ethnographer and audience, characterized by the narrator’s mastery of the nuances of transculturation and the reader’s openness to greater understanding of the racial other, yet it is also a depiction rife with ambivalences. It hints at, for example, the narrator’s liminality through the image of his stepping “within the Veil.” To step within the Veil is to traverse anxiously between, and live partly in, both White and Black worlds, a circumstance that may lend its own insight but that also speaks of alienation. As Houston Baker argues:
The “veil” is Du Bois’s metaphor for what might be thought of as the “edge” of the performative frame, the dissonant rim where safe, colored parochialism is temptingly and provisionally refigured as an anguished mulatto cosmopolitanism. The “veil” hangs in the performative moment like a scrim between dark, pastoral, problematic folk intimacy with black consciousness, and free-floating anxieties of a public mulatto modernism that subjects one to the white “gaze.”16
That dissonant edge, the performative space inhabited by the cosmopolitan Black (or racially hybrid) modern is also a space of undefined possibility for the audience as much as it is for the narrator. The image of the reader viewing beyond the Veil “faintly” both promises and withholds the possibility of his identifying with the author’s Southern Black subjects. This ambivalence over the narrator’s ability to cross racial boundaries easily, or facilitate the passage of others, is rendered still more complexly in other parts of the book.
Du Bois queries the efficacy of scientific authority, for example, by rendering uncertain the possibility of the scientist (himself included) knowing his subjects fully. His description of the Georgia Black Belt, the “center of the Negro problem,” commences with the narrator aboard a train rumbling through Georgia; its movement across the rural landscape allows the narrator to cover historical ground as well, from the slave trade, to the Cherokee nation’s displacement by the U.S. government, and into the present moment of the plantation system’s dissipation and disappearance. Du Bois’s summons the reader—“If you wish to ride with me you must come into the ‘Jim Crow Car’” —playing with the idea of simultaneous closeness and distance (440). While this invitation holds out the promise of a kind of intimacy that would grow commensurate with the reader’s increased understanding of the Black Belt and proposes the closure of a social divide, it also accurately positions the narrator and Black folk in separate racial camps and social strata from Whites and indicts the nation for its failures to live up to its social contract with the Negro. Du Bois continues, “There will be no objection,—already four other white men, and a little white girl with her nurse, are in there. Usually the races are mixed in there; but the white coach is all white …. The discomfort lies chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder—and in mine” (440–41). The inability of the White passengers to share the Negroes’ sense of constraint in movement and choice, limits their ability to truly empathize even as they share the same social space. Consequently, Du Bois’s invitation to the reader to accompany him into the heart of the Black Belt, to delve deeply beneath the layers of history and social customs to arrive at a greater measure of understanding, is accompanied by a subtle reminder of the (white) reader’s privileged social status that constrains his ability to identify with the experience of oppression that is de rigueur for the African American.
The (im)possibility of knowing the racial other deepens in Du Bois’s representation of Albany, Georgia, a typical Southern town whose Negro inhabitants he describes as “black, sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow” (442).17 The silence and brooding that Du Bois observes suggest a collective resistance to the clinical gaze of the observer, a wall of reserve erected to fend off the outsider who is the reader; and perhaps Du Bois the social scientist and light-skinned Yankee, despite his repeated claims of affiliation with Southern Black folk. The inscrutability of the masses, their refusal to be “read” as examples of a primitive type, rears up almost simultaneously with the narrator’s assertions of his ability to represent them. And admittedly, it is this same narrator who observes about this landscape and the people who populate it: “How curious a land is this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promises” (447). Such statements make clear that the author’s reservations arise from his sense that the reader will not or cannot adequately discern these individuals’ humanity either through the poverty, disrepair, and despair that overrun their town, or through a totalizing scientific narrative, that would view them as an abstraction known as “the folk.”
The narrative’s shift from an ethnographic perspective to an elegiac one underscores this question by probing the ability of ethnography to adequately represent the Black Belt in all its complexity and prodding the reader to deeper levels of empathy. Du Bois thus moves from a survey of the dilapidated cabins, to a brief historical meditation, to a lyrical recounting of the Negroes’ arrival in the American South:
Then came the black slaves. Day after day the clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoed from the Flint to the Chickasawhatchee, until by 1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. (448)
The portrait being drawn here, with its sentimental tenor, gothic images of enslavement, and hints at cultural richness yet to be discovered (“the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew”), differs strikingly from the earlier description of Black Belt inhabitants as “black, sturdy, uncouth country folk.” The almost seamless narrative’s transition from “clinical” observation to sentimental lyricism and grand mythmaking mirrors the perspectives of the narrator and reader, outsiders working to achieve a measure of closeness to the subjects under observation. As Hazel Carby argues, “In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s initial premise was that black people and black cultural forms did not exist in opposition to the national ideals but, on the contrary, embodied those ideals. He thus attempted to rewrite the dominant cultural and political script by transferring the symbolic power of nationalism, of Americanness, into a black cultural field and onto the black male body.”18
I want to suggest that the Southern Black folk, the narrator, and his readers are all active participants in a narrative whose intent is to make possible the formation of a more pluralistic national community. The narrator and his readers’ passage through the Black Belt is the more obvious in that they are understood to be modern men of reason who use travel to understand and, hopefully, cross social and geographic boundaries. Yet even as the Black Belt inhabitants seem, in contrast, to occupy a typically static position—stuck in a backward society, rooted in tradition—Du Bois produces an alternative reading that underscores the Southern country folk’s passage through time. He emphasizes, in other words, the importance of their temporal progress, their steady, collective march into the future not visible to the outsider unless he is willing to leave behind the comfort of racist ideologies and regimes to join Du Bois on the journey in the “Jim Crow car.”
The challenges posed by African Americans’ social marginalization provided much of the impetus behind Du Bois’s sociological theories and methods. In “The Negroes of Dougherty County, Georgia,” Du Bois described his methods for collecting data: “My first work [in studying small communities] was at Farmville, Virginia. What I did in that case was to go to a typical town and settle down there for a time. I made a census of the town personally, went to the house of each negro family in town, and tried to find out as much as I could about the general situation of things in that town” (reprinted in Green and Driver 154). Here he suggests settling within and blending into a community results in more acute observations; in Souls it allows for an empathetic linking of the individual and the group, the articulation of racial feeling, and the formation of a racial community. The privileging of communal relations in Souls marks a shift from The Philadelphia Negro, in which Du Bois writes in the voice of “classic social analysts [who]
