"Let us cheer the weary traveller"

Through all the sorrow of the [African American] Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope - a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear; that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs ring true?

...so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below - swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing,

Let us cheer the weary traveller,

Cheer the weary traveller,

Let us cheer the weary traveller

Along the heavenly way

And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.

W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), XIV "The Sorrow Songs" Bedford 1997, pp. 192-4.