“Awful Gladness”: The Dual Political Rhetorics of Du Bois’s “Of the Passing of the First-Born”

Introduction

The political relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, Burghardt, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, may at first glance be difficult to discern. ¹ Characterized by biographer David Levering Lewis as “verg[ing] on bathos,” ² Du Bois’s poetic rendering of Burghardt’s brief life and deeply mourned death foregrounds no figurations comparable to the “seventh son” or “second sight” of the first chapter of Souls. It offers little of the political commentary of “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” or “Of the Meaning of Progress.” Moreover, its proportions are unassuming. The shortest chapter of Souls, set like a tiny cameo between more elaborate essays, it is easy to overlook. And indeed, it has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet “Of the Passing of the First Born” illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought, and particularly his paradoxical gender politics. The elegy both memorializes a tragedy central to Du Bois’s turn, at the close of the nineteenth century, from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion, and epitomizes this new idiom. Further, the elegy’s rhetoric itself dramatizes a core tension at work in Du Bois’s writings more broadly, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses.

Commentators have linked Burghardt’s death with Du Bois’ turn to affectively charged rhetoric. ³ Likewise, both the masculinism of his uplift politics and his vexed feminism have been comprehensively analyzed. ⁴ Yet these factors have not entered into political theoretical treatments of the elegy itself. Thomas Dumm and Shannon Mariotti have explored some key meanings of “Of the Passing” for democratic theory. ⁵ Both accounts place Du Bois’s elegy alongside Emerson’s narration of the loss of his own young son in the essay “Experience,” highlighting important resonances between Du Bois’s and Emerson’s respective texts. Both also indict Emerson for failing to acknowledge his own privileges as a white male property owner. As a function of this indictment, however, Du Bois’s text enters the scene as sort of corrective in both cases. While the comparison is fruitful, this corrective positioning also means that “Of the Passing’s” own considerable tensions and contradictions regarding gender and class, as well as its place within Du Bois’s broader oeuvre, remain unremarked.

In analyzing the elegy in its own right, this essay, brings these tensions and relations into focus. I begin with a brief sketch of Du Bois’s faith in science as the best defense against racism—noting the elitist masculinism of his early sociology—and the devastating events that precipitated his shift toward the persuasive promise of pathos. Turning to the elegy itself, I discern two distinct rhetorical modes—normalizing and transgressive—through which Du Bois formulates his challenge to white supremacy in the wake of his son’s demise. In the normalizing mode, which predominates, Du Bois elicits whites’ sympathetic identification by depicting an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household. Critically engaging with Melvin Rogers’s account of Du Bois’s rhetoric, ⁶ I argue that Rogers is insufficiently attentive to the centrality of elitism and masculinism to Souls’ persuasive tactics. As the elegy makes particularly clear, Du Bois’s normalizing rhetoric may forge a shared ethical horizon with some white readers. Yet given its continuities with the class and gender norms that underpin his early social science, it fails to displace the deeper logic of gendered and classed racial exclusion. At the same time, I argue that the elegy also contains elements that interrupt this normalizing rhetoric. It subversively, though problematically, thematizes Burghardt’s racial mixture, refusing the equation of health with racial purity. It also invokes a lineage of black maternal ambivalence toward life under enslavement and Jim Crow violence, undermining the gender hierarchy otherwise so meticulously depicted. While each interruption is itself vexed, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal, in germinal form, countervailing impulses that would be articulated in Du Bois’s later writings. In this light, “Of the Passing” both crystallizes Du Bois’s patriarchal elitism at the turn of the twentieth century and anticipates future moves toward more insurgent conceptualizations of gender and political life.

1899: From Logos to Pathos

In the January 1897 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Du Bois reviewed statistician Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. ⁷ As Khalil Gibran Muhammad has shown, Race Traits was instrumental in tethering blackness to criminality in the 1890s. ⁸ It also synthesized epidemiological and vital statistics to buttress what Muhammad and others term the “disappearance hypothesis”: the notion that slavery had protected African Americans from the laws of natural selection, and that emancipation had thus initiated a decline toward extinction. ⁹ At the heart of these alleged proofs of fatal degeneracy were high rates of black infant and child mortality. For Hoffman, these deaths manifested the “race trait” of immorality, and particularly maternal immorality, issuing in venereal disease, deficient parental concern, and dysgenic race mixing. The resulting “diminished power of vital resistance among the young,” on his account, was the strongest evidence of the entire black population’s imminent demise. ¹⁰

Du Bois’s review responds to the treatise not as existential threat but simply as bad science. The review ultimately judges the work “of doubtful value,” based on “the unscientific use of the statistical method.” ¹¹ Du Bois concedes that the infant death figures are alarming; but, he points out, the study ignores both the rural majority of blacks and similar death rates in Europe. What is needed is better scientific work: he recommends a federal “Department of Negro Statistics . . . and . . . careful monographic study of the Negro . . . from particular points of view.” ¹² Later that year, Du Bois would assume editorship of the Atlanta University Studies, coordinating just such inquiries into African American life. Moreover, Du Bois was already in the midst of the intensive study of urban black life that would be The Philadelphia Negro. Using just such comparative data as that which Hoffman neglects, the latter work emphatically refutes the disappearance hypothesis: “That the Negro death rate at present is anything that threatens the extinction of the race is either the bugbear of the untrained or the wish of the timid.” ¹³

