by W. Du Bois
Thus Washington’s effect for as long as he held his power was essentially to neutralize Du Bois—but not among the populace of black intellectuals, schoolteachers, college professors, artists, and others who sided with Du Bois in the greatest intraracial conflict of the twentieth century. So while The Souls of Black Folk is indeed an attempt to reveal to whites of goodwill the humanity of black people, and to assert that blacks have a considerable contribution to make to the general welfare of the culture and the nation, it is also a sally against racism and against the ideals and ideas explicitly and implicitly set forth by Washington, especially as articulated in his popular autobiography, but also in the steady stream of editorials, books, and articles that issued from Tuskegee between the last decade of the nineteenth century until 1915, the year of Washington’s death.
Though Du Bois tells his readers at the beginning of the book that he is going to lift the veil in order to reveal the “souls of black folk,” it would perhaps be more accurate to recognize that he is also sharing with his readers his own discovery of the “souls of black folk.” For the circumstances of his birth and upbringing were such that though he knew something of that soul from his contact with his mother and her family, the Burghardts, who lived on a family farm in Great Barrington, and he learned some things about being black from his grandfather, whom he visited in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the age of fifteen, he did not know the “soul” he refers to in his title. When he went South after high school in 1885 to attend college at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, he lived for the first time in his life primarily among black people. Clearly when he mentions “black folk,” Du Bois is thinking about the whole range of black people, from the sharecroppers whom he describes in his account of black people in Georgia to the few successful farmers and landowners who live there as well. He is thinking about the other students he meets when he goes to college; about Alexander Crummell, the subject of the twelfth chapter; and about John, the black student who returns to his small southern community in the chapter titled “Of the Coming of John.” He means to reveal all these souls, both high and low.
In The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, published in 1963, sixty years after Souls, he explains very carefully his relationship to black people largely through describing his relationship to whites during his formative years. In the chapter entitled “My Birth and Family,” he indicates the distance between himself and his blackness. We must recall as we examine his words that we are listening to a man with a profound knowledge of psychology and sociology, so he fully understands the implications of the things he tells us. In the following passage, for example, his knowledge of the relation between institutions and individual experience informs his utterance.
In the public schools of this town, I was trained from the age of six to sixteen, and in the town schools, churches, and general social life, I learned my patterns of living. I had, as a child, almost no experience of segregation or color discrimination. My schoolmates were invariably white; I joined quite naturally all games, excursions, church festivals; recreations like coasting, swimming, hiking and games. I was in and out of the homes of nearly all my mates, and ate and played with them. I was a boy long unconscious of color discrimination in any obvious and specific way.
Du Bois explains here that since one’s sense of race and racial terms comes only from experience, the meaning of being white or black is not inborn but is derived from experience; hence racial distinctions, insofar as they carry negative or positive meaning, are functions of a social dynamic. Since he had no direct experience of racial animosity, no implied definitions of himself as essentially different or inferior (aside from his experience related above involving the “visiting-card,” an incident whose meaning was apparently offset somewhat by subsequent experience of a contradictory nature), how could he possibly know the “souls of black folk” without in some way learning who and what black people were?
Because we are delving into the question of Du Bois’s knowledge of the “souls of black folk” prior to his exposure to large numbers of black folk, we might well raise the question of his relation to blacks outside his immediate family, within the community that he grew up in. Were there no other black people in Great Barrington? Was there a black church? Were there black institutions paralleling those he mentions in the quotation above, institutions that might have had something of the socializing effect of those he mentions? Were there institutional influences which might have, as institutions do, influenced Du Bois’s sense of his relationship to his own blackness?
His description of the demographic makeup of the town, the description of a trained and experienced sociologist, answers these questions. For one thing he identifies the outsiders in Great Barrington, the most clearly identifiable minority and those most looked down upon and discriminated against, not as the black people of the town but as the Irish. One of the reasons that he did not feel like the downtrodden nineteenth-century southern black is that his social environment, the source of his social values, supplied him with an image of someone who was more despised than he. In his maturity Du Bois undoubtedly recognized that if the Irish seemed more despised in Great Barrington than the blacks, it was only because the Irish outnumbered the blacks and were thus seemingly a greater threat to the stability of the community despite their usefulness to the mill owners as cheap labor. In describing the Irish in Great Barrington, he chooses words that might well be used by the average Great Barrington resident to reflect the prevailing attitude of the town, only to give them an ironic meaning they would not otherwise possess:
I think I rather assumed, along with most of the townfolk, that the dirty, stinking Irish slums were something that the Irish preferred and made. Certainly in school and church and on the street, I got no idea that the town was responsible for the slums.
