Alice’s dash

In the poem “The Dash,” poet Linda Ellis writes of a man who gave the eulogy at his friend’s funeral, mentioning the birth and death dates on the tombstone. Ellis goes on:

but he said what mattered most of all

was the dash between those years.

For the dash represents all the time

That they spent alive on earth.

I thought of that dash this week because we are currently between Alice Dunnigan’s birthday, April 27, and the anniversary of Alice’s death, May 6. In Alice’s lifetime, just over 77 years separated those dates. But now we (I, at least) commemorate those dates just 10 days apart.

Today I decided to map Alice’s life across those 10 days. I wrote down 10 important happenings of her life — eras, you could say — and assigned them each a day from April 27 to May 6. By my weird estimation of Alice’s life in 10 days, May 3 is when she became the full-time Washington correspondent for the Associated Negro Press and gained accreditation to the White House and Congressional press corps.

I’ve written about that a million times, but a few months ago I learned something I couldn’t believe I didn’t already know (which is exactly how I felt when I learned about Alice Dunnigan in the first place).

I was lying in bed one night, reading Raising Her Voice by Rodger Streittmatter, a University Press of Kentucky title about influential Black women journalists. “After receiving her full accreditation, Dunnigan, who was not always a modest woman, hired a professional photographer to capture her image on the Capitol steps,” Streittmatter wrote. “She then paid for prints to be sent to all ANP newspapers, even though it cost her more than a week’s salary.”

I sat straight up and called out to Loui so that I could tell him this information immediately. I was shocked and thrilled. This was not only the photo that was published in many newspapers at the time to celebrate Alice’s accomplishment. This was also the photo that was chosen decades later to inspire a sculpture in Alice’s image. I’d always thought that sculptor Amanda Matthews and residents of Russellville had chosen that image, and in a sense they did. But, by commissioning her own photo in 1947, Alice chose what her own legacy would look like for decades to come.

I love an immodest woman.

From everything I’ve read about her, I think Alice was quite satisfied with how she spent her life. The end of Ellis’s poem asks you to consider if you will be, too:

So, when your eulogy is being read,

with your life’s actions to rehash…

would you be proud of the things they say

about how you spent YOUR dash?