From Dark Princess by W.E.B. Du Bois, page 33 in the 2007 version published by Oxford Press:
“There is a corner in High Harlem where Seventh Avenue cuts the dark world in two. West rises the noble façade of City College—gray and green. East creeps the sullen Harlem, green and gray.”
This brief passage reflects upon Matthew Towns’s past and future. To the west is Towns’s past, the predominantly white world that has barred him from pursuing his dream, and to the east is the part of Harlem that lies outside of this world, where Towns will go to deliver the message of the Princess to Black Americans in the hopes of working together to fight against the color line.
These three sentences paint a dichotomy between east and west. Du Bois uses “noble” to describe the west, whereas the east is “sullen.” The west “rises” while the east “creeps.” The repetition of the two colors, gray and green, further differentiate the east and west. Even though Du Bois uses the same two colors to describe both places, the order of the colors casts a different impression upon readers. For the west, “gray and green” gives the impression of the “noble façade” appearing gray and architecturally refined, yet surrounded by the luxury of greenery in a congested city. For the east, the order of “green and gray” sounds more “sullen” because of the placement of “gray” at the end of the sentence. In this case, the concluding “gray” emphasizes Towns’s perceived drabness of the place, both literally (with gray buildings and streets) and metaphorically (depressing). “Green” has a few interpretations in this sentence, perhaps referring to the newness of the African-American community in Harlem, or perhaps literally referring to greenery in Harlem.
It is also interesting to note Du Bois’s use of the word “dark,” a word also used in the title. It is possible to interpret “dark world” literally—after all, New York City can be physically dark with buildings blocking sunlight. However, it is more likely that Du Bois is alluding to race, as in the title. To the west is the predominantly white world where the opportunities of non-white people—and Black people in particular—are limited, and to the east is a predominantly Black community distinct from the type of community in the west. This raises a question about status: why is an institution exclusively for white people portrayed as “noble,” while a predominantly Black neighborhood is “sullen?” Whose standards are these, and who buys into them and why?
These sentences can also be interpreted as a larger metaphor of East versus West. “West” often stands in for Europe, while “East” is often the “exotic other,” frequently portrayed as being less than the Western world so as to fit the West’s agenda of colonization, imperialism, subjugation, and outright racism. Rather than buying into this portrayal of East versus West, it is more likely that Du Bois is portraying the East as being “sullen” because of the West, a “culture” that believes that its harmful actions against the East are “noble” and justified. The West is able to be “noble”—“refined” or “cultured”—at the expense of the East. These three sentences therefore could reflect the novel’s larger theme of global struggles around race and oppression.
[As a side note, I did a quick search after writing this on “East vs. West,” and it’s interesting to see how Africa tends to be left out of this conversation, although North Africa is sometimes included. With this in mind, I’m interested to know if others see my interpretation as a stretch. Perhaps Du Bois is comparing the Black American community with the East, an area where Towns has found potential allies.]