"When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers": Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetic engagement with the Civil War, masculinity, and violence.

Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetic treatment of the Civil War and its legacies explores heroism, patriotism, citizenship, death, mourning, and trauma. In reflecting on the war, considered a worthy and elevated national theme, the author found an acceptable yet powerful way to set black suffering alongside white, to testify to African American contributions and sacrifices, to figure a form of haunting bound up with the sin of racial slavery, and to pass comment on the disappointments and abuses of the post-Reconstruction era. Through readings of the poems, "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers," "The Colored Soldiers," "The Unsung Heroes," "Robert Gould Shaw," and "The Haunted Oak," with particular attention to gender construction and imagery of violence, this analysis will demonstrate how Dunbar gives extraordinary voice to African American experiences, positions, and protests. (1)

The preoccupation of the Civil War may seem a strange one for an African American poet writing in the North in the 1890s and early 1900s. Yet, this topic enables Dunbar to enter into dialogue with prior literary representations and, with varying degrees of success, to form a critique of contemporary racial injustices. Composed against a backdrop of rising anti-black violence and the widespread collapse and reversal of political and legal gains made by African Americans during the post-war period, Dunbar's poetry might be considered alongside the turn of the century prose interventions of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois. (2) In different ways, these works address questions of black identity, uplift, and self-determination in light of the legacies of slavery and the Civil War. Yet in his revisitation of the national conflict, Dunbar, too, looks to earlier European American poetic engagements with war to shape his own voicing. (3) Whether in dialect or standard English, the verse under consideration here works to reaffirm the Civil War as inextricably tied up with racial oppression, thus distancing itself from nostalgic reflections on the Lost Cause of the South, and to build a case for the equal claim of African Americans to belonging and liberty in the here and now.

The subjects of slavery and the Civil War are treated explicitly in the dialect poem "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers" (Dunbar, Collected 182-84). Here Dunbar creates the powerful first-person voice of an enslaved black woman whose beloved, 'Lias, joins the Union army to fight for freedom. The poem parallels white and black experiences of war, in large part, through an exploration of racial identity and fitness to fulfil dominant gender roles. Indeed, in this instance, gendered behaviors and codes are key to the claim to African American citizenship and full personhood. While the form of "When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers" consists of regular long lines and rhyming couplets, it also relies on a familiar and black vernacular voicing that lends to the crafting of the warmth and humanity of the speaker.

The poem's narrative sequence takes us from 'Lias's enlistment and departure to battle, through the experiences of the women left behind--both black and white--and to their responses to loss and mourning. The repeated line "W'en dey 'listed colo'ed sojers" (11. 16, 24, 40) centers our attention on the decision to let blacks join the Union ranks during the Civil War. Simultaneously, it makes us aware of their previous exclusion from the fighting forces, the white perception of their unreliability both with arms and in the face of danger, and also the non-admittance of African American men into a particular mode of masculinity. 'Lias's enlistment hence signals both a pressing desire to obtain liberty for his people and entry into a male military sphere bound up with ideals of honor, duty (it is the slave's "conscience" that calls him), strength, valor, and sacrifice for a noble cause. 'Lias wishes to fight "For de freedom dey had gin him an' de glory of de right" (1. 12), but his pride, and the speaker's, is tied up with his uniformed and parading appearance: "so strong an' mighty in his coat o' sojer blue" (l. 22). This pride is indicative of newly marshalled masculine attributes including bravery and physical power as well as efficient…