THE
SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
ESSAYS
AND SKETCHES
BY
W.
E.
BURGHARDT DU BOIS
SECOND EDITION
CHICAGO
A. C.
McCLUEG &
1903
CO.
Copyright
McClukg &
A. C.
Co.
1903
Published April 18, 1903
Second edition June
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1903
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UNIVERSITY PRESS
AND SON
-
JOHN WILSON
CAMBRIDGE,
U.S.A.
TO
BURGHARDT AND YOLANDE
THE LOST AND THE TOUND
The Forethought
HEREIN
with
lie
patience
ingr of
many things which if read
may show the__strange mean-
buried
being blackJiere at the dawning of
the Twentieth Century.
This meaning
is
not without
interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the
Twentieth Century is the problem of the color- line.
I pray you, then, receive my little book in all
charity, studying my words with me, forgiying mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is
in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
I have sought here to sketch, iu vague, uncertain
outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand
thousand Americans live and strive. First, in two
chapters I have tried to show what Emancipation
meant to them, and what was its aftermath. In a
third chapter I have pointed out the slow rise of personal leadership, and criticised candidly the leader
who bears the chief burden of his race to-day. Then,
in two other chapters I have sketched in swift outline the two worlds within and without the Veil, and
thus have come to the ceatral problem of training
men for life. Venturing now into deeper detail, I
have in two chapters studied the struggles of the
massed millions of the black peasantry, and in another
^,-
^
THE FOEETHOUGHT
Viii
have sought to make clear the present relations of
the sons of master and man.
Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped
within the Veil, raising
its
it
that
you may view
deeper recesses, — the meaning of
passion of
its
human
greater souls.
Vjold but seldom
sorrow, and
faintly
its religion,
the
the struggle of its
All this I have ended with a tale twice
and a chapter of song.
mine have seen the light
before in other guise.
For kindly consenting to their
republication here, in altered and extended form, I
must thank the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly,
The World's Work, The Dial, The New World, and the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Some
written,
of these thoughts of
Social Science.
^
Before each chapter, as
now printed, stands
a bar of
— some
echo of haunting melody
from the only American music which welled up from
black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I
the Sorrow Songs,
add that
v.flesh of
I
who speak
the flesh of
here
am bone
them that
of the bone
live within the
W.
Atlanta, Ga., Feb.
1,
1903.
and
Veil ?
E. B.
DuB.
Herein
Written
is
Pass
The Fobbthought
J "^
V^
I.
Of
vii
otjr Spihittjal Strivings
"~"II.
Of the Dawn op Freedom
—III.
Of Mr. Booker
T.
""•vIV.
Op the Meaning op Progress
Op the Wings op Atalanta
""-VI.
Of the Training op
VII.
Op the Black Belt
IX.
X.
XI.
ySLU.
V Xill.
VXrV.
13
Washington and Others
""*- V.
VIII.
1
Black Men
60
75
....
Of the Sons of Master and Man
.
.
.
.
.
Op the Faith of the Fathers
Passing op the First-Born
Op Alexander Crummell
88
110
Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece
Of the
41*
135
163
189
.
.
.
207
215
Op the Coming of John
228
Op the Sorrow Songs
250
The After-thought
265
XI
OF THE PASSING OF THE FIRST-BORN
O
sister, sister,
thy flrst-begotten,
The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood crying yet,
Who
hath remembered
me
?
who hath forgotten
?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow.
But the world shall end when I forget.
Swinburne.
f^"^^
^
U
^Jr^-^
'
tEi
T^r
S
NTO
you a child is born, " sang the bit of
yellow paper that fluttered into my room
Then the
one brown October morning.
fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of
creation ; I wondered how it looked and how it felt,
fear of
— what
were its eyes, and how its hair curled and
crumpled itself. And I thought in awe of her,
she who had slept with Death to tear a man-child
from underneath her heart, while I was unconsciously
wandering.
I fled to my wife and child, repeating
the while to myself half wonderingly, " Wife and
—
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
208
—
fled fast and faster than
Wife and child ? "
must ever impatiently
yet
and
boat and steam-car,
voiced city, away
hardthe
from
await them; away
child ?
from the
flickering
Hills that sit all
sea
into
my own
Berkshire
sadly guarding the gates of Massa-
chusetts.
