Once the world was young
For I was twenty and very old
And you and I knew all the answers
What the day was, how the hours would turn
One dial was there to see
Now the world is old and I am still young
For the young know nothing, nothing.

If a visionary midwife had told Anne Spencer's mother that the newborn infant she held in her arms on February 6, 1882, would one day write these lines, she would have registered little surprise. Anne's mother expected her daughter to be exceptional, and she reared her accordingly.

Thus in 1893 Anne found herself en route to Lynchburg, Virginia, where she entered the city's first and oldest institution of higher learning: Virginia Theological Seminary and College. At the Seminary she completed her high school education and continued her studies there through college, giving the valedictory address at her graduation.

There she also met Edward A. Spencer, a fellow student and natural entrepreneur who had an eye for brains as well as beauty. Edward used their co-operative tutoring sessions as an occasion to court this gifted young woman.

Anne, Edward and their two daughters, Bethel and Alroy.

Anne and Edward had two daughters, Bethel and Alroy, and later a son, Chauncey, the only one of their children born in their new Pierce Street home. Edward built 1313 Pierce Street in 1903.

The Spencer house at 1313 Pierce Street was built in 1903.

Shortly thereafter he erected a smaller house in the back garden. Combining their first names (Ed and Anne) in a pun on "Eden" and grafting his pun and the South African term Kraal or dwelling, he called it Edankraal. For the balance of her life, which did not end until 1975, Anne Spencer made Edankraal her sanctuary. Spending her days as the librarian of a segregated black school, she retreated at day's end to the solitude of her garden, where she drew inspiration for the poems that would establish and secure her reputation as a thinker and writer of national significance.

Anne Spencer in her garden in 1951

More self-contained than either bookish or reclusive, Anne Spencer did not avoid company; indeed, she kept more than a little because she regularly extended her hospitality to friends, neighbors, and visitors ranging from George Washington Carver to Martin Luther King, Jr.; from Mary McLeod Bethune to W. E. B. DuBois; from Adam Clayton Powell to Thurgood Marshall. Her incisive wit, intellectual toughness, and artistic determination secured her a place in a coterie of writers, thinkers, and artists whose collective energy informed the Harlem Renaissance and charted a new course in American belles-lettres. Hers is a remarkable story.

But the story does not belong solely to Anne Spencer. That her family had, a generation earlier, sufficient sense of community to erect a neighborhood assembly hall as a place where friends and neighbors might gather for meetings, recreation, and entertainment says much about the ethos underpinning her rearing; that her family, after the Civil War, converted that assembly hall to provide living space for more than twenty newly emancipated slaves says even more.

By the turn of the century the Spencer family had agreed to sell the old hall to a Baptist congregation moving to Lynchburg from the country, but before doing so, they had added several apartments to their nearby store, specifically to accommodate the hall's three remaining residents.