Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

Glossary

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"The Servant in the House": An essay on domestic service, titled after Charles Rann Kennedy's 1908 Broadway play in which Christ appears disguised as a household servant. Du Bois traces domestic work's origins as a direct legacy of slavery, notes that it was in 1920 the largest single employer of Black women, and argues for the essential dignity of service work against the era's tendency to treat it as inherently degrading. It is followed by the short story "Jesus Christ in Texas."; Related: Jesus Christ in Texas, The Damnation of Women

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A Hymn to the Peoples: The verse that closes Darkwater, following "The Comet": a prayer-like "Truce of God" invoking "the primal meeting of the Sons of Man" and "the mighty human rainbow of the world—Pale and black, tawny, red and brown," asking that "war and hatred cease" and that humanity's shared guilt be met with a shared reckoning. It stands as the book's final answer to the racial violence and imperial cruelty catalogued across the essays that precede it.; Related: The Comet
A Litany at Atlanta: A call-and-response prayer, structured as verses answered by congregational refrains such as "Hear us, good Lord!", that Du Bois wrote in the immediate aftermath of the September 1906 Atlanta race riot, in which white mobs killed Black residents over several days. It closes "The Shadow of Years," Du Bois's autobiographical chapter, and is Darkwater's clearest instance of the litany as a devotional form — a lament that interrogates a God whose silence Du Bois will not let pass unquestioned: "Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord."; Related: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, The Veil, The Prayers of God

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Children of the Moon: The long dream-vision poem closing "The Damnation of Women": a woman's spirit is carried to a twilight land of huddled, fearful Black men with no women among them, where she discovers mothers and children laboring and dying underground to raise a tower toward a veiled, winged face at its summit. She climbs the tower herself and, on finally beholding the face of Freedom, dies — binding sacrifice, motherhood, and liberation into a single image.; Related: The Damnation of Women
Credo: Du Bois's prose-poem creed, structured as a series of "I believe" statements: belief in the Negro race's "beauty of genius" and "sweetness of soul," in pride of race and lineage, in service as worship ("Work is Heaven, Idleness Hell"), in liberty and the right to vote, in the training of children, and against "the Devil" who works to narrow the opportunity of struggling human beings. First published independently in 1904 before Darkwater collected it, it establishes the book's essay-and-verse register from its opening pages.; Related: Postscript

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East St. Louis Massacre: In "Of Work and Wealth," Du Bois gives a direct, unflinching account of the events of July 1917 in East St. Louis, Illinois, where white mobs — many competing for industrial jobs with Black migrants newly arrived from the South — killed Black residents, burned homes, and drove thousands from the city. Du Bois frames the massacre not as an isolated atrocity but as the logical, terrible outcome of the wartime Great Migration colliding with organized labor's refusal to admit Black workers and a national refusal to treat Black workers' needs as legitimate. He writes of riding past its ruins the next day, past "the bones of dead men new-bleached" in streets "almost wet with blood."; Related: The Great Migration, Of Work and Wealth, The Second Coming

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Jesus Christ in Texas: A short story closing the "'The Servant in the House'" essay: Christ arrives in Waco, Texas, disguised as a Black convict under the system of convict leasing, in which prisoners — disproportionately Black men arrested on pretextual charges — were leased out to private interests as forced labor. Du Bois uses the disguise to indict a professedly Christian society that would crucify Christ again without recognizing him, so long as he appeared in Black skin and prison clothes.; Related: "The Servant in the House"

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Of Beauty and Death: A personal essay that moves between a meditation on wartime death and sacrifice — asking whether dying beautifully for a cause redeems it — and an unsparing, almost procedural catalogue of daily Jim Crow indignities: refused service, segregated waiting rooms, and the "Jim-Crow" railroad car crowded up by the baggage compartment. Du Bois asks whether beauty and dignity can survive at all for a people living inside the Veil, and answers with both the physical beauty of the Maine coast and the corrosive, cumulative injury of daily racial insult. It closes with "The Prayers of God."; Related: The Veil, The Prayers of God
Of the Ruling of Men: Du Bois's theory of democracy: a history of how the Enlightenment promise of universal suffrage was captured first by industrial capital and then by imperial power, and an argument that no government can be called a true democracy while women, workers, and colonized peoples remain excluded from rule. It is followed by "The Call," a parable of a woman who answers God's call to battle because no man will.; Related: The Damnation of Women, Of Work and Wealth
Of Work and Wealth: An essay built from Du Bois's years teaching sociology at Atlanta University, using the concrete case of East St. Louis to work through the era's central economic questions: the wartime Great Migration of Black labor north, the refusal of organized white labor to admit Black workers, and the massacre that resulted when that refusal turned to mob violence. Du Bois argues that no just redistribution of the world's wealth is possible while some workers — chiefly Black, brown, and Asian — are excluded in advance from the category of people whose wants deserve to be met. It is followed by "The Second Coming."; Related: East St. Louis Massacre, The Great Migration, The Second Coming

