Unearthing the Nuanced Strata of Anne Spencer’s Life, Home, and Garden
By: Emily Mook | Photos by: Ashlee Glen
A museum is a paradoxical thing: a permanent fixture that seeks to preserve the ephemeral, a stationary monument to that which once buzzed with momentum, a tangible rendering of such lofty intangibles as hopes, dreams, fears, love, and perhaps even radical change.
These paradoxes are especially pronounced when a museum was once someone’s home, as is the case with the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum. The eclectic beauty and thoughtful sophistication of Anne Spencer’s home and the profound tranquility and majestic splendor of her garden make an indelible impression and lend themselves pliantly to an oft-told narrative of Spencer’s life: she was an introspective creative who found respite—and helped others find respite—from the turmoil of their times in the carefully curated comforts of the home and garden she and her beloved husband, Edward, built and inhabited together. This narrative is not untrue, but it is also not close to complete. Spencer contained multitudes and made waves that continue to create ripples in and far beyond Lynchburg, and she frequently did so outside the walls and trellises of her Pierce Street abode.
Spencer’s granddaughter Shaun Spencer-Hester has served as Executive Director and Curator of ASHGM since June 2010 and has made it her mission to not only maintain and educate others about the physical spaces that her grandmother held so dear, but also to uncover and make known the complex, nonphysical layers of Spencer’s life and legacy. As more and more layers are revealed, may we come to a truer understanding of the seeds of change that Spencer and her colleagues sowed and strive to cultivate the resulting crops with care.
Spencer-Hester emphasizes to Museum visitors the kineticism of the luminaries who visited Spencer and of Spencer herself.
“When people come to visit the Museum, I try to reiterate the importance of the people who came there,” said Spencer-Hester. “They came to visit Anne Spencer, but those footsteps didn’t stay there—they went out into the community.”
Among those luminaries were James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, George Washington Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Marian Anderson, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The accomplishments of these and other visitors are abundant, vast, and well-known on a global scale, but many of them achieved things right here in Lynchburg that may get overlooked. It is important to note that although Spencer ended up forging personal connections of varying degrees with some of these visitors, she did not simply offer her home as a place of rest and retreat for friends; rather, she wanted to facilitate change in and beyond Lynchburg by hosting those whose work she believed in and with whom she felt collaboration would be possible and fruitful.
“The people who visited Anne were here doing big things—they weren’t just walking around downtown going to the barbershop or buying groceries,” Spencer-Hester noted. “You have to realize that, at that time, it was a different town. African Americans had to be careful about where they went around town. These people were coming to pursue whatever interests they had with Anne and connecting with other like-minded people in the area. George Washington Carver came and they talked about plants and seeds and flowers. W.E.B. Du Bois came and they talked about justice and equality, as did many of the people who came to visit. And then there were writers like James Weldon Johnson, who was compiling The Book of American Negro Poetry, who came to talk about writing and activism.”
Johnson’s collaborations with Spencer were particularly noteworthy.
“When James Weldon Johnson came to that house, he came as a guest—someone my grandparents knew only as a field secretary of the NAACP from New York City,” stated Spencer-Hester. “He and Anne met with 22 other community members and established the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP right there in that living room. He helped bring justice to Lynchburg by joining forces with Anne and other activists in the community.”
Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois also made their mark on a local level. According to Spencer-Hester, Hughes spoke at the University of Lynchburg [then Lynchburg College] in the 1940s and “Du Bois lectured at Virginia Seminary and conducted studies on African American culture and history in this area.”
Spencer herself didn’t shy away from speaking out either.
“Anne wasn’t just this little lady sitting in her garden on Pierce Street who wanted to be left alone,” Spencer-Hester said. “She was involved and active. She was boycotting public transportation and fighting for the integration of teachers for the school system. She was doing things here in Lynchburg that I don’t think she really gets credit for. Maybe she was a quiet mover about it, but she was definitely in the meetings. She confronted Carter Glass!”
Glass was a white newspaper publisher and politician from Lynchburg who advocated for segregation. According to Spencer-Hester, the confrontation occurred when Glass and Spencer both attended a public meeting in Lynchburg about education and the hiring of Black teachers.
“Carter Glass attended this meeting—which consisted mostly of African American attendees—and he got up to speak,” remarked Spencer-Hester. “He kept speaking and speaking, and my grandmother got up and told him to be quiet and sit down to give someone else a chance to talk. It was bold for a Black woman to do that!”
