Alexander Lucius Twilight was born September 26, 1795 in Corinth, Vermont to a free black family. He graduated from Middlebury College, also in Vermont, in 1823. His newly acquired baccalaureate degree made him the first African American to receive a degree from an American college. He was also licensed to preach by the Presbyterian Church and served several Congregational churches.
Twilight would later become principal of the Orleans County, Vermont Grammar School in Brownington, Vermont. In 1836 he built a massive three-story granite building, Athenian Hall, which would later constitute the Brownington Academy. In 1836, Twilight also served in the Vermont state legislature, thus also becoming the first African American to serve on a state legislature. Certainly, Alexander Twilight was a man of "firsts" in black history.
Twilight was well-known to the people of the Northern lands, and on many a day he could be found sitting by the fire of an inn, where he would turn the shadows into stories on the walls and make magic in the spaces between light and dark.
Now in those days, Twilight often wandered from one inn to another, but as he furled the lady Night’s cloak that morning, he returned to the same inn where he had met the dark-eyed girl and he wove all his shadows into the shapes of her stories.
For three days and three nights, Twilight lay with the dark-eyed girl, and spun shadows for her, and she tied ribbons in his hair and told him stories such as that his dreams were filled with colors.
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