Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini

Author:Jay Parini [Parini, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Books & Reading, History, Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction, Social History
ISBN: 9780385528412
Google: O0TuFjXdZ9MC
Amazon: B001K9JVUU
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2008-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

III.

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK consists of fourteen separate essays and sketches, most of which had a separate life before coming together in book form. There is even one piece of fiction, “Of the Coming of John.” Not surprisingly, the texture of each is different, ranging from soulful memoir in the immensely rich tradition of black autobiography to straightforward sociology and cultural analysis to lyrical evocations of black “soul,” as manifested in religious writings and poetry, music and speech. Nevertheless, the whole is oddly unified, as the distinct sensibility of Du Bois governs the work from first to last, and one always feels the pulse of resistance, hears a note of intelligent dissent.

The spiritual “strivings” of black folk are the subject of the first chapter, a general one in which Du Bois asks what it means to be both an American and a black person. “How does it feel to be a problem?” he wonders (43). That question hovers in the air around him. He posits a “vast veil” that separates black from white. “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” (45). Here, as throughout, the language often echoes the King James translation of the Bible and the traditions of English poetry (“shades of the prison-house,” for example, alludes to a poem by Wordsworth). This elaborate language may sound a strange note to contemporary ears not used to a rhetorical mode. It may seem excessively florid, even pompous. But Du Bois generally does not overdo any of this, and often falls back upon a simple syntax and diction, as when he frames his influential notion of “double consciousness.”

Double consciousness, the sense of allegiance to two opposing camps, has permeated the discourse on race in the last century. And the problem of America is the problem of the color line: the division into black and white, and the agony this poses for the African American, who must negotiate these two worlds. The history of race in America is the history of this strife, Du Bois argues. The analysis is devastating, as he explains how the black man has been degraded, even when he is a professional—a minister or a doctor. As recent critics have pointed out, black women are rarely mentioned in this book, and when they are, they occupy the realms of domestic life. In this, Du Bois was a person of his place and time, writing well before the full awakening of a political consciousness in women. This said, Du Bois does single out (in the second chapter) the “crusade of the New England schoolma’am” in the Deep South, praising those countless white women who dedicated their lives to educating black children in the era of Reconstruction (64).

In the main, Du Bois sets up a framework for resistance by allowing his rage to speak in a controlled fashion, isolating prejudice as the core issue. “Men call the shadow prejudice,” he says coolly, “and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism” (50).

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