More than scribbles: Lynchburg artists make film about Harlem Renaissance poet
By Casey Gillis on Apr. 02, 2008
At a distance, the scrawlings on the wall inside the Anne Spencer House on Pierce Street look like the handiwork of an overzealous child with a box of crayons.
But get a little closer to the wall, inside a dimly lit phone booth that sits in the corner of the great room, and you can make out names, phone numbers and other random thoughts of Spencer, a Harlem Renaissance poet who called Lynchburg home. It looks like chicken scratch, as if she could barely get the words out as they sped through her mind.
“She was a scribbler,” says Nina Salmon, a Lynchburg College professor and board member of the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum. “If a thought came to her, she would write it down. It didn’t matter if it was on a scrap of paper or on a wall.”
Salmon says Spencer was also a very private woman, hence the phone booth her husband, Edward Spencer, incorporated into their home.
During her lifetime, Spencer only published between 20 and 30 poems of the thousands she said she wrote, despite encouragement from contemporaries and friends like Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.
Today, she’s looked on as one of the contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the civil rights movement. Spencer was involved in the founding of Lynchburg’s chapter of the NAACP in 1918, and she often wrote about racial inequality in her poetry.
“She was one of the world’s great poets, not just Lynchburg’s,” says Keith Lee, artistic director of Dance Theatre of Lynchburg.
Last year, Lee collaborated with several local artists on “Anne Spencer Revisited,” an educational film featuring 12 of Spencer’s poems.
The film will debut Friday at Riverviews Artspace during First Fridays and will be shown in area venues all month long (see below for schedule).
As Spencer, local actress Sonia Langhorne recites the poems while acting out various scenarios, like digging in Spencer’s beloved garden, writing at her desk and cooking in the kitchen.
“I think this is going to be a tremendous educational tool,” says Lee, who has lived in Lynchburg for more than a decade but hadn’t heard of Spencer until last year, when a friend suggested he do some choreography about her.
After doing some research, he ended up at Spencer’s home.
“As soon as I walked in the house, I felt something. I felt the spirit of Anne Spencer,” Lee says. “I was inspired by her poetry, and I knew right away how I wanted to stage it.”
Langhorne, who has lived in Lynchburg since she was a teenager, was also surprised to learn about Spencer.
“I didn’t know her. To live so close to this house and to be so close to this history and to not know about it is a shame,” says the 27-year-old. “I really hope that this sheds some light and brings in some young people.”
Spencer was born in 1882. She grew up in Bramwell, W.Va., before enrolling, at age 11, in what was then the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, according to the book “Half My World: The Garden of Anne Spencer.”
While there, she studied the basics, like history, English, math and science, as well as Latin, French and German. She wrote her first poem, “The Skeptic,” when she was 14.
She graduated in 1899 and two years later, married Edward Spencer, whom she had met at school. They eventually settled at 1313 Pierce St., in a home Edward designed, and had three children: son Chauncey and daughters Bethel and Alroy.
The Spencers’ home would later host some of the era’s great black artists and political leaders. During the 1920s, there was no public lodging for black travelers, so the Spencers opened up their home. Guests included Martin Luther King Jr., Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall and Zora Neale Hurston.
Spencer also taught at her alma mater, by then renamed the Virginia Theological Seminary, from 1912 to 1914. Later, she became librarian for the Jones Memorial Library at Dunbar High School when blacks were not allowed to use the library’s main branch.
“Anne told it like it was. If she didn’t like something or didn’t approve of something, she said it,” Salmon says. “She didn’t tolerate any type of oppression.
“She was always telling people to stand up and be counted.”
Her husband created Spencer’s sanctuary, a backyard garden and cottage called “Edankraal,” which combined their names with “kraal,” a South African word that means dwelling.
The garden inspired much of Spencer’s work, as did her friendships with other artists.
In 1918, she befriended James Weldon Johnson, a poet, composer, publisher and writer. Johnson read Spencer’s work and encouraged her, which led to the publication of her first poem in the NAACP’s national journal in 1920. She was 38.
Salmon says Spencer wrote about many topics, but the struggles of blacks were closest to her heart.
“She believed in it so intensely that she exuded it at every turn,” most notably in “White Things,” which addresses racial injustice, Salmon says.
Says Lee: “It just really told her feelings of just being sick and tired of the racial climate.”
Spencer died on July 25, 1975, and shortly thereafter, the Anne Spencer Foundation was created. Her home was converted into a museum in the early 1990s, and the organization recently changed its name to the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum.
Lee began planning “Anne Spencer Revisited” about a year ago, but still hadn’t found anyone to portray the poet. Then he saw Langhorne when he was picking up his son from St. John’s Day School, where she is a teacher.
The next time they met, Lee gave Langhorne 12 of Anne Spencer’s poems. After she read them, she showed Lee some of her own poetry.
“There was something about her,” Lee says of Langhorne. “I had to see if she was indeed the artist for (the project). She had the look. But I was going, ‘Does she have the soul for this?’ Then she brought (her) poetry, and there was the soul.”
Local filmmaker Phil Spinner directed and edited the film, and photographer Susan Saandholland shot still photographs of Langhorne that will be included in the final product.
When shooting began in October, Langhorne worked hard to capture Spencer’s spirit. Before filming, she went upstairs to the poet’s bedroom and found three make-up powder puffs.
“I put some on,” Langhorne says, “and I was Anne.”
‘Revisited’ showings
Friday, April 4: 5 to 8 p.m. at Riverviews Artspace
Saturday, April 5: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Riverviews
Friday, April 11: 6:30 p.m. at Dance Theatre of Lynchburg
Saturday, April 12: 6:30 p.m. at Dance Theatre
Sunday, April 13: 2:30 p.m. at Dance Theatre
Saturday, April 19: 1 to 3 p.m. at Amazement Square
Tuesday, April 22: 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Anne Spencer House
Saturday, April 26: 1 p.m. at the Madison Heights Library
Saturday, April 25: 3:30 p.m. at the Amherst Library
Friday, May 2: 6 to 8 p.m. at CJMW Architects Gallery during First Fridays
COMMENTS
The listing for the Amherst Library is partially incorrect. It is at Saturday, April 26, 3:30, not April 25.
Thank you.