1. All say, «How hard it is
that we have to die» - a
strange complaint to
come from the mouths of
people who have to live.
- Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

2. CHAPTER X
“A gigantic eruption, like that of Krakatoa a few
years ago, with the accompanying earthquakes,
tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust, changes
the face of the surrounding landscape beyond
recognition, bringing down the high lands,
elevating the low, making fair lakes where deserts
had been, and deserts where green prairies had
smiled before. The tremendous catastrophe which
had befallen Tom had changed his moral
landscape in much the same way. Some of his low
places he found lifted to ideals, some of his ideals
had sunk to the valleys, and lay there with the
sackcloth and ashes of pumice-stone and sulphur
on their ruined heads.”
“It was the nigger in him asserting its humility,
and he blushed and wan abashed. And the " nigger
" in him was surprised when the white friend put
out his hand for a shake with him. He found the
"nigger " in him involuntarily giving the road, on
the sidewalk, to the white rowdy and loafer. When
Rowena, the dearest thing his heart knew, the idol
of his secret worship, invited him in, the "nigger"
in him made an embarrassed excuse and was
afraid to enter and sit with the dread white folks
on equal terms. The "nigger" in him went
shrinking and skulking here and there and yonder,
and fancying it saw suspicion and maybe
detection in all faces, tones, and gestures. So
strange and uncharacteristic was Tom’s conduct
that people noticed it, and turned to look after him
when he passed on; and when he glanced back as
he could not help doing, in spite of his best
resistance and caught that puzzled expression in a
person’s face, it gave him a sick feeling, and he
took himself out of view as quickly as he could.
He presently came to have a hunted sense and a
hunted look, and then he fled away to the hilltops
and the solitudes. He said to himself that the curse
of Ham was upon him.”

3. “There is but one
coward on earth, and
that is the coward that
dare not know.”
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls
strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and
unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation,
or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half
hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
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.
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.

4. “O my body, make of me
always a man who
questions!”
Black Skin White Masks
“And then…And then the occasion arose when I
had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar
weight burdened me. The real world challenged
my claims. In the white world the man of color
encounters difficulties in the development of his
bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is
solely a negating activity. It is a third person
consciousness. The body is surrounded by an
atmosphere of certain uncertainty.”
“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”
Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning
to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh
myself to tears, but laughter had become
impossible. I could no longer laugh, because I
already knew that there were legends, stories,
history, and above all historicity, which I had
learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at
various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its
place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the
train it was no longer a question of being aware of
my body in the third person but in a triple person. In
the train I was given not one but two, three places. I
had already stopped being amused. It was not that I
was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I
existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the
other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not
opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared.
Nausea….I was responsible at the same time for my
body, for my race, for my ancestors.”

5. Main Purposes of Analysis
• Starting from a post-colonial perspective, I’ll try to analyse the
abrupt changes in Tom Driscoll (C) behaviour in the aftermath
of the discovery of his black roots.
• Why Tom Driscoll (C) «dropped gradually back into his old
frivolous and easygoing ways and conditions of feeling and
manner of speech»? From a fanonian point of view, he is
trying to prove is whitness at all costs?
• Possible connections with another story of doubliness : W.E.B.
Du Bois’s short-story «Of the coming of John», published in
1903.