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Postscript: Du Bois's brief opening note, explaining the book's alternation of essay and verse — "between the sterner flights of logic... some little alightings of what may be poetry" — and situating his own vantage point: "I have been in the world, but not of it... I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner." Written in 1919, just after the First World War, as Du Bois turned fifty.; Related: Credo, The Veil

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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: The Black British composer (1875–1912) whose life and early death frame "The Immortal Child." Du Bois presents him as an artist who, sensing the "vaster tragedy" of Black history through his own experience, turned to the sorrow songs and to the example of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in search of material equal to that tragedy — an embodiment, for Du Bois, of why Black genius requires a wide rather than narrow education to flourish.; Related: The Immortal Child, The Sorrow Songs

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The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot: A multi-day eruption of white mob violence against Black residents of Atlanta in September 1906, touched off by unverified newspaper reports of assaults on white women. Du Bois, then teaching at Atlanta University, wrote "A Litany at Atlanta" in its immediate aftermath; the riot is one of the formative events in the autobiographical account he gives of his own life in "The Shadow of Years."; Related: A Litany at Atlanta
The Break with Booker T. Washington: Du Bois's account, in "The Shadow of Years," of his growing opposition to Booker T. Washington's accommodationist strategy and narrow, industrial model of Black education — a rift that began at a small 1905 meeting near Niagara Falls and hardened at a second meeting at Harper's Ferry, and that the outside world, Du Bois notes bitterly, dismissed as mere personal jealousy against "a great man." The organizing that grew out of this break led directly to the founding of the NAACP.; Related: The NAACP and The Crisis, The Immortal Child
The Comet: Du Bois's proto-science-fiction short story, closing the book. A Black bank messenger, sent alone into a bank's lower vault, survives a comet's poison gas that appears to have killed every other person in New York City. For a few suspended hours he and a wealthy white woman he finds alive are, in the emptied city, each other's only equal — until the white survivors of her circle return and the old racial order reasserts itself almost instantly, down to a near-lynching averted only because he had visibly saved her. The story is followed by "A Hymn to the Peoples," the book's closing prayer for the union of all races.; Related: A Hymn to the Peoples, The Souls of White Folk
The Damnation of Women: Du Bois's feminist essay, opening with four women of his boyhood — his mother, a cousin, a childhood friend, and a white outcast — whom he uses to frame slavery's systematic destruction of Black marriage and motherhood, including families broken by sale and women denied any legal control over their own children. He argues that the decorative, passive destiny advertised for white women was never available to Black women, who instead were "asked to be no more beautiful than God made them" but expected to labor, and insists that women's full economic and sexual freedom — not the ballot alone — is the real feminist demand. The essay closes with "Children of the Moon," a dream-vision poem of flight and sacrifice.; Related: Children of the Moon, Of the Ruling of Men, "The Servant in the House"
The Discovery of Personal Whiteness: Du Bois's phrase, in "The Souls of White Folk," for what he identifies as a distinctly modern invention: "the discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed." He argues that earlier eras regarded skin color with comparative indifference, and that the elevation of whiteness into "the ownership of the earth forever and ever" was manufactured to justify colonial exploitation and to paper over the West's failures of religion, honor, and democracy.; Related: The Souls of White Folk, The First World War as a War of Empire
The First World War as a War of Empire: The central argument of "The Souls of White Folk": that the First World War was not a sudden moral collapse of European civilization but its true face revealed — the eruption of decades of competition among the great powers for control of Africa's and Asia's labor and raw materials. Du Bois writes that the war's real cause was the "jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races," and warns that without an end to that exploitation the war would prove only "the beginning" of a larger reckoning.; Related: The Souls of White Folk, The Discovery of Personal Whiteness
The Great Migration: In "Of Work and Wealth," Du Bois traces the wartime movement of Black Southerners north to industrial jobs that opened when the First World War cut off the usual flow of European immigrant labor. He describes the migrants as fleeing poverty, disfranchisement, and lynching, only to meet the resentment of white workers who feared for their wages and their unions' hard-won gains — a resentment Du Bois shows curdling, in East St. Louis, into mob violence.; Related: East St. Louis Massacre, Of Work and Wealth
The Immortal Child: Du Bois's essay on education, framed by the life and early death, at thirty-seven, of the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Du Bois argues that every child — "of all races and all colors" — is the true end toward which civilization ought to build, and argues against the narrow industrial training favored by Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee model, insisting instead on an education wide enough to produce artists and thinkers, not only laborers. It is followed by "Almighty Death," an elegy for the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.; Related: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, The Sorrow Songs, The Break with Booker T. Washington
