AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Srikanth Reddy with Liesl Olson and Ed Roberson on Margaret Danner’s “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form”

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Ed Roberson:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form” by Margaret Danner)

And I should feel like a cherubim
All Fleur-de-lis and pastel-shell-like

Srikanth Reddy: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m guest editor Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy. This week, we returned to the little-known world of Margaret Danner. Born in 1915, Danner was a contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes, and she actually knew them personally. But she never achieved the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. Danner wrote about many things, the civil rights movement, African art, gender, class, faith. There’s a great podcast, actually a sort of companion piece to this one, that focuses on Danner’s faith that came out this spring. Today, we do a deep dive into one poem of Danner’s that explores race, class, and social mobility in 1950s America. It’s called “The elevator man adheres to form.” And it may, or may not be, about an elevator operator who worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Let me just say, I was very surprised by what we learned. The historian Liesl Olson and the poet Ed Roberson were the people who first introduced me to Margaret Danner’s poetry. There’ll be joining me in today’s conversation. Liesl is the Director of Chicago Studies at the Newberry Library, the building where Margaret Danner worked as an editor of Poetry magazine from 1951 to 1956. Ed is a celebrated poet living in the South Side of Chicago, probably not so far from where Danner grew up, and wrote much of her poetry. Here’s Lisel Olson.

Liesl Olson: So Ed, I can’t remember whether you introduced me to Margaret Danner, or I introduced you to Margaret Danner. Do you remember?

Ed Roberson: I knew about her. But I did not know that the Newberry Library was where she worked. I had no idea that it was right there that she got the idea for the elevator poem.

Srikanth Reddy: You never met her Ed, did you? Back in the day?

Ed Roberson: No, no, I never met her. I never met her. No.

Srikanth Reddy: Where did you first read her work or hear about her as a poet?

Ed Roberson: I love anthologies. For one thing, one of the only ways you used to be able to get hold of Black literature is through anthologies. So I have tons of anthologies in my collection. She’s in a couple of them through there. So I know her through that.

Srikanth Reddy: Maybe I’ll ask you, Liesl, where you first came across the poem, “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form.” You know, since you’re the director of Chicago studies at the Newberry Library where Margaret Danner herself worked in the 1950s, you both kind of worked in the same place. Only 70 years apart, right?

Liesl Olson: Mm-hmm. You know, I had been thinking about, writing about Chicago poetry and poets and artists and dancers for a while. And so, her papers are at the University of Chicago, which is where the papers of Poetry magazine are as well. And so I was sort of digging around in those just mere two boxes. And that’s where I actually found this poem and read this poem for the first time. So, not in an anthology, but actually in, in her papers. And, you know, Chicu, I’m sure, as you learned, her work is so out of print, it’s hard to find. So, I saw this poem, and it was a TypeScript. It did have this epigraph, you know, the title is “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form,” and then the epigraph is, “Not really the elevator man at Newberry Library.” And I thought, “Huh, okay, you know, she’s walking into this building.” And then I thought about her, okay, probably, the only other African American person other than the elevator man who is in this building, and then this extraordinary poem that she writes about that daily encounter. It blew my mind. It’s a really incredible poem.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Ed Roberson:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form”)

The Elevator Man Adheres to Form

Not really the elevator man at the Newberry Library

I am reminded, by the tan man who wings the elevator
of Rococo art. His ways
are undulating waves that shepherd and swing us

cupid-like from floor to floor.
He sweethearts us with polished pleasantries, gallantly
flourishes us up and up. No casual “Hi”s from him.

His greetings, Godspeedings display his Ph D aplomb.
And I should feel like a cherubim

(FADES OUT)

Srikanth Reddy: I want to ask about that epigraph. You know, right after the title of the poem, “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form,” there’s like a disclaimer in italics that says, “Not really the elevator man at the Newberry Library.” And there’s something about the word “really,” when she’s like—she could have just said, “Not the elevator man at the Newberry Library,” or she could have just not said anything, but “Not really the elevator man at the Newberry Library” feels, like, really pointed. Why is she kind of trying to cover those tracks or hold away that real world person?

