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Chapter 3

Raising the Veil: Racial Divides and Ethnographic Crossings in The Souls of Black Folk

Objectivity, Authority, and Epistemologies of Difference

Like Franz Boas, W. E. B. Du Bois profoundly helped shape modern American thought on race and culture. As I have already mentioned, Du Bois’s 1897 speech “The Conservation of the Races” was a landmark moment in the development of cultural pluralism. Biographer David Levering Lewis credits Du Bois with first articulating the principles of cultural pluralism in this speech to the American Negro Academy, long before the terminology to describe cultural pluralism even existed.¹ Lewis writes:

The writings of James and Dewey would point the way for the “cultural radicals,” the pluralists of the near future, but the boldest signpost was first erected by Du Bois when he asked rhetorically of the seventeen attentive men in the Washington church: “[W]hat after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my Black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?” (172)

In asking these questions, he began to unravel notions of citizenship and national identity, work that would contribute to a project of making America more inclusive and pluralistic. I will go on in this chapter to argue that Du Bois would prove to be a driving force in the New Negro movement, not only as a theorist of race and culture, but also as a literary figure. But in order for me to argue for his influence as a theoretician and social scientist, we must consider how the disciplines of anthropology and sociology paralleled each other at a time when both he and Boas embarked on their careers. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, sociology, like anthropology, broke with the less professional standards of writing upheld by earlier generations, by emphasizing empiricism and objectivity as proof of the disciplines’ scientific legitimacy.² Each centered on the study of “primitive” societies—abroad in the case of anthropology and at home in the case of sociology—with ethnography functioning as a privileged mode of inquiry.³

Trained at Harvard primarily as a philosopher, historian, and political scientist, Du Bois acquired the skills and methodological approach necessary to conduct the empirical research that informed his earliest writings during his years at the University of Berlin (1892–94). Although he considered majoring in philosophy at Harvard, he eventually studied history because his professors warned him of the impracticality of the philosophy major, particularly for an individual committed to the work of racial uplift.⁴ When he turned as a graduate student more decisively to the social sciences, buoyed, in part, by his studies at Harvard with the philosopher William James, Du Bois revealed a pragmatist’s concern with the tangible application of ideas to the material world.⁵ The years he spent studying at Humboldt University reinforced this approach. Carved above the university’s entrance was the maxim, “until now philosophers have only explained the world, our task is to change it” (Lewis 142). Under the tutelage of Gustav Schmoller in Berlin, he learned to privilege inductive reasoning and analysis built on objectively accumulated historical and descriptive material. Schmoller “saw the goal of social science as the systematic, causal explanation of social phenomena, and he believed that social scientific facts, based on careful, inductive analysis, could be used as a guide to formulate social policy.”⁶ Until 1910, Du Bois’s sociological works show ample evidence of Schmoller’s influence, including his emphasis on empirical data collection, the use of facts as the basis for creating social policy, an underlying interest in social justice, and an emphasis on an historical approach, of which The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is a stellar example (Lewis 201).

After returning to the States in 1896 and a short stint teaching classics at Wilberforce University, Du Bois was offered a temporary position at the University of Pennsylvania to study the social condition and urban problems of Philadelphia’s African American population. At that time, Philadelphia contained the largest community of African Americans in the North. Du Bois produced a 400-page monograph entitled The Philadelphia Negro, which analyzed the plight of the urban Black using survey and demographic data, much of which Du Bois collected during his stay in the city. Dan Green and Edwin Driver describe his sojourn in Philadelphia, during which he rented a room over a cafeteria in the “worst part” of the Seventh Ward, as an exercise in participant-observation, although the extent of his immersion in neighborhood life is debatable given his displeasure with the rougher element that populated the district. This fifteen-month appointment was followed by his employment at Atlanta University as a professor of economics and history, and as director of the Sociological Laboratory and the Atlanta University Conferences. Between 1897 and 1920, Du Bois took charge of this series of annual sociological conferences, which had been inaugurated in 1896 to study the effect of urban problems on African Americans. He also edited the annual volumes that issued from the conferences and taught a course on sociology. Yet by 1910 he moved away from pure sociology and toward other forms of address and redress, such as fiction, and his activism in the NAACP.⁷

