In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, early twentieth-century statesman of Black-American discourse W.E.B. Dubois weaves auto-fiction with poetry, social essay, and Afrofutrist storytelling that presages Butler, Due, Adjei-Brenyah, Shawl, and Jemisin. Three wise-men gather as a Christ child of color is born in a Georgia shanty; a reflection on WW I reframes its bloody legacy with the wages of Western imperialism; a tragic race riot ending with scores of Black men and women lynched, shot and bludgeoned in the streets of East St. Louis on the eve of the 4th of July is revisited as part of a long continuum of exploited inequities and workers' rights violations lurking behind the veil of race hatred; and a post-apocalyptic New York finds a Black man and white woman, possibly the last two people on Earth, on the verge of a new reckoning. Du Bois plunges twenty-first century readers into his rich, mysterious text which begs us to examine how the Black American experience has changed these last hundred years and also how it remains the same.

Published in 1920, Darkwater is reprinted here, for the first time with illustrations, as the latest edition in McSweeney's Of the Diaspora series, edited by Erica Vital-Lazare, which features previously published works in Black literature whose themes, settings, and imagery evoke the Middle Passage and a particular voice and aesthetic connecting African-derived peoples to a shared ancestral and artistic past.