Ed Roberson: I kind of looked at it as, yes, pointing to the particular man, but apologizing and taking the point away, but also, not apologizing in a sense that she’s pointing to society in general. She’s not talking about just this particular situation, but all of the situations where you have PhDs driving buses. You have Du Bois as an elevator man, you have Langston Hughes as an elevator man. You have Richard Wright as an elevator man. So she’s apologizing to the man himself. But she’s not apologizing to the larger society. This really is a situation, not just a job. It’s a country, not just a job.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form”)

No casual “Hi”s from him.

His greetings, Godspeedings display his Ph D aplomb.
And I should feel like a cherubim
All Fleur-de-lis and pastel-shell-like, but instead

I vision other tan and deeper much than tan
early Baroque-like men who (seeing themselves still strut-
lessly groping, winding down subterranean grottoes of injustice,

down dark spirals) feel
with such tortuous, smoked-stone grey intensity …

(FADES OUT)

Srikanth Reddy: Let’s just talk about the title of the poem. I mean, that’s the thing that kind of stuck in my head the first time I heard of the poem and read the poem, was, “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form.” It’s a weird title. It’s like a whole sentence, right? Does that does that title seem unusual to you and, or—

Ed Roberson: Seems really pointed to me. Having to adhere to a form. These days, we tell people to take a job because they love it. Well, or take a job because, you know, you’re gonna get somewhere, or you’re gonna make some money. But here the job is ahead of the job. Ahead of the job now understand, is to adhere. He’s not being himself. He’s not using his talents. He’s adhering to a form. So he has all of this “PhD aplomb” and all of this class of “Godspeedings” rather than, “Hey, yo.” There’s something’s funny there.

Srikanth Reddy: Right.

Liesl Olson: Yet, you know, the poem itself is so formally tight. There’s this evenness to the line, and to the number of lines in each stanza. There is a formalism to it. And yet, the title is a critique, to be sure, right? Like, what happens if the elevator man doesn’t adhere to form? Right, is, in fact, that what she’s calling him to do? Even while the poem retains a certain formality, would you say?

Srikanth Reddy: Yeah, I love that question of what would happen if the elevator man didn’t adhere to form, if he said, “Yo, what’s up?” Right? He would lose his job. And he might be at risk, in danger, depending on how far he departs from form. If he’s like, you know, “Screw you guys.”

Liesl Olson: Mm-hmm.

Srikanth Reddy: And, you know, it makes me think about something you said a while ago, Ed, about the elevator as a space, a space of risk and danger, you know, in the 20th century, in light of race in America. You said that—I didn’t know this, but the Tulsa race massacre was sparked by an encounter between a Black teenager and a white woman in an elevator.

Ed Roberson: Yes.

Srikanth Reddy: So someone didn’t adhere to form, you know, would be the narrative, right?

Ed Roberson: But they did. The young woman and the boy, both of them are teenagers, the young woman hired to run the elevator was a friend of the shoeshine worker. That’s what happened after the depression. They hired white women and Black men to keep from having to pay the greater salaries. So, what happened in Tulsa was, these kids had to take a break. They would meet and have lunch together, so they were not unacquainted. They were friends. But the incident that started the riot was, according to the story, he trips getting into the elevator, and grabs her to keep from falling, and an observer reports it as a rape. She was under pressure to say that it was a rape. And she denied it to the end. Unlike the Till case, she denied it to the end. But those gangs grew and over the night blew up and destroyed the Black Tulsa community.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(READS EXCERPT FROM “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form”)

winding down subterranean grottoes of injustice,

down dark spirals) feel
with such tortuous, smoked-stone grey intensity
that they exhale a hurricane of gargoyles, then reel into them.

I see these others boggling in their misery
and wish this elevator artisan would fill his flourishing form
with warmth for them and turn his lettered zeal
toward lifting them above their crippling storm.

Liesl Olson: There’s this way in which the poem foresees what’s going to happen, right? I mean, presumably, this is written, I mean, I know it’s not published until the ’70s. But it’s presumably written around the time she’s at the magazine, which is in the mid ’50s. We’re not yet in the kind of moment of the Black Arts Movement, of the major transformations of the civil rights era, right? We’re in a different moment, an earlier moment, but it’s as if she does see what’s ahead.

Ed Roberson: Yeah, she does.

