In Search of Soul. Alejandro Nava
poets.
Du Bois’s deeply felt identification with the folk songs and spirituals of African Americans can be seen as a note in this larger cultural score. In choosing to adopt Herder’s popular understanding of folk-soul, he placed his work in the romantic context of Sturm und Drang: “So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress today rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul.”91 Here Du Bois clearly catches the wave of romanticism’s emotional unrest and turmoil—storm and stress—but he also gives it a distinct meaning, fraught with the stress of being black in America. Rocked on all sides by violent waters, he says, the black soul is torn in two and unreconciled, striving, on the one hand, for participation in America, and on the other, for the preservation of African identity in a nation that smells of burning black flesh.92 Besides implying that one can belong to two different Volkgeists, an African and an Anglo-American (a significant point itself), the most striking element of these ruminations has to be the glaring portrait of the psychic torment and physical rupture of black lives. Du Bois’s reflections on black soul are always close to a threnody, dirge, or jeremiad, and they translate the raw forms of racism and terrorism into the idioms of high culture, converting the screams and sobs of slave ships, auction blocks, and cotton fields into the stuff of literature. Similar to the way the writers of the American Renaissance sourced and refined native preaching styles in the nineteenth century, Du Bois transformed the popular sentiments and idioms of black America into a more polished literary art.93 This is nowhere more evident than in his powerful analysis of the “sorrow songs” of Afro-America; it is in their melodies, born of the dust of toil, he remarked, that the soul finds its most articulate and exuberant expression.
Du Bois considered the spirituals—“the rhythmic cry of the slave”—the most beautiful expression of human experience born on this side of the sea.94 For him, these folk songs were eloquent proof that slaves had an undeniable capacity for grandeur in ideas and emotions. They were evidence of artistic genius among the oppressed and despised in America, proof of black folks’ deep well of spirituality, their hidden springs of magnanimity. Sometimes muted and weary, then ecstatic and effervescent, sometimes broken with trouble but still dogged in hope, they were almost always live wires of emotion that burned through pain and despair. With pitches and pulses that caused the mercury of the soul to rise to its summit, this musical folk poetry poured over the listener in tides of emotion, spilling light and harmony into a world of darkness and dissonance, breathing grace and fire into every nook and cranny of the soul. Where blacks had to “roll through an unfriendly world,” Du Bois saw these songs as something like the crooning of a mother’s alto voice: “Mary, don’t you moan, don’t you weep.”95
As many writers have noted (Albert Raboteau, James Cone, Eddie Glaude, and others), Du Bois may have overstated the otherworldly emphasis of the spirituals (claiming that they could be religiously fatalist and escapist), but he saw with great insight their aesthetic value, that they were fundamentally ennobling of black dignity and transformed the Babel of suffering into a liturgy of song, dance, and ecstasy.96 Like a religious incantation and ritual, these canticles beseeched God with body and soul, wail and moan, complaint and supplication, and gave the human spirit a chance to catch the Holy Ghost, to be seized and baptized by fire. Whatever else would happen, for Du Bois this music was a tangible example—in contradiction to the Enlightenment’s disdain for the masses—of the rich poetry of the humble slaves, the embodiment of their most primal instincts, desires, affections, fears, dreams, and hopes.97
The key to Du Bois’s analysis of black folk-soul is the simple yet radical claim that these cultural liturgies were the equal of any other artistic achievement in Europe or elsewhere. On this point he followed Herder’s refusal to rank the Volkgeist of various nations. (Terry Eagleton refers to Herder, accordingly, as the father of cultural studies.)98 In contrast to some other German thinkers, including Heinrich von Treitschke, a teacher of Du Bois in Berlin, Herder championed a tolerant cultural and linguistic pluralism, without any presumption of cultural inferiority on the part of these national spiritualities; for Herder, cultural differences were incommensurable, not tiered.99 He viewed cultural and linguistic variety as something like a great orchestra of humanity, with each culture contributing different sounds and instruments, each gifted and worthy of a seat in this ensemble of musicians, none better than the other.
In spite of Herder’s pluralistic vision, however, the concept of soul was later desecrated by the German Nazis, South African Afrikaners, and other racist regimes of the twentieth century. In their hands, as George Fredrickson has demonstrated, folk-soul became indistinguishable from an obsession with the purity of bloodlines and thus was synonymous with a version of cultural identity cleansed of all foreign contaminants.100 Used as an ideological ruse in the battle with all “inferior” races and cultures, folk-soul was increasingly stained by fantasies of racial essentialism and cultural dominance. Since the history of “soul” includes this vicious legacy of racism, these facts should give us 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