"I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highways sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."

Think of this passage as a really dramatic conclusion to a kind of dry history lesson on the Freedmen's Bureau. First, Du Bois tells us how important the Freedmen's Bureau was to the ex-slaves of the South. Then he tells us how the Freedmen's Bureau failed.

Not a happy story, in other words.

The phrase "color-line" more or less screams "racial division." But Du Bois is a little more complicated than your run-of-the-mill liberal when he writes about the "color-line."

Yes, his concept of the color-line does refer to how blacks are divided from whites in America because of skin color. But there's more to it than that. See how Du Bois writes all that stuff about the "figure veiled and bowed"? That veiled figure is likely a reference to the white, hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan. And the whole image of the "bowed human heart" evokes grieving and death.

Now why would Du Bois be so morbid? Well, racial division was often a life and death matter back then (and, unfortunately, this is still sometimes true today). So it makes perfect sense to surround the "problem of the color-line" with references to mortality.

Crossing the color-line could, indeed, be deadly. Especially in the South, where black people were lynched for the slightest of reasons.

Du Bois's writing mixes metaphors and symbols to create a dramatic, emotional effect. Take that "figure veiled and bowed": it starts out as an actual figure on the side of the King's Highway. And then it turns into something else—"that bowed human heart."

Before it becomes a human heart, though, the veiled figure "broods fear." See, veiled, hooded figures can mean death, especially to an African American with slavery at her back. Think: the KKK, or even the specter of the Grim Reaper.

Next, Du Bois takes his symbol of Death and turns it into a grieving, "bowed" heart. This personified body part is all broken up over the notion that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line."

Why? Because the color-line not only produces inequality, it also produces death. It causes death of the body (note that the heart doesn't have a whole body to house it anymore), and death of the spirit (what happened in those three centuries of American history—slavery, racial injustice—would make any heart weep).

But what's particularly impressive about Du Bois's style is that his writing moves from describing a figure that's both real and symbolic (the veiled creature), to talking an image that distills the body down to its essence: the heart.

This movement is designed to pull sadness and compassion out of us. Oh, that poor, bowed heart. It's been hurt over and over again because of all the injustices in the world.

Warning: you just might need a box of tissues when you're reading Du Bois… if you haven't got one by your side already.