From the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows bear him away to the land of slaves.
W.E.B. Du Bois: “From the low doorway the mother silently watched her boy at play, and at nightfall sought him eagerly lest the shadows…”
Editor's note · Context
This passage from The Souls of Black Folk illustrates a mother's profound fear for her child's safety, haunted by the specter of slavery.
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The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him.
Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.