Darkwater
Free public-domain edition — preview in your browser, no account required for the first chapter.
Preview free · sign up to save progress, download to your shelf, and sync with the apps
Already have an account? Sign in
This book offers a searing, poetic, and visionary critique of racism and imperialism that remains urgently relevant today.
Edition details
Book Summary
In Darkwater, W. E. B. Du Bois blends autobiography, poetry, and polemic to expose the brutal realities of racial oppression and white supremacy. He argues that the color line is the central problem of the modern world, while envisioning a future of justice, beauty, and universal brotherhood.
Darkwater is a genre-defying work that weaves personal narrative, sociological critique, and lyrical poetry. Du Bois opens with a dedication to his wife and a credo affirming faith in racial equality and democracy. He recounts his own journey from scholar to activist, detailing his work at Atlanta University and the founding of the NAACP. The book then expands outward, condemning World War I as a colonial war over the exploitation of darker peoples and indicting European imperialism in Africa. Du Bois honors Black women's resilience under slavery and economic exploitation, reflects on the legacy of composer Coleridge-Taylor, and meditates on beauty and death. The allegorical story 'The Comet' imagines a post-apocalyptic encounter between a Black man and a white woman that transcends racial division. Throughout, Du Bois uses poetry—such as 'A Litany at Atlanta' and 'The Riddle of the Sphinx'—to give voice to anguish and hope. He concludes with a hymn calling for global unity, insisting that the oppressed will rise and that true democracy requires the full enfranchisement of all people.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Darkwater
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
The Narrator
This narrator is a traveler and remembering consciousness, at home in concert halls where Coleridge-Taylor lifts his baton and in Georgia depots where the ticket window refuses him. His desire is to hold beauty and injury in the same gaze without flinching, and his wound is that he cannot forget either. He matters because the book's early arc is built from his juxtapositions—Paris and the pine coast, Hiawatha's triumph and the unheated waiting room—teaching us to read race as a matter of sightlines.
The Woman
She is less a single person than a lineage—the far-off grandmother sobbing for lost palm-trees, the bronzen grandmother scolding her laughing husband, the narrator's own mother with her velvet brownness. Her power is counsel and continuity; her tragedy is that the slave trade struck the mother-idea like doom, unmaking legal marriage and family. She matters because Du Bois locates the whole social dislocation of black America in her body, making her the book's deepest measure of what was lost and what persists.
The Stranger
He hovers at the edges of crowded rooms—the Pan-African meeting, the Crystal Palace throng—where history seems about to speak through ordinary faces. His tension is that he never quite declares himself; he is the question the narrator keeps failing to answer, the 'you' that implicates the reader. He matters because he turns the book's remembering into a confrontation, insisting that what happened to Coleridge-Taylor's father, to the Herero, to the woman in the Jim Crow line, is happening to someone being addressed.
The Messenger
He speaks in the voice of Mount Desert's rock-ribbed silence and the sail-flecked sea, announcing that men should come to these shores to renew their spirit. Yet his message curdles when the narrator asks why the scarred and battle-hurt do not travel there, and the answer arrives as a Jim Crow waiting room with no heat and no air. He matters because he carries the book's central prophecy: that the same nation which carves such sublime coastlines also carves such humiliating rooms, and the two cannot be kept apart.
The Colonel
A military authority figure appearing in scenes of conflict and command.
Harriet Tubman
Historical freedom fighter referenced as a symbol of resistance and courage.
Racial Oppression and White Supremacy
The book extensively critiques the ideology of whiteness and the systemic oppression of Black people, examining how racism manifests in violence, segregation, economic exploitation, and psychological degradation.
Double Consciousness and the Veil
Du Bois explores the experience of living behind a 'veil' that separates Black and white worlds, creating a dual identity and a unique perspective on society from a marginalized position.
Economic Injustice and Labor Exploitation
The narrative highlights the exploitation of Black workers, the connection between capitalism and racism, and how economic systems perpetuate inequality through low wages, convict labor, and denial of opportunity.
Motherhood and the Black Family
The book emphasizes the central role of mothers in African and African American culture, the destruction of family bonds under slavery, and the resilience of Black women in preserving heritage and nurturing future generations.
Reading tools
BetterReads is more than a book page—e-reader, AI beside the text, audiobooks, and native apps in one system.