Up the stairs I ran to the wan mother and whimpering babe, to the sanctuary on whose altar a life
at my bidding had offered itself to win a life, and
won. What is this tiny formless thing, this newall head and
born wail from an unknown world,
voice? I handle it curiously, and watch perplexed
I did not love
its winking, breathing, and sneezing.
thing
to
love
but her
ludicrous
;
it then ; it seemed a
—
I loved,
my girl -mother,
ing like the glory of
she
whom now
I
saw unfold-
the morning — the transfigured
\jvoman.
Through her I came to love the wee thing, as it
grew and waxed strong; as its little soul unfolded
itself in twitter and cry and half -formed word, and
How
as its eyes caught the gleam and flash of life.
beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark
gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown,
and the soft voluptuous roll
which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features
I held him in my arms, after we had sped far
away to our Southern home,
held him, and glanced
at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city
of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest.
Why
was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was
golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his
eyes crushed out and killed the blue?
for brown
his perfect little limbs,
!
—
—
OF THE PASSING OF THE FIRST-BORN
209
And
were his father's eyes, and his father's father's.
thus in the
Land
of the Color-line I saw, as
it fell
my baby, the shadow of the Veil.
Within the Veil was he born, said I; and there
within shall he live,
a Negro and a Negro's son.
Holding in that little head
ah, bitterly
the unbowed pride of a hunted race, clinging with that tiny
ah, wearily
dimpled hand
to a hope not hopeless
but unhopeful, and seeing with those bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul a land whose freedom
is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.
I saw the
shadow of the Veil as it passed over my baby, I saw
the cold city towering above the blood-red land.
I
held my face beside his little cheek, showed him the
star-children and the twinkling lights as they began
to flash, and stilled with an even-song the unvoiced
across
—
—
—
terror of
my
!
!
—
—
life.
So sturdy and masterful he grew, so filled with
bubbling life, so tremulous with the unspoken wisdom
of a life but eighteen months distant from the Alllife,
we were not far from worshipping this revela-
—
tion of the divine,
my
wife and
I.
Her own
life
builded and moulded itself upon the child ; he tinged
her every dream and idealized her every effort.
hands but hers must touch and garnish those
limbs;
no dress or
frill
No
little
must touch them that had
not wearied her fingers ; no voice but hers could coax
him off to Dreamland, and she and he together spoke
some soft and unknown tongue and in it held communion. I too mused above his little white bed ; saw
the strength of my own arm stretched onward through
the ages through the newer strength of his ; saw th§
14
210
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
dream of
my
black fathers stagger a step onward in
the wild phantasm of the world ; heard in his baby
voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within
the Veil.
And
so
we dreamed and
and winter, and the
spring,
full flush of the
awful light over the
one
night the
wee white
warm
fall
long Southern
the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf,
till
the roses shivered and the
till
its
loved and planned by
little
still
hills of
stern sun quivered
Atlanta.
feet pattered
And
then
wearily to the
and the tiny hands trembled and a
and we knew
Ten days he lay there,
a swift
bed,
;
flushed face tossed on the pillow,
—
baby waa sick.
week and three endless days, wasting, wasting
away. Cheerily the mother nursed him the first
days, and laughed into the little eyes that smiled
again.
Tenderly then she hovered round him, till
the smile fled away and Fear crouched beside the
little
bed.
Then
the day ended not, and night was a dream-
less terror,
and joy and sleep slipped away.
now
I hear
that Voice at midnight calling me from dull and
dreamless trance,
crying, " The Shadow of Death I
—
The Shadow
of
Death!"
Out
into the starlight I
—
the Shadow of
Death, the Shadow of Death.
The hours trembled
on; the night listened; the ghastly dawn glided like
crept, to rouse the
gray physician,
a tired thing across the lamplight.
Then we two
alone looked upon the child as he turned toward us
with great eyes, and stretched his string-like hands,
—
the
Shadow
of
turned away.
Death!
And we
spoke no word, and
OF THE PASSING OF THE FIRST-BOBN
He died
at eventide,
when
the sun lay like a brood-
ing sorrow above the western
when the winds spoke
veiling its face
hills,
and the
not,
211
trees, the great
green trees he loved, stood motionless.
saw
I
his
breath beat quicker and quicker, pause, and then his
little
soul leapt like a star that travels in the night
a world of darkness in its train.
The day
changed not; the same tall trees peeped in at the
windows, the same green grass glinted in the setting
sun.
Only in the chamber of death writhed the
and
left
world's most piteous thing
I shirk not.
full of striving.
