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Of the Faith of the Fathers

© Nichel Anderson

Dim face of beauty haunting all the world, fair face of beauty all too fair to see, where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled, there there alone for thee may white peace be.

Beauty, sad face of beauty, mystery, wonder what are these dreams to foolish babbling men who cry with little noises 'neath the thunder of Ages ground to sand, to a little sand. - Fiona Macleod.

Du Bois masterfully begin this essay by expressing the lovely description of a country he was born into. His exceptional chosen words in the beginning paragraph allows the reader to be encourage just enough to indulge further into the message Du Bois will ultimately present. "Of the Faith of the Fathers" essay is a tale of awakening what the reality then was like being a person of color, Du Bois exposes the pertinent awareness signs in his essay to uncover the message that life has to offer.

In reference to the first paragraph:

"It was out in the county, far from home, far from my foster home, on a dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we could hear dimly across the fields of a rhythmic cadence of song, soft, thrilling, powerful, that welled and died sorrowfully in our ears. I was a country schoolteacher then, fresh from the East, and had never seen a Southern Negro revival."

Du Bois essay chronicles the history of the Negro religion in the United States and the then culture and ramifications the church had on the community. He compares the South church to the North church when the primary purpose for seeking a place of worship was due to the outcry of the injustice of slavery. The South members represents a fearful, not outspoken, not self-assertive only to be silent and shy. The South members were being flattering and being pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile and shut his eyes to wrong.

Now, the North members emphasize the radicalism of the Negro. The North is empowered to being more outspoken and assertive as well as achieving the fruits of life within the limits that were allowed by a person of color. The downside that Du Bois masterfully portrays of the North is that it falls into two categories that limits any assistance to its counterparts in the South; the North will have classes of segregation of the poor and the middle class would aligned themselves to other middle class races and/or the rich class. This in part, the matrix of this energy leaves the Southern Negroes no other means of any significant assistance from their brethens of the North -- that freedom could provide from their Northen brethen. So the Southerns would result to aligning themselves to the conditioning of the controlled South, due to most of the South being limited both by money and freedom of expressing itself in a creative way.

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