Chapter Three: The Souls of an Ex-white Man: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Biography of John Brown

For Herbert and Fay Aptheker, am memoriam¹

The Sight of Death

Death always comes at least twice to one whose life is marked by greatness, once in life and again in biography. And, more radically, if death is at least double, then it most assuredly is never only double. One death always begets another death. If death, however, is understood first of all or only as loss, then the rich drama, the generosity, of this incessant doubling will most assuredly remain closed up and withdrawn. The difficulty of tracking some of the modalities of this irruptive doubling of death always shows itself in the scene of biography.

There is perhaps no better example of this generosity of the double, of the excessive giving that arises within the space of absence, than the narrative of the death or deaths, or lives, of John Brown. It is this enigma that sets the stage or scene of W. E. B. Du Bois’s telling of this tragic and beautifully difficult story.²

It is this second death, of course, that must occupy our attention, for it is within its unfolding that the first is named, maintained, and given meaning or a kind of livelihood. John Brown, at least, will always lead a double life within the space of this second death, the death of biography: once as a friend of the Negro in life, and again as their martyr in death. Both stories are wont to be told enough. For, the telling of the story of Brown’s friendship with the Negro is also the story of the death of a “White” man. And the telling of the story of the martyrdom of John Brown is also the story of his life as icon of the possibility of a new beginning, the story of a social being formed within the idea of belonging simply and purely to a “White” race who yet came to recognize himself as configured within the movement of an unsettled question, one that he, perhaps strategically, continued to call by the name of the “Negro question.” This latter movement, of course, would be one in which neither reference, “White” or “Negro,” could be easily set aside. For this reason, the story of John Brown can only be a story with a double reference. For this reason, it is enigmatic and difficult of telling.

Yet, of the many biographers of John Brown and of the incessant and ceaseless retelling of his life’s story in almost every genre of literature, including song, we and ensuing generations have W. E. B. Du Bois to thank for bequeathing to us the story or narrative of the double soul or souls of John Brown.

What we know is that John Brown was a “White” man who died to achieve the freedom of the Negro. What we do not yet realize, or really know, is the extent to which he already lives again, through death, as some historical being that is yet to come. Of course, he survives as an icon or as an ideal—a monumental, even if oft-denigrated, figure who stands as an appeal for the future. Also, however, he survives within the risk and loss of living as a flesh-and-blood man, configured within the very limits and frame of the world into which he was born. He survives, that is, as an example of a flesh-and-blood man whose character acquires its peculiar force only in and through the limits of his being, rather than because he transcended them. This survival is, thus, not absolute; rather, it is always at stake in the struggle toward another liberty or liberation; it is always at risk of giving up or reproducing that which it seeks to overthrow, perhaps due to the very force with which it seeks to carry out this overturning. This latter thought is the lesson, the historical inscription, both obvious and subtle, that W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown can teach us. It is a telling of something within the frame of what we think we know, in such a way that the unknown within it begins to acquire a certain unstable and enigmatic legibility. This is the performance of Du Bois’s narrative. How is this so?

First, we might surmise that it is, perhaps, because he was not absolutely decided on the moral bearing of his tale, unlike so many studies of the life of this man, that Du Bois did not fail to recognize that, even if named primarily as an apocalypticism, one often articulated in the idioms of evangelical Christianity, death was the central meaning of life for John Brown. Du Bois’s narrative is positioned within the space of a certain horror, one that we may usefully describe as metaphysical. In the turning folds of Du Bois’s narrative of Brown’s boyhood, maturity, marriage, fatherhood, violent militancy, and martyrdom, Brown seems unable to inhabit the present in any simple fashion. Moved perhaps by the theological position of death within Christianity, or perhaps by a sense of chance and fate within a young and expansive society—one marked strongly by a sense of the frontier that was nineteenth-century America—Brown developed a profound sense of disjunction from the world into which he was born, as Du Bois describes it, especially the institution of slavery. This disjunction was marked by a sense of the way in which the possibility of absolute loss remains open within the most mundane and secure activities of living. Herein, it seems, Du Bois positions a certain question as open within the consciousness of John Brown: Is it only the Negro American—for whom slavery as violence can be considered to open a movement of metaphysical horror or withdrawal with each inscription within the flesh, the body, the way of being of the slave—is it only such a being who can live within death, upon its jowls so to speak, and yet give rise incessantly to stark, originary, perhaps meaningful life? It is this question or one like it, we might suggest or hypothesize, that forms itself somewhere in the shadows, the dark recesses, of this melancholic Du Boisian narrative. The response, Du Bois’s or Brown’s, formulated by Du Bois through Brown, is that it is not simply or only the Negro American.

