Forethought
Du Bois introduces his project: 'leaving, then, the world of the white and of the black, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses.'
Read in Books4Free →The Veil
From The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Du Bois's central metaphor for the racial separation between Black and white America, a barrier through which Black Americans see but are not fully seen.
Chapter 1: Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Recounts his childhood realization of the veil when a white schoolgirl refused his visiting card: '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.'
Read in Books4Free →Chapter 11: Of the Passing of the First-Born
His infant son's death prompts the haunting line that the child escaped the veil: 'Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.'
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