Du Bois’s early commitment to empiricism is uncontested, but the question of whether and if so, when his commitment wavered varies as critics consider the significance of his varied rhetorical strategies and methods in doing anti-racist work. Wilson Moses argues, for example, that Du Bois the scholar initially adopted the discourse of the social sciences because “as a youth Du Bois was romantically involved with the idea of social science, which he naively believed might yield a science of racial advancement.”⁸ To describe this commitment as romantic suggests that Du Bois’s faith in empiricism as a weapon against social injustice was youthfully naïve, an interpretation that resonates with other critics who note that as Du Bois matured and became more aware of the roots of racial inequality, his approach to sociological research changed. Green and Driver note, “beginning in 1901 and continuing until his public split with [Booker T.] Washington in 1903, he was apparently moving through a transition period away from academic science and sociology toward action, agitation, and writing for popular magazines” (19). The lynching of Sam Hose, a Palmetto, Georgia farmer proved especially influential to Du Bois’s diminished belief in the value of inductive reasoning as a tool for social engineering.⁹ He became convinced, they assert, that scientific investigation was not sufficient to solve the problems of Black Americans because the problems were not, as he had initially and idealistically assumed, those of ignorance, but were instead based on the conscious determination of one group to suppress and persecute another.

In contrast, Robert Stepto argues that Du Bois adhered to a scientific language because of his desire for authentication. “He seeks nothing less than a new narrative mode and form in which empirical evidence, scientifically gathered in a literal and figurative field (for example, the Black Belt), performs the authenticating chores previously completed by white opinion.”¹⁰ And Houston Baker underscores Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to scientific observation, stating that “while studying in Berlin under Gustav Schmoller (1892–94), Du Bois came to believe that the solution to the American racial problem was a matter of systematic investigation,’ and throughout his life he was dedicated to critical objectivity—to what Mathew Arnold defined as ‘disinterestedness.’”¹¹

Du Bois’s view of empiricism and inductive reasoning (which he never fully abandoned) is as important as his level of commitment to these methods. Even as a young scholar, his work shows that he reflected on the possibilities and limits of constructing a scientific discourse on race, even as he revealed an acute awareness of the cultural capital that science held. In 1903, when he published The Souls of Black Folk, the reader finds Du Bois wary of an unquestioning embrace of empiricism and even of the possibility of a Negro living a “life of the mind.” Rather than advocating pure science early in his career, which he later retains or discards depending on the critic’s point of view, we can see Du Bois inhabiting the middle ground, at the intersections of thought and action, reason and emotion, scholarship and activism.

Shamoon Zamir’s argument that the empirical and emotional exist dialectically in Du Bois’s body of work introduces an alternative to other critics’ chronological or developmental narratives of Du Bois’s thought on the uses of sociology. Reflecting on the importance of his writing the first chapters of Souls while in the midst of working on The Philadelphia Negro, Zamir identifies a “triumphant” conflict between scientific empiricism and political advocacy, or between “thought and feeling.” He concludes, “if the different approaches represent conflicting understandings, then it is the very contradictions and struggles, not the straightforward triumph of one option over another, that must be accepted as the truth of Du Bois’s thought” (55–56). Dialectical exchange can be seen as the operable mode not only among discrete periods of his career, or texts (Souls and Philadelphia), but also within the singular masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk.¹² Thought and feeling, or science and activism, acquire meaning when we understand one in relation to the other. Du Bois makes evident his awareness of this fact in his layering and piecing together of different discursive traditions.

Race, Marginality, and the Formation of National Communities

The Souls of Black Folk is comprised of twelve essays and one short story, addressing a range of topics from the personal, to the sociological, historical, ethnographic, and political.¹³ According to Gates and West, the breadth of topics and genres mirrors the scope of Du Bois’s accomplishments. They call the book a monumental achievement that charts “the contours of the civilization [the Negro “nation-within-a-nation”]—the arts and sciences, the metaphysical and religious systems, the myths and music, the social and political institutions, the history both before and after Emancipation—that defined a truly African American culture at the outset of the new century.”¹⁴ The work’s expansiveness was necessary for Du Bois to successfully portray Negro “civilization” from both internal and external points of view. Sociology gave him a framework through which he could produce an empirical and historical analysis of the state of Black America. Fiction allowed him to explore the post-emancipation dynamics between the emerging intellectual and professional classes and the masses of Black Southerners; and the “sorrow songs,” as Du Bois called African American spirituals, voice the despair, longings, and hopes of Black people who had been historically silenced and subordinated because of the dual stigmas of color and poverty. In all these discursive moments, Du Bois presents himself as a representative subject who exhibits kinship and solidarity with the oppressed from a shared history of oppression, even as the adoption of the social scientist’s identity in the service of racial uplift and activism produces a tension that threatens to unravel the affiliations he so fiercely maintains.