Du Bois describes a melancholic John Brown, compelled to challenge the very terms of his fate or death. In doing so, the narrative that his life and precipitate death makes possible outlines a tear in the fabric of providence, and thus marks his struggle with the limits that have been bestowed upon him as privilege. It moves in some tenacious relationship of maintenance or affirmation, as well as a sense of loss, of the sense of possible being that has been withdrawn, the ways of being a “white” man that have been marked as beyond the acceptable or the normal, that is, the ways of being other than a “White” man. This struggle, marked so tenaciously within the life of John Brown, we might call the melancholic movement or structure of whiteness.

Perhaps because he senses or realizes that Brown’s melancholia is rooted in his uncertain struggle over the possible meanings of his own death, Du Bois was able to recognize that the uncertain outcome of that struggle motivated and organized the life and practice of John Brown.

To Begin Otherwise

There is a second register of Du Bois’s telling of this story, however—one that gives it historical and intellectual uniqueness. And, we might suggest that herein, Du Bois reveals the secret that so many writing on the life and death of John Brown have been unable to discover or to recognize. Du Bois, I suggest, recognized within the life of John Brown a simple, but fundamental and radical orientation. In addition, Du Bois found a means by which to bring this radical orientation of John Brown into renewed relief. What was this orientation? John Brown seemed to understand that, to the extent that in America of the nineteenth century, especially at the end of the antebellum era, he was socially and historically understood as “white,” as a “White” man; that in order for him to live he must give this socially granted life over to death (or not to live, or to maintain himself only within a kind of death by living as a “White” man); or rather, we might say, that in order to live, he had to take this socially and historically granted life and dispense with it, kill it, destroy it, give it up to the risk and possibility of absolute dissolution. This meant that, within the circuit of his own experience, he had to die twice: once as that ordinary historical being called a “White” man and, again, as that flesh-and-blood being who can only be given a “proper” name: John Brown.

Within this death of John Brown “proper” opens another movement of the double, one whose possibility and bearing is already set loose in the first movement of double death. This second movement of the double, of course, is the figure of the double with which I opened this preface and under whose heading I have placed the question of biography. This complicated figure of the double arises because the “proper” name can never have an absolutely proper reference; that is, it can have no proper birth or death, cannot come into being on the basis of some true reference, or dissipate with the absolute loss of such a reference. With regard to “whiteness,” Brown, for example, realizes that it has no true or simple ground. It remains an open question as to whether he realized fully the implication of the possibility that it had no true or simple death. With regard to the first death, the death of John Brown in flesh and blood, John Brown “proper,” the radical impossibility of the proper as such means that this extraordinarily proper physical death must be relived, recreated, rebirthed incessantly, in discourse, biography of one kind or another; this is precisely because there is not, nor can there be, any absolute referent or absolute loss or absence of such. Hence, John Brown must be an example that stands only for itself or himself, an historical monstrosity or dream that our discourse or words cannot fail to produce. We are compelled, then, to make up for this ineffability of the proper, its reclusiveness. We try to do it in discourse, in narrative, in biography. As such, John Brown is condemned by history, not only to live or die again, anew, with each generation, but to live and die, again, anew, perhaps always. Du Bois, it seems to me, practiced a recognition of this enigma.

If John Brown seemed to live this necessity of a double cathexis, of the death of the “White” man and the death of John Brown “proper,” did he in fact maintain some actual recognition or reflection of such? Certainly, he understood both necessities, but it must remain a question as to whether he understood both together. It is Du Bois’s narrative that weaves these two questions together in discourse. This is the enigmatic line of originality in Du Bois’s elaboration. This is perhaps what it means for Du Bois to say in the preface to the first edition that the only “excuse” for his study is a “new emphasis,” a “different point of view.” How does this unfold, if we follow Du Bois?

