Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918) is a one-act play by Alice Dunbar Nelson. Published in The Crisis, the influential journal of the NAACP, Mine Eyes Have Seen is a brutal portrait of race and identity in twentieth century America. Exploring themes of violence, faith, patriotism, and economic struggle, Dunbar Nelson crafts a poignant and unforgettable work of fiction. When their father, a successful black man, is lynched by vengeful white neighbors, Dan, Chris, and Lucy flee north with their mother. They reach the city safely, but their mother soon dies from heartbreak and exhaustion, leaving her children to fend for themselves. Dan, the eldest, manages to support his siblings until an accident at the factory leaves him crippled. This forces Chris, a bitter young man, to take financial responsibility for the family. When the United States enters the First World War, authorizing the Selective Service Act of 1917, Chris is drafted into the military. Despite his hesitation and distrust of a government that allowed his father to be murdered with impunity, he soon comes under the influence of patriotic white neighbors who encourage him to sacrifice his life for the nation. This edition of Alice Dunbar Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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A propos de l’auteur
Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875-1935) was an African American poet, journalist, and political activist. Born in New Orleans to a formerly enslaved seamstress and a white seaman, Dunbar Nelson was raised in the city’s traditional Creole community. In 1892, she graduated from Straight University and began working as a teacher in the New Orleans public school system. In 1895, having published her debut collection of poems and short stories, she moved to New York City, where she cofounded the White Rose Mission in Manhattan. Dunbar Nelson married poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1898 after several years of courtship, but their union soon proved abusive. She separated from Dunbar—whose violence and alcoholism had become intolerable—in 1902, after which Nelson taught at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware for around a decade. She continued to write and earned a reputation as a passionate activist for equality and the end of racial violence. Her one-act play My Eyes Have Seen (1918) was published in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP. Dunbar Nelson settled in Philadelphia in 1932 with her third husband Robert J. Nelson and remained in the city until her death. Her career is exemplified by a mastery of literary forms—in her journalism, stories, plays, and poems, she made a place for herself in the male-dominated world of the Harlem Renaissance while remaining true to her vision of political change and social uplift for all African Americans.
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