The Souls of Black Folk is not the first work in which Du Bois experiments with the rhetorical approach of simultaneously representing the Negro from “without” and “within,” although he did not necessarily accomplish this through discursive hybridity, as he does in Souls. In “The Black North in 1901,” he tackles the perception that Black communities in the North are homogenous by twinning his analysis of demographic statistics about social patterns such as domestic configurations and employment statistics with a brief psychological sketch of the “average New York negro” that attempts to describe the emotional and psychic resources on which Black people draw in response to racism. In the essay he observes, “they live and move in a community of their own kith and kin and shrink quickly and permanently from those rough edges where contact with the larger life of the city wounds and humiliates them” (reprinted in Green and Driver 151).¹⁵ This description emphasizes that social contact across interracial lines is obstructed by a racism that can be palpable in its damaging effects. Du Bois states that racism is a force from which the Negro shrinks and retreats into the protective fold of a homogenous community in an act of self-defense. Yet this observation occurs in as essay in which substantial effort has been made to establish the high degree of social, economic, and moral differences among Blacks in New York’s segregated neighborhoods. The incongruous representation of New York Blacks as both heterogeneous and insular suggests that both juxtaposition to and segregation from a dominant group can render a marginalized community cut off and isolated. Rather than positioning Blacks, the domestic U.S. version of the primitive others, as “out of time,” Du Bois underscores the notion that segregation is directly caused by adverse social and historical forces.

Insights such as these were made possible by Du Bois’s multiple allegiances to scholarly and racial communities. Inspired by the liminality of his own subject position, he introduces the symbol of the veil as a figure for the racial divide. The image can also be read as a symbol of the ethnographer as participant-observer. In the “Forethought” of The Souls of Black Folk, he conjures an image of a narrator unique in his ability to move and communicate across the color line: “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (359). This portrait illustrates an ideal relation between ethnographer and audience, characterized by the narrator’s mastery of the nuances of transculturation and the reader’s openness to greater understanding of the racial other, yet it is also a depiction rife with ambivalences. It hints at, for example, the narrator’s liminality through the image of his stepping “within the Veil.” To step within the Veil is to traverse anxiously between, and live partly in, both White and Black worlds, a circumstance that may lend its own insight but that also speaks of alienation. As Houston Baker argues:

The “veil” is Du Bois’s metaphor for what might be thought of as the “edge” of the performative frame, the dissonant rim where safe, colored parochialism is temptingly and provisionally refigured as an anguished mulatto cosmopolitanism. The “veil” hangs in the performative moment like a scrim between dark, pastoral, problematic folk intimacy with black consciousness, and free-floating anxieties of a public mulatto modernism that subjects one to the white “gaze.”¹⁶

That dissonant edge, the performative space inhabited by the cosmopolitan Black (or racially hybrid) modern is also a space of undefined possibility for the audience as much as it is for the narrator. The image of the reader viewing beyond the Veil “faintly” both promises and withholds the possibility of his identifying with the author’s Southern Black subjects. This ambivalence over the narrator’s ability to cross racial boundaries easily, or facilitate the passage of others, is rendered still more complexly in other parts of the book.

Du Bois queries the efficacy of scientific authority, for example, by rendering uncertain the possibility of the scientist (himself included) knowing his subjects fully. His description of the Georgia Black Belt, the “center of the Negro problem,” commences with the narrator aboard a train rumbling through Georgia; its movement across the rural landscape allows the narrator to cover historical ground as well, from the slave trade, to the Cherokee nation’s displacement by the U.S. government, and into the present moment of the plantation system’s dissipation and disappearance. Du Bois’s summons the reader—“If you wish to ride with me you must come into the ‘Jim Crow Car’” —playing with the idea of simultaneous closeness and distance (440). While this invitation holds out the promise of a kind of intimacy that would grow commensurate with the reader’s increased understanding of the Black Belt and proposes the closure of a social divide, it also accurately positions the narrator and Black folk in separate racial camps and social strata from Whites and indicts the nation for its failures to live up to its social contract with the Negro. Du Bois continues, “There will be no objection,—already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white …. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine” (440–41). The inability of the White passengers to share the Negroes’ sense of constraint in movement and choice, limits their ability to truly empathize even as they share the same social space. Consequently, Du Bois’s invitation to the reader to accompany him into the heart of the Black Belt, to delve deeply beneath the layers of history and social customs to arrive at a greater measure of understanding, is accompanied by a subtle reminder of the (white) reader’s privileged social status that constrains his ability to identify with the experience of oppression that is de rigueur for the African American.