Indeed, Spencer’s boldness in the spheres of community and collaboration, of letting wild things grow and of cultivating positive change as a collective, is reflected in her home and garden—both during her life and after her death. For starters, both spaces resulted from a beautiful partnership between Spencer and Edward.
“The home and garden were definitely extensions of not just Anne, but also of her family,” Spencer-Hester noted. “Edward and Anne were both instrumental in making these spaces into places where people could feel comfortable and have open discussions. I don’t think people think of Edward as an artist, but he was definitely a creative. He utilized elements of math and science to construct, and Anne brought the arts, the colors, and the patterns. Together, they had a vision of what their home and garden could be.”
Additionally, the garden was just as much a hub of activity as it was a place of quiet contemplation for Spencer during her lifetime.
“The garden is often described as this place of leisure and a place of retreat for Anne, but they also partied in that garden!” exclaimed Spencer-Hester. “They had a party for Langston Hughes that was in the house but extended into the garden. There’s an article in one of the African American newspapers that says they had 350 people there! It’s a beautiful green space that they created, but that doesn’t mean that they just used it to talk about flowers and sip on mint juleps. They were having big discussions, celebrating weddings, and hosting children’s groups like the Jack and Jill Club.”
After Spencer’s death in 1975, this spirit of collaboration continued to define her home and garden. Spencer-Hester fondly recalls a memory of her father, Chauncey Spencer, going through photos of his parents’ garden and the resulting community restoration project that helped shape the garden into the resplendent space it is today.
“When I was younger, my father was going through photographs at home and asked my sister Kyle and me to help him pick out photographs of the garden,” Spencer-Hester said. “In 1983 he started asking around town about restoring the garden. By this point, the house had been made a historic landmark, and my father started really directing his attention toward the garden. He talked to us a lot about the garden and what it meant to him and how special it was. He ended up meeting with Jane Baber White, who later told me about the meeting. She said she immediately fell in love with the garden. The collection of small black and white photographs on display at the Old City Cemetery are the photographs my father gave to Jane.”
White was a landscape designer and a member of the Hillside Garden Club.
After meeting with Chauncey, she met with Lynchburg Garden Club member and fellow landscape designer Mina Walker Wood, and together they approached the Hillside Garden Club to inquire about taking on the major task of restoring the Anne Spencer Garden.
The Hillside Garden Club agreed, and thus the restoration began.
“Folks raised funds and donated trees and flowers and E.C. Glass students helped lay down brick,” recalled Spencer-Hester. “It was truly a community project, and not just a restoration project—people learned about Anne Spencer.”
Even the plants themselves that once populated and still populate the Spencers’ garden tell a tale of gathering and collective growth.
“Anne had quite a collection of roses, and we still have many of her original roses, as well as many of her plants and trees and shrubs,” Spencer-Hester remarked. “She also grew native flowers. She and Edward would drive the Virginia highways and dig up Virginia native flowers—don’t do that today; it’s illegal!—and bring them home and plant them in the garden. They had what we consider today an early pollinator garden, and there’s still evidence of that. She also loved and grew nasturtiums and wrote about them. She had a lot of lilies as well. I’m doing research in her archives at UVA, and there’s a huge collection on her garden. I’m going to meet with the [Hillside] Garden Club at some point about planting some new plantings in the garden from this research of her magazines and of catalogs she checked off and ordered from. This garden is a living thing. It’s something you have to preserve and continuously restore.”
Anne Spencer’s legacy, too, is a living and evolving thing, and Spencer-Hester’s incredible dedication to researching and disseminating all aspects of her grandmother’s life has allowed that legacy to bloom so very brilliantly. There is a lot of love in that stewardship, and there’s also a lesson: when it comes to your elders, do a little digging. You never know what you may unearth about them, about yourself, and about the garden we’re all growing, together.
“I didn’t know a lot of these things about my grandmother,” said Spencer-Hester.
“She was really something. I’m amazed and very proud. There’s a lot you don’t know about your elders until you’re older—or maybe not even when you’re older! It depends upon whether or not you’re interested. I tell people to ask their grandparents and parents and uncles and aunties simple questions while you can: ‘Where were you born?’ ‘What were your parents like?’ Even if it doesn’t seem important to ask these questions, it is. It’s amazing how all of our stories are intertwined.”
