seminary
six years later she was valedictorian of her
class. While in school, Anne had met Edward
Spencer, Lynchburg's first parcel postman, and
they married in 1901. The couple had three
children: Bethel, Alroy, and Chauncey. (Later Chauncey Spencer
would help to initiate the training
program that produced the Tuskegee Airmen.)
Spencer taught at her alma mater from 1910 until 1912. While there, she met and tutored Ota Benga, a so-called pygmie who had been brought from the Belgian Congo and who had been placed on exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the Bronx Zoo for several years before being sent to Lynchburg.
In 1924, Spencer was hired by the Jones Memorial Library's board of trustees to work at the Dunbar High School library. Dunbar was Lynchburg's African American high school and its library the only branch open to African Americans in the city. Between these two jobs, Spencer spent much of her time writing and serving on committees to improve the legal, social, and economic aspects of African Americans' lives. During this time, Spencer also helped to establish the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP and led a campaign to hire black teachers in black schools.
Title: Anne Spencer's Muse
Source: VFH Radio
More informationSpencer's work with the NAACP brought James Weldon
Johnson to town and launched Spencer's literary
career. Johnson was the Renaissance man of
Harlem—a poet, diplomat, journalist,
anthropologist, teacher, lawyer, and
songwriter—and he came to Lynchburg in 1919 in
his capacity as a field agent for the NAACP.
During his visit, he befriended Spencer and
encouraged her to publish her work. Spencer was
as prolific a writer as she was reticent about
publishing. Her often idiosyncratic poems were,
even to Johnson, "perhaps too unconventional,"
and when H. L. Mencken offered to help her
publish them she turned him down. His criticism,
coming as it did from a non-poet, was unwelcome.
Johnson, apparently, had a lighter touch, and
Spencer was published by such Harlem Renaissance
publications as The
Crisis, a journal founded by the NAACP, and
The Lyric, a
magazine for traditional poetry.
The relationship between Spencer's race, her politics, and her poetry is complex. Although a civil rights activist, she opposed school integration as "tokenism," and she did not address the issues of African Americans in her poetry nearly as often as did other Harlem Renaissance artists. Johnson once declared that "practically none of her poetry has been motivated by race," and while that was an exaggeration, Spencer seemed more protective of her artistry than of her race. She explained her range of subject matter to Greene, saying, "I write about some of the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate."
In "White Things" (1923), one of her best known exceptions to Johnson's claim, Spencer explored "whiteness" and how its supremacy is maintained only through the violent destruction of all things colored. Spencer explained that she wrote the poem in response to a lynching she had read about—perhaps the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia—in which a pregnant woman and her unborn child were murdered. The poem opens with the observation that "Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea. / Black men are most men; but the white are free!"
Several lines later, the white "wand of power" has reduced the hills of "red and darkened pine" to blanched wastelands
and has turned the "blood in a ruby rose / To a
poor white poppy-flower." The poem's final
verses turn from the transformative devastation
that whites inflict upon the "natural" world to
the violent "whitening" of blacks through their
transmutation to ash and bone in the act of
lynching: They pyred a race of black, black
men,
And burned them to ashes
white; then,
Laughing, a young
one claimed a skull,
For the
skull of a black is white, not dull …
Critic Keith Clark, in his essay on Anne Spencer in Notable Black American Women, suggests "White Things" has come to be seen as "the quintessential 'protest' poem." But given the graphic description and subject matter, Spencer's editors at The Crisis found it unnerving and asked for revisions. Typically, she refused.
At other times, Spencer eschewed politics for primroses.
"Life-Long Poor Browning" is at once a formally
structured tribute to her favorite poet,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and a mystic retreat
into the natural world. Echoing Browning's
formality and constraint, she contrasts the
precision of English gardens—"Primroses, prim
indeed, in quiet ordered hedges …"—to the
riotous beauty of Spencer's familiar Blue Ridge
Mountains: Here canopied reaches of dogwood
and hazel,
Beech tree and
redbud fine-laced in vines,
Fleet clapping rills by lush fern
and basil,
Drain blue hills to
lowlands scented with pines …
According to Spencer's biographer, J. Lee Greene, she wrote constantly, "on paper bags, in the margins and fly leaves of books, on envelopes, on tablets, on the telephone bill, on the back of a check." "Dear Langston," addressed to her friend and frequent correspondent Langston Hughes, appeared as a notation among Spencer's papers. The poem seems to express frustration at her perceived inability to complete anything. In the early 1970s, Spencer admitted to Greene that she had a reputation for never answering letters, but she explained herself by saying, "I answered every letter I ever received, though at times—too many times—that answer did not get on the paper or in the mail."
Title: Anne Spencer Garden
Source: Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution ShareAlike
2.0 License.
More informationSpencer's fame increased over the years, but not only
because of her poetry. She called her large
garden Edankraal, which combined her and her
husband Edward's names with the idea of sacred
places such as the biblical Eden and the African
kraal (an
Afrikaans term for a native southern African
village community). As early as the 1920s, the
Spencers turned Edankraal into an artists'
salon, hosting W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson,
Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, among
others. While Jim Crow laws prevented these
Harlem Renaissance luminaries from staying in
Lynchburg's hotels, they could find hospitality
and intellectual stimulation at Edankraal. In
this way, Spencer cemented her influence on
Harlem—all the way from Virginia.
Anne Spencer died of cancer in Lynchburg at the age of ninety-three on July 27, 1975. Her house and garden at 1313 Pierce Street are maintained and open for tours. The Anne Spencer House became incorporated shortly after the house was designated as a Virginia Historic Landmark in the autumn of 1976.
Email SignupFirst published: November 6, 2008 | Last modified: July 2, 2009
