Reviewing While White: Jump Back, Paul

Welcome to “Reviewing While White,” an occasional series of reviews by our core contributors.  Some of our reviews will seek to spotlight positive examples of books to which we wish to draw attention. In the spirit of Debbie Reese’s charge, others will criticize books which we believe perpetuate White dominance.

All Reading While White core contributors stand behind the reviews published under the Reading While White byline. Reviews reflect our individual positions, not those of our employer, or other reviewing bodies or committees to which we contribute. 

by Nina Lindsay

I have not read much of, or about, Paul Laurence Dunbar.  So when I received Jump Back, Paul: the Life and Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Sally Derby, with illustrations by Sean Qualls, published by Candlewick Press, I dug right in.   

The biographical narrative (interspersed with Dunbar’s poems) is presented by a fictional narrator in a “Grandma” voice, which felt awkward to me at first, though I tried to go with it, noting that Derby cites this voice as the inspiration that shaped the narrative.  Derby grew up in Dunbar’s home town of Dayton Ohio, had a lifelong admiration for him, and expresses the hope that her book “will restore some of the recognition Dunbar deserves,”  while acknowledging “it is always somewhat risky to write about someone whose culture is not your own.” (p.119)   

I moved ahead, marking questions about where Derby was heading with her arguments, so that I could check back at the end to see if they were resolved.  But then I read, on page 10, in regards to rough treatment from Paul’s father Joshua: “It wasn’t like Joshua was heartless. I’m not excusing the beating, but life had treated Joshua rough.  Raised a slave, how could he know what family life could be like?”  In case you didn’t catch the microaggression: in that last sentence, whether intended consciously or not, Derby suggests that Black people born into slavery could have had no concept of family life.   

Sucker-punched, I read on through to the end, marking even more questions for follow up, and finding none of them answered in Derby’s text or aftermatter. So I gave myself a mini crash-course in Dunbar, reading through the sources that Derby indicates she consulted the most. I was surprised to feel I was reading about a completely different Dunbar than the one Derby presented.   

Dunbar was born in 1872, to parents who were formerly enslaved.  Derby relates his parents’ story and his early life. “His mama, now, she liked telling about life in the slave cabins--everyday goings-on, especially the funny ones. Even when Paul was grown, he liked to listen to old folks talking about their lives, and sometimes he’d turn their memories into poems.”  (p.4) This becomes an opportunity to share some of Dunbar’s famous poetry in dialect.  But by repeatedly interspersing these with stories of his childhood, drawing direct comparisons with the subject matter, and including suggestions such as “If you’re wondering what it was like growing up back then [during Paul’s childhood], you read Paul’s stories and poems, you’ll get a  good idea,” (p.15)  Derby lays a misleading suggestion that the experience of these poems came from Paul’s own childhood, rather than from stories told to him.  Paul’s childhood was a generation removed from the childhoods presented in his dialect poems, and it was a crucial generation, as it spanned Emancipation.

She moves on through his youth and young career to his success as a poet, and continues to include his poems both in dialect and in “formal” English. The difference in the reception of these two styles is the central argument of Dunbar’s work. His poetry in dialect (and his Broadway minstrel writing) was what made him famous in the White literary establishment, and this was a topic of debate among his peers, yet Derby only brings it up, late in the narrative, as a point of contention between Dunbar and his wife Alice (p.88-89), almost entirely avoiding it, and certainly marginalizing its prominence in his career. Why?

In her author’s note, she speaks to the Grandma voice that inspired her, and talks of how she argued with this voice. “I’d say, ‘I don’t know what to write here. Some experts think one thing and some think another.’ And she’d answer impatiently, ‘Those people wrote their own books. This one’s yours. You need to write what you think.’  So that’s what I did. With Grandma’s help.” (p.104)  Yet we’re never clear on what Derby thinks about Dunbar.  She doesn’t offer much in explanation of his poems, as if intending for Dunbar’s work to speak for itself.  In Chapter 6 she starts to get into Dunbar’s political commentary, and then excuses herself at the start of Chapter 7 “There, now, I guess I strayed away from my story a little bit, didn’t I?” (p.79).  In other words, his political views are not central to understanding him, in her estimation.

On page 98, Derby’s “Grandma” says, regarding Dunbar’s famous line “I know why the caged bird sings”: “You don’t have to be black to understand the longing in that poem, to feel its sadness.” (p.98).   Here Derby seems to be justifying herself, acknowledging that she can appreciate and understand Dunbar even though she’s White.  Does she also realize the many microaggressions that reverberate from this statement, stripping the very importance of Blackness from the appreciation of Dunbar’s poems?  Did she consider what a Black child reading this line would hear?

It’s as if Derby is hiding behind a fictional voice she hopes will lend credence to avoid writing about what she doesn’t want to touch. She avoids the uncomfortable questions regarding race, class, and White privilege in the literary establishment that were central to Dunbar’s story as a writer, and are not inaccessible to a young reader. We are left with what feels like a “White polite” version of Dunbar. That this was clearly thoroughly researched and painstakingly written, and that Derby clearly admires her subject, makes the whole endeavor even more frustrating to read.