African American literature: history and themes

African-American Literature

Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks offers the reader glimpses into the heart and mind of black men and women living in the post-reconstruction south when the splendor that had resided especially in the cotton market, had all but disappeared. The disappearance of the cotton market left in its wake thousands of black men and women the legacy of the laborers that built the place still laboring and still slaves to the land and the landlord. In Chapter 7 "Of The Black Belt" Du Bois describes an area in the south that is filled with black people mostly renting land from the heirs of fine plantations, the heirs who all had better places to be but still collect rents that equal a man's annual wages if they do not exceed them. The epigraph of the chapter the song "Bright Sparkles" references grave goods associated with the African tradition of leaving shards of broken glass and such on the graves of ancestors. The song describes deliverance, deliverance to the arms of a figurative mother, a mother they were separated from as small children, their slave mother or in some ways possibly their mother land Africa. Such deliverance might seem the only deliverance available to a man or woman who labors for their whole lifetime with nothing but debt to show for it. One striking example in the text is that of a question that Du Bois and his fellow travelers pose to a sharecropper living in former penal colony housing;

A dismal place it still remains, with rows of ugly huts filled with surly ignorant tenants. "What rent do you pay here?" I inquired. "I don't know, -- what is it, Sam?" "All we make," answered Sam. It is a depressing place, -- bare, unshaded, with no charm of past association, only a memory of forced human toil, -- now, then, and before the war. They are not happy, these black men whom we meet throughout this region. There is little of the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are won't to associate with the plantation Negro… (95)

Du Bois on his tour of the region finds countless laborers who tell a similar tale that they have worked for many years and continue to work on land that is not their own with rented mules and broken spirits. One man rented a mule worth $40 for $20 dollars a year. (94) To Du Bois the whole scene the desperation and unhappiness of it served as an undercurrent of desolate sadness, small joys found in raising children and sometimes being able to afford to educate them are little consolation for a man who has nothing.

He had worked here twelve years and has nothing but a mortgaged mule. Children? Yes, seven; but they hadn't been to school this year, -- couldn't afford books and clothes, and couldn't spare their work. There go part of them to the fields now, -- three big boys astride mules, and a strapping girl with bare brown legs. Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there; -- these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred. (96)

The challenges are according to Du Bois so extreme that there is little consolation, a system that is entirely unforgiving, willing to take everything from a man when his boss refuses to pay his wages and debt comes due.

Du Bois also develops significant and telling analogies one of which describes the region as the Egypt of the confederacy, the undergirding analogy of the "black belt" a land with great historical significance none of which is of any value to those living on it today. (93) "The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction, -- and now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation's weal or woe?" (92-93) The message is a strong sentiment describing the history of the place, the remnants of fences and homes once opulent and plush, though not enjoyed by the laborers, still indicative of care and prosperity, now only a skeleton of history rotting into the ground or roughly rebuilt to house a worker who simply has nowhere else to go. "I think I never before quite realized the place of the Fence in civilization. This is the Land of the Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty. Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences." (89) The whole tour of the region offers a look at what Du Bois saw as the center of slavery, the seat of the south, and the ideal of the peculiar institution which to his day was still reaping its taxes on the backs of its laborers and their offspring. The message is clear, there is no joy left and what little bits one finds are exceptions still eking out happiness and minimal prosperity, often when offered a hand up by a kindly white person some years back, a white person whose kindness rarely passed a generation. "His master helped him to get a start, but when the black man died last fall the master's sons immediately laid claim to the estate." (94)