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In: African American Writers·Biographies·Essays, Letters & Speeches
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #15210.
Darkwater is a collection of essays, poems, and reflections that W. E. B. Du Bois assembled in 1919 to give voice to the “inner torment of souls” he perceives in the Black experience. The opening pages frame the work as a meditation on the universal concerns of humanity, beauty, death, war, and reason, while insisting that his perspective is “in the world, but not of it.” He promises to revisit themes already treated by “great souls,” adding his own half‑tone to the ongoing dialogue about race, labor, and spirituality. The table of contents, with sections such as “The Souls of White Folk,” “The Hands of Ethiopia,” and “The Damnation of Women,” signals a broad sweep across history, politics, and personal memory, all anchored in the author’s own family saga that stretches from a 1787 Revolutionary soldier to his own childhood in post‑Emancipation New England.
The voice is unmistakably that of a scholar‑poet steeped in the intellectual currents of the early twentieth‑century Harlem Renaissance. Du Bois blends rigorous sociopolitical analysis with lyrical prose, moving fluidly between historical narrative, theological confession, and poetic fragment. Readers who appreciate a blend of academic insight and literary experimentation, particularly those interested in African‑American history, race relations, and the moral philosophy of the period, will find Darkwater rewarding. Its layered style, rich with allusions to contemporary journals and a personal credo, invites a patient, reflective audience rather than those seeking a straightforward narrative.
The opening · free to read
These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death and War. To this thinking I have only to add a point of view: I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm within. From this inner torment of souls the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways. For this reason, and this alone, I venture to write again on themes on which great souls have already said greater words, in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.
Between the sterner flights of logic, I have sought to set some little alightings of what may be poetry. They are tributes to Beauty, unworthy to stand alone; yet perversely, in my mind, now at the end, I know not whether I mean the Thought for the Fancy--or the Fancy for the Thought, or why the book trails off to playing, rather than standing strong on unanswering fact. But this is alway--is it not?--the Riddle of Life.
Many of my words appear here transformed from other publications and I thank the Atlantic, the Independent, the Crisis, and the Journal of Race Development for letting me use them again.
W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS. New York, 1919.
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