f the veil which has hidden the history of black striving and struggle from view. Eric Foner's book on the reconstruction was the first major study of the period since Du Bois's book on the period fifty years earlier.*A href=#Footnote11B name=Footnote11A*Footnote11*/A* The reconstruction which Foner terms America's unfinished revolution could also be called American invisible revolution due to the lack of scholarship on the area. *br* The most striking examples of the theme of the veil and invisibility is in literature about Blacks struggling with their identity and with oppression. In *I*Beloved*/I* Setha's rational for killing her child can not be understood by the white police system which sentence her to prison. In Ralph Ellison's *I*Invisible Man*/I* the main character says, "I am an invisible man, No I am not a spook like those that haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasm's. I am a man of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible understand because people refuse to see me."*A href=#Footnote12B name=Footnote12A*Footnote12*/A* Ralph Ellison's invisible man like the history of black women, slavery, reconstruction, and many other elements of black life are hidden behind "the veil" making them invisible to much of society. *br* The veil is also a metaphor for the separation both physically and psychologically of blacks and whites America. Physically the veil separates blacks and whites through Slavery, Jim Crow laws, economic inequality, and the voluntary segregation that followed the end of the civil war. The veil acts as a physical barrier that permanently brands black Americans as an "other"; the veil is the metaphorical manifestation of the train tracks that divide the black and white parts of town. Du Bois in Chapter two lays out the creation ...
