The Souls of Black Folk

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

One-hundred and twenty years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk For generations of writers, scholars and intellectuals, the idea of Black consciousness beyond the color line has informed the way we think, and write, about race. I suggest the brilliance of Du Bois in 1903 is comparable to an Old Soul in a New World.

There is more to the soul today than the racial psychology of a 1903 world in the U.S.

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A few moments ago and quite by chance, I witnessed a racial moment through my American eyes. A local waiter with grace and tenderness caressed the bright red hair of a white toddler. The toddler was around three years old and unaware of her striking hair color and texture from the perspective of the waiter. The moment only lasted for two or three seconds. No self-consciousness, pure curiosity on the waiter’s part.

Reverse this racial moment…imagine a resort in the United States where a white waiter mindlessly ran her fingers through the tightly curled hair of a black toddler…without Mom’s permission. The foreseeable consequence might be a Twitter mob, a Tik Tok meltdown.

In one way, the foreseeable racial fallout represents a psychological advance from the days of 1903. It is also true that a caress out of affection is just an innocent and curious caress. Are we over reacting nowadays to phantom pain from denigration over a century ago?

As I write, I find myself among local people who have all the physical attributes and appearances of Black Americans. Everyone from the executive manager and administrative assistant to the accountants and cooks, waiters and maids all could be stand ins for a family reunion back home. It is true.

And I remain mindful that outside appearances tell me nothing about their inner stories, experiences and perspectives. I am living in a mental playground for the curious.

I tossed and turned about this essay. Caricatures and stereotypes do not move me. I find joy in the individual which is why The Souls of Black Folk can no longer light our racial path forward. Time has moved on. We have moved on as Americans. It is not 1903 anymore.

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This essay came to me in a life moment, innocuous in the moment but resonant with rich meaning upon reflection.

My wife and I were at the concierge desk. I was eager to explore the library, my natural home away from home. My wife said, “I’m going to be using the pool. My hair gets frizzy. Do you have hair products?”

The two women of dark skin color and tightly curly hair said, yes.

“For my hair?” my wife inquired. “For your hair too?”

Both of the staffers said, yes.

In this small exchange we can see racial worlds colliding. Hair care products for black hair unite women with a certain hair texture around the globe. I once dated a black woman from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Dartmouth College is like a two-hour drive from Boston. My former girlfriend and other black women would travel down to Boston for hair care. There were no places that carried hair care products at that time around Dartmouth College or between Dartmouth and Boston. So, my wife was coming from a place where the location of black hair care products was duly noted.

The nice local women behind the desk were not coming from such a place. Since everyone employed had tightly curled hair, they never gave hair care products a second thought. It is not a care or concern. As an American, my spouse brings hair consciousness to the table in a way alien to inhabitants of a 100 percent tightly curled hair world.

It is comparable to me having no sense of blackness or race in an all black world between 1961 and the fall of 1969. If everyone is black, blackness dissipates into the ether…unless you define African Americans as rap in the year 2023…

All of the resort staff have the skin color and hair texture of Black Americans. And yet I am half a world away from memories of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and public school desegregation and affirmative action. None of these ways of understanding Blackness apply in this foreign land.

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With views of palm trees, sandy beaches and light blue water vistas in the distance, I am going to draw connections between two ideas that otherwise might seem unconnected. Stay with me for a short while. I think you will recognize the creative association.

Among the twelve or so souls in our group is a German journalist. I gather he is quite known in Germany for documentaries. I enjoy deep conversations and the journalist has not disappointed. I will name the journalist “Dan” for several reasons. He looks and sounds just like my friend, Dan. The two are roughly the same age with the same personality.

Dan and I began talking about family history. He argued that children should rebel against their parents (within reason) and make their own way in life. I countered that children are more closely aligned with grandchildren as a rule of thumb. Dan in turn shared how difficult the past was for many Germans. Some parents shared good stories while others left a legacy of horrible and terrific stories for children. Dan recognized both good and bad stories from his parents. His job as a mature adult was to reconcile those two versions of the past into a single, congruent story.