The recognition on John Brown’s part that, I have suggested, set in motion this movement of the double was not simple or pure; it was not sui generis. We must not forget that the imagined thought of such a possibility—that of an absolute repleteness—was the ultimate reference of cathexis for the nascent discourse and practice of “whiteness” in mid-nineteenth-century America. Thus, it must be underlined here that this recognition of the necessity of a certain disjunction from the given moorings of his identification as a “White” man, and through it his struggle with the coming meaning of his death—a meaning that by necessity preceded for him his death—that this recognition was itself achieved or produced by the strange movement of a “White” man becoming “otherwise,” other than simply “white,” perhaps. We will not try to name all at once what he became—avoiding, first, the idea that he became something else all at once or finally, and also, secondly, the idea that he became, simply, Negro, or Black. We can instead rest with Du Bois’s formulation in the preface to the first edition of this study, that Brown, perhaps of all “Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” Of course, it is only meaningful to rest with such a thought if we also follow its path of implication, the path followed by Du Bois in the narrative itself. In this narrative, that “touch” is always a response, a mark of a passion, carried bodily, invoked by a call or gesture, a solicitation that is otherwise than a simple or passive invitation. Within the narrative, whether by a particular figure or as the slave in general in America, it was the Negro American that, according to Du Bois, solicited the recognition of John Brown. We can underline that this solicitation was not passive by considering what it set in motion within the movement of self-identification of John Brown: a movement of becoming other. On the one hand, becoming “otherwise” for Brown was both to become other than a “White” man, while yet unavoidably reproducing that very figure of being, even in the movement of becoming other, of becoming other than simply “white.” On the other hand, this movement, this becoming other, is also to become what one “is” through or by way of the other. It is, thus, this risk of self in the detour or passageway through the other that remains the scene of the production of the deaths and lives of John Brown. It is the historical form of this passage to self by way of the other that Du Bois takes as a palimpsest for the inscription of his own narrative of John Brown “proper.” It is the history of this passage by way of the other in the production of John Brown that Du Bois’s narrative seeks to tell.

A Second-Sight

Du Bois writes in his first preface that “the viewpoint adopted in this book is that of the little known but vastly important inner development of the Negro American.” What exactly does Du Bois mean by reference to something he calls the “inner development” of the Negro or African American?

Nearly every commentator on Du Bois’s study of John Brown, since its first publication in 1909, has remarked or called attention to this passage. Yet, it seems to me, most have not succeeded in providing a convincing account of the structure of this “viewpoint”—that is, the organization and pertinence for historiographical study of the “inner development of the Negro American.” Yet, the position that a reader takes concerning this formulation will affect, to some extent and in a decisive manner, almost every other aspect of one’s interpretation of this great study. To the extent that this formulation remains inscrutable or simply opaque to a reader, such an interpreter would be hard-pressed to recognize or trace the lineaments of Du Bois’s elaboration and its most decisive gestures. The central bearing of Du Bois’s approach is not in and of itself substantive or primarily substantive; that is, it is not first of all or ultimately about particular or specific empirical or concrete matters. Rather, the meaning of this reference to the “inner development of the Negro American” is primarily an epistemological one, having to do with the very way in which the object of critical reflection comes into view or being. This is what Du Bois means when he refers to “point of view” as the site of the originality of his study. In particular, this epistemological frame has certain theoretical effects, we might say, having to do with the orientation of an interpretation, or of the explanations put forth in this biography. It does not have so much to do with a particular substantive insight, or set of such insights or revelations. It should almost go without saying that still less does this originality have to do with the production or circulation of facts. Indeed, we know from Du Bois’s own statements that his is a study produced almost entirely on the basis of previously published sources, entailing, thus, no archival investigation by him. What Du Bois enacts, as he says that he has sought to do, is quite simply to study John Brown from the point of view of the Negro. Yet this, as I have already suggested, is where the simplicity ends concerning this narrative.

This point of view that arises within the “inner development of the Negro American” concerns the consciousness, or more precisely the self-consciousness, of the Negro. What scholars and other commentators on this study of Du Bois’s have yet to realize is that Du Bois formulates and carries out his approach to his study of John Brown on the analytical premise of the relevance of the double cathexis of the Negro, of the double reference of the Negro, to both an Africa and an America, to the interpretation of the life story and deaths of a “White” man, John Brown. What is this relevance?