The NAACP and The Crisis: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its magazine, which Du Bois helped found in 1909 and 1910 respectively and where he served as editor. In "The Shadow of Years" he describes their founding as the fulfillment of ambitions he had held since boyhood — to lead an organization fighting for the race and to edit a paper speaking directly to and for Black readers — and dates the writing of Darkwater itself to the vantage point of his fiftieth birthday, looking back on that work.; Related: The Break with Booker T. Washington, A Litany at Atlanta
The Pan-African Congress: In "The Hands of Ethiopia," Du Bois lays out the case for Pan-Africanism around the Pan-African Congress he helped convene in Paris in 1919, timed to coincide with the postwar peace conference. He argues that Africa's peoples, having been exploited for war material and colonial revenue, deserve a voice in deciding their own governance, and proposes that the conquered German colonies form the nucleus of an internationally administered African state directed toward eventual self-rule. The essay is followed by "The Princess of the Hither Isles."; Related: The Proposed African World State, The Princess of the Hither Isles, The First World War as a War of Empire
The Prayers of God: The dramatic-monologue poem closing "Of Beauty and Death," spoken in the voice of a lyncher who at last confronts the God he has wronged directly, seeking forgiveness for a violence he can no longer justify to himself. Like "A Litany at Atlanta," it uses devotional form — prayer addressed upward — to indict devotional hypocrisy rather than to offer comfort.; Related: Of Beauty and Death, A Litany at Atlanta
The Princess of the Hither Isles: A prose parable closing "The Hands of Ethiopia": a princess, throned in a cold and swampy land, is courted by a wealthy "king of Yonder Kingdom" who offers her his gold but recoils in contempt when she is drawn instead toward a poor Black beggar in whose face alone she sees reflected the light and understanding of the sun itself. When she finally offers her heart to the beggar, the white king strikes it from her hand with his sword rather than allow the union — and she leaps toward the sun regardless.; Related: The Pan-African Congress
The Proposed African World State: Du Bois's concrete Pan-African proposal in "The Hands of Ethiopia": that the former German colonies in Africa, rather than being redistributed among the victorious European powers, become the founding territory of an internationally governed African state, administered toward eventual independence on the same principle of self-determination the Allied powers had proclaimed for European nations like Poland and Ireland. He calls it, if realized, the first recognition in the modern world "that black men are human."; Related: The Pan-African Congress
The Riddle of the Sphinx: The verse that closes "The Souls of White Folk," addressed to a "dark daughter of the lotus leaves" and building to a catalogue of empire's crimes — "the white world's vermin and filth," its theft, murder, and "barter of women" — before prophesying that the peoples who "raised the boasters" to power will one day "drag them down again." It closes on a vision of a "black Christ" born to redeem "manhood... yellow or black or white."; Related: The Souls of White Folk
The Second Coming: A prose parable closing "Of Work and Wealth": three bishops — white, Black, and Japanese — are separately and mysteriously summoned to Valdosta, Georgia, on the eve of Christmas, where Christ is reborn as a Black infant to a white mother, attended by all three faiths. The white bishop of New York recoils in disgust on seeing that the child is Black, even as unearthly music rises around them — Du Bois's staging of professed Christian universalism colliding with the reflexive color line.; Related: Of Work and Wealth, East St. Louis Massacre
The Sorrow Songs: In "The Immortal Child," Du Bois recalls how the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, sensing "the vaster tragedy" of Black history through "the fainter shadowings of his own life," turned early to the sorrow songs — the spirituals Du Bois had earlier named and analyzed at length in The Souls of Black Folk — seeking in them a "masterpiece of this world-tragedy" he could set to music. The mention is brief but pointed: it ties Coleridge-Taylor's art directly to the same body of song Du Bois elsewhere calls the singular creative gift of the enslaved.; Related: The Immortal Child, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
The Souls of White Folk: The book's most forceful essay, in which Du Bois argues that "the discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing," a nineteenth- and twentieth-century invention rather than an ancient or natural category. He traces how this new "religion of whiteness" organized the imperial scramble for Africa and Asia, and argues that the First World War was the predictable eruption of the same supremacy that had carved up the colonized world for profit. The essay closes with "The Riddle of the Sphinx," a long verse indictment of empire's cruelty.; Related: The Discovery of Personal Whiteness, The First World War as a War of Empire, The Riddle of the Sphinx
The Veil: Darkwater's central recurring metaphor, carried forward from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and given an even more explicit, structural role here — the book's own subtitle is Voices from Within the Veil. In "Of Beauty and Death" Du Bois writes that the Veil "drops as drops the night on southern seas—vast, sudden, unanswering," standing "between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White, between You and Me"; in "The Shadow of Years" he recalls teachers at Fisk who felt themselves "some shadow of the Veil" and lifted it gently for their students to peer through. Where Souls of Black Folk introduced the Veil chiefly through the psychological frame of double consciousness, Darkwater treats it as an already-settled fact of Black life that each essay writes from within, rather than a discovery each essay has to make anew.; Related: Of Beauty and Death, A Litany at Atlanta, The Souls of White Folk