Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,-refused it peremptorily, with a glance. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards-ten cents a package-and exchange.
I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.Īnd yet, being a problem is a strange experience,-peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.
They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town or, I fought at Mechanicsville or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail,Īnd the fire of the end begin to burn in the west Īnd the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,Īs the water all night long is crying to me.īetween me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
Unresting water, there shall never be rest O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?Īll night long the water is crying to me. The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,Īll night long crying with a mournful cry,Īs I lie and listen, and cannot understand "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
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