Du Bois had already proposed the enigmatic bearing of a double reference within the social and historical identification of the Negro American in “Conservation of Races” (1897) and “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897) (Du Bois 1897a; Du Bois 1897b). In the revised version of the latter that stands as the opening essay of his classic The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches of 1903 this formulation emerges as titular for a narrative of such subjectivation (Souls, 1–12, chap. 1).³ For Du Bois, in the historical and existential sense, this movement of double identification was set loose within, or as the formation of, the self-consciousness of the Negro American through the palpable force of a limitation or mark (often, but not always, of exclusion) which would distinguish one social figure from another under the heading of race. Within the movement of this double cathexis, Du Bois describes a sense of “double consciousness” as the sense of being, the relation to self, or the self-consciousness of the Negro American. It is to this structure that Du Bois refers when he speaks of the “inner development of the Negro American.” In that essay, Du Bois had famously written:

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the 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 two-ness,—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. (Souls, 3, chap. 1, para. 3)

What is first of all important here is to recognize something of the architecture of this formulation by Du Bois. We might consider what Du Bois calls “second-sight” as a sort of general historical structure of reflection (one which of necessity refers to the possibility of reflexivity in general, even if that is not its primary idiom of elaboration here by Du Bois or our primary concern). Within the frame of this historically situated reflection and reflexivity, we might consider, then, a sense of this reflexivity, a sense of being, to arise for a particular historical and social figure. The figure is the Negro. This sense of being Du Bois describes as a kind of “double consciousness.” Secondly, what must also be remarked is something of the kinetic force of this formulation for Du Bois. For him, this movement of double consciousness, although appearing or motivated in its appearance under the heading of the negative, also appears under the heading of the affirmative. Du Bois names the structure of “second-sight” as also a “gift” in the very locution of his announcement of its formulation. And despite his concern for the difficulty—the violence and paralysis—that can attend this movement of the double, within the very next paragraph of this essay, Du Bois refuses to disavow (or affirms, to put it precisely) either term of the double reference that configures this movement of “double consciousness,” even if he affirms each differently.

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. (Souls, 4, chap. 1, para. 4)

For Du Bois, in this essay, the difficulty of this double reference did not mean that the Negro should reject one term or aspect of its identification for another. Rather, this doubling was the very future or possibility of its becoming. It marked out the very space and possibility of desire and that which is yet to come.

Within the gesture of this affirmation of the bearing, the legibility, the heterogeneity, of a double reference is situated the conceptual resource on which he draws to illuminate the question of John Brown.

This affirmation sets loose within Du Bois’s conception of the African American a profoundly rich understanding of the possibility of a new way or new ways of social being, ways that would be excessive to the simple and oppositional divisions that would dominate the social field in which the Negro American arises. This figure of the double gives rise to an excessiveness within the American context in a twofold manner. On the one hand, it maintains the social being of the Negro in a domain of identification that refuses to abide by the oppositional logic or categories of racial distinction; one can be both a Negro and an American. It confounds the ultimate premise of racial distinction, a categorical or oppositional logic of distinction or identification. On the other hand, it affirms a difference as operative in America, one that Du Bois, perhaps strategically, perhaps anachronistically (and perhaps not) names as “African.” This difference produces a heterogeneity within the general social field of American life and history, one that would be organized according to a racist logic of categorical distinction and be given over to a narrative of purity, of the self-repleteness and historical becoming of a white subject, an historical and social being supposedly arising of its own initiative, unmarked by any sign of difference. Such a subject would be understood to realize the purity of its own self-image in every form of historical and social activity. For this reason, we might suggest, Du Bois considered the reference to Africa, or a difference that could not be simply dissolved, an essential reference in the recognition of the position of the Negro in America. He would not let the mark of such a reference or difference be erased from the historical ledger in positioning the African or Negro in America. He maintained such, even as he resolutely insisted upon the identification of the Negro as also American, also in a manner that could not be simply dislodged or dismissed.

