I remember well when the shadow swept across me.  I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea.  In a
wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards,--ten cents a package--and exchange.  The exchange was merry, till one girl, a
tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance.  Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life
and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.  I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows....

    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.