Missing from both the review and Du Bois’s contemporaneous sociology, however, is any comment on Hoffman’s depiction of unwed black mothers’ pathogenic immorality. In fact, as Kevin Gaines argues, The Philadelphia Negro prominently features “a problematic linkage of poverty and immorality,” blaming especially “the absence of the patriarchal black family.” ¹⁴ For Du Bois, poor urban blacks’ alleged “lack of respect for the marriage bond” caused “sexual looseness . . . adultery and prostitution.” ¹⁵ While Du Bois vehemently contested Hoffman’s conclusions, his own early social scientific contributions similarly characterized unwed lower-class black women as dangers to the social body.

In a speech to the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in November 1897, Du Bois summed up his devotion to scientific investigation: “true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science, and continue to insist that if we would solve a problem we must study it.” ¹⁶ Less than two years later, however, Du Bois experienced a crisis of faith in the power of objective science to combat the polity’s increasingly entrenched white supremacy: “there cut across the plan which I had as a scientist,” he writes, “a red ray which could not be ignored.” ¹⁷ This inadequacy was made painfully clear by the April 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Atlanta; a grocery store near the Du Bois residence displayed Hose’s knuckles. “Du Bois later wrote that in the wake of this atrocity, *he* ‘began to turn aside from [his] work’” . . . one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved,” and the white public evinced little interest in his findings. ¹⁸ A mere month after Hose’s lynching catalyzed this sense of the limits of science, Du Bois’s nineteen-month-old son, Burghardt, died after a short bout of diphtheria, denied competent medical care in the South’s most modern city. Cornel West writes that Du Bois’s “Enlightenment worldview falters in the face of death—the deaths of Sam Hose and Burghardt.” ¹⁹

Du Bois did not give up on scientific pursuits; the Atlanta University Studies continued. Yet he determined that additional tactics would be necessary; he “resolved to write of the genius, humanity, and enviable destiny of his race with such passion, eloquence, and penetration that the claims of African-American inferiority would be sent reeling.” ²⁰ The year after Souls’ publication, Du Bois retrospectively characterized its writing as a deliberate shift from logos to pathos: “In thus giving up the usual impersonal and judicial attitude of the traditional author I have lost in authority but gained in vividness . . . some revelation of how the world looks to me cannot easily escape [the reader].” ²¹ “Of the Passing of the First-born” is a particularly revealing instance of this rhetorical shift. It depicts the very season of loss that precipitated Du Bois’s turn toward this mode of persuasion. The encomium also encodes a strikingly specific rebuttal of the scientific and public consensus that Hoffman’s treatise distilled. It not only counters allegations of blacks’ moral and affective deficiencies but reverses these allegations: whites, not blacks, are morally deficient and unfeeling. The dominant terms of this rebuttal, however, rely on gender and class figurations congruent with those of The Philadelphia Negro, casting the Du Bois family as a kind of photographic negative of urban black pathology. At the same time, more transgressive rhetorical currents run through the elegy. I examine each rhetorical mode in turn.

Alike, Dear Reader, “In Heart and Life and Longing” ²² : The Normalizing Mode

From its opening passages, “Of the Passing of the First-Born” depicts a household in scrupulous conformity with late-Victorian moral and affective conventions. The chapter’s first line—“Unto you a child is born”—casts Burghardt’s birth in messianic terms. ²³ But Du Bois figures himself as the quintessential secular public man, “unconsciously wandering” far from the “sanctuary” of the birth chamber. His wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, unnamed in the chapter, is cast as his feminine counterpart, the all-giving heart of the home. The new father, speeding home, thinks “in awe” of her womanly self-sacrifice, of she “who at my bidding had offered itself to win a life, and won.” On his arrival, her “wan” face testifying to her ordeal, Du Bois finds her reclining on the “altar” with this offering, his Madonna and child. ²⁴ A stranger to the mysteries of the nursery, he initially wonders at “this tiny formless thing,” and deems the baby at first “a ludicrous thing to love.” Emphatically not so, however, his “girl-mother” . . . “whom I now saw unfolding like the glory of the morning.” This glory lights the way to his own fatherly adoration: it is “through her [that] I came to love the wee thing.” ²⁵

In a few quick strokes, Du Bois paints an idealized bourgeois turn-of-the-century household, dramatizing the gendered separation of spheres requisite for the citizen family: private and pious, public and profane. His wife’s anonymity exemplifies Joy James’s observation that black “women . . . largely remain nameless in Du Bois’ nonfiction.” ²⁶ James also argues that “black women appear largely without specifics” and indeed Nina is the archetypal angel in the house. ²⁷ Against the prevailing notions of black female immorality that Hoffman propounded, Nina embodies the very essence of true womanhood, the pure and innocent “girl-wife” glorified and transfigured through the fulfillment of her motherly destiny. The passage’s glancing description of her physical appearance even arguably invokes canonical literary depictions of white feminine suffering through her postpartum depiction as “wan,” signifying pallor. ²⁸ The baby’s recurrently mentioned “wee white bed” also testifies to bourgeois propriety, as evidence that the family does not sleep together willy-nilly.

