Strolling a` la Anne Spencer

I receive one poem per day via email from http://www.poets.org/ – which is nice because it’s just one poem, and it’s usually one which I would not come upon through my own devices. Yesterday’s offering was one by Anne Spencer, a contemporary of Langston Hughes and a member of the Harlem Renaissance School of Writers.  She died in 1975.  The poem is called “At the Carnival.”

Poet Anne Spencer's home in Lynchburg, VA

As I read it, I fondly recalled the day a few years ago when I strolled in front of Anne Spencer’s historic landmark home in Lynchburg, VA, and knocked determinedly on the front door to see if a tour was available – then sat on her porch, talked to her neighbors and some gardeners, took a few photos, and . . . finally, left. I happened to be in Lynchburg visiting my daughter who attended college there until her graduation in 2008.

I love going to writers’ homes and taking tours – feeling that certain feeling.  That’s what I like – feeling that certain feeling. Anne Spencer loved gardening, as do many writers.  She even had a little garden house out in the back where she would write.  I imagine she would write for a while, stroll through her rosebushes and do a little pruning work, then go edit some words out, then stroll and prune some more, rewrite . . . that sort of thing.  There were some men working in her back yard the day we were there.  I suppose they had been hired by the historic society to maintain the grounds as Anne Spencer would have liked them.  But they acted as though they had never even heard of Anne Spencer – this was just another job for them, and they were eager to be done.

My daughter was embarrassed of me that day, feeling I had pushed the envelope too far by sitting on Anne Spencer’s porch and talking to gardeners in her back yard. She sat in the car and waited for me impatiently as I strolled the neighborhood looking for someone who knew something about the Anne Spencer home and whether a tour was available.

We finally left the neighborhood and went to an historic cemetery nearby. We walked through a good portion of the cemetery’s 20,000 plots looking for Anne Spencer’s gravesite, but never found it. I later learned she was buried in a newer cemetery a few miles from there. We did learn all about African burial practices, however, and I took a few pictures of the gravesite of the most famous whores in Lynchburg, a mother-daughter team named Agnes and Lizzie Langley. They ran what was called “a sporting house” in Lynchburg during the Civil War era. They say it is uncertain as to whether the Langleys bought the elaborate grave marker with their own money or if their patrons bought it for them:

RIP, Agnes and Lizzie Langley, circa late 1800's

Then we ate some Indian food, perused a used bookstore where I couldn’t find any books by Anne Spencer but found a few other gems, and then drove to Poplar Forest which was Thomas Jefferson’s little-known summer retreat house nestled amongst 5,500 acres of . . . poplar trees. Poplar Forest is a bona fide tourist destination now, but in 2008 it was still in the process of being restored to its architectural authenticity, and we were privilegd and free to wander the house and gardens to observe the restoration in process. Jefferson said he went there "to be a hermit and to read and to entertain his absent friends." 

Thomas Jefferson's silent retreat called Poplar Forest

 Reading “At the Carnival” made me recall the spirit of that day – searching, strolling with my daughter, having fun, eating, finding things we didn’t look for, and not finding things we did look for. It was a carnival of sorts . . . and here are some lines taken from the center part of Spencer's long poem:

 I came incuriously—
Set on no diversion save that my mind
Might safely nurse its brood of misdeeds
In the presence of a blind crowd.