Assignment America: 'Souls of Black Folk'

ABOARD THE CRESCENT, Miss., April 25 (UPI) -- W.E.B. Du Bois is being celebrated on this, the 100th anniversary of "The Souls of Black Folk," and that's a very fine thing.

Passing by my window, among these hardscrabble red clay farms of northern Georgia, the dense thickets of Alabama, the lazy snaggle-tooth towns of Mississippi, are ghosts of slavery that, thank God, are no more than that. The shanty towns and shotgun houses are gone. There's no Jim Crow car on the train. There are no more tenant farmers to be stretched on the rack of crippling debt. Every once in a while you see a logging truck or a service van indicating that the old cotton land has ended up in the hands of people far, far away from here. It's become what they always wanted it to be: pure commodity.

And yet.

And yet a good and noble thing has been lost. Everything Du Bois called for in his book, in the oncoming "century of the color line," has, it seems to me, been dashed and shattered.

I have dinner in the dining car with an activist couple from Greenville, S.C., who shake their heads over their last state election. The Republican strategy for getting out the vote, it seems, had been to rabblerouse on the Confederate flag issue. Of such paltry stuff are race issues shaped today. Led by the worst of both races, each side attempts to force the other to cry uncle, to command respect from the place respect is most readily denied, and thereby ensure a continuous struggle.

Du Bois called for the end of struggle. He called for a meeting of the races on the highest level, not the lowest. Listen to these words:

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

This strikes me as both a plaint and a promise. We don't need to search for common ground. We already have it. In these Hamlets and Monte Cristos and suffering prophets, we have plenty of humanity to go around; enough, at least, to draw up from the well of Otherness the conviction "Are we not alike? Yes, the very same."

It was "The Souls of Black Folk" that first led me to emotionalize the sameness of the races. I was a college student in Nashville, where my university shared a library with Fisk University, where Du Bois was regarded as a deity. Fisk, the only university in our history to be endowed by a choir (the Fisk Jubilee Singers), and at that time the trainer of 95 percent of the black physicians in the South as well as a good many of its clergymen and university teachers, had (I would find out later) a rather tenuous connection to Du Bois.

He had gone there only after his application to Harvard was denied, and as soon as he could, he transferred to Harvard, eventually taking his doctorate here. It was only in later years that he became sentimental about Fisk, especially after his daughter graduated there and he was plied with honorary degrees.

No matter. Fisk claimed him, and they claimed him for an interesting reason: They regarded Du Bois as the antidote to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute.

There was no "industrial education" at Fisk. There was no talk of training up the black race in trades so they could be of economic value to the nation. That was all Tuskegeeism. Just one example: Washington thought education for blacks should begin at a very basic level, beginning with small schools that include reading and writing but aim to teach some useful trade.

Du Bois held the opposite view. It was no accident, he said, that the first institution of learning in America was a college, not a grade school. You build the universities, and they create teachers, and knowledge moves ever downward. At Fisk, where he was revered, the students were more likely to be carrying French grammars and Latin-inscribed chapbooks than textbooks on agriculture.

Du Bois was a young man when he wrote "The Souls of Black Folk," and I was a young man when I read it, but the emotional shock of the prose made me feel I was in the presence of a mentor of vastly more experience and deep reading than my own, and it made me feel instantly more mature myself. It's a gentle, lilting book -- actually a collection of magazine articles that are connected only by Du Bois's clarity of style and conviction -- and it's a book that pulls you in by degrees. What appears to be a work of journalism at the beginning, and I think it should be listed among our greatest works of journalism, becomes by turns a meditation on the nature of hatred, despair, doubt, and finally, his Big Three closers: "Of the Passing of the First-Born," his crying out to God over the death of his infant son; "Of Alexander Crummell," the story of a would-be priest, born too early, who fights church and society for 80 years to be allowed to serve them both, only to die with the knowledge that his self-sacrifice has been wasted on people who have no want of it; and "Of the Coming of John," a shattering world-shaking story that I still recall so keenly that I'm afraid to read it again, for fear that I've idealized it and it's not really the most perfect story ever written. A mundane reader might say the story is about lynching, but it's not. It's about the terrible burdens of knowledge itself.

Du Bois was primarily an educator, I suppose, so he knew that burden, although I still think of him as a journalist. (His description of Dougherty County, Ga., although full of statistics, can still be read today with a sense of amazement at just how clearly he sees things.) You could also call him a sociologist, perhaps a politician (he was the only black on the board of the original NAACP), an historian, a writer of fiction, and an activist. I know little about his later career, when he flirted with Communism, wrote with increasing radicalism about the need for blacks to establish a separate culture from whites, and, shortly before his death at age 95, became a citizen of Ghana.

It actually hurts me to think that he became a citizen of Ghana. It breaks my heart, and I'll tell you why. In the final chapter of "The Souls of Black Folk," Du Bois writes about what he calls "The Sorrow Songs," and what would later be called spirituals or gospel songs. He's talking about the most ancient ones here, the ones that grew up directly out of slavery, and he feels they're so much a part of his story that he introduces every chapter with the actual music. His point is that, out of the cold fierce bloody clash between African and European, something ineffably beautiful emerged, something that drives right straight to the marrow. Our most beautiful native art, our soul-speak, comes from this clash.

And I had remembered this chapter, and I had remembered a certain line in it, as "Without the Negro and his songs, America would not be America."

So much for my memory. I checked the actual passage, and it's much richer and more eloquent:

"Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation, we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her Negro people?"

So there's the line that I remember, the line that, for me, "lifted the Veil," as Du Bois would put it. Did the man who wrote that line really become a citizen of Ghana in his heart? Did he spend the next 60 years finding out that the effusions of his youth, expressed in this little book, were somehow futile? Did he cease to think that, through the great ideas of the West and the Sorrow Songs of Africa, black and white could attain to any level of empathy, even to sacrificial love? Did he cast aside all these things for a fierce "back to Africa" black separatism? Did he come to believe that America could be America without her Negro people?

prefer not to think of it that way. I prefer to think of it like this: He had 60 years during which he could have altered and updated "The Souls of Black Folk," but he left it as it was. Even if he changed, he must have sensed that unencumbered young men sometimes write more truly than decorated old ones. He must have thought, even as he died in Ghana, that something in the optimism of the book was worth saving. I like to think that he flirted with the Philistine, flirted with the Amalekite, but died, like Moses, on Pisgah, looking straight in at the Promised Land.

As the train draws closer to New Orleans, the land grows blacker, and I want to speak to Du Bois. I want to call him out. I want to tell him that you don't speak of blood brotherhood so lightly. I want to say that once a white boy met you in a gilded hall where smiling men and welcoming women glide.

--

(John Bloom writes several columns for UPI. To contact him, send e-mail to [email protected] or visit joebobbriggs.com or snail-mail P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)