Liesl Olson: And what do you make of “the tan man,” you know, in the opening line, and then the fourth stanza, “I vision other tan and deeper much than tan/early Baroque-like men”?

Ed Roberson: That’s a very clear historical note. What was happening, you have this new building, this modern structure, a whole new social space. What do you do with that new, completely open design social space?

Liesl Olson: The elevator.

Ed Roberson: Yeah, you return it—what they did is they returned it to servitude. So, you made sure that you hired people who gave the impression to these rich men or, on way to being rich men, pretending to be rich men, you gave them the idea that they were being serviced. They weren’t in there with fellow workers. They were being serviced in the elevator. So you’re in this room with the servants. But he isn’t invited—they greet him. They tell him hello, very nice chit chat form. But he’s not invited onto their floor. He stays in that space.

Liesl Olson: He stays in that space. Yeah, he stays in that space. He’s not getting out, right? And it’s a confined space. It’s very tight. As you know, you know, everybody knows, when you’re in an elevator there you are, sometimes awkwardly, with people you don’t know. You know, because it’s such a tight space.

Ed Roberson: And in that design, rather than be was a dark-skinned person who is very much Negroid, Negro, or whatever they called them. What happens? You get someone that looks like yourself. So you get a light person. You hire a tan person. You don’t hire Black folks. Or rather, you hire Black folks who are light enough not to look like Black folks to you. And not to talk like Black folks. Because one of the requirements for being hired was that you had to have an education and you had to be able to speak certain kinds of language.

(READS EXCERPT)

and pastel-shell-like, but instead

I vision other tan and deeper much than tan
early Baroque-like men who (seeing themselves still strut-
lessly groping, winding down subterranean grottoes of injustice,

(FADES OUT)

And then she calls them all “early Baroque.” (LAUGHS) That’s the full range of Black folks. Tan folks, Black folk, blue folks, blue Black folks, all of them are Baroque in her eyes. All of them are, you know, that elegant and her eyes, but they don’t get hired for that. So she makes it clear, “the tan ones.”

Srikanth Reddy: Ed, do you remember Black elevator operators from your own childhood or growing up?

Ed Roberson: Sure. The minister at my church had a daytime job as an elevator operator in downtown Pittsburgh. It wasn’t one of those buildings we were even allowed in. He would talk about rising up. But he would also talk about how much he sacrificed in rising up. Probably the only sermon I remember from Frank Felder is a sermon called “Fool of Books.” I don’t even remember where it comes from, “Thou fool.” But I remember in the music of the sermon talking about “Thou fool.” He goes through what the fools were. One of the fools was a fool of books. You adhere too much. Adhere to the book too much and you lose yourself. I’m 12 years old, I hear that sermon, it scared the bananas out of me. (LAUGHS) That was probably the only thing I got from Frank Felder was, I was gonna get the books, like he said, but I was not going to be the fool of books, I ain’t gonna adhere to the books. That was learned even then, I mean, that was in the community. What she was writing about was in the community when I was 12 years old.

(RECORDING OF ELEVATOR AUDIO PLAYS)

Going up
Second floor

Srikanth Reddy: And he was probably, you know, I mean, he probably knew, while he was working his day job as an elevator operator, that these people who are coming into the elevator and he’s, you know, being polite, serving them,—

Ed Roberson: Frank Felder, his last name is Felder. The Felder plantation was one of the largest plantations in Alabama. Frank Felder, my minister, used to tell us, tell us in his sermons, of seeing his grandfather’s back with the stripes from being beaten. So, in the ’60s, when that iconic picture is released, of that slave with his back scarred up like that, I had seen that my own imagination, from the age of nine, listening to Frank Felder’s sermons. He told us where we came from.

Srikanth Reddy: And that was in the elevator, too, with him, he was carrying that, and—

Ed Roberson: He was in the elevator with those men, yes.

Srikanth Reddy: He was probably saying to himself, you know, while he was making pleasantries and adhering the form, he’s probably thinking, “Thou fool,” he was thinking about his “Thou fool” sermon that was going to deliver it that weekend.

Ed Roberson: This day. His thing was, you know, God is looking at you, but I’m looking at you, too. We look at each other.