The clear implication is that the Irish slums were in fact “dirty” and “stinking,” but that his perspective was that of a child. He departs from the belief that the Irish lived in such conditions simply because they chose to live thus; he recognizes that his attitude toward the Irish was no different from the attitude of the majority culture toward blacks. He also distances himself from mainstream attitudes and feelings, as he rides above the veil, rising above both Anglo-Saxon and Irish, the mill owners and their peasant workers, the Irish, who, he reports, “Sometimes ... called me ‘nigger’ or tried to attack me,” in his description of the river that as a child he had seen as “golden.”
My Housatonic River, for instance, was “golden” because of the waste which the paper and woolen mills poured into it and because more and more the river became a public sewer into which town and slum poured their filth.
Du Bois reports how few black people there were in the town and thus how little influenced he was during his youth by values stemming from black culture. He is trying to establish the similarity of his early experience to that of others in the general culture and to present himself as a link, therefore, between mainstream culture and black culture. The point is that he can show what is behind the veil, stepping to either side of it or rising above it, because he knows both sides of the veil to a far greater degree than practically any other person of his time. Undoubtedly other black people grew up in somewhat similar circumstances, but few had the ability to understand or articulate his message and at the same time the undeniably strong inclination to identify with black people of all classes and stations to so great an extent.
Aside from the Irish, we are told in Du Bois’s Autobiography, “the other minority in my town were my own colored people, but they were few in number. In Great Barrington there were perhaps 25, certainly not more than 50, colored folk in a population of 5,000.” This group of blacks was hardly a monolithic body. Some had intermingled “with local Indians,” a few were “black immigrants from Africa,” and others were “an isolated group of black folk whose origin was obscure.” Of this latter class Du Bois writes, “we knew little of them but felt above them because of our ed
ucation and economic status.” Yet Du Bois’s family was not altogether aloof from these recent arrivals: “The newcomers astonished us by forming a little Negro Methodist Zion church, which we sometimes attended [my emphasis].” Though Du Bois’s family was Episcopalian on both sides, he and his mother joined the Congregational church, “the most important church,” because “it had the largest attendance of all the churches, including merchants and farmers, and professional men of the town.” Of interest is the delicate balance Du Bois’s relatives, especially his mother, observe between individual and community, white and black.
Thus from the age of six to sixteen, the exceptions referred to above notwithstanding, Du Bois was very much a part of the life of the Great Barrington mainstream. Thereafter, however, he began to see things in a somewhat different light: “After I entered high school, I began to feel the pressure of the ‘veil of color’; in little matters at first and then in larger.” A significant tension develops. Du Bois in later life thoroughly commits himself to the defense and advancement of black people, yet something of his past remains: “The Negroes in the South, when I came to know them, could never understand why I did not naturally greet everyone I passed on the street or slap my friends on the back.” He accounts for his restrained behavior by reference to his “New England social heritage” and to the “taciturnity” of his Dutch forebears. His response to the descent of the veil when he recognized its fall in his life was to withdraw: “Whatever of racial feeling gradually crept into my life, its effect upon me in these earlier days was rather one of exaltation and high disdain. They were the losers who did not ardently court me, and not I, which seemed to be proven by the fact that I had no difficulty outdoing them in nearly all competition, especially intellectual.” He moves away from his earlier cultural and racial identification toward, he tells us in his autobiography, another one, a movement that culminates in his embracing of the Fisk University experience: “A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.”
We need to see this sentiment in relation to the statement on dual identity quoted above and most frequently referred to by critics of and commentators on The Souls of Black Folk. Let me quote it in part again: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts ... two warring ideals in one dark body.” His comment that “henceforward I was a Negro” offers a different gloss on that text, an antithetical perspective. In the one case, his is a divided soul; in the other, the question of his racial and national identity is resolved. Du Bois’s sense of dual identity seems to have belonged to his youth when he acknowledged the possibility of reconciliation between his racial and national identities. His interpretation of his experience leading to his “I was a Negro” statement is an interpretation made long after the fact: the “twoness” statement is in the book of 1903; his “I was a Negro” statement was published in 1963, at the end of Du Bois’s life. The clear implication is, and the direction his life took bears this out, that what seemed paradoxical and incapable of resolution at one time in his life was eventually resolved. He finally decided : “I am a Negro.” He cut himself off from whites and became a pan-African nationalist, renouncing his American citizenship and moving to Africa, to Ghana.
As Du Bois in his autobiography writes about his life when he enters Fisk University and enters the black world, he points out time and time again that the whole experience is entirely new to him, that he is in the process of discovering the meaning of “the souls of black folk.” When he enters the South for the first time on his way to Nashville it is as though he is on an exotic voyage of discovery: “Ah! the wonder of that journey, with its faint spice of adventure, as I entered the land of the slaves.” He is not posing; the South is indeed, as far as he is concerned, an undiscovered country.
