The Quest of the Silver Fleece Read online

  OTHER HARLEM MOON CLASSICS

  Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color by Carole Ione

  Soulscript: A Collection of African American Poetry edited by June Jordan

  Published by Harlem Moon, an imprint of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1911 by A.C. McClurg & Co.

  Introduction copyright © 2004 by Arnold Rampersad. All rights reserved. No part of this introduction may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Harlem Moon Classics series advisor: Gina Dent, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

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  First Harlem Moon trade paperback edition published 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Du Bois, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868–1963.

  The quest of the silver fleece : a novel / W.E.B Du Bois.—1st Harlem Moon trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Power (Social sciences)—Fiction. 2. African American women—Fiction. 3. Rejection (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Cotton trade—Fiction. 6. Swamps—Fiction 7. Race—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3507.U147Q46 2004

  813’.52—dc22 2004047414

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82321-2

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Harlem Moon Classics

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Arnold Rampersad

  THE QUEST OF THE SILVER FLEECE

  Dedication

  Note from the Author

  One: DREAMS

  Two: THE SCHOOL

  Three: MISS MARY TAYLOR

  Four: TOWN

  Five: ZORA

  Six: COTTON

  Seven: THE PLACE OF DREAMS

  Eight: MR. HARRY CRESSWELL

  Nine: THE PLANTING

  Ten: MR. TAYLOR CALLS

  Eleven: THE FLOWERING OF THE FLEECE

  Twelve: THE PROMISE

  Thirteen: MRS. GREY GIVES A DINNER

  Fourteen: LOVE

  Fifteen: REVELATION

  Sixteen: THE GREAT REFUSAL

  Seventeen: THE RAPE OF THE FLEECE

  Eighteen: THE COTTON CORNER

  Nineteen: THE DYING OF ELSPETH

  Twenty: THE WEAVING OF THE SILVER FLEECE

  Twenty-one: THE MARRIAGE MORNING

  Twenty-two: MISS CAROLINE WYNN

  Twenty-three: THE TRAINING OF ZORA

  Twenty-four: THE EDUCATION OF ALWYN

  Twenty-five: THE CAMPAIGN

  Twenty-six: CONGRESSMAN CRESSWELL

  Twenty-seven: THE VISION OF ZORA

  Twenty-eight: THE ANNUNCIATION

  Twenty-nine: A MASTER OF FATE

  Thirty: THE RETURN OF ZORA

  Thirty-one: A PARTING OF WAYS

  Thirty-two: ZORA’S WAY

  Thirty-three: THE BUYING OF THE SWAMP

  Thirty-four: THE RETURN OF ALWYN

  Thirty-five: THE COTTON MILL

  Thirty-six: THE LAND

  Thirty-seven: THE MOB

  Thirty-eight: ATONEMENT

  Reader’s Companion

  About the Author

  Introduction

  When W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, appeared in 1911, he had bravely begun only a year before a new, exciting, but also potentially disastrous adventure. After thirteen years as a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois dumped his academic robes in 1910 and joined an upstart civil rights organization in New York City, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Specifically, he joined the NAACP as its first director of publicity and the founding editor of its crusading monthly magazine, The Crisis. For the next twenty-four years, he made this magazine a clarion call to blacks across America who were dedicated to their rise as a people.

  As a novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece was an audacious departure from the kind of books that had established Du Bois not only as the premier black academic in America but as one of the leading American academics in almost any field. His first book, The Suppression of the Slave-Trade to the United States, was a major work of history; his second, The Philadelphia Negro, a pioneering example of empirical sociology based on an exhaustive study of blacks in that city. At Atlanta, he edited an annual series of sociological studies on subjects pertaining to black American life, based on conferences he organized at his university. (The publications started in 1897 and continued beyond his departure from Atlanta.)

  Educated at Fisk University, Harvard University (where he earned a doctorate in history), and the University of Berlin, Du Bois labored to be a scholar according to the strictest standards of the profession. Although no white college or university would dare to hire him as a professor, he succeeded in establishing an excellent reputation as an academic writer. However, he also failed, as he saw it, because all of his vaunted scholarly texts had done virtually nothing to alter the appalling conditions under which black Americans lived, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, which justified and encouraged the practice of racial segregation.