Liesl Olson: Wow. It’s so, it’s the adherence to form, so much violence underlies that adherence to form. So much is held in in adhering to form. So much is contained, right. I mean, one of the, I think, really powerful lines in this poem as it kind of unwinds at the end, is the exhalation, “a hurricane of gargoyles.” It’s just incredible. All that is released, because it has been pent up in that adherence to form, right? These histories of violence and then this need to let it out, right? All this, what has been pent up. It’s incredible.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: Liesl and I actually went to the Newberry Library to ride the elevator.

(RECORDING OF Srikanth and Liesl RIDING ELEVATOR PLAYS)

Liesl Olson: All right, here we go—

Srikanth Reddy: Okay, so let’s go in the door.

Liesl Olson: She probably would’ve opened these big wooden doors, you see how massive they are? As we walk inside the foyer.

Srikanth Reddy: We’re inside the elevator. It’s really small.

Liesl Olson: You’re right.

Srikanth Reddy: Is this about the size of—

(RECORDING FADES OUT)

Srikanth Reddy: Paul Laurence Dunbar was an elevator operator.

Ed Roberson: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright.

Srikanth Reddy: They all were elevator operators.

Ed Roberson: Yeah. We hired the educated people. Those were the educated jobs in the community.

Srikanth Reddy: So in some ways, that sounds a lot like the experience of getting into an Uber today, that race and mobility, the story of the Black elevator operator in 20th-century America is just one chapter in a longer story about race and mobility in US society.

Ed Roberson: Yes.

Liesl Olson: And I remember you saying at one point that the elevator operators were really also the kind of genesis of labor organizing, that they did form a union.

Ed Roberson: Yeah. One of the early groupings of people or collectives, was the Black elevator operators, to use their numbers to try to get better conditions. So what started out as a group of elevator operators wanting things to get better, eventually, the janitors joined,  and then the engineers joined. And then the other workers, the garbagemen joined. That was the beginning of unions. That was the start. That’s exactly where it comes from.

Srikanth Reddy: So Margaret Danner is really, I mean, she’s opening up so many social issues with this brief poem. And, you know, we talked a little bit about the elevator as a space where a Black teenager and a white teenager, a Black man and a white woman met with disastrous consequences, right? And this poem is actually not about a Black man and a white woman. It’s about a Black man and a Black woman sharing the space of an elevator, right? And something passes between them or doesn’t pass between them in that space. So, I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit or think a little bit about, you know, gender in this poem? What does it mean for Margaret Danner as a Black woman to write a poem that’s—is it addressed to the Black elevator man, or is it about him?

Ed Roberson: She said, she says that she should feel like a cupid. You know, little Cupids with wings and those fluttering hearts and flowers and stuff. She should feel all of that. But she doesn’t. “He sweethearts us”—there’s a courting going on here. But who’s being courted? She’s aware of that. So, she’s like, this is terrible, you might want to cut this out. But it’s like a Black woman in an elevator with a Black man who’s flirting with a white woman. That’s the dynamic that’s going on there. It’s his boss. But he has to flirt with his boss like a woman. So you have this Black woman looking at this ideal man flirting with this white woman. She doesn’t make anything of that. But I bet she’s pissed as hell. (LAUGHS)

Liesl Olson: She does not feel it, right?

Ed Roberson: She’s not feeling good about, let’s put it that way.

Liesl Olson: Yeah. Yeah.

Ed Roberson: No, she doesn’t.

Liesl Olson: No, “And I should feel like a cherubim/All Fleur-de-lis and pastel-shell-like.” I mean, she’s also evoking these forms of female beauty that come from the history of art, right? Venus de Milo rising from the sea, white woman, very pale woman. And she is not feeling that form, right? She is not adhering to that form. You’re absolutely right.

Ed Roberson: Yeah, it’s a dynamic on a larger scale that she’s seeing. But she knows the dynamic. She definitely has the dynamic drawn right there.

Srikanth Reddy: So Ed, you were you were saying you felt like maybe you shouldn’t say that Margaret Danner may have felt anger at seeing the Black elevator man flirting with a white woman in that enclosed space. Can you say a little bit more?

