Lynchburg icon, poet Anne Spencer’s works turned over to UVa

Technically, the University of Virginia took formal possession Monday morning of the collected papers of poet and Lynchburg icon Anne Spencer.

But “papers” is much too pat a phrase for what was hidden within the nearly 70 boxes carted away from Spencer’s preserved home at 1313 Pierce St. And curator Edward Gaynor, while obviously excited about the acquisition, had to smile wryly when asked how difficult the cataloguing process would be.

“It will be a challenge,” he said. “We will probably try to catalogue the poems by title or subject and the correspondence chronologically.”

But that doesn’t begin to address the hundreds of scraps of paper on which Spencer, considered one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance literary period (roughly 1925-1935), scribbled a few lines of verse or thoughts on the issues of the day. Like Emily Dickinson, she wrote mostly from home — favoring the cool refuge of her garden cottage, Edenkraal — but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t keenly aware of what was happening in the larger world.

“She kept everything she wrote,” said Ann Spencer, widow of Anne Spencer’s son Chauncey, “not because she thought it was all important, but because she just didn’t throw anything away. She used the back stairs of the house as her filing system, and after she died, we could hardly get up them.

“She would even make corrections in books she was reading if she thought something was wrong.”

Such packrats are like gifts from God for historians.

As UVa employees hauled the boxes out to a white college truck, sweating even at 9:30 a.m., Ann Spencer said: “It’s a little sad to see them go, but I understand.”

Her daughter, Shaun Hester, felt the same way.

“It’s bittersweet,” said Hester, who recently moved back from Washington, D.C., to live with her mother in the family home across the street from 1313 Pierce. “I used to enjoy looking through that stuff myself. There’s magazines, stuff written on envelopes, letters, papers from my father.”

The courtship between the University of Virginia and the fiercely independent and opinionated family matriarch dated back to the 1960s. The school offered to serve as a repository for her papers then, and Spencer promptly refused because UVa was segregated.

“They tried again after she had passed away (in 1975),” said Nina Salmon, a Lynchburg College professor who serves on the board of the Anne Spencer House, “but nothing came of it. We found a letter about that from 1980 when we were looking through the material.”

Meanwhile, the boxes containing the legacy of the late poet — the first black woman and first Virginian to have her work included in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry — had become nomads.

“Carol Spencer Read (Anne’s late granddaughter) had them for a while,” said Salmon, “and they were at Lynch Christian’s law office downtown, which was flooded, and I had them in my basement. It became obvious that we needed a safe place, so we started looking around. I went up to UVa, toured the special collections facility there, and it was a no-brainer.”

The new home for the Spencer papers will be the Albert H. Small Special Collections Building, located near the center of the UVa campus.

“It’s funny,” said Gaynor, “because people call it the ‘Small Collections Building,’ when it’s actually the ‘Big Collections Building.’ Two-thirds of it is underground, and there are 13 miles of shelving.”

UVa is particularly interested in Virginians, literature and African-American history, Gaynor added, “and Anne Spencer knocks them all out of the park.”

The Small Building also houses the collective papers of former Congressman, Senator, Secretary of the Treasury and newspaper publisher Carter Glass, a Lynchburger best known for being one of the co-designers of the Federal Reserve System. Ann Spencer had a story about Glass and her mother-in-law.

“She was at a meeting once when Carter Glass was speaking,” she said, “and he wasn’t letting anyone else talk. So she stood up in the audience and said: ‘Why don’t you shut up and give someone else a chance?’”

“A couple of days later, there was a knock on her door, and it was Carter Glass. She finally let him in, and they talked, and they became great friends.”

And now, their written histories will be neighbors.