324 Making It New: 1900–1945of the trouble involved, not in being hidden from “the Lord,” but in being hidden
from oneself. It is also a black transposition of the theme of the poem by Symons: a
meditation, not on lost love, but on lost identity, a lack of connection with oneself
and with others. All this issues from Du Bois’s seminal account, alluded to earlier, of
the “double-consciousness” of “the Negro.” When he was young, Du Bois recalls, a
“shadow” suddenly swept across him. It dawned upon him that he was different
from others; “or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their
world by a vast veil.” In this, he suggests, he was and is like all others of his race. He,
and they, have been “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American
world,” a world that yields them “no true self-consciousness” but only lets them see
themselves “through the revelation of the other world.” “It is a peculiar sensation,
this double-consciousness,” Du Bois confides, “this sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others.” The African-American “ever feels his two-ness, – an
American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.” For Du Bois, “the history of the American Negro is the history of this
strife.” It gives him or her, certainly, a special knowledge, the “second-sight” of
the secret sharer. But it also leads to a potentially disabling ambivalence: “the
contradiction of double aims” as an African and an American. The African-American
longs “to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” a merging in which “he
wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.” That, however, still remains a
consummation devoutly to be wished. Despite the end of slavery, the shadow still
falls across every black man and woman in America. Du Bois weaves together
autobiography and analysis, meditation and incantation in this seminal account of
African-American dualism, the veil of invisibility thwarting identity and true
community. Gathering together intimations dimly perceived and expressed in
earlier works by black Americans, it was to exercise a profound influence on later
writing. Ironically, Du Bois seemed in later life to gravitate toward one side of his
own “double-consciousness.” In 1934 he was expelled from the NAACP for
advocating the use of segregation as a means of drawing blacks together into a
cohesive group during the Depression. And in 1963, just a year before his death, he
became a citizen of Ghana.
The notion of the double-consciousness of the African-American found an
immediate echo in the work of James Weldon Johnson. In his first novel, The
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the protagonist suggests that “every
colored man” in the United States has, “in proportion to his intellectuality, a sort of
dual personality.” “He is forced to take his outlook on things, not from the viewpoint
of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being,” he explains, “but from the viewpoint
of a colored man.” “There is one phase of him,” the protagonist adds, “which is
disclosed only in the freemasonry of his own race.” This gives the African-American
a certain insight, what Du Bois had termed “the gift of second-sight”: “I believe,” the
“ex-colored man” declares, “that the colored people of this country know and under-
stand the white people better than the white people know and understand them.”
But it can also be a source of deep confusion: in the course of his life, as he tells it,GGray_c04.indd 324ray_c 04 .indd 324 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM