The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, by

Paul Laurence Dunbar

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Title: The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

Author: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Commentator: William Dean Howells

Release Date: May 7, 2006 [EBook #18338]

Language: English

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WE WEAR THE MASK

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

53
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Souls of Black Folk

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Release Date: January 29, 2008 [EBook #408]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

The original file may be found at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm

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54
 The Souls of Black Folk

by

W.E.B. Du Bois

Of Our Spiritual Strivings

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.

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 remember 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 merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer,
refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness

55
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 beyond 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, by 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 stubborn to the
whitest, but relentlessly narrow, 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 warring
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 brightness. Here
in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and

56
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 black 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 but 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 black 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 sorrow, 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 right hand. At last it came,—suddenly,
fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood 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; 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!"

57
 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 seemed ever
barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of
industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword
beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty
demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which
before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and
perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and
emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had
done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the
decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired.
Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political
power,—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night
after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know
and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have
been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and
rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and
guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know
how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down
the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had
fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim
and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism,
the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to
the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving
his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some
faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the
world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his

58
back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his
poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with
rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very
bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the
humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands
and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of
systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient
African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening
almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its
time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his
prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men
call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning
against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen!
and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture,
righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice
that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal
disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of
fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to
inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair
that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten
word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-
disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of
contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying,
cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook
and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and
nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,—
and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful
adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the
sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters
of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul;

59
inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,—physical
freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have waxed and
waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone
was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the
other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must
be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of
deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure
hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery?
Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think,
the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not
successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims
before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal
of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races,
but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on
American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker
ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit
of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild
sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all,
we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will
America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro
humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the
Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the
spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of
their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers'
fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways,
with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

60
68
 Yet 'Do I �arvel

I DOUBT not God is good, well-meaning,

kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell
why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day
die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

3
Cullen, Countee. Color. Harper & Brothers, 1925.
Used by permission.