To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites.
This passage illustrates the profound hope and expectation that enslaved African Americans placed on emancipation as a deliverance from all suffering.
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Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.
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.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.