Golden Apples

There were a lot of big and interesting ideas in the excerpts of The Souls of Black Folk that we read. I feel like these chapters brought together a lot of ideas on which we’ve been working. Doubleness appeared often – not just between the Veil and the other world, but in the divergence of religious belief, between the educated and the tradesman, between the North and South. [In this vein it is also interesting that DuBois picked a poem by Fiona Macleod, a pen name of William Sharp’s. I couldn’t find if DuBois knew it was a pen name or not, but either way, it adds another element of doubleness.]“To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward radicalism, the other toward hypocritical compromise.”  This categorization of southern blacks tending towards ‘hypocritical compromise’ and crime seemed odd. DuBois writes a little later in ‘Of the Faith of Our Fathers,’ “Under the lax moral life of the plantation, where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime.” I can’t tell if DuBois is focusing on the reasoning of ex-slaves versus those who have always been free, or if he is asserting that ex-slaves/Southern Negros are predisposed to crime.

The decline of the slave-supported economy in the South also demonstrates some doubleness, this time between the ex-slaves and ex-owners, and the quest for freedom versus for ‘gold.’ “The South laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro,–the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his incorruptible honesty and dignified humility. He is passing away just as surely as the old type of Southern gentleman is passing, and from not dissimilar causes…” DuBois’s focuses on the ‘Negro’ and the ‘Southern gentleman’ of the past through the lens of earning money. He attributes the changes seen in the ‘Negro’ and the ‘Southern gentleman’ to  “the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread.” Freedom used to be the religion to which slaves subscribed, but post-slavery competition with white men/other black men for jobs and money have become more important. When DuBois discusses Atlanta (as a microcosm for race in America), he worries that it will go the way of Atalanta, who resisted the temptation of gold twice, but not the third time, and was defeated. (“How dire a danger lies before a new land and a new city, lest Atlanta, stooping for mere gold, shall find that gold accursed!”) “What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?” I feel like DuBois can’t be totally condemning the newly freed black man’s desire to make money and improve his life. I think his issue is with greed – ‘mannonism’ – and abandonment of virtues/ideal in that pursuit. DuBois brings attention to the fact that freedom has been replaced by money in the dream of black Americans, and the changes that brings. Being enslaved wasn’t idyllic – its dreams, social structures, and survival strategies were different.