Breaching the Veil

“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” W.E.B. DuBois must be well familiar with that old cliché; he has looked within his own soul to reflect upon the souls of millions of blacks that suffered through this Nation’s most shameful face, in his novel, The Souls of Black Folk. To be quite honest, I was very skeptical when picking this novel; I’ve read about it all before, I know how horrible of a time it was – spare me any more sob stories. DuBois had an answer for me: “We seldom study the condition of the Negro to-day honestly and carefully. It is so much easier to assume that we know it all” (112). There was no sob story or statistic filled textbook to be found here. Instead were the heartfelt words of a man that had seen enough horror to last him more than his share of lifetimes. DuBois has wrenched me with his sincerity; he has wrenched me into thinking about the luxuries of peace and understanding that I take for granted every day.

“Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness” (217). His concluding afterthought is a return to his beginning prelude: “This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (1). There is no dishonesty in his writing; to write about the soul, one must write from the soul, and DuBois has done it with eloquence and grace in a way that cannot be taken lightly. He speaks of the emergence of freedom with passion and luster, and then of the disappointments and failures with regret and sadness. He acknowledges and concedes basic truths, that there is no sole side to a story, while calling upon all involved to step up and fight the battle with “the Veil”. He remarks of his return to an old valley town, “In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly” (59). But still, he feels the flame of passion that he writes about, and it is dripping from every word: “They are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world” (87). With utmost respect and utter sincerity, DuBois bridges the gap between textbook and life, and it has made me wonder; in a world that accepted the universal rights of Mankind, through the struggle of generation after generation of trials and tribulations, how can I think of those past times as mere pages in a book?

I cannot. DuBois has proven this to me: he has put a face to the statistic. “We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul” (118), he says. Instead of examining the struggle of the war, he examines the struggle of the people after the war; the people that every day must go back out onto their farm, tilling the land for a mere 30 cents a day; the people that every day must live with the realization that they are not equals, nor are they are wanted as equals; the people that must every day ride the trains in the Jim Crow cars; the people that can be arrested and certainly tried for talking with a white woman. Such were the results of the “crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead” (122). And these are not just “people” – they are Josie, John, Alexander, Sambo, Hans, Jacques, Pat, and so many more. These were people that he knew, personally, and their pain was completely evident and extremely identifiable, if only through their relationship with DuBois. When John was murdered in vengeance for killing a white man trying to rape his sister, part of DuBois died with him – in a way, a little piece of this Nation died with him too.

DuBois was not searching souls merely to muse about a race’s problems and suffering – he was looking for undeniable human truths, and in many cases, he found them. The worst tragedy, he notes, is the paradox of the South: “There is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with thoughts and feelings of the other” (149). In this point, significant truth of the human race is buried – our essential loneliness shrouds us, aided and abetted by a language that fails us. Quite simply, we are caught in a struggle to get through to one another, and break “the Veil” DuBois frequently mentions, a veil that masks both sides and leaves them blind to one another. “And herein lies the greatest tragedy of the Age…”, he says, “…that men know so little of men” (185). When I look around me now, and see countless faces I know nothing about, but feel completely comfortable with and accepted by, I understand the gift that these prior generations have passed on to me, perhaps in a new light, or perhaps for the first time. At the time of the death of his first-born, DuBois writes, “If one must have gone, why not I?” (174). The answer: because they have gone for us. So help me if I ever forget that sacrifice.

If there was ever a novel that deserved the tag of “powerful”, The Souls of Black Folk would have it. With a topic that has been made mundane after years and years of scholarly “textbooking”, DuBois brought a new scope to the picture, and thus, to life in general. I only wish DuBois lived today, to see much of the fruits of the struggles he writes so passionately about. His words are eloquent; his message is sincere. His struggle, and all the struggles that he has penned down are struggles that have reminded me of what exactly I cannot afford to forget – to do so would be an injustice greater that any he has yet written about.