Du Bois’s tableau also specifically challenges the attribution to blacks of an innate affective deficiency, as distilled in Hoffman’s use of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism:

Inferior forms of marriage . . . cannot develop to any great extent that powerful combination of feelings . . . which in so marvelous a manner has grown out of the sexual instinct . . . the supreme interest in life (the raising up of members of a new generation) disappears . . . a prevalent unchastity severs the higher from the lower components of the sexual relation: the root may produce a few leaves, but no true flower. ²⁹

Du Bois narrates his own affective development as a father in terms that mirror Spencer’s account of civilized reproduction. Initially at a perplexed distance from the “winking, breathing, and sneezing” newborn, ³⁰ it is precisely his “complex passion” for his wife that enables an expanding appreciation of Burghardt as a distinct and precious life. Mutual devotion translates to literal adoration: “we were not far from worshipping this revelation of the divine, my wife and I.” ³¹ Manifestly the product of “affection, admiration, [and] sympathy,” Burghardt is a consummate “true flower.”

Nina’s affects, too, are properly gendered, consumed by the passions of virtuous maternity: “Her own life builded and moulded itself upon the child . . . No hands but hers must touch and garnish those little limbs; no dress or frill must touch them that had not wearied her fingers . . . she and he together spoke some soft and unknown tongue and held it in communion.” ³² Du Bois’s corresponding liturgy is distinctively masculine: “I too mused above his little white bed; saw the strength of my own arm stretched onward through the ages through the newer strength of his; saw the dream of my black fathers stagger a step onward in the wild phantasm of the world; heard in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise within the Veil.” ³³ Nina and Burghardt are knit together in prelinguistic unity; if her hands themselves lose contact with the infant’s body, dresses and frills serve as soft prostheses. Du Bois’s own arm stretches not toward the babe but toward the future; and not homely fibers but the tiny arm of Burghardt himself extends the father’s reach. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes, Du Bois imagines his son as “newly embodying in his arm the patriarchal strength of Du Bois’ arm.” ³⁴ Where Nina babbles with Burghardt in a private language, Du Bois hearkens to a message for his people. For Nina, Burghardt constitutes the immersive present; for Du Bois, he is the future. Gender conventions likewise frame the narration of Burghardt’s passing. Nina, “the world’s most piteous thing—a childless mother,” inarticulately “writhe[s]” in the “chamber of death,” while Du Bois rails against his fate. His anguished apostrophe to Death protests its intrusion into his private “coign of happiness” when he had willingly risked all in public strivings. ³⁵ Nina’s single utterance in the elegy expresses simple faith in Burghardt’s heavenly reward; Du Bois, in masculine contrast, mutters a skeptic’s prayer. As Hazel Carby argues, “Du Bois described and challenged the hegemony of the national and racial formations in the United States at the dawn of a new century, but he did so in ways that both assumed and privileged a discourse of black masculinity.” ³⁶

Dumm largely misses these codes of gender and class in his moving treatment of the elegy, which he reads alongside Emerson’s “Experience” as a resource for democratic theorizations of loss. He underscores Emerson’s positioning within structures of domination: Emerson’s lament, he writes, “seems to depend extravagantly, if silently, on the privileges Emerson enjoyed as a free white male property owner.” ³⁷ In contrast, “Du Bois did not enjoy the privileges of an Emerson, and this was only because he was a Negro.” ³⁸ Dumm rightly emphasizes the fundamental differences between the two fathers’ experiences of grief: Du Bois’s loss is both “ordinary” and a matter of grave and ongoing injustice. ³⁹ Yet this emphasis precludes attention to Du Bois’s own replication of gender and class hierarchies that cast the black majority as not yet fit for citizenship. Dumm represents as Burghardt’s birth scene a later passage actually depicting the family’s entry into the South, glossing over the opening depiction of the birth chamber and idealized bourgeois maternity and paternity. ⁴⁰ He also quotes a passage near the end of the elegy: “The wretched of my race that line the alleys of the nation sit fatherless and unmothered; but Love sat beside his cradle, and in his ear Wisdom waited to speak.” ⁴¹ Glossing this simply—“Du Bois was Wisdom, his wife was Love”—Dumm lets stand without comment the division that Du Bois draws between the abandoned (or illegitimate) masses and his own household, as well as the gendered personification of virtues. ⁴² This is consequential because it precludes a comprehensive consideration of how, for Du Bois versus Emerson, “the fact of racism ma[de] a difference for the experience of grief.” ⁴³ Part of this difference, as Dumm rightly suggests and Du Bois articulates—as discussed below—in the elegy’s transgressive moments, is a true incommensurability in the meanings and expectations of life and death alike. But part of it is also, conversely, an insistence on assimilability, on the equivalence of value between his own cherished infant and the child of any respectable white reader. Unlike the wretched of the race, Burghardt is no less properly mothered and fathered, and so no less of a loss.