At that moment, I heard a French woman singing a lovely melody. Her voice reminded me of Edith Plaf from Tu Es Partout. (The scene in Saving Private Ryan when Corporal Upham translates the French lyrics of love, loss and sorrow) I felt a shift in time, how we Americans would have been mortal enemies with our dinner guest, Dan, ninety years ago and, now, we were warm companions in friendship, white wine in hand, accepting of Dan’s whole, tortured inheritance as a modern German

If ninety years could turn mortal enemies due to differences of national race into warm fellowship over a bottle of wine, surely black Americans and white Americans could find warm fellowship hundreds of years after the scourge of slavery. Even the Klingons and Humans found friendship aboard the starship Enterprise over time.

In a sense, I saw in the German journalist the souls of black folks on a different and better plane of consciousness. I have used the term trans racial consciousness in the past. The phrase aptly describes the consciousness. Dan does not define himself by consciousness of race in the 1940s. He is accepting of all the good and bad stories in his family inheritance as a modern in the year 2023.

Black Americans should similarly find modern racial souls for modern times. Why should Black Americans define themselves by consciousness of race in the 1940s or even 1903? Believing Blackness is Oppression, Nothing else Matters will not get one to the promised land where racial divisions melt away.

The new horizon in race research should be divining modern souls of modern black folks.

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Black Americans are around half of one percent of the world’s population. To be a black American is a unique and uncommon phenomenon. The odds upon birth of being a black American, however that identity is defined, are one in two hundred.

As a little kid walking on gravel along Twyman Road, I would think these things. Why of all things was I born in this place and time? The world was a big place, so big I would amuse myself by digging a hole to China at the corner of Belt Boulevard and Twyman Road. I buried time capsules, the impulse of an old soul in a child’s body.

I thought about these things, my place in the larger world. I was six or seven years old. My universe was a scrappy patch of land marked by Twyman Road, Belt Boulevard, Hickory Hill Elementary School, Grandma’s house on Terminal Avenue, and Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

My family called this land home since the 1870s. We lived in the shadow of a great ancestor, not an African but an enterprising American who founded a family.

It is so disrespectful to our ancestor to proclaim Blackness Is Oppression. Nothing Else Matters.

Even then before the grand age of eight, I knew there was more to the world. And I find myself now on the opposite side of the world in the larger world.

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If you are still with me in this essay, the end lies within sight. I could write further arguments against the relevance of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead, I want to show a side of the spiritual realm which remains relevant.

Few ideas are black and white in this world.

Under the night sky, I found myself at a long dinner table. Our every whim was attended to. I feasted on four different types of pizza. The day time heat had cooled off and endless stars hovered over head. I was lost in food, drink and satisfactory conversation.

Our entrees arrived and I began to eat my steak. As I cut my steak, my emotions were drawn like a magnet elsewhere. I stopped eating dinner. I ignored my dinner guests. I found myself staring in the distance, into the darkness. Two female voices shone in the darkness, and the darkness was no longer a veil. A veil was lifted by the music, not of a double-consciousness or race consciousness. The universal language of music lifted a veil.

I was transported away by visceral emotion.

The two women who sang the night away bore every physical characteristic of black American women. In their tones and intense feelings, I felt soul to my center of being. I was transfixed. As an emotionally intense person, I was moved by their rendition of Weak by SWV. “I Don’t Know What It Is That You’ve Done To Me” Du Bois wrote of sorrow songs in The Souls of Black Folk, “that the music was so powerful and meaningful that, regardless of the people's appearance and teaching, "their hearts were human and their singing stirred men with a mighty power." I felt the power of human emotion in the darkness…on a tropical island…thousands of miles away from home.

And then as if my heart were a play thing, the two ladies, more black in physical appearance than Alicia Keyes, seized my soul with a rendition of If I Ain’t Got You.

See 0:00 to 3:45.

What was so soulful about the music? What was transcendent and eternal? Even the waiters burst into song…they were so touched and moved by the emotion and feeling in the music. Something ephemeral connects the two island singers to Black American singer Alicia Keyes.

Could the answer be, in part, the souls of Black Folk, or…the souls of a universal humanity?

Some people think
That the physical things
Define what's within
And I've been there before
That life's a bore
So full of the superficial

— Lyrics from If I Ain’t Got You by Alicia Keyes