With other black boys the strife was not so
fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy,
or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking
distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry,
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own
house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us
all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly
narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod
darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the
stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue
above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born
with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,
--a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that
looks on in amused contempt and pity.
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