Darkwater: Voices from Within the VeilDu Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
General
Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt)
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
We skirt the pine-clad shores, chary of men, and know how bitterly
winter kisses these lonely shores to fill yon row of beaked ice houses
that creep up the hills. We are sailing due westward and the sun, yet
two hours high, is blazoning a fiery glory on the sea that spreads and
gleams like some broad, jeweled trail, to where the blue and distant
shadow-land lifts its carven front aloft, leaving, as it gropes, shades
of shadows beyond.
* * * * *
Why do not those who are scarred in the world's battle and hurt by its
hardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the
utter joy of life? I asked this once sitting in a Southern home. Outside
the spring of a Georgia February was luring gold to the bushes and
languor to the soft air. Around me sat color in human flesh--brown that
crimsoned readily; dim soft-yellow that escaped description; cream-like
duskiness that shadowed to rich tints of autumn leaves. And yet a
suggested journey in the world brought no response.
"I should think you would like to travel," said the white one.
But no, the thought of a journey seemed to depress them.
Did you ever see a "Jim-Crow" waiting-room? There are always exceptions,
as at Greensboro--but usually there is no heat in winter and no air in
summer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken,
disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand
and wait and wait until every white person at the "other window" is
waited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets
and money are over there--
"What d'ye want? What? Where?"
The agent browbeats and contradicts you, hurries and confuses the
ignorant, gives many persons the wrong change, compels some to purchase
their tickets on the train at a higher price, and sends you and me out
on the platform, burning with indignation and hatred!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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