Ed Roberson: Yeah, the reason I said I didn’t want to say it was because I’m putting a contemporary frame on an old feeling. She wouldn’t have drawn the dynamic out the way I just did. You know, a Black woman, Black man, white woman, white world, white woman. She would have drawn it white world, not white woman. But it feels the same. So I didn’t want to bring it up, because I didn’t want it to be confused with the contemporary situation. But the contemporary situation is just a hangover from the old situation. You know, but I’m not sure everybody understands that. So that’s reason I didn’t want to bring it up. But that dynamic is right there, you know, for me. And I thought that maybe, since it was so explicitly drawn in the poem, and I so explicitly felt it, that she might have felt it also that way. That’s a lot of rationalizing, or intellectualizing a thing that I didn’t want to be misunderstood.

Srikanth Reddy: It seems like it’s a poem about knowing what someone else feels. We don’t hear any of the pleasantries that the elevator man addresses, or we don’t hear any speech between people in the elevator, we hear the uncomfortable silence. It’s like a love poem, in a way, because it’s like she is saying to this elevator, man, “I know, I know, you and I know what’s going on here.” Right? We don’t have to say it. And we can’t say it, we can’t say it here, because that would put us at risk.

Ed Roberson: Exactly.

Srikanth Reddy: I feel like maybe one reason that she has that epigraph, “Not really the elevator man in the Newberry Library,” is to protect him. Right, and maybe to protect herself, because she may have put herself at professional risk by publishing a poem about this charged material when she’s wanting to publish poetry in Poetry magazine and working there.

Ed Roberson: That’s the reason I thought that it was an apology or a defense of him. It was not a defense of the larger situation that he is in.

Liesl Olson: Mm-hmm.

Ed Roberson: It’s excusing that particular elevator man, but not excusing the process by which he’s chosen, the position he’s in, the attitudes toward him, not only in elevators, but on street cars, on anywhere else in the country. Yeah, they know, they know each other. They know each other, they know each other very well. And probably have attitudes toward each other that can be unpleasant at times, because the elevator man had to go into the community and the community wasn’t too happy, either that, you know, all this nicey nicey for somebody else and no nicey nicey coming in this direction. The community was not exactly happy about that. And not only in elevators, but any kind of service.

Liesl Olson: I think what is so stunning about the kind of emotional complexities of this poem, is that Danner doesn’t—it’s not a poem about wink, wink, nod, nod, we’re in this together. It’s not that. In fact, she, the speaker develops a kind of anger, but it’s—you’re so right, Ed—it’s not an anger towards the elevator man. It’s an anger at the condition. It’s unclear where the elevator man kind of, where his emotional energy is in the poem, right? She doesn’t give you that.

Ed Roberson: No, the most respectful thing she says about him, apart from all that other nice mannered, flashy, flashy stuff. She says he has a “flourishing form.” That’s important. Because that form is a natural form. It’s his form. And it’s not the form of the Rococo or the Baroque or the nice manners or the whoever hired him and insisted that he do such and such a kind of ballet, you know, bow and stuff. It’s his flourishing form. So she sees him as those things that he’s using, those refinements of himself, she sees him having to use them in a certain way. But she also sees him flourishing by that refinement. So she’s respectful of him. She’s not down on his butt.

Liesl Olson: Right.

Ed Roberson: She’s very respectful to him.

(RECORDING OF Liesl and Srikanth WALKING THROUGH LIBRARY PLAYS)

Liesl Olson: It’s really at the forefront of that.

Srikanth Reddy: Okay, here we are walking.

Liesl Olson: We’re walking into special collections, the fourth floor, into the reading rooms up here, which is where you see manuscript materials and rare books. How are y’all?

Library staff member: I’m good, how are you?

Liesl Olson: Good. We’re waiting for some really amazing material because we’ve done a little work to find out who were the elevator operators at the Newberry Library. So, one of my colleagues, a librarian, is now delivering some employment records from the Newberry’s institutional files.

Srikanth Reddy: I think this is exciting. So this is, like, just yesterday, Liesl emailed me, I should inform our readers, this is, like, hot poetry news flash, right off the presses. You heard it here first, on the Poetry magazine podcast. Liesl emailed me to say, “We found out who the elevator operator actually was.” And it’s interesting, because Danner kind of put a disclaimer on the poem saying the poem is “Not really the elevator operator at the Newberry Library,” but Liesl and the Newberry Library staff have found documentation of who the elevator operator was. And it’s fascinating.

