Black Prophetic Fire Read online

  CHB: In the expression of suffering.

  CW: Yes, yes.

  CHB: It is here that his empathy shows. There is a piece, a conversation Du Bois has with a white person, I think, who does not understand what Jim Crow is like, even in 1920.20 And he explains it in terms of his own daily experience and how humiliating it can be. This is his way of expressing the suffering of the people under oppression.

  CW: Very much so. You could be alluding to what I consider to be one of the most powerful essays that he wrote—and he wrote so many powerful essays and texts—but “The Souls of White Folk” is probably the most militant, radical, illuminating, and counter-hegemonic text that we have.21 I know it was a favorite of the great John Henrik Clarke, who was a great Pan-Africanist and who viewed Du Bois as one of his precursors, but again fascinating that John Henrik Clarke viewed Du Bois as a precursor in the same way that William Julius Wilson, concerned about class but more about integration, would view Du Bois as a precursor. In the same way, an NAACP liberal integrationist would view Du Bois as a precursor, so that Du Bois is rich enough and his work polyvalent enough, subject to multiple interpretations enough, that he ends up with all of these different progeny. But that essay, “Souls of White Folk,” is a devastating thing. I remember the first time I read this, I said, “Oh my God, this is a Du Bois we don’t really get a chance to look at too closely.” He writes:

  It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather a great religion, a world-war cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!22

  That’s just one moment.

  CHB: There is yet another one, where there is the perspective of the daily life of Blacks and their suffering from discrimination, etc. He exposes that in a dialogue that is really powerful. Which brings me to another point, namely, that within the limits of his concept of culture, he, in principle, would have agreed with you that it is not enough to explain something scientifically but that one should also try to express it by other means, in different styles. This is what he did in his work, be it in his novels or in his very early essays in The Souls of Black Folk, where he combined scientific essayistic writing with the poetic. And the reason for this was really that he wanted to reach out. He knew he could not reach people otherwise, though one would doubt that he could reach them today with his at times lyrical Suada [German for “harangue”].

  CW: No, but there would be other artists who would appropriate his work and make it more popular, because they could see the genius at the center of it. One of the things that makes me smile is Du Bois putting on these pageants, these plays, you know, thousands of Black people, trying to get them to see the greatness of African civilization, hundreds of actors and so forth. I mean, that’s popular culture at its core, and it’s, again, his attempt to reach out. I love his passion to communicate by any means relative to what he thinks are going to be the most effective means.23

  CHB: True, and also, as to media, in his time he was avant-garde as an editor of the Crisis. This is what he could do as an activist.

  CW: Absolutely. That was popular. Any of us who try to expand the public spheres into film and music and books and magazines and some of television and, of course, radio—I think we’re building on Du Bois, even if we have slightly different conceptions of culture. I think that in an interesting kind of way, Du Bois was an indisputable radical democrat in his ideology—though I’m not so sure he was an indisputable radical democrat in his temperament, in his personality. I think he was shaped at a time when his temperament and personality were much more rooted in a kind of elitist formation essentially, and yet he never allowed that to impede or obstruct his sensitivities and his inclusivity when it came to the suffering of other people. That is part of his greatness to me, even though I tend to accent a much more radical democratic temperament, personality, and way of being in the world.

  CHB: Again, he saw the problem himself. He revised the concept of the Talented Tenth, because he wondered about it. He again admitted that he had been naïve, idealistic, because what he had counted on was character, and he had become aware of the fact that you could not count on that. So when he revised his concept of the Talented Tenth, he was contemplating how to actually realize his concepts and how to solve the problem of organization.24 And this essay shows to me that there was a certain helplessness on his part, but then, aren’t we all at a loss when it comes to organization? It is so difficult a task.

  CW: Oh absolutely. Yes, I think it’s true. And I do think that at the center of his conception of the Talented Tenth was an ethos of service to the poor, service to those who have been left behind, as it were, or in the religious sense, service to the least of these—echoes of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew—and I like that core very much. It’s just that early on in 1903, when he put forward that notion, it was deeply bourgeois and elitist. In the 1940s, when he revised it, he had been radicalized by Marxism; he had been radicalized by the Communist movement. And so he knew that that ethos of service had to be now cast in such a way that the class elitism of 1903 had to be rejected, and also the sexist elitism.

