He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.
This passage explores the profound and historically accumulated burden of ignorance, encompassing not just formal education but also practical life skills and cultural knowledge.
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The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom.
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why…
Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.