Melvin Rogers similarly neglects the constitutive character of masculinism and elitism in the rhetoric of Souls as a whole. Rogers argues persuasively that “the structure of Souls moves from attempting to cultivate sympathetic identification . . . to eliciting shame in the [white] reader by the end of the book. It is the work of sympathy—creating a shared normative and affective horizon—that increases the chances that a sense of shame will emerge.” ⁴⁴ The normalizing rhetoric in “Of the Passing” illuminates both the efficacy and the limitations of this affective work. Its scrupulous conformity with bourgeois gender norms is not incidental but integral to this process of identification. The sympathy thus engendered may lend moral force to depictions of anti-black exclusion and violence—but conditional on the respectability of its victims. Rogers does briefly note that “Du Bois’ constant reference to ‘black men’ and to male leadership reveals his patriarchalism . . . all the more problematic in the context of arguing against political–ethical inequality.” ⁴⁵ Yet Rogers’s insights about the shared sentimental horizon enabled by Souls miss the centrality of this (elite) patriarchalism to the work’s persuasive power.

“Of the Passing’s” normalizing rhetoric in fact replicates, in miniature, the trajectory from sympathy to shame that Rogers identifies in Souls as a whole. The depiction of the bereaved parents sets the stage for an explosive moment of cruelty at Burghardt’s burial: “Blithe was the morning of his burial, with bird and song and sweet-smelling flowers . . . The busy city dinned about us; they did not say much, those pale-faced hurrying men and women; they did not say much,—they only glanced and said, ‘Niggers!’” ⁴⁶ This scene could serve as a second direct rejoinder to Hoffman’s ascriptions of affective deficit; it is not the mourners but the passing whites that display a gruesome lack of feeling. By the time the burial occurs, near the end of the chapter, white readers sharing in a bourgeois sensibility have been primed to feel the shock of shame. Invited into an intimate tableau of maternal devotion, paternal ambitions, and angelic babyhood, they have witnessed the devastating loss and the parents’ properly gendered sorrow. For contemporaneous readers, identification may have been further strengthened by the fact that while black infant mortality vastly exceeded the mortality rates of whites, a significant proportion of all families lost at least one child in infancy. ⁴⁷ The little beflowered procession along streets made unfamiliar by grief likewise bespeaks a loss that could be felt by all. But then, into this seemingly universal scene of bereavement, irrupt the cold white glance ⁴⁸ and the cruel word. The moral impact of this sequence, however, has been enabled by the family’s representation in strict conformity with gender and class norms. Had Nina been a single mother or waged worker, or had Du Bois depicted a crowded extended family, the response of white readers could not have been counted on in the same way. To borrow Rogers’s terms, “aspirational” figurations of “the people” ⁴⁹ may themselves replicate exclusions by which the “descriptive”—that is, already officially recognized—citizenry is defined.

The normalizing rhetoric of “Of the Passing of the First-Born” thus levels a potent but selective rhetorical challenge to the racial ideology of the day. For Rogers, Alexander Crummell—whose biographical sketch comprises the chapter after “Of the Passing”—“serves as a proxy” for the individual strivings of black men in America, meant to engender recognition of a common humanity “within and without the veil.” ⁵⁰ Du Bois’s depiction of himself, his wife, and his son likewise serves as a proxy for the worthy black family. Both proxies powerfully challenge constraints on white readers’ sympathy and moral imagination, potentially expanding the limits of “the people” to include certain black subjects, insofar as they remain within the strictures of respectability. Yet given the normalizing terms in which both traffic, they fail to displace the logic of racial exclusion itself.

Hybridity and Ambivalence: The Transgressive Mode

While this normalizing mode dominates, the elegy also contains more disruptive and destabilizing currents. The first of these celebrates Burghardt’s racial mixture. The second expresses ambivalence toward life under white supremacy, and culminates in echoing the words and deeds of black mothers before and after emancipation. While neither is innocent or unproblematic, each unsettles the elegy’s aspirations to respectable inclusion.

Hybridity was increasingly politically charged at the time of Souls’ writing. For Hoffman and other race scientists, racial mixing was allegedly responsible for African American moribundity. The law of the land confirmed this consensus: in 1883’s Pace v. Alabama, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld state anti-miscegenation laws, holding that “amalgamation of the two races, produc[es] a mongrel population and a degraded civilization.” ⁵¹ As Juliet Hooker writes, “All strands of scientific racism” at the time “coincided that miscegenation led to degeneration and that crossing between so-called superior and inferior races should be avoided at all costs.” ⁵²

