Try to Imagine
W.E.B. DuBois, 1918
In writing this novel, I needed to try, as best I could, to develop an understanding of the particular experience of being a Black American, having not lived it myself. Two books, especially, had a profound influence on me.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a letter written to his fifteen-year-old son, was a hard read. I watched my defensiveness rise. But Mr. Coates rich language moved me. Forcefully, necessarily. How could I not hear in that fierceness, a father’s pain for the legacy bequeathed to his son – the violence against the black body that is foundational to our country and which perpetuates racial injustice? He deepened my appreciation for his experience.
His words echoed those of W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. With breathtaking lyricism, Mr. DuBois describes the condition of Black Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century:
“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…. 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.”
Yet, out of these insufferable conditions arose another aspect of the legacy of slavery. To me it suggests the indominable quality of ‘The Souls of Black Folk’. It is the ‘Sorrow Songs’ which gave birth to truly authentic American music – Gospel, the Blues and Jazz.
Until next time,
Babs
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. Melbourne, VIC, Australia: Text Publishing Company.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1903. The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches. Chicago, A. G. McClurg. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
Photo credit: "W.E.B. Du Bois" by US Department of State is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.