[p. 3] He makes reference to the Veil without defining what he’s talking about. (He defines it a few paragraphs later, but using it in capitalized form on first reference without saying what he’s talking about made me wonder whether it was a contemporary term that everybody understood or not). Anyway, you discover later that the Veil is his metaphor for the racial divide in America.
[p. 5] “seventh son” in folklore mystical attributes (such as “second-sight”) were assigned to the seventh son.
[p. 6] “This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.” Well, sure — you and me both, pal.
“slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice…” Here he’s saying that just freeing the slaves was clearly not enough; something else needs to happen for American society to get past it. Later he says “the Freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”
[p. 7] “In vain do we cry out to this our vastest social problem: ‘Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves/Shall never tremble!'” Buh?
“carpet-baggers” white northerners who descended upon the South during Reconstruction, some with less than honorable economic motives. Since then used as a pejorative to denote a politician running for office outside his or her home geography. Similar biases exist today in urban areas against “gentrification”.
“Left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom”. He returns to medieval notions of serfdom repeatedly, undoubtedly to convey the sense that the race problem in America harkens back to a feudal social organization and is something less than progressive.
“In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself, — darkly as through a veil…” Another use of the “veil” metaphor, this time to describe the translucency of self-discovery through education.
[p. 8] “he felt the weight of his ignorance…” the downside of acquiring knowledge is that you become aware of what you don’t have and as a result lose innocence (maybe as Adam & Eve did in Eden?).
“the red stain of bastardy” this seems pretty nasty by today’s standards — it implies that the white blood flowing through the veins of the children of slaves burdens them with “the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers.” It could have been very difficult to predict then that the first black president of the U.S. would not be descended from American slaves.
“men call the shadow prejudice”
“the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil” buh?
“so dawned the time of Sturm und Drang” because the conflict has not been resolved
[p. 9] The bright ideals of the past: physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands…each alone was over-simple and incomplete… To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one”
suggests that blacks can at least in some ways be more American than Americans with contributions to culture and music, the “pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence” and the “simple oasis of faith” set apart from the “dusty desert of dollars” (what the Bible would refer to as “Mammon”
[p. 12] “the singular Port Royal experiment” program to return slaves to land abandoned by white owners after the Civil War
“their language funny” blacks in the Sea Islands (where the Port Royal experiment took place” spoke a distinctive Creole called Gullah
“Fisk Jubilee Singers” vocal group that served as a precursor to touring jazz and gospel bands of the early 20th c.
“Cariacature has southg again to spoil the quaint beauty of the music” Here referring to minstrelcy which he also derides in earlier grafs
[p. 13] “these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world”
“this was primitive African music” this characterization probably would not fly today (it’s a bit of a cultural-relativism party-foul); the notion that one peoples’ music is “primitive” because they don’t play in tuxedos in air-conditioned concert halls has always been pretty bogus, and it’s a fact that African music has more complicated rhythms and melodies than a lot of popular western music
[p. 14] “the result is still distinctively Negro and the method of blending original, but elements are both Negro and Caucasian.” This tradition would continue in the 20th c. with jazz and blues created by both white and black artists
“in these songs, as I have said, the slave spoke to the world. Such a message is naturally veiled and half articulate.” Again the metaphor of the “veil” here denoting that the information conveyed in music is linguistically clouded and often completely encoded (since slave masters exerted control over how and when their slaves could perform music)
[p. 16] “Again I go to the ___________ (brunele?), but I drink nothing”. Not often you see German quoted in this context; it’d be interesting to know what’s meant by “brunele”
[p. 17] “the words of these hymns were improvised by some leading minstrel of the religious band.” “Minstrel” in this sense means “traveling performer” but he’s referring to what we would refer to today as gospel
[p. 18] “…the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls of their skins. Is such a hope justified?” MLK echoed this almost verbatim in 1963.
Background
American Lit Journal 