All say, «How hard it is that we have to die» - a

strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have to live.

- Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

CHAPTER X “A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few

years ago, with the accompanying earthquakes,

tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust, changes

the face of the surrounding landscape beyond

recognition, bringing down the high lands,

elevating the low, making fair lakes where deserts

had been, and deserts where green prairies had

smiled before. The tremendous catastrophe which

had befallen Tom had changed his moral

landscape in much the same way. Some of his low

places he found lifted to ideals, some of his ideals

had sunk to the valleys, and lay there with the

sackcloth and ashes of pumice-stone and sulphur

on their ruined heads.”

“It was the nigger in him asserting its humility,

and he blushed and wan abashed. And the " nigger

" in him was surprised when the white friend put

out his hand for a shake with him. He found the

"nigger " in him involuntarily giving the road, on

the sidewalk, to the white rowdy and loafer. When

Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew, the idol

of his secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger"

in him made an embarrassed excuse and was

afraid to enter and sit with the dread white folks

on equal terms. The "nigger" in him went

shrinking and skulking here and there and yonder,

and fancying it saw suspicion and maybe

detection in all faces, tones, and gestures. So

strange and uncharacteristic was Tom’s conduct

that people noticed it, and turned to look after him

when he passed on; and when he glanced back as

he could not help doing, in spite of his best

resistance and caught that puzzled expression in a

person’s face, it gave him a sick feeling, and he

took himself out of view as quickly as he could.

He presently came to have a hunted sense and a

hunted look, and then he fled away to the hilltops

and the solitudes. He said to himself that the curse

of Ham was upon him.”

“There is but one

coward on earth, and

that is the coward that

dare not know.”

The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls

strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and

unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation,

or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half

hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton

and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,

and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world

which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see

himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar

sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking

at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by

the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One

ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two

thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one

dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn

asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—

this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double

self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of

the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for

America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not

bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he

knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply

wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an

American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows,

without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

“O my body, make of me

always a man who

questions!”

Black Skin White Masks

“And then…And then the occasion arose when I

had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar

weight burdened me. The real world challenged

my claims. In the white world the man of color

encounters difficulties in the development of his

bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is

solely a negating activity. It is a third person

consciousness. The body is surrounded by an

atmosphere of certain uncertainty.”

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”

Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning

to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh

myself to tears, but laughter had become

impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I

already knew that there were legends, stories,

history, and above all historicity, which I had

learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at

various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its

place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the

train it was no longer a question of being aware of

my body in the third person but in a triple person. In

the train I was given not one but two, three places. I

had already stopped being amused. It was not that I

was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I

existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the

other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not

opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared.

Nausea….I was responsible at the same time for my

body, for my race, for my ancestors.”

Main Purposes of Analysis • Starting from a post-colonial perspective, I’ll try to analyse the

abrupt changes in Tom Driscoll (C) behaviour in the aftermath

of the discovery of his black roots.

• Why Tom Driscoll (C) «dropped gradually back into his old

frivolous and easygoing ways and conditions of feeling and

manner of speech»? From a fanonian point of view, he is

trying to prove is whitness at all costs?

• Possible connections with another story of doubliness : W.E.B.

Du Bois’s short-story «Of the coming of John», published in

1903.