It is this double reference of the Negro American that Du Bois uses, critically and affirmatively, to reopen the question of the meaning of the death and the life of John Brown. How does he do this? It is at the precise site, in a conceptual sense, on the ground of the conceptualization that he has already formulated with regard to the African American, the conceptualization of an historical difference that Du Bois has already named as “African” in the 1890s, as we saw in the passage from The Souls of Black Folk quoted above—it is with reference to this difference that Du Bois begins to tell, or retell, the narrative of John Brown.

Du Bois begins this biography, not with a statement of when and where John Brown was born in America, but with a first chapter, titled “Africa and America,” about the contribution of Africa to the making of America. Let us recall the epigraph and opening two paragraphs of this opening chapter. In so doing, we may be able to make legible the analytical bearing of Du Bois’s formulation of the heterogeneous reference of the Negro American in his biographical study of John Brown.

“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, Out of Egypt have I called My son.”⁴

The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs. Her greatest destiny—unsensed and despised though it be—is to give back to the first of continents the gifts which Africa of old gave to America’s father’s fathers.

Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however; the greatest by far is the score of heroic men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization: Benezet, Garrison, and Harriet Stowe; Sumner, Douglass and Lincoln—these and others, but above all, John Brown. (John Brown, 15)

Du Bois thus situates John Brown squarely within the folds of the productivity of Africa in America. However, both terms of this double figure are essential for the formulation of Du Bois’s argument, for this positioning of the Negro American and John Brown to be coherent and attain analytical force. If there is no reference to Africa, only to an America, then analytically one is hard put to remark the distinctiveness of the role or function of the Negro in the development and making of American history, or of the great historical figures in American history. If there is no reference to America, and the Negro is understood as essentially and definitively as something other than American, as African in a simple and primordially given sense, then the Negro in Africa might conceivably have a place in human history, perhaps even tangentially in America, but there could be no analytic or historiographical recognition of its position within the great maelstrom of historical becoming that was the making of the American project (for some four centuries by the turn of the last century). In order to recognize the bearing of the “inner development” of the Negro on understanding the death and life of John Brown, this essential doubleness of the Negro in America must be affirmed at every level of generality. This affirmation of the double stands at the root of Du Bois’s interpretation of John Brown.

Du Bois frames this question first in a global manner, as “Africa’s” relation to “America.” America’s “destiny,” its great future, is, for Du Bois, to be responsible to the great legacy of ancient Africa. This ancient legacy is borne out in American history through the inspiration to greatness that the history of the Negro in America sets loose or calls forth in America. Within this global and broad social frame, Du Bois positions the telling of the story of great figures. It is here, positioned within the broad sweep of world historical movements, that Du Bois situates the telling of the story of one individual. If the ancient legacy of Africa is moving in America, it is through the striving and passion of the Negro American. Exactly how such inspiration is produced in the life of John Brown is the prime and motivating question of this biographical narrative.

With the economical and deft formulations of his opening two paragraphs, then, Du Bois sketches the entire frame of his study and begins his narrative. We must remember and maintain in heightened relief the fact that this narrative does not begin in New England, in Connecticut, where John Brown “proper,” so to speak, was born in the flesh, but by reference to Africa, to another beginning.

Another Telling

As the telling of the narrative, as such, bears no proper substitute, I will only remark, as a question, the way in which Du Bois’s discourse accomplishes or fails to accomplish its task. It is the concern of this chapter simply to formulate and bring the character of this task into a certain relief.

As it were, comprising thirteen chapters in sum, the narrative develops according to what can be described as four stages.

Across the first four chapters, the initial stage of the study, Du Bois offers a presentation of the development of a certain moral rectitude on the part of John Brown, from his boyhood through full maturation, into the early part of his fifth decade. This rectitude is a disposition with which Du Bois maintains a persistent affirmation. In the second staging of the narrative, the five core chapters of the story of Brown’s life, proper, as it were, Du Bois proposes an account of the development of John Brown’s expressed and active opposition to slavery, by way of this figure’s engagement with the question of the Negro and his direct relations with Negro Americans. The third stage brings to its conclusion the story of John Brown’s life in two sharply drawn episodes, by way of its telling of the event of the aborted insurrection at Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath.

