The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering.
In his exploration of Black American life, Du Bois describes the bewildering experience of a generation for whom slavery was a distant memory.
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If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.