Against this consensus, Du Bois depicts Burghardt as a vital embodiment of racial mixture. Golden curls and blue eyes were the trademarks of juvenile innocence and purity in the day’s sentimental literature. ⁵³ Du Bois appropriates these features to glowingly depict his son: “his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had moulded into his features.” ⁵⁴ Hybridity is emphasized with increasing intensity: “dark gold” moves slightly away from convention, and the mingled colors are suggestive, but the “blood of Africa” is unequivocal. Burghardt radiantly embodies the dual heritage that the white world would simultaneously deny and condemn to death. In direct contrast to Hoffman’s claims that “the mulatto is . . . of all races the one possessed of the least vital force,” ⁵⁵ Burghardt is magnificently vital. He is “sturdy and masterful . . . filled with bubbling life.” ⁵⁶ And not only his parents but “the world” itself “loved him,” women, men, and children alike. ⁵⁷

This depiction of Burghardt replicates in prose Du Bois’s pointed inclusion of light-skinned African American babies and children in his early twentieth-century photographs. Evelynn Hammonds argues that “Du Bois used . . . photography, to make visible the evidence of race mixing that white society denied.” ⁵⁸ Such evidence threw into doubt clearly legible racial categories, as well as the degeneration hypothesis. ⁵⁹ Unlike the photographs, however, the elegy locates the transformative potentials of hybridity not only in Burghardt as category-blurring visual object, but as a gazing subject in his own right. Despite Mariotti’s detailed reading of Du Bois’s optical practices, she does not explicitly thematize Burghardt’s own vision. Yet Burghardt’s blue-brown eyes are in a sense the fixed stars around which the chapter turns. Even as a tiny infant, his “eyes caught the gleam and flash of life.” They are innocently penetrating: “bright wondering eyes that peer into my soul.” ⁶⁰ Others, too, found this infant gaze transfixing: “men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes.” ⁶¹ And as mother and father stood beside his little deathbed, he “turned toward us with great eyes” ⁶² and they knew that death was near. After the death, Du Bois reflects: “I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering beyond this narrow Now.” ⁶³

Du Bois is elegizing not only Burghardt’s physical eyes but his way of looking. While the Veil has woven itself irreversibly into Du Bois’s own optical faculty, Burghardt does not yet see the painful deception of the “land whose freedom is to us a mockery and whose liberty a lie.” ⁶⁴ He simply “watched the world with wondering thoughtfulness,” for “he knew no color line . . . the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, the loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed.” ⁶⁵ His infantine vision recalls Du Bois’s own sunny babyhood, before the color-line cleaved soul from soul. Moreover, this vision, preserved by death in this innocent before, ⁶⁶ points toward the possibility of a future political optic after the Veil: “when men ask of the workman, not “Is he white?” but “Can he work?” When men ask artists, not “Are they black?” but “Do they know?” ⁶⁷

This aspiration finds an echo in chapter 14 of Souls, where he casts racial mixing as the corporeal aspect of a nation that must be affirmed as the collaborative work of blacks and whites: “Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of the nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth.” ⁶⁸ While not noting how this reference to mixing could jar the sensibilities of Du Bois’s white readers, Rogers points out that Du Bois here “projects a vision of the nation (now hybridized) that might be born anew” ⁶⁹ Burghardt, in his “wild pride of being,” embodies the nascent hope of that hybrid nation.

This celebratory description of Burghardt’s racial mixture thus prefigures what Hooker calls Du Bois’s “mulatto fictions” such as those in 1920’s Darkwater and the 1928 novel Dark Princess, in which “representations of mixture enable Du Bois to imagine (and, he hoped, thereby facilitate the construction of) alternate, better worlds . . . racial utopias that dare to imagine a world not dominated or defined by whiteness.” ⁷⁰ In both his aspect and his innocent perspective, Burghardt embodies the promise of such a world. Claudia Tate connects the elegy and Dark Princess; she characterizes the birth of the mixed-race messiah to the black American protagonist and his royal South Asian mate in the latter as a “grandiose repetition” of Burghardt’s birth and the “prophetic aspirations” that accompanied it. ⁷¹ In both cases, the “figurations of transgressions across the color line were indelibly bound up with questions of futurity.” ⁷² The differences between them chart the shifts in Du Bois’s terms of futurity itself, both geographical and political—from survival as part of the national future in “Of the Passing” to global, proto–third world future in Dark Princess.

At the same time, Hooker notes that “the racial utopias depicted in his mulatto fictions were rife with internal contradictions.” ⁷³ And indeed, some of the criticisms applied to these later writings on mixture also complicate the elegy’s subversive celebration of Burghardt’s hybridity. ⁷⁴ Alys Weinbaum points out the heteronormative logics that underwrite Du Bois’s representations of hybridity in the 1920s, and the elegy likewise couches the family’s mixed genealogies within an unimpeachably proper heterosexual union. Du Bois’s portrait of Burghardt also partakes in the colorism noted by many critics, even as it blurs racial categorizations. Tate observes that “although Du Bois consciously racializes as dark the overdetermined feminine ideal in his creative writings, this intention is invaded by an effect of the white standard of female beauty . . . using as uplift symbols ideal dark women who are, in actuality, golden-hued.” ⁷⁵ Farah Jasmine Griffin likewise highlights the patriarchal colorism that pervades even Du Bois’s most overtly feminist writings. ⁷⁶ His photographic and textual iconographies of mixture in babies and children can be read similarly, largely conforming to white standards of appearance even as they blur the color-line. Burghardt, scion of “black fathers,” is nevertheless golden-hued.