And then, almost as a kind of coda, in the final stage of the text the narrative proper undergoes a kind of metamorphosis, wherein its central question up to this point in the narrative of the comprehension of the terms, motivation, and commitment of John Brown in his decision to act toward the violent and revolutionary overthrow of American slavery gives way to (or, better, is enfolded within) a far-reaching theoretical proposition of the articulation of the global-level “problem of the color-line.” On the one hand, such purview does allow an understanding of the eruption that was the initiative of John Brown proper. Yet, too, on the other, the maintenance, persistence, and commitment to the extension of slavery within the American context and the assent to modern colonialism on a worldwide basis (that is, the worldhood of Europe and America, in particular), of which Atlantic slavery both marked its incipit and became a nodal expression, was likewise rendered tractable. Here, taking reference to the final chapter of the biography, the world historical extension of Du Bois’s perspective and its relation to the African American example—moving from Brown’s then of the 1850s then to Du Bois’s now of the 1910s, on the eve of the First World War, from American slavery here (in the so-called New World) to European and American imperial colonialism there (in the supposed Old World)—may be given a distinct legibility.

We are, in fact, to-day repeating in our intercourse between races all the former evils of class distinction within the nation: personal hatred and abuse, mutual injustice, unequal taxation and rigid caste. Individual nations outgrew these fatal things by breaking down the horizontal barriers between classes. We are bringing them back by seeking to erect vertical barriers between races. Men were told that abolition of compulsory class distinction meant the leveling down, degradation, disappearance of culture and genius and the triumph of the mob. As a matter of fact it has been the salvation of European civilization. . . . The same is true in racial contact. Vertical race distinctions are even more emphatic hindrances to human evolution than horizontal class distinctions, and their tearing away involves fewer chances of degradation and greater opportunities of human betterment than in the case of class lines. On the other hand, persistence in racial distinction spells disaster sooner or later. The earth is growing smaller and more accessible. Race contact will become in the future increasingly inevitable, not only in America, Asia and Africa, but even in Europe. The color line will mean not simply a return to the absurdities of class as exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but even to the caste of ancient days. This however, the Japanese, the Chinese, the East Indians and the Negroes are going to resent in just such proportion as they gain power: and they are gaining the power, and they cannot be kept from gaining more power. The price of repression will then be hypocrisy and slavery and blood. This is the situation to-day. (John Brown, 381–83)

It is then by way of this epistemological perspective that Du Bois turns to propose the principal question of his study, enunciated here as two distinct and yet inseparable locutions, two forms of the same vocative register, comprising the last two chapters of the study, respectively. The penultimate chapter, construed as an account of his trial for treason, which in turn is a trial of the principle of justice at stake in the American law of slavery, poses the question: “What is the meaning of John Brown?” And, here the question of justice is no longer subtended by the ontological question—the idiomatic question or riddle of the ages, that is “the riddle of the sphynx,” given as an interrogative—“What is man?” which could then be extended within legality as a proposition that the enslavement of the human is without justification and hence such practice can be adjudged as wrong or morally corrupt; not only that, but rather the whole problem of justice has become distended by the question what is to be done in the relation of human to human, let us say, in the care for the other?⁵ It is thus that the closing chapter, in the form of the question “What is the legacy of John Brown?” is able to unfold a question about futurity, in which death is something other than simply loss, and which may perhaps be thought also as a name for possibility, for that which gives, for generosity. Du Bois invokes the possibility of a temporality that extends both before and after the time of American slavery—“beyond this narrow Now,” as he frames the death of his still-infant son in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter devoted to his passing in The Souls of Black Folk—stretching the limited frame of the historicity that would indict John Brown for his actions at Harper’s Ferry beyond its holding points. The persistent refrain of the narrative—that the “cost of liberty is less than the price of repression”—now comes into its own. The cost of war, we can now adjudge could be dissimulated for a certain time, and perhaps place, in history, but so long as such an organization of relation as fundamental violence were maintained, the exorbitance of its “price” would in its eventuality become the very terms of future historial possibility.

If such an organization of violence were to remain the definitive terms of historial existence, death, then, in its capacity to give, on all levels of historical generality, would remain closed up and withdrawn.

In this sense, it can be said that in this study, Du Bois not only offered an account of the inner moral and ethical development of John Brown, referred as it were, to the moral and ethical development of the Negro as American in the United States, but likewise the coming into crisis of the inner moral and intellectual development of the so-called American nation. Let us now fold this description of the outward face or form of this narrative reference back, across, and through its own textured frame, of a life both within death and yet beyond, otherwise than a simple mark, so that we can come to recognize the lineaments, the lines of intersection and contoured relief, another form of fold, that may show therein, if not now, then, otherwise than now.

