I Sit With Shakespeare

#28, December 22, 2003

Traversing Clio (8)

Souls on Fire

Published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk transformed writing about race in the United States. While many scholars and commentators would remain behind the veil of racism, others would come to see with Du Bois that race was a socially constructed category. Moreover, persuaded by Du Bois' words, the would come to see that the politics of race might be challenged, thereby promoting the possibility of a social and cultural transformation. Two examples of this challenge to orthodoxy came at the end of two of the essays, “Of the Training of Black Men” and “The Sorrow Songs.” In the former, Du Bois challenged the notion of racial inferiority by claiming that he could sit with Shakespeare, Dumas, and Balzac. As one of the best educated Americans of his day, this was no idle boast. In the other essay, he gave voice to the idea that just because a people had been emancipated it did not mean that they were free. In these words, one can hear the dawning of a new voice, one that would reach a crescendo in the civil rights incantations of Martin Luther King, Jr The following are the two excerpts rendered as poetry.

I Sit With Shakespeare (from The Souls of Black Folk)

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not;

I move arm in arm with Balzac and with Dumas,

where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.

From out the caves of evening

that swing between the strong-limbed earth

and the tracery of the stars,

I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will,

and they come with no scorn or condescension.

So, wed with truth, I dwell above the veil,

above the dull red hideousness of Georgia;

and standing upon this high Pisgah,

between Philistine and Amalekite,

I sight the Promised Land.

Free (from The Souls of Black Folk)

Rend the veil and the prisoned shall go free:

free as the sunshine trickling down the morning

into the lavish garden of ours;

free as yonder fresh young voices

welling up from the caverns of brick and mortar below.

Our little children are singing in the sunshine,

swelling with song, instinct with life,

tremulous treble and darkening bass,

and thus they sing:

Let us cheer the weary traveler,

cheer the weary traveler,

let us cheer the weary traveler,

along the heavenly way.

The traveler girds himself,

sets his face toward the morning,

and goes his way.