W.E.B. Du Bois

The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things.

The things evidently borrowed from the surrounding world undergo characteristic change when they enter the mouth of the slave.

Of death the Negro showed little fear, but talked of it familiarly and even fondly as simply a crossing of the waters, perhaps—who knows?—back to his ancient forests again.

Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little of wooing and wedding; the rocks and the mountains are well known, but home is unknown.

Over the inner thoughts of the slaves and their relations one with another the shadow of fear ever hung, so that we get but glimpses here and there, and also with them, eloquent omissions and silences.

Like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature’s heart.

The words that are left to us are not without interest, and, cleared of evident dross, they conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.

The ten master songs I have mentioned tell in word and music of trouble and exile, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the End.

Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.

In these songs, I have said, the slave spoke to the world.

The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the…