My Soul Has Grown Deep Classics of Early African American Literature

INTRODUCTION IT IS A NEW CENTURY. InThe Souls of Black Folk, written as the 19th century ended and the 20th began, W.E.B. DuBois prophesized that the problem for the new/old century we have just escaped would be the problem of the colorline: "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of man in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." To understand if progress has been achieved toward resolution of these race matters, it's necessary to read backward. Place ourselves in the world as W.E.B. DuBois might have understood it, poised at the edge of the unknown, just as we are today, experiencing the transition from one epoch to another, epochs demarcated arbitrarily by 100-year cycles, as if the unknown, the unfathomable configures itself more accessibly, more transparently at such designated junctures. DuBois attempted to gauge the future by looking backward first. In a meditation optimistically entitled "The Dawn of Freedom," he begins the Negro's story in ancient Egypt and brings the tale forward swiftly to concentrate on the last decades of the 19th century, detailing the formation and failure of the Freedman's Bureau, one of the nation's first answers-in-progress to the still unresolved question: How should radically unequal, African-descended ex-slavesimpoverished, landless, stigmatized, disenfranchised, without civil rights, lacking formal education, with little or no previous experience of citizenshipbe incorporated into a society whose announced creed is democracy, a democracy in theory open and fair that guarantees all its citizens an equal opportunity to compete in the struggle for a decent life? Are we closer today to answering this question? How can progress be measured unless we reconstruct and reanimate the past? Put another way, the past is eternally with us, present as the arc of our personal experience follows us, fills us, defines us. Doesn't any step forward depend on invisible footprints anchoring, locating, echoing, connecting, validating the instant motion by rooting it in time? To be visible in time, visible to ourselves, we imagine the unseen, the unseeable, the trail of footprints evaporating behind each step we take. We imagine a narrative, births and deaths, imagine names for immaterial persons, places, things, for lives we may or may not have lived or never lived. Language is one form of this moving, recycling energy driving us forward by directing us back through its museum of invisible footprints, its archeology of traces. Language is a medium for constructing histories, both personal and collective. Written language conjures an appearance, inscribes for us the invisible, the intangible. Words are dreams. A spectral means of perceiving what things are and what they might be. Words dream history. History is the bed where words sleep and awaken and sleep again and dream. When we read history, we don't discover some hard, permanent past; we interrogate our present. Jeopardize it, tease it into instability, experience it as one precarious possibility among many possibilities. Reading history permits us to confront what Ralph Ellison inInvisible Mancalls the "uncertainties that live within our certainties." Writing our stories, writing our lives reveals them as a dream, only as substantial or unsubstantial as the words narrating them. Words resonate and accentuate while they also chip away at each other, just as when we watch a movie or listen to music, the tapestry of one realityscape segues into another. There is no concrete past, no material reality intact, solid, available somewhere for us to dust off and take down off the shelf. History exists as a work in progress, problematic, made up word by word. Even the stories of ancient monuments, like the scattered fragmenWideman, John Edgar is the author of 'My Soul Has Grown Deep Classics of Early African American Literature', published 2002 under ISBN 9780345455666 and ISBN 0345455665.