  Before this novel, in addition to the works already mentioned, Du Bois wrote a biography of the abolitionist martyr John Brown, edited journals of news and opinion aimed at a black audience, and published poems that expressed the powerful emotions evoked by the horrors of Jim Crow. His single most influential work before 1910—perhaps the finest work of his long life—was The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In this volume, Du Bois brought together his talents in history, sociology, fiction, religious and musical studies, biography, and autobiography. It boldly announced his differences with Booker T. Washington, the most powerful black American of his day and the founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The Souls of Black Folk showed Du Bois’s intimate knowledge, despite his New England origins, of black life in the South. It reflected his sense of a perpetual crisis in black American life, caught between the cruel fact of segregation and the promise of freedom. It declared famously that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

  In many ways, The Quest of the Silver Fleece renders in novel form the essence of The Souls of Black Folk and the knowledge and insights gained by Du Bois about white Americans, black Americans, himself, and life since 1903. Despite the success of The Souls of Black Folk in establishing him and his vision as the main rivals to the authority of Booker T. Washington, Du Bois saw the limitations of the book even as it appeared. By 1911, when Quest was published, he had an even more acute sense of how much (as he would later publicly regret) his 1903 volume suffered from his lack of a deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the works of Marx and Freud—that is, dialectical materialism and psychology. Because of his reading of these two major thinkers and because the novel as a form invited psychological probing, The Quest of the Si
lver Fleece took Du Bois into areas he had barely touched as a commentator on the predicament of being black in America. In so doing, it broke new ground among black novels.

  By our standards of fiction today, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is in some ways a quaint, old-fashioned work of art. Based on the “marriage” plot (that staple of bourgeois fiction in which the complexities of a story are resolved by the triumph of love in a wedding), it is aimed at least as much at middle-class women, who then as now made up the majority of the American readership of fiction, as at middle-class men. Because of that strategy, as well as for other reasons, the tale is often sentimental and idealistic. It employs, at times, archaic diction. Du Bois also uses black dialect as a marker of social and educational inferiority in ways that were common at the time but which now often seem to us condescending and stereotypical.

  Nevertheless, this novel is a remarkable accomplishment, an always entertaining work that, unlike perhaps any other novel of its time, throws open a wide window on black life—urban and rural, rich and poor—in the first years of the century. As much concerned with its heroine, Zora, as with its hero, Bles, it is set in the South and the North, as well as in the middle territory of Washington, D.C. It involves electoral politics, with the Republicans (the party of Abraham Lincoln) vying for the black vote against the Democrats (the party of the white South).

  Most striking among black novels before and of its time, it reveals a shrewd interest in economics. Like the white novelist Frank Norris’ trilogy about the production and marketing of wheat, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is anchored in the production and sale of cotton—including the people (most often black) who plant and pick it, the farmers (typically white) who control its production at a primary level, the bankers (all white) who control these farmers, the speculators on Wall Street who make and lose fortunes as the price of cotton rises and falls, and the purchasers of cotton garments who typically understand little of the drama and, often, the tragedy involved in the production and sale of the fabric.

  Du Bois’s novel, which starts in the South, is also about education. It reprises the most famous antagonism of his life to this point, pitting him as a lover of culture and the liberal arts against Booker T. Washington, who stressed manual and vocational training as the main way for Southern black masses to rise out of poverty. Compelling in its concern for morality (although unconcerned with formal religion), the story scrutinizes the values of American culture from top to bottom. The child of an evil woman, compromised early by exposure to sexual license, Zora must remake herself into a woman of virtue in order to be worthy of the hero, Bles, who himself strays from the path of righteousness before regaining his moral balance. Both redeem themselves and their lives by recognizing the importance of self-control, moral integrity, formal education, a dedication to hard work, and a commitment to toil, above all, for the uplift of other black people.

  Black American character runs the complete gamut here, from our virtuous hero and heroine to villains such as Zora’s witch of a mother and the coolly sophisticated but unscrupulous woman, Carolyn Wynn, who almost leads Bles permanently astray. So, too, are the white characters of various types. Sarah Smith, a veteran New Englander who has made her life’s work the education of poor black folk, is the absolute beacon of moral light that guides the blacks she serves, including Bles and Zora. She shares the stage with more lamentable characters—the profligate Southern plantation owner and his son, who exemplify the corrupted white aristocracy of the region; the poor whites, who are typically pawns exploited by those rich whites who foment the racial antagonism between them and blacks; and cynical Northern whites, who are but a mere shadow of the radical moral energy that led decades before to the Civil War.

  Writing with comparative ease, Du Bois spins a complex tale. The novel ends in the triumph of idealism, education, and the will to work hard over both those blacks who would surrender, in one way or another, to the miasma of their lives under white domination and those whites who would make a mockery of their own vaunted standards of morality and culture by worshipping money and denying the principles of democracy. Far more so than in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois shows a sure understanding of how economic interests underlie most aspects of life. Similarly, in touching almost sensationally on such matters as miscegenation between black men and white women, and the possibility that some white women might actually desire, if mainly in an unconscious way, black men (certainly a black man as attractive as Bles), the novelist takes us into psychological and subliminal territory barely acknowledged before in fiction by writers black or white.

