man and how it differs from that of the white, though he sees that both are Americans. He links his voice to that of all black men through time in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," a poem in which he says "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins" (2). This ancient past is within his soul, and his soul is one with the ancient rivers, growing as deep as they were. There is a long black history that has been largely ignored by white society, which treats all history as a white history. The speaker knows that this is not so and that within him is that truth his instructor says will come out on the page:
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
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