LITMIR.BIZ

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      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,

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