Technically, the University of Virginia took formal possession last week of the collected papers of poet and Lynchburg icon Anne Spencer.

But "papers" is too simple a phrase for what was hidden within the nearly 70 boxes carted away from Spencer's preserved home at 1313 Pierce St. And U.Va.'s Edward Gaynor, while obviously excited about the acquisition, had to smile wryly when asked how difficult the cataloguing process would be.

"It will be a challenge," the curator said. "We will probably try to catalog the poems by title or subject and the correspondence chronologically."

But that doesn't begin to address the hundreds of scraps of paper on which Spencer, considered one of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, scribbled a few lines of verse or thoughts on the issues of the day. Like Emily Dickinson, she wrote mostly from home - favoring the cool refuge of her garden cottage, Edenkraal - but that doesn't mean she wasn't keenly aware of what was happening in the larger world.

"She kept everything she wrote," said Ann Spencer, widow of Anne Spencer's son Chauncey, "not because she thought it was all important, but because she just didn't throw anything away. She used the back stairs of the house as her filing system, and after she died, we could hardly get up them.

"She would even make corrections in books she was reading if she thought something was wrong."

As U.Va. employees hauled the boxes out to a white college truck, sweating even at 9:30 a.m., Ann Spencer said: "It's a little sad to see them go, but I understand."

Her daughter, Shaun Hester, felt the same way.

"It's bittersweet," said Hester, who recently moved back from Washington to live with her mother in the family home across the street from 1313 Pierce. "I used to enjoy looking through that stuff myself. There's magazines, stuff written on envelopes, letters, papers from my father."

The courtship between the University of Virginia and the fiercely independent and opinionated family matriarch dated to the 1960s. The school offered to serve as a repository for her papers then, and Spencer promptly refused because U.Va. was segregated.

"They tried again after she had passed away [in 1975]," said Nina Salmon, a Lynchburg College professor who serves on the board of the Anne Spencer House, "but nothing came of it. We found a letter about that from 1980 when we were looking through the material."

Meanwhile, the boxes containing the legacy of the late poet - the first black woman and first Virginian to have her work included in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry - had become nomads.

"Carol Spencer Read [Anne's late granddaughter] had them for a while," said Salmon, then they were in a law office, and in Salmon's basement. "It became obvious that we needed a safe place, so we started looking around. I went up to U.Va., toured the special-collections facility there, and it was a no-brainer."

The new home for the Spencer papers will be the Albert H. Small Special Collections Building, located near the center of the U.Va. Grounds.

Gaynor said U.Va. is particularly interested in Virginians, literature and African-American history, "and Anne Spencer knocks them all out of the park."

The Small Building also houses the collective papers of former congressman, senator, secretary of the treasury and Lynchburg newspaper publisher Carter Glass, a segregationist and co-designer of the Federal Reserve System. And Ann Spencer had a story about Glass and her mother-in-law.

"She was at a meeting once when Carter Glass was speaking, and he wasn't letting anyone else talk," she said. "So she stood up in the audience and said: 'Why don't you shut up and give someone else a chance?'"

"A couple of days later, there was a knock on her door, and it was Carter Glass. She finally let him in, and they talked, and they became great friends."

And now, their written histories will be neighbors.
Darrell Laurant is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg.