Abstract
In The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois posits that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Yet, in The Crisis “Children’s Numbers” and The Brownies’ Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: the question of how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois’s works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child’s entry into double consciousness and to repurpose it as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight the ways that racism and sexism converge in the experiences of discrimination faced by black women, but the term gestures more broadly toward the limits of identity politics to account for the ways that race, gender, and class intersect in the experiences of many who live at the crossroads of multiple identity categories.
- 2.
Alys Eve Weinbaum argues that the form of the interracial romance, of which Dark Princess is the strongest model, is a crucial internationalist and anti-imperialist expression of “the politics of juxtaposition” made famous in Souls. Lawrie Balfour makes a case for Du Bois’s essays, Black Reconstruction (1935) and Dusk of Dawn (1940), as extensions of the “trial and revision” paradigm so successful in Souls (18). And Eric Sundquist and Amy Kaplan both argue that Du Bois’s vision of a global color line, subtle in Souls, reaches “full flower” (Sundquist’s phrase) in the period after the First World War when Du Bois wrote Darkwater.
- 3.
Sundquist, 551. Du Bois himself aids in this reassessment. Even before Souls, Du Bois had already begun to imagine the color-line in a global light. He titled an essay “The Color Line Belts the World” in 1906 but used that expression as early as 1898 (Kaplan 176–178).
- 4.
Rudine Sims Bishop asserts that African-American children’s literature “begins to bloom” with Du Bois’s publication of The Brownies’ Book, and she likewise provides a thorough account of the circumstances, including the “dearth of suitable materials connected to the lives of Black children,” that drove Du Bois’s intervention into the field (24).
- 5.
The caption “Souls made of fire, and children of the sun, with whom revenge is a virtue” appears beneath a set of child photographs in the 1916 Children’s Number (285). The quote is from the eighteenth-century English tragedy, Revenge by Edward Young, about a slave who seeks revenge against his Spanish master. And in 1919, when Du Bois announces The Brownies’ Book in that year’s Children’s Number, he dedicates it to “all children, but especially for ours, ‘the Children of Sun’” (286).
- 6.
Elinor Sinnette’s 1965 study of The Brownies’ Book focuses on the magazine’s efforts to counter racial stereotypes and provide black child readers with emulative images and stories of black history and life that could not be found in popular American children’s literature. Violet J. Harris agrees with Sinnette that replacing stereotypes with “authentic representations of African American life” is a central goal of The Brownies’ Book as part of its editors’ “explicit appeals for racial solidarity, pride, and uplift” (547). Dianne Johnson-Feelings likewise describes the creation of The Brownies’ Book as “in essence, an experiment in pedagogy and propaganda aimed at African-American youth” (336).
- 7.
The color line is a living line whose meaning Du Bois persists in re-evaluating long after the publication of Souls. After the First World War, Du Bois increasingly reflects on that proclamation made “once upon a time in my younger years” to ask “how far was it prophecy and how far speculation?” (“Worlds of Color” 423). In addition to extending the global reach of the color line, in Darkwater Du Bois also expands its meaning by placing the problem of women’s uplift “next to” the color line as “our greatest cause” (105).
- 8.
“Cross-writing” is a crucial concept in childhood studies. It was first theorized by U.C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers as “any text that activates a traffic between phases of life we persist in regarding as opposites” (viii). Often, cross-written texts address a dual audience of adults and children, but more important than the double audience is the implicit double-voice of the cross-written text, which contains “a dialogic mix of older and younger voices” (vii).
- 9.
In The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century this passage is interrupted by a description of the town and with a more historical account of the year of Du Bois’s birth, but the wording is the same (61).
- 10.
This description appears both in Du Bois’s Autobiography, 93 and in Du Bois’s 1938 speech (later published as a pamphlet) “A Pageant in Seven Decades: 1878–1938,” in W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890–1919, 22.
- 11.
In “A Pageant of Seven Decades,” Du Bois describes the sheltered “provincialism” of life in Great Barrington and writes of the various historical happenings of racial import, such as the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment, the death of Charles Sumner, and the closing of the Freedmen’s Bank, that “of these things my little village said nothing” (23).
- 12.
Given this, it is not surprising that Du Bois would direct a substantial part of his revisionist efforts toward black children. Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Elinor Sinnette, and Fern Kory have all described The Brownies’ Book as a consciously-constructed alternative, for example, to St. Nicholas Magazine, the most popular American children’s periodical of the era. For Kory, The Brownies’ Book can be read as “self-consciously ‘signifying’” on St. Nicholas’s patron figure with its tribute to the trickster Brownie as well as on an entire “unself-conscious” Eurocentric fairy tale tradition (92–93).
- 13.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois: Childhood,” The Crisis 24.6 (October 1922) 250. Though Du Bois’s conception of the child as “little man” is, as his own assessment attests, unconventional, it is hardly new. Over two centuries prior, John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) sought to make a similar case. It was Locke’s argument that the qualities so cherished in the modern man, namely reason and liberty, were likewise to be valued in childhood, for “children,” Locke argued, “have as much a mind to show that they are free, that their own good actions come from themselves, that they are absolute and independent, as any of the proudest of you grown men, think of them as you please” (51).
- 14.
Du Bois writes in “Our Baby Pictures” that “At first we tried to make our selections with some system and according to certain rules of human interest, beauty and physical type. All this, however, was quickly given up and we frankly confess that there is no reason in the world why most of the pictures which we have not used should not have been printed instead of these” (298).
- 15.
David Levering Lewis (30–33) and Shawn Michelle Smith (100) each read Du Bois’s exhibit in these terms.
- 16.
In what is an important turn from the method of Souls, Du Bois does not leave the interpretative variety of the Children’s Numbers unremarked. In October 1914, he writes, “The pictures which we have published may be considered from many points of view.” And he proceeds with his own explication of some of these. For the students “of a great social problem,” he writes that they will first be seen “as physical types” (298). By another “prejudiced jury,” they will, “notwithstanding” all of their many attributes, be “looked upon as ‘problems’” (299). And last, but certainly not least, Du Bois describes the child images as “argument[s] against war” and “against the greatest modern cause of war,—race prejudice” (300).
- 17.
Denise E. Agosto refers to the traditional picture book in the terms of the “twice-told tale” and distinguishes from this form of “parallel storytelling” the more modern “interdependent tale,” where the images bear much more of a burden in the meaning-making process (267).
- 18.
Maurice Sendak’s 1963 Where the Wild Things Are is often cited as a highly influential forerunner to this new trend in modern American picture books. On the mid-century shift to the “internal child” see Barbara Bader’s “American Picture Books: From Max’s Metaphorical Monsters to Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse,” 142, and for the shift in value to the figurative and intangible see William Moebius’s “Introduction to Picturebook Codes,” 137.
- 19.
Nina Du Bois, letter to W.E.B. Du Bois, 8–15 August 1914, General Correspondence Part 1, Reel 4:680, Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- 20.
Ibid., 31 October–15 November 1914.
- 21.
W.E.B. Du Bois, letter to Yolande Du Bois, 10 November 1914, General Correspondence Part 1, Reel 4:681, Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- 22.
Deborah McDowell describes these dual disadvantages during Fauset’s publishing career, from white and black communities alike, in her introduction to Fauset’s novel, Plum Bun.
- 23.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” The Crisis 36.6 (June 1929) 187. While it is significant that Du Bois continues for adults what began as a children’s editorial series, it is worth noting that the later adult versions of “As the Crow Flies” lack the dualistic qualities of the earlier Brownies’ Book numbers, exhibiting to a far greater extent the Crow’s as not only a truthful but a peculiarly sardonic voice.
- 24.
These excerpts from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poems, “Motherhood” and “Brown Eyes,” are used here with the permission of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
- 25.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The True Brownies,” 285. For a more thorough explication both of the history of the Brownie figure in children’s literature and of how that figure is revised in The Brownies’ Book see Fern Kory’s “Once upon a Time in Aframerica: The ‘Peculiar’ Significance of Fairies in the Brownies’ Book.”
- 26.
According to Johnson-Feelings, it was “the estimation of W.E.B. Du Bois” that “young black readers needed information that was interpreted and reported from a radically different perspective than that offered in St. Nicholas,” which was not immune from the “preponderance of negative black images in the American mass media” (336). And Elinor Desverney Sinnette argues that St. Nicholas was, by turns, guilty of presenting child readers with gross caricatures of the black race or (as was more often the case) altogether remise in the representation of black childhood. And too Sinnette argues that The Brownies’ Book’s manner of presenting the news (a clear reference to “As the Crow Flies”) was “more mature” than was St. Nicholas’s journalistic counterpart, “The WatchTower” (134–135).
- 27.
Yolande Du Bois, letters to W.E.B. Du Bois, 12 January 1916 and February 1916, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
- 28.
Suzanne Rahn writes that Dodge’s “non-human editorial persona” is, as far as she knows, “the first of his kind” (110).
- 29.
Mary Mapes Dodge, “Jack-in-the-Pulpit,” 46.
- 30.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “As the Crow Flies,” The Brownies’ Book 1.1 (January 1920) 23.
- 31.
The perception of Du Bois as a modern Victorian is common. Vanessa D. Dickerson may take this argument the furthest in her thesis that Du Bois affirms the benefits of a “Victorian soul” throughout his career, even into his late Pan-African politics.
- 32.
See Robert L. Vann’s January 21, 1936 letter to Du Bois (in Aptheker 124).
- 33.
I draw here from Du Bois’s 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” which traces the First World War to the battle for profits that white cultures have waged along the color line. Yet Du Bois remains hopeful that “our democratic ideals” may yet be “extended” to “yellow, brown, and black peoples” (712).
- 34.
I would agree with Vilashini Cooppan that the philosophy of double consciousness in Souls is consistent with and foundational to Du Bois’s nationally and globally dialectical politics of later years, but this latter investment, while nascent in Souls, seems to me far more of a foreground issue in later works such as, in this case, “As the Crow Flies.”
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Phillips, M. (2016). The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book. In: Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50807-2_6
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