Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Maurice Lee

In 1911, according to Wilson J. Moses, Du Bois knew less about African cultures and more about a myth tradition Moses calls Ethiopianism. More recent criticism links such spiritualist leanings to racialist theory (Appiah), nationhood (Sundquist, Wake), and the psychical research of William James (Schrager) - all of which cohere with my present contention that Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece uses mysticism to create a space for African American voices. In the swamp, the "'voodoo woman'" (371) Elspeth provides the "'wonder seed, sowed wid the three spells of Obi in the old land ten tousand moons ago'" (75). In the swamp are "strange power" (14), "huge bronze earth-spirits" (375), and "thick memories of some forgotten past" (209). Scholars have interpreted this mysterious realm as everything from "loving" (Elder 358) to "evil" (Rampersad 120), but just as Elspeth sows the "holy" Fleece while threatening Zora's purity (215), the swamp resists easy reduction to univocal symbolic structures. It harbors pure love and immoral revels, African roots and a future black community. Its "virgin and black" soil is cleared and furnished with Tennyson, Balzac, and Plato (78). It is an emblem of twoness where voodoo meets Christianity - where the spirit of Elspeth is dispelled by Old Pappy, "'a preacher, and some folks say a conjure man, too'" (37). Among all these things, the swamp is also a place for potentially free expression, for its boundless, shifting, liminal nature cannot be contained by traditional forms. When Bles casts his eyes on Washington, D.C., "somehow it looked like the swamp" (318). Zora says of New York, "'I knew the city was like the swamp, always restless and changing' ";" 'it is moving - always moving'" (245-46). Caroline Wynn advises Bles that" 'the line between virtue and foolishness is dim and wavering, and I should hate to see you lost in that marshy borderland'" (277). Indeed, the swamp is like the novel - a moving, mixed, wavering borderland neither real nor romantic, neither North nor South. Mystical and, as Du Bois writes, "formless" (371), the swamp holds a sanctity he defends with a veil.

When Mary enters "the deep shadow of the swamp," there is a "certain brooding terror." The earth is "black and burned," but she continues on "with the hush of death about her, and the silence which is one great Voice" (202). Here a white New Englander meets slavery's legacy: the impenetrable shadow of the Negro, the earth black and burned like a lynching victim, the brooding terror of the Great Dismal Swamp where Nat Turner and other maroons sought refuge. Most powerfully, the silence which is one great Voice describes the lost link to an African past and the voices lost in slavery - untold stories we hear whispered again in Elspeth's cabin, "too far for words" (203), and in Bles's painful "unspoken story that lay too deep for words" (262). Du Bois may not reclaim these narratives, but he does suggest their power. Moreover, he protects their hard-bought freedom from the prying eyes of white influence, for when Mary eventually comes upon Zora, the black's face is "mask-like, regular and comely; clothed in a mighty calm, yet subtly, masterfully veiling behind itself depths of unfathomed misery and wild revolt. All this lay in its darkness" (203-04).