Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,—that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond.
Describing his journey south, Du Bois characterizes the "Black Belt" as a place of historical suffering and ongoing isolation.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
Thus we have two great and hardly reconcilable streams of thought and ethical strivings; the danger of the one lies in anarchy, that of the other in hypocrisy.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.