The line also sustains the melodic thought that runs throughout the poem:

Seen my lady home las’ night,
Jump back, honey, jump back.
Hel’ huh han’ an’ sque’z it tight,
Jump back, honey, jump back.

This is oral poetry at its lighthearted and humorous best. Its effectiveness lies in recitation. It must be read aloud. Indeed, the persona in many of Dunbar’s poems is asking to be freed from the prison of the page. The poems are asking to be verbalized, to take flight in the air. Dunbar seems to have been the best at verbalizing the oral tradition in black American literature.

Nowhere is this oral tradition more apparent and effective than in “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” The theme is freedom, but it is couched in an analysis of the biblical relationship of the Israelites and the Egyptians, and that is why the preacher says:

. . . I’se a-judgin’
Bible people by deir ac’s;
I’se a-givin’ you de Scriptuah,
I’se a-handin’ you de fac’s. . . .
Fu’ de Bible says “a servant
Is a-worthy of his hire.”

Here Dunbar moves in and out of dialect almost imperceptibly, between humor and direct finger pointing—all done behind the mask of the Bible. The minister is clever enough to know that someone in the congregation is going to go back and report what happened at the meeting to the master, and that is why he admonishes the congregation:

Now don’t run an’ tell yo’ mastahs
Dat I’s preachin’ discontent.

One must remember how dangerous it must have been to preach about freedom and equality in a time of slavery. So the minister is quick to say

Dat I’m talkin’ ’bout ouah freedom
In a Bibleistic way.

Dunbar is able to draw laughter from his reader-audience, and maybe it is this trait that causes him most of his troubles.

Dunbar’s complex and often ironic linguistic usage can be attributed in part to the society and the times in which he lived. But the pervasive talent behind it exists today in the linguistic skills of contemporary African American youths, specifically spoken word poetry and rap music. Can we in fact, in hindsight, blame Dunbar for his sometimes stereotypical and often ironic uses of dialect without equally examining similar developments in our own time?

In his brief lifetime (1872-1906), less than thirty-four years, Dunbar seems to have been inoculated with the same serum that caused several of the English Romantics to write at such a breakneck speed and then rush headlong into the future. At eighteen or nineteen when Dunbar graduated from high school, the only black in his class, he had a mere fifteen years left to write. In that decade and a half he wrote twelve books of poetry, four novels, four books of short stories, one opera, two musicals, and a variety of one-acts with incidental music. He wrote four full-length plays, three of which are lost and the fourth only recently published for the first time. A number of his wide-ranging essays are yet to be collected. No matter how we perceive his overall output, it was major, and Dunbar was operating under the stress of restrictive times and restricting circumstances.

Writing under conditions the likes of which we can only begin to imagine, Dunbar produced a substantial body of work that is filled with vibrant characters, exhilarating atmosphere, and delightful language. While the poet’s later letters evince regret, early in his career Dunbar observed with quiet poignancy, in “The Poet and His Song”:

There are no ears to hear my lays,
No lips to lift a word of praise;
But still, with faith unfaltering,
I live and laugh and love and sing.
What matters yon unheeding throng?
They cannot feel my spirit’s spell,
Since life is sweet and love is long,
I sing my song, and all is well.

We are persuaded by the device of humor in numerous Dunbar poems, and we are convinced by the various masks each persona wears. These masks not only obscure the nature of the character, but also serve as poetic devices to obscure the hand of the poet. He suggests in his most famous rondeau, “We Wear the Mask,” that the mask is safety; it is protection; it is a defense mechanism for

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—. . .
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

The world of Dunbar’s day was not interested in black suffering, and if the truth be told, it may not yet be.