Explore "The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, / All night long crying with a mournful cry, / As I lie and listen, and cannot understand / The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, / O water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? / All night long the water is crying to me. / Unresting water, there shall never be rest / Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail, / And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west; / And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, / All life long crying without avail, / As the water all night long is crying to me. / Arthur Symons
Between 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. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. 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. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.