till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet-above the Veil." "Of Alexander Crummell" In this chapter, Du Bois recounts a short biography of Alexander Crummell, an early black priest in the Episcopal Church. Du Bois starts with, "This is the history of a human heart." He notes that Crummell faced three temptations: those of Hate, Despair, and Doubt," while crossing two vales, the Valley of Humiliation and the Valley of the Shadow of Death." Du Bois ends with, "And now that he is gone, I sweep the Veil away and cry, Lo! the soul to whose dear memory I bring this little tribute." "Of the Coming of John" The penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, "Of the Coming of John", "reads like a short story, [but] Du Bois clearly considered it an essay." (See footnote to this essay in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates; Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). The essay/story describes two young men, both named John, one Black (John Jones) and the other white (John Henderson, the son of the wealthy and powerful Judge Henderson). Both Johns grow up in Altamaha, Georgia, where they were playmates in their youth. Both leave to go off to college, and both the white and Black communities in Altamaha anticipate their returns, saying: "When John comes." When John Jones returns to his hometown, transformed by his time away, now a serious man with a deep understanding of the world, including the injustice of racism and of Jim Crow, he finds himself at odds with both Black and white. He speaks at his church, but what he says falls flat: "[l]ittle had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue" (Du Bois 170). He convinces Judge Henderson to let him become a teacher at the Black school, and is warned to keep his place and to not stir up trouble. The Judge makes his opinions clear: "in this country the Negro must remain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white men....But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then, by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every N-- in the land." John Jones says he accepts the situation and is allowed to teach.