Here’s a quote worth pondering: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” While it’s commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde, no one is quite sure where the quote originates. The Psalmist expresses a similar sentiment, “I praise you, Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139.14). There are times when we deny our true selves and don a mask as coverup. We might wear a confidence mask at work or a happy mask in social settings. One of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s (1872-1906) poems vividly captures his personal struggle with wearing a mask. He was the son of former slaves, born shortly after the Civil War, and the only Black in his Dayton high school. A close friend and classmate, Orville Wright, ran a printing business after school with his brother Wilbur before they turned their sights to aviation. They published a weekly newspaper Paul edited for Black Americans. Paul and Orville often partnered together, helping each other with school assignments as Paul was gifted in writing while Orville excelled at math and science. One edition of Paul’s newspaper mentioned Orville’s dream for an “airship,” among the earliest references to the Wright brother’s flying machines. Paul turned to writing after high school. Since he couldn’t find employment as a Black writer, he worked as an elevator operator and sold copies of self-published poems for a dollar to interested customers who rode his elevator. One of his best-loved poems, “We Wear the Mask,” poignantly describes the pressure Paul feels to wear a mask as a young black man living in a segregated society. Although he never mentions race in his poem, it’s essential to the meaning. Blacks often had to subjugate their true feelings to survive in unsympathetic American society in the late 1800s. His poem begins: “We wear this mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.”
Paul often expounds on Christian themes in his poems. In the last stanza of his mask poem, Paul expresses his anguish to God:
“We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.”
Paul wrote four hundred poems and four novels before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age thirty-three. His 1895 poem, “When Storms Arise,” leads us to pray: