A Seasonal Blessing in Word and Song from the Pen of W.E.B. Du Bois (1913)
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a male womanist as well as an intrepid lifelong warrior for racial justice. The overarching thread of his eighty (80!) years’ worth of published writings was the need for Black folk and communities of color worldwide to join together in the common interest of global equality and racial equity – a cause that was eloquently laid out in his 1916 essay “The Color Line Belts the World” and remained prominent to the end of his life. What's more, his view of “white and male supremacist capitalist societies [as] simultaneously race-, gender-, and class-specific and hegemonic” (Rabaka, 53) foreshadows intersectional approaches to Blackness and womanism. He declared that “all womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers but in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins” (Du Bois 1920, 164); and that “the uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause” (Du Bois 1920, 181). His standing as a male womanist is tainted today because he consistently imagined the causes of racial justice and global equality as being led by men, with women in prominent but still always supporting roles – but this stance tempers rather than erases his strenuous efforts to convince his contemporaries of the vital necessity of the uplift of women in a world otherwise intent on women’s subjugation.
To further complicate things, Du Bois’s relationship with the Christian churches in all their denominations was, shall we say, vexed: for most of his life he celebrated the teachings of Jesus Christ and was ever mindful of the centrality of the Black church as a force and source of community and moral support for Black folk, especially in the U.S.. But he refused to turn a blind eye to the historical fact that White Christianity had been a staunch supporter and enabler of slavery; and that White Christianity was a safe haven and source of embrace for the Ku Klux Klan and other racists who spuriously claimed divine justification for racist hatred and racial oppression.
All that leads to this question: what happens when the eloquent and intrepid racial-justice warrior / paternalistic male womanist / reluctant celebrant of Judeo-Christian theology puts pen to paper to envision a song that brings together a priest, a rabbi, and a Black pastor who follow a star in the Christmas Eve sky to a woman’s apartment on the seventh floor of a Manhattan building? (It sounds like a setup for a joke: a priest, a rabbi, and a pastor walk into an apartment . . .)
Magic. Magic is what happens.
The angel who facilitates that magic is a Black man, and the magic is born of Woman, a woman whom the three magi find sitting alone, gazing “into the mystery of the fire” as “the brilliancy of the star gaze[s] in upon her.” After the rabbi’s inquiry after “H[im] that is born king of the Jews” and the priest’s inquiry after “H[im] who is born king” have met with sad rejections, the Black pastor says: “Where is He, for we have seen His star in the East, and have come to worship Him?”
This, too, the woman sadly rejects. The rabbi and the priest persist, to no avail.
And then comes the magic. The Black pastor explains that the three spiritual leaders seek “child neither of [her] body nor of [her] brain, but of [her] heart”:
Strong Son of God, immortal love. We seek not the king of the world nor the light of the world, but the love of the world, and of all [people], for all [people]; and lo! this thou bearest beneath thy heart, O woman of mankind. This night it shall be born!
And it is. Her thoughts go to the song that Mary sings to her cousin Elizabeth in Luke 1:46-55: the Magnificat. That song is silent at first. But then new strength grips her and she rises -- and as she does so the roof rises with her, the walls of the room widen; “the shouting, careless, noisy midnight crowds” that surge in the streets shrink to meaninglessness. And she – she, the woman who sat melancholy, dejected, and alone just moments earlier -- intones the powerfully subversive lines of the Magnificat that are often downplayed or outright ignored, but that have profoundly empowering significance for a humanity suffering from hatred, racism, and ruthless capitalist inequity:
He hath put down the Mighty from their seats and hath exalted them of low degree; he hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away.
She turns and sees the Black pastor, “an old, bent black man, sad faced and pitiful, and yet with brilliant caverned eyes and mighty wings that [curve] toward heaven”: an angel of God’s goodness. And with him recognized for who he really is, Du Bois quotes Luke 2: 13-14 (King James version):
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
“Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
It is Woman’s intoning of the divine humbling of the Mighty and exaltation of “them of low degree,” together with her recognition that the way to peace and good will comes not from rabbis and priests in their surplices, but from the “old, bent black man” in all his humility, that makes this midnight miracle in story and song possible: this is how the ever-intrepid and ever-vexing figure of W.E.B. Du Bois reconciles the strength of his convictions and the strength of his contradictions into a short story of glory, peace, and good will.
Enough of my words! Please read Du Bois’s story here (start on p. 80) or here (it’s only three pages; you can do this!). And as a teaser, here is the image that’s given, under Du Bois’s editorship, on the cover of the issue of The Crisis in which this story in word and song appeared:
SELAH!
Sources:
Du Bois, W.E.B.(1920). “The Damnation of Women.” Ch. VII (p. 163-92) in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1913). “The Three Wise Men.” The Crisis: A Journal of the Darker Races 7, no. 2 (December, 1913): 80-82.
Rabaka, Reiland. “W.E.B. Du Bois and ‘The Damnation of Women’: An Essay on Africana Anti-Sexist Critical Social Theory,” Journal of African American Studies 7/2 (2003): 37-60.
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