By almost every critical reckoning, The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1989) is the preeminent statement of modern black consciousness. A fusion of history, sociology, personal memoir, and collective memory, Souls is unique in form and unsurpassed in influence among African American texts. Yet it is not on these grounds alone that Souls garnered the range of commentators and celebrants for its centenary that it did.1 In his masterwork, W. E. B. Du Bois drew on African American expressive culture—its music and rhetoric—to produce a singular text that resounds throughout the literary tradition of the twentieth century. Metaphors of the Color Line, the Veil, double consciousness, and the Black Belt inform such African American classics as The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Cane (1923), Invisible Man (1952), and Song of Solomon (1987). In Arnold Rampersad’s assessment, “If all of a nation’s literature may stem from one book, as Hemingway implied about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then it can as accurately be said that all of Afro-American literature of a creative nature has proceeded from Du Bois’ . . . The Souls of Black Folk.â€?2

I concur with that judgment. My argument centers on why and how Souls has been foundational to modern African American literature. The most important reason lies in the text’s self-consciousness of its participation in an ongoing tradition of African American expressivity. However, as its chapters unfold, Souls locates itself in a soundscape that exceeds the limits of textual representation. The distance between what the text can and cannot represent is �gured by the musical epigraphs that precede each chapter. The silent bars of music drawn from the Negro spirituals or “sorrow songs,� as Du Bois deemed them, are signs for sounds to which the text can at best allude. They represent voices that Du Bois’s readers in 1903 could not hear. I read the epigraphs as hieroglyphs that stand in for gaps in the text, gaps that subsequent writers would strive to �ll. I end my article with a reading of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel that creates a �ctional terrain evocative of the Black Belt in Souls. In her re-sounding of Du Bois, Morrison writes a text as haunting as its precursor.

Although my argument turns on what Souls omits, I want ï¬?rst to acknowledge how much it contains. As a multigeneric volume, Souls documents the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency established in 1865 that served as the government of the unreconstructed South for seven years. It charts the rise of Booker T. Washington, who is sardonically described as “certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis,â€? and assesses his role through the historical perspective of black leadership.3 It compiles statistics on housing and employment. It analyzes the structure of rural black communities, giving data on social class, criminality, and the church. It offers an eloquent brief for the value of liberal arts education and cites the number of black college graduates—400 from white colleges and 2,000 from black institutions—at the time of its writing.

The importance of this data notwithstanding, Du Bois had announced in his preface that the aim of his little book was to “sketch, in vague, uncertain outline, the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans live and strive� (37). Far from empty-handed supplicants, black folk brought their own estimable gifts—spiritual and aesthetic—to the branch of the kingdom of culture slowly being established in the United States. Consequently, Souls testi�es to the legacy of the black intellectual and spiritual leader Alexander Crummell. It elegizes those whose potential goes unrealized, including Du Bois’s own son, his student Josie, the �ctional protagonist John Jones, and his sister Jennie. It presents religious rituals and proclaims the beauty of the sorrow songs, deeming them “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people� (205).