Liesl Olson: Right, right. So, we dug around in the institutional records to find out who was operating the elevator when Danner—

Srikanth Reddy: And you didn’t tell me you were doing this, it’s very sneaky.

Liesl Olson: No, no, you know, I mean, so the man in this poem is unnamed. There’s a stepping back from that identification. He’s not really the man, right? But let’s give him a name. Let’s give him a history. Who is he? And what we found really squares with what Ed Roberson has been saying about this new job that was created through the technology of the elevator, which is to say, it’s a job for highly educated, Black men, but Black men who are light-skinned, who are part of a service industry, but yet overseeing a space that’s small enough, that’s intimate enough that they are going to, you know, only give it to light-skinned men. Does that make sense?

Srikanth Reddy: Yeah, yeah, and I was, well, maybe I should say, you know, I’ve always wondered why the elevator operator in the poem is described as “tan” and why Margaret Danner is so emphatic that this is a “tan man,” and that there are other much darker than tan men out there in the world. And so, we’re looking at some documents that were brought in, there’s a box here, it looks like a shoe box—

Liesl Olson: Archival box, right, but tiny, almost like the size of a card catalog drawer, right?

Srikanth Reddy: And it’s got all these little index cards. It’s like a little Rolodex.

Liesl Olson: These are the cards of all the employees at the Newberry.

Srikanth Reddy: And on the right hand corner, it says, “Elevator Operator,” so we know that this person was the elevator operator. We know the name of the person who Margaret Danner was greeted by.

Liesl Olson: Lloyd Overton Lewis. Lloyd Overton Lewis.

Srikanth Reddy: What else does this stuff mean? In the middle of it.

Liesl Olson: Yeah, so it says he began services February 1946. His salary was $115.00 per month. And then he retired July 31, 1961. So, with all of this information, it wasn’t really that hard to find out a lot more about this man, which we did, by searching the census records, as well as the Chicago Defender, which was, of course, the nation’s largest race weekly, published out of Chicago and totally digitized.

Srikanth Reddy: And you knew this just yesterday without letting me know.

Liesl Olson: Yeah! Well, my colleague really did the work. So, what we found, if our elevator operator Lloyd O. Louis that we see on these employment records is the same Lloyd O. Louis that was in the 1920 census, then he and his wife are counted in the census as mulatto, and that there are a few mentions of him, Dr. Lloyd O. Lewis of Morehouse College in articles in the defender.

Srikanth Reddy: So that would map directly onto the first line of the poem, “I’m reminded by the tan man,” listed in the racist language of the census at the time as “mulatto”—

Liesl Olson: That’s right.

Srikanth Reddy: So he was a mixed race elevator operator, “I am reminded, by the tan man who wings the elevator/of Rococo art.” And then, two stanzas later, we hear about “His greetings, Godspeedings display his PhD aplomb.” And you know, when I read the poem, at first, I thought, oh, well, I didn’t know about how elevator operators at the time were oftentimes highly educated, ministers like Ed Robertson’s childhood minister, and this elevator was not only mixed-race, tan, but he was also—taught at Morehouse College or what’s—?

Liesl Olson: That’s right. He was a Baptist preacher. And his obituary mentions that he retired from Morehouse in 1945. He was referred to as Reverend Lloyd O. Lewis, which means that he was a preacher. Maybe he even taught at Morehouse, right?

Srikanth Reddy: In Atlanta.

Liesl Olson: In Atlanta, Georgia. That’s right. So, after he retired at Morehouse in 1945, he would have moved North, like many African Americans during the Great Migration. Second wave of the great migration. He came North, arrived in Chicago and he took this job as an elevator operator at the Newberry, which would have been a job open to highly-educated Black men who were light-skinned.

Srikanth Reddy: So Lloyd Lewis, I mean, you know, I wonder if he would have used the Library also.

Liesl Olson: Another thing we might mention is that a quick search turns up that his wife actually had a degree in Library Science.

Srikanth Reddy: (LAUGHS)

Liesl Olson: Yeah, right. So there would have been an interest in libraries and archives. You know, this highly-educated Black couple moves North, he gets a job working at a very prestigious Library. And he’s married to a woman who, I don’t know what her relationship would have been to the Library. But there’s much more to find out.

