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"If there is anybody in this land who thoroughly believes that the meek shall inherit the earth they have not often let their presence be known."

- W.E.B. Du Bois

We were driving in the Berkshires in February when my husband said, quietly, “That’s where W.E.B. Du Bois lived.” If the road weren’t so busy, I would have asked him to stop the car right then. 

 Instead, we returned the following morning, our feet crunching over snow for the half-mile hike from the parking lot to the place Du Bois was raised by a single mother in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
He would go on to become Harvard’s first Black PhD recipient and one of the most profound scholars of the 20th century. All that’s left of his boyhood home is a platform of the old house's "great room" and there are markers along the way of quotes and photographs. 
Contrast that to another historic home a half-hour away — that of writer Edith Wharton. It’s stately and sprawling, organized around perfect paths and manicured gardens. Here, she wrote the novel “Ethan Frome,” about a depressed man who pines for his sickly wife’s cousin.