  CHB: He was a nineteenth-century person in that regard, but he moved forward.

  CW: Yes, he had come a long way from where he was in the early part of the twentieth century. Of course, you are absolutely right, “The Damnation of Women” from Darkwater is a good example. I was blessed to take courses with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. She was an intellectual powerhouse. She was on fire for justice and would not put up with any kind of patriarchal mess from anybody. She taught at Harvard in the early 1970s. She was something, and she had wonderful memories and reminiscences of her husband.25

  CHB: And Du Bois then writes in Darkwater about servants, female servants.

  CW: Yes, yes. Absolutely. “The Servant in the House”; that’s powerful.

  CHB: What I appreciate is his self-reflexivity on his own development, his self-criticism. It is very honest.

  CW: Yes. You wonder, though, whether the major reception of Du Bois’s corpus will be providing the launching pad for that American Gibbon I was talking about, i.e., a turning away from Du Bois’s challenge and the escalation of the refusal of the deliberate ignorance, the willful evasion of the realities Du Bois was talking about at the level of empire and white supremacy that will constitute the downfall of the American project. America slowly but surely moves toward a second-world, maybe even a third-world status, with ruins and relics of its great democratic past being completely trampled by the kind of neoliberal obsession with unregulated markets and indifference toward the poor and polarizing politics of scapegoating the most vulnerable. And Du Bois’s magisterial corpus sits there and says: “You should have listened. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get you to listen, to wake up, to heed the challenge that I was talking about because I was concerned both about you but first and foremost about my people that you’ve been trampling.” And there is a very, very good chance that that’s where we are headed. The irony would be that the indisputable relevance of Du Bois was not heeded: we didn’t listen; we didn’t take him seriously. Shame on you, America! Shame on you, the American academy! Shame on you, the American intelligentsia, that your narrow individualism, your truncated rapacious marketeering, your deep dedication to paradigms and frameworks that are too truncated to come to terms with the realities that were undermining your democratic experiment have led to the need for the American Gibbon. That’s very much where we are right now.

  CHB: Yes, but it is really a question of bringing the more radical Du Bois to the fore. Before I had read more of Du Bois, I used to focus on The Souls
of Black Folk. That is not to say that this is not a great work, with all the metaphors that have shaped academic discussions such as “the veil” and “double-consciousness.” But I am also deeply impressed, in Dusk of Dawn, by his metaphor of the cave, which is describing the same caste system26 but in much more radical terms; or rather, it’s darker, more pessimistic, and you hardly ever see it referenced. He plays on Plato’s cave, I think.

  CW: Absolutely. Straight out of Republic. No, it is darker here. It is darker here. He writes:

  No matter how successful the outside advocacy is, it remains impotent and unsuccessful until it actually succeeds in freeing and making articulate the submerged caste. [. . .] This was the race concept which has dominated my life, and the history of which I have attempted to make the leading theme of this book.27

  And yet he is one of those who emerges out of the provincialism, he shatters the narrowness and becomes the grand cosmopolitan and internationalist that we know him to be. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why in my own classes I assign Souls of Black Folk, but I also have students read Reconstruction, the 1935 classic, especially the more literary, more metaphoric sections of that text alongside the analytical sections,28 because by 1935, he has become someone wrestling with the legacies of Marx and Freud, wrestling with Lenin’s conception of imperialism based on Hobson29 and others, and that is a different Du Bois. I mean, there are continuities, but it is a very different Du Bois.

  CHB: When I was thinking about the issues we would be talking about, I thought your perspective might be that, in the end, he is just too dark. Where is the hope that you would insist on? But in contrast, one of your points of criticism in The Future of the Race is that you think he partakes in American optimism.30 So you probably meant a different phase. But what do you think about Du Bois’s optimism or pessimism?