Srikanth Reddy: It feels a little bit like a step down in a way. The Great Migration brings him North and he, he retires from his pastoral position, and then he’s in this enclosed space. And, you know, but also, I guess it’s more complex than that.

Liesl Olson: Right. What we do know from the poem is that Margaret Danner knew exactly who he was. Recognized his education, recognized how he spoke, his comportment, who he was, and how he was confined. So, you know, Chicago was supposed to be the promised land for many migrants during the Great Migration. But, you know, oftentimes they arrived and found all kinds of restrictions upon their lives. Where they could live, especially. So, the tightness of those housing conditions. And I think, I think about that, too, in terms of the tight space of that elevator.

Srikanth Reddy: You also told me that you found his address and some interesting information about the neighborhood he lived in, in Chicago.

Liesl Olson: That’s right. So, on this employment card, his address is 6529 St. Lawrence, Chicago, Illinois. And that puts him just one block south of where Emmett and Mamie Till lived. One block south. So that story would have been very much known to him.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: You showed me a photograph of him on a stage with W.E.B. Du Bois at adeus, right, like, I mean, this man was in the proximity of major Black intellectuals, founders of the civil rights movement. Talk about mobility, right, the Great Migration coming from Atlanta to Chicago and then becoming a figure in Margaret Danner’s literary imagination for upward mobility and class.

Liesl Olson: Absolutely. But he would have found, like many people who arrived from the South, that there was only a few sections of the city where he was actually allowed to live. This very constrained seven-mile long, two-mile wide section of the city, Bronzeville, a little bit further south. If you put it on the map now where he lives 6529 South St. Lawrence, we’re essentially in kind of Woodlawn.

Srikanth Reddy: So probably close to where Danner herself lived. They probably had the same commute, right? Except she got to ride the elevator and get out of it. And he got, came here and just stayed in the elevator.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: I almost wish I had the elevator man on this podcast to say, you know, like, “Did you, how do you feel about this poem?” You know, “Did you get to read this poem ever?” I think the poem allows Danner to express a feeling to someone who she sees every day. They know each other, but they totally don’t know each other. They have the same kind of interaction every day, but there’s a whole history of race and injustice behind those interactions. And she’s able to say things in the poem that they can’t say to each other in the space of the elevator. And she’s respectful of him. She doesn’t put words in his mouth. It’s like a wish, or a benediction to him.

Ed Roberson:

(READS POEM)

The Elevator Man Adheres to Form

Not really the elevator man at Newberry Library

I am reminded, by the tan man who wings the elevator
of Rococo art. His ways
are undulating waves that shepherd and swing us

cupid-like from floor to floor.
He sweethearts us with polished pleasantries, gallantly
flourishes us up and up. No casual “Hi”s from him.

His greetings, Godspeedings display his Ph D aplomb.
And I should feel like a cherubim
All Fleur-de-lis and pastel-shell-like, but instead

I vision other tan and deeper much than tan
early Baroque-like men who (seeing themselves still strut-
lessly groping, winding down subterranean grottoes of injustice,

down dark spirals) feel
with such tortuous, smoked-stone grey intensity
that they exhale a hurricane of gargoyles, then reel into them.

I see these others boggling in their misery
and wish this elevator artisan would fill his flourishing form
with warmth for them and turn his lettered zeal
toward lifting them above their crippling storm.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: Big thanks to Ed Roberson, Liesl Olson, Alison Hinderliter, and the Newberry Library for making this episode possible. To listen to a companion episode about Danner that dives into the questions of religious faith in her work, check out our March 2022 episode with poet CM Burroughs. Ed Roberson is the author of a dozen books of poetry, winner of many awards, and lives in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s Southside. Liesl Olson is director of Chicago studies at the Newberry Library. Her books include Chicago Avant-garde: Five Women Ahead of Their Time, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis and Modernism and the Ordinary. You can read a series of Margaret Danner’s poems, as well as essays about her life and work in the March 2022 issue of Poetry, in print, and online. If you’re not yet a subscriber to Poetry magazine, this is a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show was produced by Rachel James. A special thanks to Matthew J. Lee for field production at the Newberry Library. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.