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Du Bois
1911
A swamp cotton crop, a Black Belt romance, and Du Bois's argument about who owns the South.
The Quest of the Silver Fleece
W. E. B. Du Bois · 1911
Best known for the essays of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote only one novel in this period — and used it to dramatize an argument essays couldn't quite make the same way: that Black economic independence in the Jim Crow South was strangled less by lack of effort than by who controlled the land, the credit, and the cotton market itself. Bles Alwyn and Zora's swamp-grown cotton crop, planted against a New England mission school and a scheming planter family, turns the crop-lien system and the politics of industrial education into a story with real stakes, written by the era's sharpest analyst of exactly those stakes.
38 chapters · 107,584 words · ~8.2 hr read
Contents
Chapters
Du Bois tells one continuous story across thirty-eight chapters — from Bles Alwyn's arrival at a Black Belt mission school and his partnership with Zora on a swamp-grown cotton crop, through the Cresswell family's maneuvering over land and credit, to the novel's reckoning over who actually owns the South's cotton wealth.
- 1Chapter 1~9 min
- 2Chapter 2~5 min
- 3Chapter 3~8 min
- 4Chapter 4~12 min
- 5Chapter 5~12 min
- 6Chapter 6~14 min
- 7Chapter 7~17 min
- 8Chapter 8~11 min
- 9Chapter 9~13 min
- 10Chapter 10~20 min
- 11Chapter 11~13 min
- 12Chapter 12~19 min
- 13Chapter 13~6 min
- 14Chapter 14~8 min
- 15Chapter 15~16 min
- 16Chapter 16~11 min
- 17Chapter 17~10 min
- 18Chapter 18~11 min
- 19Chapter 19~15 min
- 20Chapter 20~11 min
- 21Chapter 21~10 min
- 22Chapter 22~14 min
- 23Chapter 23~10 min
- 24Chapter 24~15 min
- 25Chapter 25~18 min
- 26Chapter 26~13 min
- 27Chapter 27~12 min
- 28Chapter 28~10 min
- 29Chapter 29~15 min
- 30Chapter 30~13 min
- 31Chapter 31~21 min
- 32Chapter 32~10 min
- 33Chapter 33~16 min
- 34Chapter 34~16 min
- 35Chapter 35~15 min
- 36Chapter 36~18 min
- 37Chapter 37~9 min
- 38Chapter 38~10 min