Another Beginning

Another beginning, or a beginning otherwise, made it narratively or interpretively possible for Du Bois to construe John Brown as configured in a double cathexis, just as Du Bois had already described himself and the Negro American in general as configured by way of a double reference, to both Africa and America. That is to say that Du Bois described for John Brown, a man socially and historically understood as “white,” a structure of double reference, a kind of reference that he had already described for the Negro American as a kind of “double consciousness.” Thus, in a theoretical sense—that is, with regard to its angle of interpretation—Du Bois’s study is a sustained inquiry into the structures of “double consciousness” of a “White” man, understood by Du Bois to be configured as such by way of his being with reference to the Negro in America.⁶

Yet, what is of equal importance is a structure of possibility, a general epistemological condition of Du Bois’s narrative that is sedimented everywhere, but remains almost just beyond legibility: namely, that the essential condition of possibility of Du Bois’s own narrative, of his “new emphasis” in the telling of the story of John Brown, of his “different point of view,” is the structure of double cathexis, of “double consciousness,” that configures the ground of his own social being and, for Du Bois, the Negro or African American in general. He, Du Bois, is only able to tell the story of John Brown from this “new” standpoint, that is, of recognizing John Brown’s production and self-identification as a social being by way of a double reference to both the Negro (or Africa) and America, by way of his own inhabitation of a certain double reference. Du Bois’s own “double consciousness” is the condition of possibility of his narrative of John Brown’s “double consciousness.” As Du Bois will write of himself just a few months after the publication of John Brown, in a radical and groundbreaking essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” he is both a Negro and a “White” man, formed within the movement of the production of each; hence, he can claim to see and understand each from the “inside,” so to speak.⁷ Du Bois, perhaps, wrote that later essay on the basis of the accomplishment of the narrative of John Brown. The thesis of the later essay, to which I have just referred, might well be taken as the ultimate thesis of the biographical study, John Brown.

What should be added here is that, for Du Bois, his study was exemplary—exemplary in every way: of the position of the Negro in America, both in the past and in the future; of the possibilities for rethinking the history of America from this standpoint; of the place of a great individual in the life of a nation; of the passion necessary for the historian or biographer to recognize the meaning of history (to offer a few examples). It is perhaps for this reason that its title is iconic, standing for the man, the book, the symbol—each, in a movement of reference that has a shuttling instability, with the final meaning of this title resting simply with none. This instability, of course, is part of the instability of the proper in general, and thus part of what opens the question of John Brown, incessantly, to the future.

What Du Bois has accomplished here is the study of the production and dissolution of “whiteness” by way of an account of the history of the position of the Negro as a problem in America.⁸ Du Bois delivers John Brown to us, and to the future, by situating the meaning of John Brown as a figure arising within or through the meaning of the Negro, the African, in the history of America and, by implication, the modern world. This we might say is a certain formulation of the Negro as material idea, the Negro as a problem for thought, a figure of exorbitance, in the modern epoch. This is the uniqueness and enduring legacy of Du Bois’s study. In this regard, it stands as a monument to the position of John Brown within the historical consciousness of the Negro in America.⁹ Yet it also stands as an exemplary testament to those “White” men who, over the centuries past and in those yet to come, have discovered from the “inside” out the enigmatic difficulty of living on the basis of a kind of death, one that entails “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals,” configuring the meaning, for oneself and thus for history, of one’s own body, one’s own flesh. For we must remember or recognize that it is ultimately of John Brown’s relationship to himself, his sense of himself, his self-consciousness, that Du Bois so persistently and carefully seeks to give an account. We can perhaps recognize the form or movement of two “souls,” one bending into the other, one moving inextricably within the other, in a statement of John Brown’s given near the end (John Brown “proper,” the one who has already sought the death of John Brown the “White” man), the statement with which Du Bois closes his study: “You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now, but this question is still unsettled—this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.”¹⁰ Who knows but that perhaps this John Brown, this biography, this story that begins from a death, is the living proof of this statement, or last testament, of John Brown, “proper.”