assignment/Du-Bois-The-Souls-of-Black-Folks..pdf
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Li
ary
Chapter 1
I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings
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O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All night long crying with a mournful cry,
As I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest
Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,
And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west;
And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All life long crying without avail,
As the water all night long is crying to me.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
[musial notation from "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"]
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some
through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All,
nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me
curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be
a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at
Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I
smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require.
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, -- peculiar even for one who has
never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days
of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I
emember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the
hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic
to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads
to buy gorgeous visiting-cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange. The exchange was
me
y, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, -- refused it peremptorily, with a
glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the
others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a
vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all
eyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great
wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-
time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all
this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling
opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some,
all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law,
y healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head, -- some way.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into
tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking
distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an
outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round
about us all: walls strait and stu
orn to the whitest, but relentlessly na
ow, tall, and
unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing
palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the �Teuton and Mongolian, the
Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this
American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets
him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity. One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts,
two unreconciled strivings; two wa
ing ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain
self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this
merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize
America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach
his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a
message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without
having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to
escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or
forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the
Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash
here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged
their
ightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's
turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very
strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is
not weakness, -- it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the
lack artisan -- on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of
wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand �to plough and nail and dig for a
poverty-stricken horde -- could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had
ut half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro
minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of
the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be
lack savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a
twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white
world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that
set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt
in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race
which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another
people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has
wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,
-- has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at
times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.
Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of
all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such
unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he
thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all so
ow,
the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty
than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled
one refrain -- Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his
ight hand. At last it came, -- suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of
lood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: --
"Shout, O children!
Shout, you're free!
For God has bought your liberty!"
Years have passed away since then, -- ten, twenty, forty; �
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forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy
spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our
vastest social problem: --
"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble!"
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in
freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change,
the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people, -- a disappointment all
the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance
of a lowly people.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon
that