  CW: Remember, when he was on the boat and he looks back he says: “The Negro cannot win in America. I must go international, got to go to Ghana,” linked to China, the Soviet Union, and so forth.31 I’d have to rethink what I had in mind when I talked about American optimism. That was certainly part of his earlier phase. I think the later phase is closer to the darkness that I was talking about. One of the things that has always disturbed me about the great Du Bois is that I’ve never encountered in his grand works a substantive wrestling with Chekhov, or I would even say with Russian literary tradition as a whole: Tolstoy, Gogol, Leskov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and we could go on and on.32 And I believe that would have shattered any cheap optimism or any American optimism that informs earlier stages of his work. I’m just amazed that there is no wrestling with Kafka; there is no wrestling with even Beckett in the 1950s, from a radical democratic point of view. I want him to hold on to his militancy and radicality in terms of the talk about empire and white supremacy. But I think there is a connection between him running from the blues and him running from Chekhov and running from the Russian literary tradition and running from Kafka and from Beckett. And yet he has his own kind of darkness at which he arrives on his own.

  CHB: By way of analysis, on the basis of his sociological training.

  CW: Yes, exactly. When he looks at the structural and institutional forces in play vis-à-vis poor and working people, and those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,”33 I think of the Chekhovs and the blues sitting there waiting for him. And yet he arrives on his own, so in that sense I’d have to revise my critique if I was implying that American optimism actually held through all of the phases of his thinking as opposed to just the earlier phases.

  CHB: I wonder what he read in terms of literature, since, he quotes in Souls of Black Folk—

  CW: —A lot of Shakespeare, Balzac.

  CHB: Yes. His famous quote: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”34

  CW: Oh, we know his favorite was Goethe. That’s one of the things that I hit him hard on, you see.35

  CHB: Well, after all, he had spent some time in Germany.36

  CW: Yes, he was deeply shaped by the German conception of Bildung, and at that time—and understandably so—the major stellar figures were Goethe and Schiller, who actually mean much to me, too.

  CHB: It’s the idea of humanism, I think, that shapes him.

  CW: Yes, absolutely. Yet you don’t get a serious wrestling with modernist texts at all in his work. There’s little Joyce, there’s little Proust, there’s little Kafka.

  CHB: What I wonder is, did he really not read any of them, or did he choose not to comment on them because they were alien to his thinking?

  CW: It’s a good question. My hunch is that he was certainly aware of them. He was too cosmopolitan and intellectual not to know that Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Kafka, and Mandelstam and others were around. He may have read Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil [1945] in German, but we have very little evidence for this, and it would be the same in terms of modernist movements and in Afro-American life. What did he think of Charlie Parker? Was he moved by the pianistic genius of Art Tatum? I would like to know.

  CHB: And what about Richard Wright and writers of his time?

  CW: I think he did read Wright. I recall reading a review of Richard Wright, especially given the Communist overlap, both being members of the Communist culture.37 Wright was actually a member of the party. Du Bois was not, but they overlapped for a little while before Wright left the party. And what did Du Bois think about Ralph Ellison? I think he did actually write about Ellison, too. So, again, I mean this not so much as a brick thrown at the great Du Bois but as a matter of trying to see what constitutes his edifice and which bricks are missing in the building that he was working on. And I think this again resonates with the concerns about popular culture, the contemporary cultural expressions of his day, and the concern about popular culture as a whole.

  CHB: There is a heated debate about religion in Du Bois’s work, and most of his biographers think he was an agnostic, if not an atheist, due to his Marxism. There are comments that he makes from which you could conclude that. But then there is an interesting book by Edward Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet, who argues that Du Bois, though certainly not an orthodox Christian, was religious in a way and kept it up.38 In his view, Du Bois did not just do some window dressing using religious phrases, examples from the Bible, but there was a, let’s call it, spirituality that shaped him throughout his life.

