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Often, in the years that followed, Dorothy Scarborough recalled the night when her search first promised fruition, when after months of letterwriting and interviews she heard the sound of the uncorrupted black voice. She heard it in 1921 from John Allan Wyeth, a 76-year-old white Civil War veteran and nationally renowned surgeon, one-time president of the American Medical Association, and founder of the Polyclinic Hospital, the first postgraduate school of medicine in the United States. Seven years earlier, Wyeth had published his memoirs, With Sabre and Scalpel, which included accounts of slave songs and dances he had learned growing up on his family's Alabama plantation. Scarborough was desperate to meet him, and a doctor friend offered to make introductions. Letters were sent, an appointment was made, and on a breezy spring evening the friend brought Scarborough to Wyeth's door.Reserved, formal, and accustomed to deference, Wyeth was imposing, but Scarborough soon felt at ease: at age 43 years, she had a calm, sweet, daughterly manner, and an intimate knowledge of Southern patriarchs. Her father, John Bledsoe Scarborough, had been a Confederate veteran from Louisiana, like his wife a child of slaveowners, and in the war's aftermath he became a judge and a trustee of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Dorothy Scarborough grew up in his shadow, expected to take on the role of her father's hostess, but she had ideas, and in her quiet way she rebelled. By 1899, she had earned a BA and an MA in English at Baylor, and when her father died in 1905 she put her degrees to work, teaching sporadically at Baylor while pursuing a doctorate in English literature, traveling first to the University of Chicago, then to Oxford University, only to discover that the university refused to grant women degrees. In 1915, she enrolled at Columbia University and began a PhD thesis on the supernatural in English fiction, and almost immediately, Columbia's extension division offered her a post teaching creative writing. She quit her job at Baylor, shipped up the last of her belongings, and settled in New York City for good.
Often, in the years that followed, Dorothy Scarborough recalled the night when her search first promised fruition, when after months of letterwriting and interviews she heard the sound of the uncorrupted black voice. She heard it in 1921 from John Allan Wyeth, a 76-year-old white Civil War veteran and nationally renowned surgeon, one-time president of the American Medical Association, and founder of the Polyclinic Hospital, the first postgraduate school of medicine in the United States. Seven years earlier, Wyeth had published his memoirs, With Sabre and Scalpel, which included accounts of slave songs and dances he had learned growing up on his family's Alabama plantation. Scarborough was desperate to meet him, and a doctor friend offered to make introductions. Letters were sent, an appointment was made, and on a breezy spring evening the friend brought Scarborough to Wyeth's door.Reserved, formal, and accustomed to deference, Wyeth was imposing, but Scarborough soon felt at ease: at age 43 years, she had a calm, sweet, daughterly manner, and an intimate knowledge of Southern patriarchs. Her father, John Bledsoe Scarborough, had been a Confederate veteran from Louisiana, like his wife a child of slaveowners, and in the war's aftermath he became a judge and a trustee of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Dorothy Scarborough grew up in his shadow, expected to take on the role of her father's hostess, but she had ideas, and in her quiet way she rebelled. By 1899, she had earned a BA and an MA in English at Baylor, and when her father died in 1905 she put her degrees to work, teaching sporadically at Baylor while pursuing a doctorate in English literature, traveling first to the University of Chicago, then to Oxford University, only to discover that the university refused to grant women degrees. In 1915, she enrolled at Columbia University and began a PhD thesis on the supernatural in English fiction, and almost immediately, Columbia's extension division offered her a post teaching creative writing. She quit her job at Baylor, shipped up the last of her belongings, and settled in New York City for good.
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