This celebration of hybridity is thus at least partially structured by masculinist and colorist hierarchies. Yet in casting Burghardt as a radiant embodiment of racial impurity, Du Bois counters allegations of black moribundity. Further, his account of Burghardt’s vision resignifies purity itself: immediately after the image of souls “uncolored” in his son’s eyes, he writes that “I—yea, all men–are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life.” ⁷⁷ Purity in this sense has nothing to do with bloodlines preserved from amalgamation; rather, it is a way of seeing that obviates the boundary between whiteness and blackness. While a number of the signature limitations of Du Bois’s liberatory imagination are in evidence, this treatment of Burghardt’s hybridity does not primarily attempt to foster whites’ sympathetic identification. Rather, it foreshadows Du Bois’s later visions of a world where whiteness has lost its power.

The second current of transgressive rhetoric manifests in moments of striking ambivalence in the essay, risking readerly sympathy to articulate the complex and bitter specificity of black parenthood under Jim Crow. Immediately after the celebratory passage described above, Du Bois’s register shifts from adoration to suspicion toward Burghardt’s hybrid features: “Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had the brown of his eyes not crushed out the blue? For brown were his father’s eyes, and his father’s father’s. And thus in the Land of the Color-Line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil.” ⁷⁸ In dramatic counterpoint to the foregoing appropriation of white childhood’s gold and blue, Du Bois now rejects their public significations of innocence as he recalls unnamed private injuries. Departing from the language of harmonious intermingling, he also seems to allude to the history of white supremacist sexual violence—though troublingly, as an antagonism between rival paternities. ⁷⁹ Burghardt’s initial portrayal suggests both blurring and transcendence of the color-line; here Du Bois depicts a rigid and embattled boundary. The lines that follow further dramatize black parental anguish, a painfully educated anticipation of violence that defies assimilability across the color-line. Delight in the “unbowed pride” of Burghardt’s little head is alloyed with the lived certainty that some future day will see it bowed. Adoration of his “tiny dimpled hand” is made bitter with the knowledge that the father’s own hands cannot offer sufficient protection. ⁸⁰ As Dumm keenly observes, “for Du Bois, the formulation of grief is already written into the life of the child who is mourned.” ⁸¹

This haunted ambivalence reaches an apex in Du Bois’s admission, after Burghardt’s death, of an “awful gladness in [his] heart”:

. . . my soul whispers ever to me saying, “not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool was I to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the veil. . . . In the poise of his curl-crowned head did there not sit all the wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? . . . Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you. ⁸²

This ambivalence jars with the elegy’s more conventional depictions of paternal bereavement. If the chapter’s normalizing rhetoric emphasizes the convergences between Du Bois’s experiences and affects and the white reader’s own, this passage reveals the abyss at which that shared horizon stops—or, at least, where it requires a far more arduous exercise of political imagination. Du Bois signposts these limits with an appeal: “nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil”: the progression from sympathy to shame cannot here be presumed. ⁸³

It is a testament to this passage’s departure from the conventions of fatherly grief that it evokes, more than anything, the moments of maternal ambivalence that thread through slave narratives and black political speech and writing. In an appeal made the year of Burghardt’s birth to the white National Congress of Mothers, Du Bois’s contemporary, Mary Church Terrell, expresses her anguish, as well as the limits of whites’ sympathetic identification, in strikingly similar terms. Terrell, who had lost three children within days of their births, underlines the incommensurability of experience between black and white mothers:

Contrast, if you will, the feelings of hope and joy with thrill the heart of the white mothers with those which stir the soul of her colored sister. Put yourselves for one minute in her place (you could not endure the strain longer) and imagine, if you can, how you would feel if situated similarly—As a mother of the weaker race clasps to her bosom the babe which she loves as fondly as you do yours, her heart cannot thrill with the joyful anticipations of the future. For before her child she sees the thorny path of prejudice and proscription which his little feet must tread. . . . So rough does the way of her infant appear to many a poor black mother that instead of thrilling with the joy which you feel, as you clasp your little ones to your breast, she trembles with apprehension and despair. ⁸⁴

While she stops short of invoking death as a release from this grim destiny, Terrell’s depiction of black mothers’ “apprehension and despair” about the future, where white mothers can “thrill with . . . joyful anticipations,” reveals an unbridgeable distance between the experiences of motherhood within and without the Veil. Like Du Bois, she begins with the establishment of affective symmetry between black and white mothers, and then dramatically emphasizes the non-identity of these experiences. Also like Du Bois, Terrell simultaneously asks for white auditors’ identification with her complex sentiments and acknowledges the impossibility of full identification. She asks the audience to “put yourselves . . . in her place,” yet almost peremptorily declares that they could never withstand the corresponding anguish.