  CW: I think that Du Bois had a self-styled spirituality that was not wedded to cognitive commitments to God talk. He was very similar to his teacher George Santayana. Santayana used to go to Mass, shed tears weekly as a lapsed Catholic, and would say, “The Mass was too beautiful to be true.” So he was moved by the passion and the perceptions and the purpose in the Eucharist but could not make cognitive commitments to any of the claims. Ludwig Wittgenstein was the same way, and I think Du Bois is part of that particular coterie of secular figures who are profoundly religiously musical, to use Max Weber’s words; people who resonate deeply with the issues that religious people are wrestling with—what it means to be human, how do you engage in a virtuous life, what kind of character do you cultivate, what kind of sensitivity, what kind of compassion, what conceptions of justice, the centrality of love and empathy—without being religious in terms of belief in God, in the rituals of faith.

  And I have a great respect for Du Bois’s spirituality, even as a Christian, which makes him in some ways even more of a prophet than most Christians or religious Jews or religious Buddhists and so on, because it means that he was able to sustain himself spiritually without the help of the religious apparatus of tradition. He also didn’t fall into the kind of narrow reductionist traps of scientistic, positivistic ties to science, the kind of narrow Darwinism that you get today among the number of the more sophomoric atheists like our dear brothers Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, who reduce the rich Darwin to narrow scientism. Darwin is the brook of fire through which we all must pass. But you can be religiously sensitive without being religious, and Du Bois
certainly was one of the most religiously sensitive of the secular thinkers.

  CHB: Du Bois wrote an essay entitled “The Revelation of Saint Orgne”—i.e., Negro—“the Damned,” and there is a concept of a new church which, according to Du Bois, should be based on the “word of life from Jeremiah, Shakespeare and Jesus, Buddha and John Brown.”39 And it’s a church organized “with a cooperative store in the Sunday-school room; with physician, dentist, nurse, and lawyer to help serve and defend the congregation; with library, nursery school, and a regular succession of paid and trained lecturers and discussion; they had radio and moving pictures”—now: mark that!—“and out beyond the city a farm with house and lake.”40 That’s his—Orgne’s—concept of a church, and what I think is so interesting about it is what is joined here: not just the secular and Christian traditions but body and soul, mind and body; that is what the church would have to offer to help people come to combine the two, to provide food for body and soul. I have noticed that this concept appears in several of Du Bois’s writings, and I’d like to follow up on that because I don’t think it has been much commented on, though it seems to be part of his later thinking. At first Du Bois counted on the mind exclusively, and then he changed and said, “No, that’s not enough,” and although he does not go as far as you wished him to—namely, to take into account the physical expression in dance and music and so on of the African American tradition—as a concept he expresses it in that new church that he thinks is needed to raise people to a higher level.

  CW: I think you are right about that. It reminds me of one of my own favorite figures and thinkers, Nikos Kazantzakis, where you have this kind of self-styled spirituality that appropriates Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, Shakespeare. I mean, it’s quite a heterogeneous coterie of chaps—not too often women actually—who become part of a kind of ecumenical exemplary group of those who constitute grand examples of high-quality living. So it’s the beauty of life, it’s the quality of life, it’s the courage, the freedom that these people exemplify.41 You can go from Socrates to Shakespeare in that regard. And there’s something that I’ve always found fascinating about that, I must say. Again, it has a lot to do with Du Bois’s humanism. He is a thorough-going radically democratic humanist drawing on the Renaissance, on the Enlightenment and the Victorian critics. William Morris was probably the most revolutionary of them, but Ruskin played a role, and certain moments in Arnold, certain moments in Carlyle, certain moments in Hazlitt; those are Du Bois’s intellectual ancestors. I do think that Du Bois would be again relevant for our day because the religious traditions—be they Christian or Islamic or Judaic—if they are not radically Socratized and humanized, then the fundamentalist wings of all three are going to push us into a living hell, which is to say, radically anti-democratic, radically sexist, racist, xenophobic, capitalist hell. Well, I shouldn’t say that radical Islam would be capitalist, though. The fundamental Christians would be capitalist, but not the fundamental Islamic folk; they are just theocratic. Now the fundamentalists in Judaism, that’s interesting. They tend to be free-marketeers, too, in general, though there are theocratic manifestations of it, too.