And neither world thought the other world’s thought, save with a vague unrest.” Du Bois forces together these two lives in order to dramatize their bifurcation: “Few thought of two Johns-for the black folk thought of one John and he was black and the white folk thought of another John, and he was white. Jones kills Henderson, and so leaves town again, for the North. The two lives, already linked by name, town, and racial system (John Jones’s sister Jennie works as a maid in the Judge’s house), intersect one fateful day, when John Jones discovers John Henderson sexually assaulting Jennie in a wood. From the same town, “the other John,” John Henderson, the white, entitled son of Judge Henderson, sails off to Princeton without a thought for his navigation. Years later, he comes home to find himself alienated by his education and limited in opportunity. John Jones, an African-American full of promise, leaves the small town of Altamaha, Georgia, to get an education. One of the most moving chapters in W. E. B. Du Bois’s collection of essays, “ The Souls of Black Folk,” is a fiction, a harrowing hypothesis titled “Of the Coming of John.” It tells the story of two young men bound by the same first name.
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