The Quest of the Silver Fleece

The Quest of the Silver Fleece by W.E.B. Du Bois

The opening portion of The Quest of the Silver Fleece follows Bles Alwyn, a fifteen-year-old boy from Georgia who comes to Miss Sarah Smith’s Negro school in Alabama. Lost in the swamp on his arrival, he is drawn by music to a cabin where he sees Zora, a wild, beautiful girl dancing and singing. The next morning they meet beneath an oak, share food, and form an immediate bond. Zora lives in and belongs to the swamp, dreaming of fields beyond it filled with “dreams” and devils; Bles, more practical but fascinated by her imagination, begins returning to see her. At the school, Miss Smith has spent thirty years struggling to educate black children and fears for the institution’s future because of poverty and white hostility. A wealthy visitor, Mrs. Vanderpool, refuses to support broad education for black people, believing schools should chiefly train servants. Miss Mary Taylor, a young white teacher, arrives reluctantly, disturbed by her pupils’ poverty and color, yet increasingly interested in cotton and in Bles’s intelligence. Bles explains the growth of cotton to her, and she calls it the “Silver Fleece,” comparing it to the Golden Fleece of Jason. Bles turns the comparison into an accusation: the Cresswells, great landowners, possess the fleece as Jason possessed his prize. Bles persuades Zora to learn to read. Though she initially scorns books and white learning, she proves startlingly quick, reading and absorbing stories with great power. To pay for schooling, she picks cotton despite pain, hunger, and exhaustion, refusing charity. Bles buys her a vivid red dress, and together they dream of raising exceptional cotton on a hidden island in the swamp, using its profits to support her education and their future. They clear the wild island with great labor, borrow a mule secretly from the Cresswell plantation, and receive strange black cottonseed from Zora’s mother, Elspeth, who is feared as a witch. At midnight Elspeth ceremonially sows the seed. Zora enters Miss Smith’s school in the red dress, alarming and captivating the teachers. Miss Taylor distrusts her, especially after Zora steals a brooch and defends the act by claiming that people have no right to what they do not need. Miss Smith refuses to expel her, instead drawing her into small household tasks and offering her a clean private room where she can read. Zora gradually learns new habits, clothes herself more carefully, and becomes both more poised and more beautiful. Her attachment to Bles deepens into a shy, powerful love, while he becomes devoted to her and to their growing cotton. Meanwhile, John Taylor, Mary’s brother, works with Edward Easterly in the cotton trade. He envisions an immense combine controlling both cotton mills and the cotton-growing South. He seeks the alliance of Colonel St. John Cresswell and his son Harry, who own vast acreage, lead the Farmers’ League, and are burdened by debt. Taylor offers them a place in a planned All-Cotton combine that would control banks, merchants, planters, cotton production, and manufacturing. Harry agrees to investigate the scheme, while also recognizing that Negro education threatens the cheap labor on which the plantation system depends. Harry Cresswell courts Mary Taylor and uses her desire for white society and influence to gain an ally at the school. He tells her that Zora is depraved and should not be admitted. Mary believes him, but Miss Smith refuses to judge Zora by his accusation. Mary increasingly adopts the belief that black education should produce servants, farmers, and laborers under white guidance. Her reports help persuade Mrs. Grey, widow of the millionaire Job Grey, to consider endowing several Negro schools, including Miss Smith’s. The Silver Fleece grows magnificently on the island. When a week of heavy rain threatens to destroy it, Bles fears both the crop and Zora are lost. He finds that Zora has saved the field by digging a canal that drains the lagoon, but she is dangerously ill from the effort. He carries her to Miss Smith, and she survives after a long illness. Reunited in the cotton field when it is white with bolls, Bles and Zora confess their love through their embrace and begin to speak of marriage. At the same time, Miss Smith learns how the Cresswells keep black tenants trapped by debt, threats, punishment, and fraudulent contracts. Aunt Rachel’s sons are threatened with the chain-gang if the family leaves the plantation; Jim Sykes has paid for years toward land he will never own; Robert abandons hopes of college because he sees so little opportunity for an educated black man. Miss Smith needs money to buy the Tolliver plantation for the school and its community, but, tempted by the promise of Mrs. Grey’s gift, mortgages the school property for ten thousand dollars through the local bank, where the Cresswells hold influence. Mrs. Grey’s educational scheme is soon redirected by Easterly, Taylor, and Cresswell. They decide that Northern financiers, philanthropists, and Southern planters should control Negro education, making it acceptable to employers and landowners. A visiting board comes to the school, where a clergyman urges the students to accept inequality, serve whites, avoid political ambition, and be content with work in fields and kitchens. Miss Smith insists that she means to make full men and women, fathers, mothers, workers, and citizens. When Mrs. Grey offers an endowment of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on condition that Cresswell and allied businessmen control it, Miss Smith refuses. She declares that Cresswell’s relation to evil in the community makes him unfit to direct her school. The Cresswells’ party then encounters Bles and Zora embracing on the road. Harry calls Zora notorious and threatens Bles with arrest. Mary repeats the judgment, and Bles, shaken, confronts Zora in the field. Bound by her promise to tell him the truth, she reveals that before she knew him, the Cresswells’ master had used her while she was still a child at Elspeth’s cabin. She explains that she believed purity meant wanting to be pure and that she had never been with anyone since meeting Bles. Horrified and ignorant, Bles rejects her, saying she should have died, then leaves after learning that the man was connected with the Cresswells. Zora collapses in grief, while Miss Smith takes her in and resolves to save both the girl and her endangered school.

By W.E.B. Du Bois · First published 1911 · Genre: African American literature, Social protest novel, Political fiction · 38 chapters · 135,686 words

First lines

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.

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African American literature · social realism · racial injustice · Southern United States · cotton industry · economic exploitation · education · political corruption · romance · coming of age · Black community · post-Reconstruction era

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