By Stuart Mitchner

So the lawyers suggested going around the globe and get someone completely opposite from J.D. Salinger. Not a novelist but a journalist, not a white guy but a Black guy, and that’s how I lucked out and got the role.

—James Earl Jones (1931-2024)

The feature attraction at this weekend’s Friends and Foundation Princeton Public Library Book Sale is a collection of rare African American literature donated by Rutgers Professor Donald Gibson, who died at 90 on January 3. During his four decades as a teacher, Gibson helped establish the study of Black literature as a legitimate university course. Among his numerous books, essays, and lectures is the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, which is available among the titles in the library’s non-fiction book group.

The Common Factor

Gibson presents Du Bois’s book as “a very personal document” in which the soul is “a common factor, exclusive of considerations of race, class, or religious affiliation, education or social status.” Gibson suggests that the “I am a person and you are a person” principle underlying The Souls of Black Folk shares the “whatever belongs to me as well belongs to you” spirit of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s famous mantra also expresses the foundational spirit behind secondhand books and the sales that keep them moving from reader to reader. That said, book sale patrons will still have to pay the stated cost for each volume, as well as the admission charges at Friday’s 9 a.m.-noon Preview Sale. As a longtime Princeton resident, Gibson no doubt attended his share of these sales, presumably finding treasures like those that will be on view in the Community Room from Friday, September 20 through half-price day on Sunday, September 22.

“The Sorrow Songs”

For a first-time reader, one of the most striking things about The Souls of Black Folk is the way Du Bois prefaces each of the 14 chapters with an unidentified bar of music placed under epigraphs from various primarily white 19th-century writers, including Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, and “Mrs. Browning” (twice). Among the spirituals Du Bois mentions is “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” — “the cradle-song of death” — which he pairs with Lord Byron’s lines, “From birth till death enslaved: in word, in deed, unmanned!…. / Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”

Those lines are taken from Byron’s poem, “Greece Enslaved.” In the spirit of “whatever belongs to me as well belongs to you,” Du Bois includes among the “souls of Black folk” a renowned British poet writing about a country “trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand.”

Sorrow Songs

The epigraph for the final chapter is from “a Negro song” that ends “And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day / When I lay this body down.” The chapter begins with one of the book’s most haunting and haunted sentences: “They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days —Sorrow Songs — for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely.”

“A Human Text”

When Du Bois came to Nashville in later years, he saw “the great temple builded of these songs towering over the pale city…. Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil. Out of them rose for me morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody, full of the voices of my brothers and sisters, full of the voices of the past.”

Du Bois wrote those words in February 1903. In Gibson’s introduction, he calls The Souls of Black Folk “a human text,” whose “chief metaphor, ‘souls,’ makes reference to basic assumptions about western culture and mythology.” According to Gibson, Du Bois believed that “black and white may interact in a humane way if whites recognize that blacks have souls.” Flash forward a century (105 years, to be exact), and a little less than 20 years after Gibson’s 1989 introduction, Barack Obama is elected president. Sixteen years after that, Kamala Harris is running for the nation’s highest office.

Lady Kamala

If I were asked to name the most memorable moment of Obama’s presidency, I’d say it was when he sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine Blacks killed by a white gunman in the June 2015 Charleston Church shooting.

One of the most memorable moments of Kamala Harris’s brief presidential campaign occurred during last week’s one-sided debate. Watch her with the volume turned down and she could be a jazz diva — Lester Young would call her “Lady Kamala” — singing her variation on “Amazing Grace” to a scowling, aging, unemployed television personality. When she skewers him with “disgrace,” she hits the word like a bell. No wonder Taylor Swift endorsed her. She’d recognized a kindred spirit, a performer, and a warrior.

Jones Plays Salinger

In April 2004, at the Baseball Hall of Fame ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of the 1989 film Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones said, “I have no favorite role, but I have a favorite kind of movie and it just so happened that Field of Dreams fits in that category.”

Jones has admitted weeping all the way through a showing of the film that was based on W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, where a farmer builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield that attracts the ghosts of baseball legends like Shoeless Joe Jackson. The farmer’s at first unwilling companion in his quest is J.D. Salinger, the author of The Catcher in the Rye. How did a Black actor best known for playing Darth Vader became so emotionally invested in a role based on a notoriously reclusive white writer? According to Jones, Salinger “told the film company, ‘You got away with it in the novel, but you’re not going to get away with it in the film. You use my name or a likeness of me in any way and I’ll sue you.’ So the lawyers suggested going around the globe and get someone completely opposite from J.D. Salinger. Not a novelist but a journalist, not a white guy but a Black guy, and that’s how I lucked out and got the role.”

Again, in the spirit of “whatever belongs to me as well belongs to you,” Salinger, who died in January 2010, and Jones, who died September 9, 2024, share the “common factor, exclusive of considerations of race, class, or religious affiliation, education or social status” that underlies The Souls of Black Folk.

Forty Years of Work

The original title for the novel that inspired Field of Dreams was The Kidnapping of J.D. Salinger, which inadvertently reflects the fate of the 40 years of unpublished writing Salinger left with instructions for publication. All this year I’ve been slowly banging my very small drum about the fact that Salinger’s work is still being inexplicably held back by his heirs, even though it’s been almost 15 years since his January 2010 death. By now, readers should at least not have to prowl the Net for pirated versions of his extraordinary novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, a tour de force still imprisoned between the covers of the June 19, 1965 New Yorker.

Note: Rarities from Donald Gibson’s donation on display at the Friends and Foundation Book Sale include a signed first edition of “Maud Martha” by Gwendolyn Brooks; a first edition of Langston Hughes’s “Ask Your Mama”; a first edition of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Lyrics of the Hearthside,” and a signed first of “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia” by M. B. Tolson. Gems from other donations: “Eloise in Paris” and “Eloise in Moscow” by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight; and a signed first edition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Other signed first editions are by Lee Child, Nora Ephron, Gunther Grass, Aleksander Hemon, Donna Tartt, and Herman Wouk. According to Book Sale Manager Claire Bertrand, while there are copies of “The Souls of Black Folk” in the Gibson donation, they are not considered rare. For detailed information, email booksale@princetonlibrary.org.