W.E.B. Du Bois

He walks too straight to be a tenant,—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres.

All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds.

There is little beauty in this region, only a sort of crude abandon that suggests power,—a naked grandeur, as it were.

I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization.

This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty.

Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury.

But now and then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near.

The Wizard of the North—the Capitalist—had rushed down in the seventies to woo this coy dark soil.

So the Waters-Loring plantation was stilled by the spell of dishonesty, and stands like some gaunt rebuke to a scarred land.

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 promise!

In one place the wood is on fire, smouldering in dull red anger; but nobody minds.

Or perhaps, having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts.