pause. Racism was born out of an impulse similar to, though wildly perverted from, that which led to the formation of folk-soul: namely, the desire to create cohesion, belonging, and national identity. In the case of racism, however, essentialist categories of race and identity led the proponents of folk-soul to create pyramids of domination, with their own racial group at the peak.101
As I see it, this leap into the mire of modern racism represented an idolatrous caricature and misrepresentation of soul. When the soul is dragged through the dirty waters of racism, we end up with a perversion of the concept, a notion that shares hardly anything with the classic view of the soul in Christianity and very little with the views of soul among the best of the romantics and modernists. In these latter instances, as in the work of Du Bois, Lorca, or Ellison, folk-soul is the scourge of materialism, possessive individualism, cultural elitism, and discrimination.102 It is a communal value that seeks to preserve the spiritual treasures of culture even as it invokes a radical and transformative future.
The Power of Blackness
In the best understandings, the vision of soul avoided the crude disfigurements of racism and instilled a healthy sense of pride in cultural traditions that had been relegated to the dungeons of history. It tapped into subterranean rivers to water the roots of one’s cultural traditions, turning something once uprooted into a healthy family tree. As Yeats put it, this sort of work amounted to the “calling of the Muses home.”103 When invoking the Muses (daughters of Zeus and the goddess Mnemosyne, or “Memory”), the epic poet was recalling and preserving the stories of old; and when the bard sang his poetry with a lyre—the particular instrument associated with Apollo—the poet effectively joined knowledge of the past (a gift of the Muses) with a seer-like knowledge of the future (associated with Apollo).104 In this construction, words and odes, melodies, and stories all play a key role in defining a people’s past and future: where they have come from and where they are going.
It was a “homecoming” of this sort that motivated Du Bois—and later cultural nationalists—to write essays paying homage to what black folks had endured and overcome in America. Resisting attempts to silence and bury black memories in an unmarked grave of dishonor, he exhumed the memory of the dead not only to rewrite the American past, but also to prophesy a more just future. Through this reconstruction of American identity—now with the souls of black folks haunting any portrait of life in the United States—Du Bois gave the American experiment a new element to test: the “power of blackness.” Though this was Melville’s expression—spoken in tribute to Hawthorne’s tragic sensibility—Du Bois called this element “home” and made it epitomize the plight of African peoples throughout the globe. In so doing, Du Bois rebaptized the “power of blackness,” plunging it into dark waters and branding it with the mark of the runaway slave, exploited sharecropper, or urban indigent. The meaning of “soul” was transfigured, not in dazzling lightness, but in darker shades, as if it had been suddenly pulled through the mud and dirt like the face of the blind beggar when Jesus smeared mud on him (John 9:1–7) or when Jacob wrestled with God in the dirt by the river Jabbok (Gen. 32:24–32).
Whereas in Hawthorne’s and Melville’s writings “the power of blackness” was synonymous with a seer-like vision of evil, passed on to them by their sin-obsessed Puritan ancestors, for Du Bois it was the power of actual black lives to scale mountains of injustice and oppression. Du Bois did not deny the existential account; he simply broadened it to include the untold stories of those on the dark side of the veil; in effect, he added a “thick description” to Melville’s vision. Through his eyes this concept became a trope of artistic and cultural achievement in the face of centuries of abuse and enslavement. Black soul was the rising phoenix out of the ashes of conquest and affliction, the strange fruit that bloomed in the most blighted of conditions. By fleshing out the meaning of “soul” and “blackness” in relation to the specific experiences and achievements of black folks in America, Du Bois added a certain depth and richness to these terms that was lacking in even the best American Gothic writers.
At the same time, there is something more to this portrait of blackness that takes us beyond the urbane and highbrow genius of Du Bois, deeper into the heart of the profane. In honor of Leslie Fiedler or Melville, we might call this the Faustian path of soul, or in honor of Lorca, the way of duende, or for hip-hop, the raw, vernacular version of soul.105 In each case, the path of soul requires us to swerve from piety and polished erudition to travel into more dangerous and forbidden domains of human experience. In straying from orthodox paths in this way, we open ourselves to the wilder, funkier, and more eccentric possibilities of soul, something closer to the streetwise imagination of Jean-Michel Basquiat than the classic mind of a Michelangelo, closer to the gritty, vulgar insights of hip-hop than a Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Richard Wagner. In confining our search for soul to conventional piety or classical music and art, we risk lulling the creative imagination to sleep and consequently neglecting the moments of clarity and beauty that happen in surprising and unexpected locations: in the boisterous and crowded realities of urban life, in riotous and insolent music, in forbidden dances, and in strange and raucous thoughts. It could be that the blasts of noise in orthodox traditions—dreary dogmatics, hypocritical piety, and repressive righteousness—drone on and prevent us from hearing new sounds or from seeing the pied beauty in “all things counter, original, spare, strange.”106
In the modern era the legacy of spiritual, aesthetic, and moral revolt—inspired by the example of Jesus in his agitation with religious authorities—finds many disciples in America, including figures as disparate as Melville and Du Bois, Howlin’ Wolf and Tupac. In their flirtations with blackness, the traditional patterns of soul are battered and smashed, then suddenly reconstituted again to make something truly original and unforeseen. Based on their examples, exile from society and conventional institutions is not only a handicap; it may lead to unique possibilities in perception, vision, or experience. Melville’s Ishmael describes these possibilities thus—“a long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery”—and then adds, “I myself am a savage.”107 By identifying a dimension of savagery within his own being, he essentially establishes his likeness to everyone beyond the pale of the civilized world. Like his namesake in the Bible (the biblical Ishmael is exiled along with his African mother, Hagar), Melville’s Ishmael will wander the earth with other exiles and savages and come to the realization that they all share the same humanity. In the course of his unlikely relationship with Queequeg (the tattooed heathen called “Son of Darkness” by Captain Bildad), Ishmael reaches the conclusion that this “wild idolater,” worshipper of a black god, is nothing less than his fellow man, to whom his respect and love are owed: “Consequently,” he concludes, “I must unite with him in his (religion); ergo, I must turn idolater.”108 Rebellious syllogisms of this kind—a mutiny against the legal and moral laws of his day and an embrace of outcast lives and estranged sensibilities—are the basis for Melville’s own judgment that he had written a wicked book.109
In this reading, if one attained the power of soul, it would be achieved by mirroring the human cargo of Melville’s ship, freighted as it was with the meanest sailors and savages, renegades and castaways, maroons and rogues (including an American Indian, a Zoroastrian, a Polynesian, an African, black Americans, Quakers, etc.). Soul in Melville would thus contain the whole cosmos; it would be one of the roughs and have its helm and rudder steered by tattooed heathens and sons of darkness. In archetypal American fashion, the soul would become a melting pot for the lives of many people, refined and coarse, graceful and rowdy, with this legion of styles gelling into one, while still allowing space for each one’s unique flavor.
In rummaging through the nether parts of the human soul in these ways and allowing ourselves to be schooled by the renegades and castaways of social and religious life, we naturally enter a battleground on which a life and death struggle ensues with the problem of evil, or in Job-like fashion, with God; this, too, is part of the power of blackness. In this case, the most profound quests of the soul depend on the spirit’s capacity
