In the final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois asserts that African-American gospels and spirituals were not only the most original American music but also the most beautiful expressions of humanity born of great suffering. Tracy K. Smith echoes this sentiment in her beautiful lyric To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, in which she confidently plays Ariadne in the labyrinth of American history, masterfully leading the reader with experiences that depict the resilience of the soul as her red string.
Smith, a former poet laureate of the United States and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 collection, , begins by plumbing the history of her paternal line, using census data to situate her and Sunday mornings set aside for church. “Where does the soul reside?” Smith asks. “In the heart, the mind?” She imbues this age-old question with the music of a quick rhyme, the in and , dancing the question into a contemporary spin. The soul, she offers, “is strongest and most active in the generations of those who claim and conjure it, who nourish it with praise and serious laughter.”