  The Quest of the Silver Fleece was not a commercial success. Nevertheless, Du Bois so enjoyed writing this novel that he would produce another, Dark Princess, in 1928. Much later, near the end of his life, he published a trilogy of novels of black life on an epic scale, spanning several generations. A historian and sociologist by training, he loved the arts, especially music and literature. He clearly valued the novel as a form. The fiction he wrote is an important index to his superb intelligence and imagination, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece should be read by all those who respect his matchless gifts as perhaps the premier black intellectual in our long history.

  ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

  Stanford University

  Professor Arnold Rampersad is cognizant dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. An acclaimed biographer, he has written books on Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, and cowrote Arthur Ashe’s memoir, Days of Grace.

  THE QUEST OF THE SILVER FLEECE

  TO ONE

  whose name may not be written but to whose tireless faith the shaping of these cruder thoughts to forms more fitly perfect is doubtless due, this finished work is herewith dedicated

  Note

  He who would tell a tale must look toward three ideals: to tell it well, to tell it beautifully, and to tell the truth.

  The first is the Gift of God, the second is the Vision of Genius, but the third is the Reward of Honesty.

  In The Quest of the Silver Fleece there is little, I ween, divine or ingenious; but, at least, I have been honest. In no fact or picture have I consciously set down aught the counterpart of which I have not seen or known; and whatever the finished picture may lack of completeness, this lack is due now to the story-teller, now to the artist, but never to the herald of the Truth.

  NEW YORK CITY

  AUGUST 15, 1911

  THE AUTHOR

  One

  DREAMS

  Night fell. The red waters of the swamp grew sinister and sullen.

  The tall pines lost their slimness and stood in wide blurred blotches all across the way, and a great shadowy bird arose, wheeled and melted, murmuring, into the black-green sky.

  The boy wearily dropped his heavy bundle and stood still, listening as the voice of crickets split the shadows and made the silence audible. A tear wandered down his brown cheek. They were at supper now, he whispered—the father and old mother, away back yonder beyond the night. They were far away; they would never be as near as once they had been, for he had stepped into the world. And the cat and Old Billy—ah, but the world was a lonely thing, so wide and tall and empty! And so bare, so bitter bare! Somehow he had never dreamed of the world as lonely before; he had fared forth to beckoning hands and luring, and to the eager hum of human voices, as of some great, swelling music.

  Yet now he was alone; the empty night was closing all about him here in a strange land, and he was afraid. The bundle with his earthly treasure had hung heavy and heavier on his shoulder; his little horde of money was tightly wadded in his sock, and the school lay hidden somewhere far away in the shadows. He wondered how far it was; he looked and harkened, starting at his own heartbeats, and fearing more and more the long dark fingers of the night.

  Then of a sudden up from the darkness came music. It was human music, but of a wildness and a weirdness that startled the boy as it fluttered and danced across the dull red waters of the swamp. He
hesitated, then impelled by some strange power, left the highway and slipped into the forest of the swamp, shrinking, yet following the song hungrily and half forgetting his fear. A harsher, shriller note struck in as of many and ruder voices; but above it flew the first sweet music, birdlike, abandoned, and the boy crept closer.

  The cabin crouched ragged and black at the edge of black waters. An old chimney leaned drunkenly against it, raging with fire and smoke, while through the chinks winked red gleams of warmth and wild cheer. With a revel of shouting and noise, the music suddenly ceased. Hoarse staccato cries and peals of laughter shook the old hut, and as the boy stood there peering through the black trees, abruptly the door flew open and a flood of light illumined the wood.

  Amid this mighty halo, as on clouds of flame, a girl was dancing. She was black, and lithe, and tall, and willowy. Her garments twined and flew around the delicate moulding of her dark, young, half-naked limbs. A heavy mass of hair clung motionless to her wide forehead. Her arms twirled and flickered, and body and soul seemed quivering and whirring in the poetry of her motion.

  As she danced she sang. He heard her voice as before, fluttering like a bird’s in the full sweetness of her utter music. It was no tune nor melody, it was just formless, boundless music. The boy forgot himself and all the world besides. All his darkness was sudden light; dazzled he crept forward, bewildered, fascinated, until with one last wild whirl the elf-girl paused. The crimson light fell full upon the warm and velvet bronze of her face—her midnight eyes were aglow, her full purple lips apart, her half hid bosom panting, and all the music dead. Involuntarily the boy gave a gasping cry and awoke to swamp and night and fire, while a white face, drawn, red-eyed, peered outward from some hidden throng within the cabin.

  “Who’s that?” a harsh voice cried.