It is certainly possible for a book to have more than one tone, and DuBois is at times scholarly, strident, argumentative, and elegaic in The Souls of Black Folk. Part of this is because the book is really a collection of essays, but it is also true that DuBois portrays life behind the "color line" as complex and contradictory. In his chapter entitled "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," for example, he is highly critical of Washington's approach to race relations, which he deems overly submissive and ultimately self-destructive. Elsewhere, as in "The Meaning of Progress," he is sad and mournful:
How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
If there is one word that describes the book, however, it would be something like "sad". Sadness is a constant theme of The Souls of Black Folk, and it is important to remember that the book was written near the low point of race relations in American history. Lynchings and so-called "race riots" were rampant in the South, the Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to Jim Crow laws in Plessy v. Ferguson, and African-Americans in the South entered the twentieth century having been almost totally disenfranchised by literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation. So it makes sense that DuBois would look back ruefully and with outrage on the development of what he calls the "color line." He even questions at one point whether his child, who died as an infant, was not better off than if he had lived to grow to adulthood as a black man. Yet in his final chapter, DuBois concludes on a hopeful note, if one that acknowledges the sadness of the black experience in America:
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.
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