The (im)possibility of knowing the racial other deepens in Du Bois’s representation of Albany, Georgia, a typical Southern town whose Negro inhabitants he describes as “black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow” (442).¹⁷ The silence and brooding that Du Bois observes suggest a collective resistance to the clinical gaze of the observer, a wall of reserve erected to fend off the outsider who is the reader; and perhaps Du Bois the social scientist and light-skinned Yankee, despite his repeated claims of affiliation with Southern Black folk. The inscrutability of the masses, their refusal to be “read” as examples of a primitive type, rears up almost simultaneously with the narrator’s assertions of his ability to represent them. And admittedly, it is this same narrator who observes about this landscape and the people who populate it: “How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promises” (447). Such statements make clear that the author’s reservations arise from his sense that the reader will not or cannot adequately discern these individuals’ humanity either through the poverty, disrepair, and despair that overrun their town, or through a totalizing scientific narrative, that would view them as an abstraction known as “the folk.”

The narrative’s shift from an ethnographic perspective to an elegiac one underscores this question by probing the ability of ethnography to adequately represent the Black Belt in all its complexity and prodding the reader to deeper levels of empathy. Du Bois thus moves from a survey of the dilapidated cabins, to a brief historical meditation, to a lyrical recounting of the Negroes’ arrival in the American South:

Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. (448)

The portrait being drawn here, with its sentimental tenor, gothic images of enslavement, and hints at cultural richness yet to be discovered (“the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew”), differs strikingly from the earlier description of Black Belt inhabitants as “black, sturdy, uncouth country folk.” The almost seamless narrative’s transition from “clinical” observation to sentimental lyricism and grand mythmaking mirrors the perspectives of the narrator and reader, outsiders working to achieve a measure of closeness to the subjects under observation. As Hazel Carby argues, “In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s initial premise was that black people and black cultural forms did not exist in opposition to the national ideals but, on the contrary, embodied those ideals. He thus attempted to rewrite the dominant cultural and political script by transferring the symbolic power of nationalism, of Americanness, into a black cultural field and onto the black male body.”¹⁸

I want to suggest that the Southern Black folk, the narrator, and his readers are all active participants in a narrative whose intent is to make possible the formation of a more pluralistic national community. The narrator and his readers’ passage through the Black Belt is the more obvious in that they are understood to be modern men of reason who use travel to understand and, hopefully, cross social and geographic boundaries. Yet even as the Black Belt inhabitants seem, in contrast, to occupy a typically static position—stuck in a backward society, rooted in tradition—Du Bois produces an alternative reading that underscores the Southern country folk’s passage through time. He emphasizes, in other words, the importance of their temporal progress, their steady, collective march into the future not visible to the outsider unless he is willing to leave behind the comfort of racist ideologies and regimes to join Du Bois on the journey in the “Jim Crow car.”

The challenges posed by African Americans’ social marginalization provided much of the impetus behind Du Bois’s sociological theories and methods. In “The Negroes of Dougherty County, Georgia,” Du Bois described his methods for collecting data: “My first work [in studying small communities] was at Farmville, Virginia. What I did in that case was to go to a typical town and settle down there for a time. I made a census of the town personally, went to the house of each negro family in town, and tried to find out as much as I could about the general situation of things in that town” (reprinted in Green and Driver 154). Here he suggests settling within and blending into a community results in more acute observations; in Souls it allows for an empathetic linking of the individual and the group, the articulation of racial feeling, and the formation of a racial community. The privileging of communal relations in Souls marks a shift from The Philadelphia Negro, in which Du Bois writes in the voice of “classic social analysts [who] pretend to speak either from a position of omniscience or from no position at all,” to his explicitly positioning himself within a particular social context.¹⁹ Declaring in the Forethought, “need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil?” Du Bois claims a racial and biological affiliation that minimizes the regional, educational, and class differences that distinguished him from the masses of Southern Black slave descendants (209). Where in The Philadelphia Negro he highlights intraracial difference, in this text, written almost contemporaneously, he underscores notions of attachment through kinship.

Stepto argues that “Du Bois’s efforts at binding or combining create expressions of a special unity between ‘we’ and ‘I,’ ‘our’ and ‘my,’ ‘theirs’ and ‘mine,’ that is unquestionably central to the rhetorical and narrative strategies of The Souls and, quite likely, essential to Du Bois’s personal sense of self.”²⁰ This strategy also anticipates the Renaissance project of communal and cultural identity construction. By merging the “I” and the “We,” the individual and the communal, he signals a shift toward the articulation of a common, modern identity emerging from the ashes of slavery. Du Bois turns to the South at a moment when Blacks were beginning to leave the region and its slaveholding legacy in increasingly larger numbers (the trickle he documents will, in a matter of decades, turn into a flood of urban migrants). He documents the development of an expressive culture that held traces of the old and new, the South and the North, the Black and the White. The ongoing importance of these ideas is signaled by the frequent turn by New Negro contributors to the folklore and culture of the African American slaves as a source of artistic inspiration, even as they announce a definitive break from the past.