In this attempted articulation of the inarticulable, both Terrell and Du Bois inherit a legacy of black maternal ambivalence under enslavement. This ambivalence about whether the child’s good would be best served by nurture under the living death of slavery, or by physical death in preference to this death-in-life, is difficult to track. The most visible traces of this maternal dilemma are those cases that have ultimately taken the latter position, choosing infanticide over enslavement; Margaret Garner’s case, fictionalized by Toni Morrison in Beloved, is the most well known of these. ⁸⁵ Cornel West makes this link explicitly: “Morrison’s Sethe echoes Du Bois’ own voice upon the painful passing of his First-Born.” ⁸⁶ But in its elegant formal register and rhetorical construction, it is Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical account of the anguish of enslaved motherhood that most closely prefigures Terrell’s and Du Bois’s ambivalence.

I loved to watch [my son’s] infant slumbers; but always there was a dark cloud over my enjoyment. I could never forget that he was a slave. Sometimes I wished that he might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very ill . . . I had prayed for his death, but never so earnestly as I now prayed for his life; and my prayer was heard. Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery. ⁸⁷

As Du Bois and Terrell would do four decades later, Jacobs reaches out to readers with rhetorical formulations that establish an affective symmetry—Madonna-like mother over sleeping babe—while simultaneously showing that the respective experiences of parenthood are utterly incomparable. Saidiya Hartman observes that Jacobs’s narration, earlier in the narrative, of her sexual maneuverings under violent duress seems to concede moral superiority to her white readers, but in fact demonstrates that “womanly” virtue is impossible under chattel enslavement, forcing readers to confront “the situational ethics of the enslaved.” ⁸⁸ Similarly, in this passage, Jacobs dramatizes the gap between the situational affects and expectations of free and enslaved motherhood. Under the living death of slavery, maternity is shown to present an agonizing paradox: the clearest expression of love for a child may be the wish for its corporeal death. Du Bois’s directive to the reader not to judge him strikingly echoes Jacobs’s denial of equivalence with whites’ gendered moral compass.

In so closely paralleling Terrell, Jacobs, and the Garner mythos, this “awful gladness” evinces what Fred Moten terms “animateriality”: the defiant presence in Du Bois’s writings of a “maternal mark that bourgeois respectability demands be relinquished.” ⁸⁹ This maternal presence disrupts Du Bois’s respectable self-representations “most clearly after the fact of a deprivation”; ⁹⁰ it is thus unsurprising that it breaches the respectable surface of the elegy. Moten discerns this disruptive element in the sonic features of Du Bois’s texts, especially the recurrent depiction of his enslaved African great-great-grandmother’s song in his autobiographical writings. The elegy similarly “both reveal[s] and repress[es]” this maternal mark through its lyrical components; even as the elegy invokes his “black fathers,” the maternal is given a kind of encrypted priority in both the Sorrow Song that heads it—“I hope my mother will be there in that beautiful world on high”—and the accompanying Swinburne verse, which dramatizes maternal loss. ⁹¹ It is perhaps most audible in his soul’s whisper: “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” Channeling a history of ambivalent losses and fugitive despair, Du Bois here insists on a more capacious notion of life than the white world can contain. For whites, he implies, are themselves souls “choked and deformed,” who glory in the deliberate crushing of fellow human spirits. Life’s duration under these conditions means at least some degree of spiritual death; conversely, life in its expansive fullness may perhaps only be preserved by an early corporeal death. Du Bois thus simultaneously grieves Burghardt’s loss and celebrates his escape, his “wild pride of being” intact and free.

While less clearly prefiguring future writings than the treatment of Burghardt’s hybridity, this fierce ambivalence resonates with the convention-defying characterizations of black maternity in Darkwater’s “The Damnation of Women,” published in 1920. ⁹² In “Damnation,” Du Bois forwards a vision of black motherhood that departs strikingly from both the sociological linkage of promiscuity with social pathology and the late Progressive Era maternalism prevalent at the time. ⁹³ Du Bois pays special homage to black mothers past and present: from the hell of slavery, forced to “starv[e their] own wailing offspring to nurse to the world their swaggering masters” and subject to unimaginable sexual violence, to the defiant “future promise” of unmarried working-class black women’s motherhood, which he compares favorably to more respectable “childless white wives of the North.” ⁹⁴ For “this history of insult and degradation,” while unforgivable, has also given rise to standards of strength and freedom unimaginable within a white patriarchal frame. ⁹⁵ In her reading of “Damnation,” Lawrie Balfour argues that Du Bois “gestures toward what Hortense Spillers calls ‘the insurgent ground’ of an alternative female subjectivity.” ⁹⁶ In the essay that Balfour is citing—and on which Moten’s notion of animateriality also turns—Spillers theorizes black maternity as impossible under the ongoing logic of enslavement, and hence generative of modes of life that escape this logic. ⁹⁷ “Damnation” does not thematize black maternal ambivalence per se. But its laudation of black women’s enactments of freedom and care in violent exile from the conventions of motherhood suggests an extension of the elegy’s transgressive refusal of the white world’s terms.

