W.E.B. Du Bois: “It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad.”

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.

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.

But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them.

So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.