The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity - Critical Essay

Conclusion: Unreconciled Strivings

The simultaneous readings suggested by the "passing" novels we have considered are not accidental; in fact, they seem unavoidable in any sustained effort to explore American racial polarities. In his "Forethought" to The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois implies a distinct separation between what he sees as the two American racial worlds:

Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, - the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggles of its greater souls. . . . Before each chapter, as now printed, stands a bar of the Sorrow Songs, some echo of haunting music which welled up from black souls in the dark past. And, finally, need I add that 1 who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil? (vii-viii)

It is interesting to note in this context the strange rhetorical stance Du Bois adopts here: On the one hand, placing himself squarely within the camp of "them that live within the veil," while on the other placing even this - his own fundamental declaration of racial identity - in the form of a question. The rhetoric notwithstanding, Du Bois here and elsewhere in Souls gives his white readership what they expect: two racial worlds, distinct and separable. Even the form of the book, each chapter headed by a bar from the Sorrow Songs, tends to reinforce this view of the American racial landscape. Between the white reader and "them that live within the veil" Du Bois maintains an implicit separation; the musical notations, familiar yet indecipherable to the un-initiated, mark the boundaries of racial understanding. Du Bois invites his white readers to take a peek beyond the veil - but he never ushers them in, never lets them forget that the veil is there. Essential categories of race are preserved by this structure. The line between the white world and the black is clearly demarcated, and membership in either world is predicated upon physical qualities rendered as metaphysical: "flesh," "bone," and "blood" are reinscribed as the physical manifestations of an eternal and "natural" separation.

Obviously Du Bois knew his white readership - knew both what they expected from him, and what they would be willing to accept. But one should not draw from his rhetoric the conclusion that Du Bois was blind to the real implications of his project in Souls. His famous thesis - that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line" (10) - is at bottom a subversive proposition, and one that no amount of gentle rhetoric or structural manipulation can soften much. Clearly, the twentieth century has proved Du Bois right in this respect - our problems have been, largely, the problems of the color-line. But - and this perhaps because of that gentle rhetoric - his thesis was probably misread by Du Bois's contemporary white readers, and continues to be misread today. The white conversation about race in America has been consistently deflected toward the poles of two seemingly opposed discourses: that of "segregation," on one hand, and that of "integration," on the other. Beneath the seemingly diametrical opposition of these two discourses is a largely unexamined common thread: Each assumes a rigid and "natural" division between races, and each is therefore fundamentally invested in recreating the color-line. Our public discourse, even today, generally revolves around how permeable we want that line to be; seldom, though, does it question the legitimacy of the line itself.