The Literal and Figurative South

Members of the New Negro Renaissance legitimized the movement’s progressiveness by underscoring the rural, slaveholding South’s setting in the retrograde past; and looking back at the progress narrative intrinsic to the “Hampton Idea,” we can see that this was not a formulation invented by the upwardly mobile African Americans of the 1920s. Du Bois’s response to this impulse, however, was to suggest, through what I call the homecoming trope (in “Of the Coming of John”), that one must first revisit the past in order to move more assuredly into the future.²¹ The reoccurrence of the Southern home as trope in the literature of the period gives weight to Sterling Brown’s observation that Harlem was not the epicenter of the New Negro Renaissance. He insisted, “the New Negro movement had temporal roots in the past and spatial roots elsewhere in America.”²² Houston Baker provocatively suggests, “Modernism’s emphasis falls on the locative—where one is located or placed—in determining how constricted the domain of freedom might be” (Turning South 69–70). Fiction as diverse as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Walter White’s Fire in the Flint (1924), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Langston Hughes’s Ways of White Folk (1933), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) repeat and revise Du Bois’s story of education, migration from, return to, and uplift of Southern homes. These narratives of homecoming and cosmopolitan migration constitute a collective, fictive grappling with both the ethnographic imagination and its implications in the complex relations of the “talented tenth” to the “folk” he or she aspires to represent. Especially at this historical moment, the South represents, according to Baker, “a liminal zone, a middle passage of the imagination, a space of performance, a series of peculiar ‘strips’ of interactive behavior where blackness has played or performed toward the scene of modernity” (36). The South was a symbolic location with which New Negro intellectuals constructed and performed modern Black identities.

The social sciences’ emphasis on fieldwork as a fundamental mode of inquiry established the notion of “the field” as isolated, set apart, and uncorrupted by outside communities.²³ Yet we should not attribute the place of the South in the Renaissance imagination solely to this fact. Because the Southern Black Belt is a central site of analysis for Du Bois he, as much as a figure like Boas, influenced Harlem Renaissance constructions of New Negro identity in relation to the Southern past. Alain Locke extends Du Bois’s thesis when he argues in “The New Negro,” for example, for the recognition of more progressive, assertive, and urban identified Negro, whose advancement was tied to a revaluation of the artistic and cultural roles Southern Blacks have played in the regional and national scenes. What was needed, in other words, for the advancement of the race, was a reassessment of the value of the culture from which it was born:

It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant matrix of that section of American which most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. (15)

Locke’s identification of the Southern “folk” as a point of orientation for the creation of an African American expressive culture corresponds with and is informed by a period in which Black writers absorbed the idea of the “field” as apart from the real and modern present because of their ethnographic training and/or interests.²⁴ In fact, Du Bois’s representation of the Southern Black Belt anticipates the New Negro consumption of anthropological concepts when, in The Souls of Black Folk, he describes a Southern town as a product of the imagination of modern, urbanized Northerners:

Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life so little that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded country district. Now the world has well nigh forgotten what the country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of sand and gloomy soil. (442)

When writing from a distance, whether geographic or experiential, Du Bois suggests descriptions of the other inevitably leave something lacking because the writer endows them with characteristics of the familiar, or relies on easy stereotype. The city dweller, he implies, may aspire to represent “country life,” but her or she may only be able to imagine a “little city” in which the relational geography assumes the characteristics of life in an urban setting, while at the same time imposing on the landscape stock features of associated with the rural: cotton, corn, and gloomy soil.

The irony is that while Du Bois certainly emphasizes the isolation of Southern towns because of historical circumstances (namely racial segregation), he also stressed its status as an ideal study site because the advent of emancipation allowed for the rapid social transformation of a once oppressed group of individuals. In “The Atlanta Conferences” (1904), for example, he wrote:

The careful exhaustive study of the isolated group then is the ideal of the sociologist of the 20th century—from that may come a real knowledge of natural law as locally manifest—a glimpse and revelation of rhythm beyond this little center at last careful, cautious generalization and formulation. For such work there lies before the sociologist of the Untied States a peculiar opportunity. We have here going on before our eyes the evolution of a vast group of men from simpler primitive conditions to higher more complex civilization. (reprinted in Green and Driver 54)