by Sarah Stewart Taylor in HUMANITIES, Fall 2022, Volume 43, Number 4
Turning onto Main Street, it was the words of Frederick Douglass, who spoke at the old town hall on January 4, 1866, that followed me. Douglass intended to give a speech about voting rights in town, but he pivoted to speak about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln instead.
In West Brattleboro, I wandered the landscape that inspired the iconic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his eerie 1931 story “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” checking over my shoulder as I listened to accounts by local middle school students of Lovecraft’s source material—tales of nonhuman remains washing down into the valleys after the historic Vermont flood of 1927.
And as I drove the winding hills and valleys south of town, my companion was the voice of artist and writer Shanta Lee reading the poem “Bars Fight” by Lucy Terry Prince, one of the earliest known African-American poets and a formerly enslaved woman who created a rich and multifaceted life for herself and her family in early Vermont. Along with her husband, Abijah, Prince farmed, fought to defend her land from racist neighbors, and created a community in Guilford, Vermont, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lee’s reading and additional historical context by author Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina added layers of meaning to the physical places where the Princes’ lives unfolded in moments both extraordinary and mundane.
The Brattleboro Words Project, funded by a 2017 NEH Creating Humanities Communities matching grant, celebrates the unique literary and historical legacy of Brattleboro and the surrounding region. The area is known for its lively book scene, with a thriving literary festival and library, multiple independent new and used bookstores, institutions of higher education, and many full-time and part-time resident writers. It’s known, too, for its associations with literary luminaries like Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, and Saul Bellow, and titans of the American printing industry.