—a
childless mother.
I long for work.
am no
I
I pant for a life
coward, to shrink before
the rugged rush of the storm, nor even quail before
shadow
the awful
Death
Is
I
the Veil.
of
my
not this
life
But hearken,
hard enough,
that dull land that stretches its sneering
me
cold enough,
—
is
not
all
—
is
O
not
web about
the world beyond these
must
About my head
the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and
the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the weak
but what cared I, within my home beside my wife
four
little
walls pitiless enough, but that thou
needs enter here,
— thou,
and baby boy?
Wast thou
O
Death ?
coign of happiness that thou
— thou,
his
his, all
there,
joy and love, with tears
— sweet as a summer's
the Housatonic.
women
must needs enter
little
O
Death?
A perfect life was
to make it brighter,
side
so jealous of one
kissed his curls,
day be-
The world loved him;
the men looked gravely
the
into
wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and
about him. I can see him now, changing
fluttered
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
212
like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening
frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he
-^watched the world. He knew no color-line, poor
and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had
dear,
He loved the white
not yet darkened half his sun.
matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little
world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.
are larger and purer by the inI
yea, all men
She who in
finite breadth of that one little life.
simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said
when he had flown, "He will be happy There; he
ever loved beautiful things." And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of mine own weaving, sit
alone winding words and muttering, " If still he be,
and he be There, and there be a There, let him be
Jiappy, O Fate!"
Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird
and song and sweet-smelling flowers.
The trees
whispered to the grass, but the children sat with
hushed faces. And yet it seemed a ghostly unreal
day,
the wraith of Life.
We seemed to rumble
down an unknown street behind a little white bundle
of posies, with the shadow of a song in our ears.
The busy city dinned about us; they did not say
much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women;
they did not say much,
they only glanced and said,
"Niggers!"
—
—
—
—
—
We
could not lay him in the ground there in
Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red ; so we
bore him
and his
where,
away
little
to the northward, with his flowers
folded hands.
O God
I
—
In vain, in vain
for
beneath thy broad blue sky shall my
!
OF THE PASSING OF THE FIRST-BORN
dark baby rest in peace,
— where
and Goodness, and a Freedom that
All that day and
gladness in
all
Reverence dwells,
is
free?
that night there sat an awful
— nay, blame me not see
— and my
darkly through the
my heart,
the world thus
213
N
if I
Veil,
me, saying, " Not dead, not dead,
but escaped; not bond, but free." No bitter meansoul whispers ever to
now
baby heart till it die a livno taunt shall madden his happy boyhood.
Fool that I was to think or wish that this little sovil
should grow choked and deformed within the Veil
I might have knovra that yonder deep unworldly
look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was
peering far beyond this narrow Now.
In the poise
of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all
that wild pride of being which his father had hardly
crushed in his own heart ? For what, forsooth, shall
a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows ?
Well sped, my boy,
before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence,
had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to
cringe and bow.
Better far this nameless void that
ness
shall sicken his
ing death,
my
than a sea of sorrow for you.
he might have borne his burden more
bravely than we,
aye, and found it lighter too,
some day; for surely, surely this is not the end.
stops
Idle
life
words
;
—
Surely there shall yet
dawn some mighty morning
Not for
young
for
fresh
me,
but
I shall die in my bonds,
waken
souls who have not known the night and
to the morning; a morning when men ask of the
"
workman, not " Is he white ? " but " Can he work ?
to lift the
—
Veil and set the prisoned free.
—
jj
214
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
When men ask artists, not "Are they black?" but
" Do they know? " Some morning this may be, long,
But now there wails, on that
dark shore within the Veil, the same deep voice.
long years to come.
Thou shalt forego ! And all have I foregone at that
all save that
command, and with small complaint,
fair young form that lies so coldly wed with death in
the nest I had builded.
Why may I
If one must have gone, why not I ?
not rest me from this restlessness and sleep from this
wide waking? Was not the world's alembic. Time,
in his young hands, and is not my time waning?
Are there so many workers in the vineyard that the
fair promise of this little body could lightly be tossed
away? The wretched of my race that line the alleys
of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered ; but Love
sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited
Perhaps now he knows the All-love, and
to speak.
—
needs not to be wise.
I sleep
\
and waken
patter of little feet
Sleep, then, child,
—
— sleep
till
baby voice and the ceaseless
above the Veil.
to a