Sex and the Race Man: Imagining Interracial Relationships in W. E. B. Du Bois's Darkwater

RYAN SCHNEIDER Sex and the Race Man: Imagining Interracial Relationships in W- E. B. Du Bois's Darkwater N:early two decades after the 1903 appearance of his widelyacclaimed The Souls of Black Folk, W E. B. Du Bois published a second major semi-autobiographical work: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil.1 Although the recipient of far less critical scrutiny than its justly famous predecessor, Darkwater is equally compelling for its diversity of subject matter, depth of feeling, and revision of traditional autobiographical and biographical conventions.2 Like Souls, Darkwater also makes use of fictional and poetic modes: several of the book's ten chapters are followed by a separate verse or parable that strives, often in mythic or quasi-religious terms, to augment or elaborate upon topics raised in the non-fiction prose, and many of the chapters themselves are partially or entirely fiction.3 Intriguingly, some of these parables and stories explore the implications of social interaction across the color-line, with a few even daring to suggest that breaking taboos against miscegenation might have a positive effect on social relations. In essence, these scenarios imagine possible liaisons between consenting adults as a means of underscoring both the pressing need for mutually beneficial interracial relationships and the barriers that exist to prevent them from forming and flourishing. Yet, as this essay shows, these stories merit greater scrutiny not only for the fact that they stretch social boundaries and violate taboos, but also because, in the process, they establish their own specifically gendered limits as to who may participate in interracial liaisons, and in Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1 6 10 6oRyan Schneider what way and under what conditions. To be more precise, even as these scenarios challenge traditional limits of racial-sexual interaction, they also suggest that Du Bois's otherwise enlightened, progressive vision of black-white relations is based on a restricted notion of black female sexual agency. In advancing this claim, it is not my intent to portray Du Bois as ultimately unsupportive of women's autonomy and equality; his progressive challenges to gender-based oppression are well-documented and deserving of the praise they have received. Nor is it my intent simply to point out an apparent contradiction between what Darkwater argues, on the one hand, about the need for full-scale women's independence, and what it imagines, on the other, about possibilities for interracial relationships. Rather, my putpose is to shed much-needed light on the relation of Du Bois's interracial fiction in Darkwater to his developing status as a black male autobiographer and public intellectual in the years after The Souls of Black Folk. As he continues to refine his concept of what it means to write as a race leader, the focus of his work simultaneously broadens to provide greater attention to the cultural achievements of black men and women and sharpens to promulgate concepts of sexual agency that circumscribe the role of black women.4 Before proceeding with my argument, I offer a summary reading of one of these stories, "The Princess of the Hither Isles." The same fantastical qualities that facilitate the exploration of interracial sexuality in this piece and others like it also distance them from the bulk of Du Bois's writing; for this reason, they receive little or no attention in the few extant critical studies of Darkwater and may not be familiar.5 "The Princess of the Hither Isles" appears as a discrete coda to Chapter Three: "The Hands of Ethiopia," an essay that criticizes the on-going economic exploitation of Africa at the hands of colonizing European nations and chastises those nations for their color-based prejudices . "The Hands of Ethiopia" makes a convincing case for rapid modernization and the implementation of home rule by citing a series of historical examples of abuse by colonial governments and invoking a range of socio-economic data; the chapter concludes with an argument for the building of a new, independent African state with the capacity for self-government. Immediately following this call for de-colonization, Du Bois shifts into a fictional mode...