The Quest of the Silver Fleece

For a novel steeped in African-American conjure and Southern folk belief, Du Bois's first novel promotes an ambivalence with regards to the conjure tradition. Like his second novel, Dark Princess, it is a romance in which the struggle of black characters against racism is embedded in the trials of the two young lovers. However, without exotic Indian princesses and the theme of the global color line, The Quest of the Silver Fleece focuses on African-American characters and their white counterparts in the struggle against the post-Reconstruction political economy of Alabama, with only a few references to the connections between the oppressed colored masses of the US and colonized peoples elsewhere.

The kingdom of cotton is thoroughly analyzed here, demonstrating precisely how "slavery by another name" persisted after the Civil War in places like the fictional Tooms County, Alabama. The combination of the Southern planter aristocracy and Northern capitalists combining their forces to consolidate the exploitation of black sharecroppers, the denial of education for black children, and the violation of black womanhood due to their rape and sexual exploitation by white men are constants here. Part of the story is set in the nation's capital, where the alliance of Northern capital and the Southern aristocracy asserts itself in the Republican party's opportunistic and limited support of black civil rights. Again, like Dark Princess, Bles Alwyn, akin to Matthew in the later novel, is paired with a light-skinned and cynical black woman, but cannot abandon his ideals too long and eventually returns to the South. 

As a romance novel with some of the socialist themes one can expect from Du Bois (hopes for eventual collaboration of blacks and poor whites against their capitalist exploiters, critiques of industry and monopoly capitalism), Bles and the other protagonist, Zora, build their own kingdom after clearing the swamp in which Zora's mother, Elspeth, resided. They clear the swamp with the help of black tenants, splitting the profits with them to fund the school started by Miss Smith and expand services and settlement-work. Thus, a combination of sorts of black nationalist assertions of self-rule, communal land ownership, and utopian romance come together through the union of a "wild child" of the swamp and Bles, who represents the larger world of knowledge and higher ideals.

This is where the ambivalence with regards to the "half-forgotten heathen cult" comes in. It is through a magic cotton seed of Elspeth that the swamp first produces the "Silver Fleece," a metaphor for black authority and independence in the midst of the planter domination of the Cresswells and other former slaveholders. Zora, although not completely aware of her heritage, hears Elspeth claim descent from an African king, and she witnesses the bizarre world of the swamp, its charm, and the "dreams." As a former child of the swamp, removed from social norms, her quest of knowledge, largely initiated by Bles, culminates in her central leadership of the plan to save the Smith school for black children and clear the swamp for an egalitarian farm. In the course of doing this, she nearly fails and is rejected by the local preacher, Jones, as a child of a "voodoo woman." 

Nonetheless, she believes "the Way" consists of one's actions, not in one's faith, so she takes the initiative and eventually triumphs. She places her faith in human actions and solidarity among the great black masses, not in any Christian God or half-remembered African spirits. In this regard, she brings to mind the eponymous heroine of Scott Joplin's opera, Treemonisha. Like Zora, Treemonisha embodies knowledge and becomes a messianic figure, a black Athena to guide the lost masses ever onward in education, progress, and the realization of their own potential. However, in Joplin's "ragtime opera," conjure and hoodoo are represented as negative influences preying on the superstition and ignorance of the emancipated black masses. Further, whites are nearly absent in Joplin's opera, whereas Du Bois's novel features multiple white characters and the political economy of Jim Crow to show the tremendous obstacles to the agency of African-Americans. 

I would conclude that, for Du Bois, who novel reflects a Greek myth and African-American conjure, the "pagan" past can lay the seeds for a future, but only if they don't lead to a fatalism among the oppressed. One thinks of Jacques Roumain and The Masters of the Dew here, although Du Bois never comes close to celebrating "voodoo" in the manner of Haitian indigénisme. Perhaps The Quest of the Silver Fleece can be construed as a transitional work in which African-derived spirituality was portrayed ambivalently but not denounced, as would be expected within the civilizationist discourse of black nationalist thought prior to the "primitivism" of the interwar years.