I was thrilled to be for the first time among so many people of my own color or rather of such various and such extraordinary colors, which I had only glimpsed before, but who it seemed were bound to me by new and exciting eternal ties.
In discovering the “souls of black folk” he first of all discovers their bodies, the actual existence of black people not so different from him, but different from any blacks that he had ever known at close range—people and not ideas of who these people were or might be. These were black people who either had acquired or were desirous of acquiring status, not ordinary workers or tradespeople—people with no equivalents in Great Barrington.
Never before had I seen young men so self-assured and who gave themselves such airs, and colored men at that; and above all for the first time I saw beautiful girls. At my home among my white schoolmates there were a few pretty girls; but either they were not entrancing or because I had known them all my life, I did not notice them.
It is not enough, however, for Du Bois to know only such people as these. They are but a small fraction of the black folk; they by no means constitute the majority. Du Bois seeks to establish the relation between black top and bottom, haves and have-nots, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, by describing his attempts to bridge the gap between poet and peasant, the university and the Tennessee countryside, his past and his present.
Du Bois describes in Chapter IV of The Souls of Black Folk his first contact with the rural black South, indicating—retrospectively and by design—his nearly total ignorance of its character. His classmates at Fisk, the autobiography tells, were not nearly so much out of his ken as were his black rural brethren: “I was eighteen and knew nothing of the South at first hand, save what little I had seen in Nashville from the protected vantage ground of a college campus. I had not seen anything of the small Southern town and the countryside, which are the real South.” He tells us in the autobiography that he touches the very root of black experience in the hemisphere, slavery, at its most vitally available manifestation:
I travelled not only in space but in time. I touched the very shadow of slavery. I lived and taught school in log cabins built before the Civil War.... I touched intimately the lives of the commonest of mankind—people who ranged from barefooted dwellers on dirt floors, with patched rags for clothes, to rough, hard-working farmers, with plain, clean plenty.
He reveals the “souls of black folk” to consist in the understanding revealed to him through his experience. At work here is not only Du Bois’s faith in logic and reason as a principle governing the thought and conduct of people of the western world but also his belief in the commonality of the psychology of people engaged in the experience of western culture. Du Bois believes that people like him, reasonable, cultured, intelligent people—as he assumes his audience to be—will see things as he does.
The meaning of the final chapters of The Souls of Black Folk depends upon the assumption of the existence of the sympathy of his audience. Most of the book relies upon idea, thought; the rest of the book, beginning with Chapter XI, relies upon feeling and faith. One possible center of the book is Chapter XI, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” where Du Bois most exposes his own personal soul, where he reveals his innermost thoughts and feelings even to the extent of imagining, through his ruminations about the death of his son, the desirability of his own nonexistence, and by implication, the nonexistence of any particular black human being living in the United States. It might be better, he offers, to be dead than suffer the fate of a black person living here. “Idle words,” he says in reply to such bleak thoughts.
In revealing his innermost thoughts about the death of his firstborn child, Du Bois believes that he will touch the hearts and minds of his audience. He believes that honesty and forthrightness will prevail. The chapters following this one are based upon the same assumptions: basic human feelings are shared among whites and blacks of education and goodwill. Anyone who reads and sympathizes with “Of the Passing of the First-Born” will undoubtedly extend the same sympathy in reading “Of Alexander Crummell,” “Of the Coming of John,” and “The Sorrow Songs.” Initially Du Bois calls upon the reader’s mind, with his historical and s
ociological perspective upon black life; then he calls upon the reader’s feelings, feelings emanating from the reader’s sense of relatedness to another human, though one of a different color.
The first ten chapters are all written from a generalized perspective, being largely descriptive of the situation of the race as a whole. Even the third chapter, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” is about a particular man only as his politics and program have to do with the race as a whole. Chapters XI, XII, and XIII focus in on individuals who exist within the broad historical and sociological context laid out in the preceding chapters. The general racial situation is particularized in the experience of Du Bois himself, in that of the black churchman Crummell, and in the story of John, a fictional character representing any black person with education and cultural aspirations.
A cue for the last chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, “The Sorrow Songs,” is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, an autobiography that Du Bois had probably read in all of its versions (the first was published in 1845; subsequent revised and updated versions appeared in 1855, 1881, and 1892). Douglass, too, speaks of the spirituals as revealing the souls of the slaves who sang them, and he speaks further of their being expressive of sorrow. The spirituals
told a tale of woe which was then [while he was still enslaved] altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.... The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as the aching heart is relieved by its tears.