But a pall of debt hangs over the beautiful land; the merchants are in debt to the wholesalers, the planters are in debt to the merchants, the tenants owe the planters, and laborers bow and bend beneath the burden of it all.
This passage describes the pervasive system of debt that entrapped various levels of society in the post-Reconstruction South.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.
Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.
So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?
So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.