Anne Spencer

Garden at Spencer's house in Lynchburg

Annie Bethel Bannister was born in Henry County, Virginia, to Joel Cephus Bannister and Sarah Louise Scales, African Americans who were determined to make a better life for their daughter. Her parents worked on a plantation after their marriage. Both parents, although her father Joel was born a slave in 1862, were part of the first generation of African Americans whose childhood followed the demise of slavery.

As an only child, she was the center of her parents' affections. This devotion led to their separation over differences in ideas about child rearing. After the separation, Annie Bannister was then known as Annie Scales, taking her mother's maiden name. Mother and daughter moved to West Virginia and settled in Bramwell, a town whose acceptance of African Americans and immigrants was unusual for the time. Annie lodged in the home of the Dixie family while her mother worked as a cook at a local inn. William T. Dixie, a proprietor of his own barber shop, his wife, Willie Belle, and their five children, were prominent members of the African American community.[2]

As a lodger in the Dixie household, Annie was without cares, chores, or schooling of any kind, even though she grew up with the Dixie children who attended school locally and routinely performed household chores. Sarah was deeply devoted to her daughter and she believed the local schools were unsuitable for her. Without the formal structure of education, Annie had an unusual amount of freedom for an African American child in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It was this freedom of life without care in Bramwell that would lead to her development as a poet, through her explorations of the natural world and her reliance on the solitude she found in the only private place available to her, the family outhouse. It was there in the outhouse, that Annie, as an illiterate child, would take the Sears and Roebuck catalog and seclude herself, turning the pages, imagining and dreaming herself as a reader.[3] Her childhood in Bramwell was to prove foundational to her development as a poet and an intellectual. The solitude she found in the Dixie's outhouse was to resurface for her as an adult in Lynchburg, with the garden house her husband built for her, called Edankraal, a name derived from the combination of their names, "Edward" and "Anne," and the Africaans word for enclosure or corral, "kraal."[4]

Although separated, Annie's parents, Joel and Sarah, continued contact concerning their daughter's well-being. When Joel learned that Annie was not in school he sent Sarah an ultimatum that Annie must attend school or he would take her back to live with him. Although Sarah believed the local schools were unsuitable for Annie, she had learned of the Virginia Seminary at a church meeting. With Joel's ultimatum in mind, Annie was sent to Lynchburg to be enrolled in the Virginia University of Lynchburg (then known as Virginia Seminary) in 1893 when she was 11 years old.[5] Despite her largely illiterate childhood, Annie excelled at the seminary, delivering the valedictory address at her graduation in 1899.[5] Annie would return to Bramwell during breaks and over the summer. Having received a Normal School education at the Virginia Seminary, Annie returned to Bramwell after graduation and taught school in Elkhorn and Maybeury, West Virginia from 1899 - 1901.[6]

Later Life

While at the Virginia Seminary Annie met fellow student Charles Edward Spencer, whom she married on May 15, 1901 at the Dixie's home in Bramwell. In 1903, the Spencers moved permanently to Lynchburg and built a home at 1313 Pierce Street where they raised three children together, two daughters, Bethel and Alroy, and a son, Chauncey Spencer. Chauncey was to continue his mother's legacy of activism, playing a prominent role in military service during World War II. Chauncey's actions and determination led to the formation of the Tuskegee Airmen. Chauncey Spencer was to become a noted member of that group at a time when African American pilots had been refused military service as pilots.[7]

Before Anne started her life as a writer, she worked at an all-black local high school known as the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. At the school, she worked as a librarian for more than 20 years from 1923 to 1945.[8] The library consisted of a rather small collection of books, which resulted in Spencer bringing books from her own collection at home to add to the library.[4]

Anne Spencer poet Lynchburg

Anne Spencer's literary life began while she was a student at the Virginia Seminary where she wrote her first poem, "the Skeptic," now lost. She continued to write poetry throughout her life, using any scrap of paper or garden catalogue page that was handy, to record her thoughts. Spencer's poems spoke to race, nature, and the harsh realities of the world that she lived in.[9] Her work would go on to be widely anthologized. Spencer's career as a poet began in 1919, when she was planning to open a chapter of the NAACP in Lynchburg. Anne Spencer hosted James Weldon Johnson in her home, as a traveling representative for the NAACP. It was during this visit in 1919 that Johnson discovered Anne's poetry, and working through H.L. Mencken, Johnson's own editor, Anne had her first poem, "Before the Feast at Shushan," published in the February 1920 issue of The Crisis. She was 40 years old at the time her first poem was published.

The majority of Spencer's work was published during the 1920s, during the Harlem Renaissance.[10] Her work was highly respected during her time, and through her poems, she was able to touch on topics of race and nature, as well as themes of feminism.[11] For instance, critics interpret her poem "White Things" to be a comparison of the subjugation of the black race to the despoliation of nature.[12] Her work was notably featured in Alain Locke's famous anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, which connected her to the lifeline of the Harlem Renaissance, despite the fact that she lived in Virginia, far from New York.[13] In addition, her poems were included in The Book of American Negro Poetry, which was edited by another figure of the Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson.[14] During her lifetime, Spencer was able to publish over 30 poems. She earned herself a place in the esteemed Norton Anthology of American Poetry for her writing, making her the second African American to be featured in this work.[4] After her death in 1975, much of her work was published in Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry. She was later featured in Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance.[15] In the later half of the twentieth century, much of Spencer's lost work was found and published by other famous poets.