Reading elements of Du Bois’s elegy as partaking in a tradition of black maternal subversion unquestionably raises thorny problems. Following James and Carby, Balfour cautions readers that Du Bois’s articulations of feminism are always incomplete and paradoxical, drawing attention to Du Bois’s propensity for ventriloquism of black women’s voices. ⁹⁸ Du Bois’s narration of his own “awful gladness” at his son’s death in terms so similar to Terrell, Jacobs, and (public memory of) Garner could be read as ventriloquism, an uncited appropriation of black maternal experiences and insights. Moreover, it remains true that his depiction of Burghardt’s actual mother’s grief is granted no such subversive complexity. It could also be argued that, like West’s parallel between Sethe and Du Bois, this reading of Du Bois’s ambivalence as maternal elides the intergenerational horror of sexual violence under enslavement and Jim Crow, which looms large in Morrison’s text as well as that of Jacobs’s Incidents (even if not in the passage cited here). Finally, it could be argued that, while the passage echoes both Terrell and Jacobs in depicting a baby boy, its emphasis on a masculine trajectory that so clearly evokes Du Bois’s own life story counters its matrilinearity to some extent.

Yet the ambivalence of this passage nevertheless differs in crucial ways from roughly contemporary expressions of white paternal ambivalence, such as that which Mariotti discerns in Emerson’s “Experience.” Emerson laments that his son’s loss ultimately left him unchanged; he “grieve[s] that grief can teach [him] nothing” about the true nature of things. ⁹⁹ Near the end of this lamentation, he writes: “Nothing is left to us but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction. . . . There at least is reality that will not dodge us.” ¹⁰⁰ For Emerson here, death is the ineluctable end of life, the fact of individual finitude. For Du Bois and his maternal antecedents, however, these terms take on different and doubled meanings. Birth is entry into unfreedom and violence, a “living death” of the heart as well as the divine renewal of the world. And this violence is itself intersubjective and intergenerational, not merely individual. For Du Bois—as for Jacobs and Terrell—parenting meant in part reliving his own injuries and anticipating their repetition on his child’s body and soul, alongside the wonder and adoration. All three authors suggest that, in the face of a reality not elusive but unbearable (yet borne), biological death may itself be a dodge, as well as an unfathomable loss. If Emerson’s ambivalence issues from the fact that his son’s death brings him no closer to the world as it truly is, this black maternal ambivalence demands a different world altogether.

Conclusion

Between the pervasiveness of police and vigilante killings of black people, the quieter atrocity of disproportionate black infant death rates, ¹⁰¹ and publicly avowed white supremacy on the rise, our contemporary moment strongly echoes Du Bois’s pivotal spring of 1899. Likewise, the demand for black respectability still structures both white notions of civility and black self-policing. ¹⁰² Meditating on the public self-presentation of Trayvon Martin’s bereaved parents, Stephen Marshall writes, “respectability is a discipline that frames black abjection for sympathetic engagement by non-blacks. It is a filter that subtracts racialized excess.” ¹⁰³ There is no doubt that the normalizing rhetoric dominates the elegy, representing the Du Bois’s home life in ways designed to engender sympathy in white bourgeois readers. Precisely as if to soothe such readers, Du Bois’s narration of his “awful gladness” is immediately followed by a swing back toward the recuperative: “Idle words,” he writes, “for surely he might have borne it more lightly than we.” ¹⁰⁴

Yet these “idle words” remain. Moten writes that it is “necessary to understand Du Bois’ adherence to the ideology of normative uplift as always disrupted by his deviance from it.” ¹⁰⁵ In the elegy, this deviance is marked by moments of ambivalence. Ambivalence attends Du Bois’s treatment of Burghardt’s hybridity. The infant is at first an avatar of future possibilities of being and seeing beyond the color-line, prefiguring Du Bois’s future turn to utopian imaginings of hybridity. Yet Du Bois then connects his son’s hybrid features to the racist harms that he himself has suffered and the violent history of mixture in the United States. This ambivalence culminates in his formulation of “awful gladness.” Whereas his normalizing rhetoric aims to demonstrate that a particular black child is a grievable life, this ambivalence suggests that life itself under violent white supremacy is both more and less than a grievable loss. Echoing both Jacobs’s paradox of enslaved motherhood and Terrell’s indictment of the intergenerational violence of Jim Crow, Du Bois draws attention to the continuities from enslavement into the post-emancipation era, and refuses a future that projects these continuities forward in time.

Given the striking parallels between Du Bois’s “narrow Now,” and our own, what can we glean from these moments of generative ambivalence? For Rogers, Souls’ rhetorical elicitation of sympathetic identification gives rise to a motivational shame on the part of the white polity. The elegy’s transgressive rhetoric, however, exceeds the disciplined containment of Du Bois’s own grief, invoking a heritage of fugitive maternity and anticipating future visions of the end of whiteness and patriarchy. Understood thus diachronically, we might also read it as distantly prefiguring key rejections of respectability in responses to anti-black violence in our own moment, from state and state-sanctioned murders ¹⁰⁶ to disparate death rates. ¹⁰⁷ The elegy’s transgressive moments are far more equivocal and ephemeral than these contemporary responses. Yet the former likewise point past sympathy, toward how unrecognizable the polity must become to itself—if it is ever to be home to “a Freedom that is Free.” ¹⁰⁸