In what is of late one of the most quoted passages in American Letters, W. E. B. Dubois describes the Double Consciousness that makes the Negro “a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (5). Paradoxically, given the visual logic of his accounting, the very power of DuBois's notion has obscured the incident whose recounting generates it. Describing his boyhood initiation into racial self-knowledge in his early life “as a little thing, away up in the hills of New England … in a wee wooden school-house,” DuBois focuses on a moment in which he and his schoolmates splurge on “gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange.” The social ritual is “merry” until an authoritative onlooker, a “tall girl, a newcomer,” “refused my card— refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (4). At this precise moment, we're meant to believe, the boy's individualist faith in character as destiny is “forever shattered” (Lewis 33). With the girl's refusal, “the shadow swept across me”; “it dawned upon me that I was different from the others, … shut out from their world by a vast veil” (DuBois 4).