Lovingly built in 1903 by a parcel postman for his young Virginia bride – a remarkable woman who grew up to be the first African American librarian, a civil rights activist, a self-taught master gardener and a Harlem Renaissance poet – Edward and Anne Spencer’s house in Lynchburg was well and truly lived in. Over the next 72 years it became home not just to the Spencers, but to Anne’s mother (a probable daughter of the slave-owning Reynolds tobacco family) and, intermittently, to the stars of the 20th century’s African American intelligentsia: bass-baritone and actor Paul Robeson, writer and sociologist WEB du Bois, contralto Marian Anderson, activist and minister Martin Luther King Jr and poet Langston Hughes. Plus three children and eleven grandchildren. Anne wrote of this house that it was born of ‘our passionate, poverty-stricken agony to own our own home’. These days, having been transformed into a snug museum, the house still embodies their heart-wrenching aspiration and the hard-won success of the African American middle class.
But if the description ‘woman poet’ calls to mind a fragile Elizabeth Barrett Browning or the Brontë sisters, have another think, because Anne was no pallid romantic. She wore (homemade) trousers, for starters, and never met a wallpaper she didn’t like. Once, because she refused to ride to work ‘in the back’ of a trolley, she was hauled to the office by the irate motorman who phoned her husband to come and get her. (This was the South, remember.) Unfazed, that gutsy ‘woman poet’ refused to take the trolley at all, hitching rides instead in the cargo beds of farmers’ pick-up trucks. She had a genuine writer’s ego, too. When the well-known journalist and satirist HL Mencken, an admirer of her work, suggested some edits, Anne flatly refused. ‘I don’t write to publish,’ she said. ‘I love writing.’
She loved her garden as well: a handsome quarter-acre brimming with paths, ponds, gazebos and trellises built by the multifaceted Edward. It was there that he constructed a cottage for her, a one-room retreat called Edankraal (Ed + An(ne) + Kraal, the Afrikaans word for corral).
Making his rounds in a truck he’d painted red, white and blue, Ed’s eagle eye turned up trays, picture frames, discarded building materials, books and beds, not to mention wallpaper – any handsome or serviceable salvage that he and Anne could recycle to beautify their world. There was nothing he couldn’t fashion for her. Even a tiny telephone ‘booth’ under the stairs.
Appallingly, until the late 1960s, African American travellers weren’t welcome in Southern hotels, which was how the cosy Spencer house became a favoured Virginia stopover. Visitors enjoyed pleasant surroundings, tasty meals, stimulating conversation and soft beds. There were no floral arrangements in the guest-rooms, however, since picking Anne’s flowers was taboo. As was the cutting-down of trees. Granddaughter Shaun Spencer-Hester, current steward of the house, tells of one late December day when her father, Chauncey, brought her mother home to meet the in-laws. ‘When she asked why there was no Christmas tree, Edward explained about his wife’s tree rule. The young couple went out to find one and were delighted to spot a tree, already decorated, being removed from a florist’s window. They put it up in the sunroom. The day after Christmas, Anne insisted it come down.’
Chauncey Spencer was movie-star dashing and exceptional in his own right. He was a barnstorming pilot during the 1930s and, as World War II approached, his aerial expertise convinced Harry Truman, Congress and the Senate that ‘negro pilots’ could be fliers. Too old by that time to enlist, Chauncey instead helped to found the famed Tuskegee Airmen, which explains how his flight suit, white silk scarf and goggles are now in a glass case at the Smithsonian Institution. When Anne died in 1975, he moved his family back to Lynchburg to look after his childhood home. Within a year, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a Virginia Historic Landmark.
Making the house presentable, however, required years of TLC. ‘My grandfather loved every minute of building all this,’ Shaun explains. ‘He loved adding beautiful crown mouldings and trim to every room.’ And when the baton was passed to her, she found the job a joy, especially the decorative ‘finds’: the original green linoleum beneath the living-room parquet, for instance, and the stacks of slipcovers up in the attic, ‘all still in great shape’. Early on, it became astonishingly clear that, while with one hand her indefatigable grandmother was composing poems, hosting the famous and refusing to sew a single button on her husband’s shirts, with the other, she was whipping up ‘Perfection Salad’ (moulded gelatine studded with canned fruit) and dyeing her curtains and sheets. Green, of course, like that ‘salad’. On a cabinet beside the pair of salvaged red leather doors in the kitchen (‘The coolest doors to come in and out of,’ says Shaun), Anne asked an artistic relative to handpaint her poem ‘Lines to a Nasturtium (A Lover Muses)’. Entering the house today, Shaun says she still ‘feels their love for the place. It was a fairy tale here.’
As was the garden, where Anne wove and coaxed all those (uncuttable) roses, wisteria, nasturtiums and grapevines through the latticework and fences. Naturally, the grandchildren weren’t allowed to eat the grapes. Those were reserved for the purple martins that also dined on the pond’s mosquitos.
In reading this piece, you may have noticed what has always seemed an awkward construct to me: ‘African American’. It recurs here because, while it’s accurate, we haven’t found anything less clumsy or more apt. It’s satisfying to know, however, that along with her grape-eating and tree-cutting strictures, Anne also refused to let her family differentiate themselves from other citizens of the country they grew up in. Always outspoken and independent, she let them know that, in her opinion, a simple ‘American’ was fine. And fundamentally, like the matriarch herself, more poetic.
The Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum, 1313 Pierce St, Lynchburg, VA 24501, USA. annespencermuseum.com
A version of this article also appears in the July 2018 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive interiors stories like this one, direct to your inbox.
