W.E.B. Du Bois

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.

Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.

To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.

Then in after years when I came to Nashville I saw the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city.

They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.

Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely.

And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men.

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart.

And all the time he had meant right,—and yet, and yet, somehow he found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about him.

If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard,—aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility, without the cruel hurt that hardened his heart and soul.

Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going; since many of the richer and brighter seemed hurrying all one way.

A tinge of sarcasm crept into his speech, and a vague bitterness into his life; and he sat long hours wondering and planning a way around these crooked things.