The Souls of Black Folk | Page 4

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 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