Dear Mr. DuBois,

I wonder if the thought of someone like me ever crossed your mind when you wrote of the inescapable "two-ness" a black man feels. Has it ever crossed your mind that someone might have felt it by accident, by a mistake?

You see, Mr. DuBois, I'm a white man who grew up thinking I was a black man my entire life. It's a long and complicated story that I don't have the time or, to be honest, the will to tell. I will tell you, though, that I don't look black at all, and if I was telling you all this face to face, you would surely question whether or not I was in my right mind. But I swear to you it's true. I grew up believing I had a few drops of negro blood running through my veins, and my entire life was shaped around this falsehood which I took to be as true as the word of God. I talked like a black man, acted like a black man, thought like a black man. I was black, by every definition but one. And that one just happened to be the most important.

I also believed myself to be a slave. The woman who pretended to be my mother was a slave, and by the laws of my time, that made me a slave too. So not only was I living the life of a black man, I was living the life of an enslaved black man. And I know you know, Mr. DuBois, what exactly that means. While I'll admit my life in the small town of Dawson's Landing, Missouri was not as bad as those poor souls further down the river, my belief that I was a slave affected every bit of my existence. All parts of my life were the way they were because I had no reason to believe that I was a free man.

When I found out my real identity, my entire world came crashing down. You might be surprised to hear that upon being informed of my whiteness and, therefore, my freedom, I sunk into a long and never-ending state of unhappiness. And this is where your ideas come in, sir. You wrote that the black man is "always looking at [himself] through the eyes of others," and that was no less true for me. Despite my pale skin, I saw myself as everyone else saw me -- a slave. What's more, you say that the black man, in one part of his double identity, "would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism"; this is the source of all my sorrows.

I cannot bleach my negro soul, despite what I know to be true of myself. So I am left in limbo, with no identity that I can call my own, because neither the black world nor the white world is my own. I am always gray.

Sincerely,
Tom Driscoll

Questions:
1. At what point did the "one-drop" rule implied by Roxy and Chambers' racial status as black fade out into the "one-quarter or more" rule described by Chesnutt? Was it purely a result of postbellum conditions, or were there other contributing factors?
2. In response to the Chesnutt piece: What consequences and complications, if any, arose from a child being legally (1/8) white while one of his or her parents was legally (1/4) black? How did the child's identity as a bastard child (due to the unlawfulness of his parents' union) affect his or her identity as a legally white child? And how did the child relate to his parents with regard to racial identity?