The Quest of the Silver Fleece

by W. E. B. Dubois

  The mother sobbed, “The cradle—was baby’s!”

  With an oath the white man dashed the cradle into the fire, and the red flame spurted aloft.

  The crimson fire flashed in Zora’s eyes as she passed the overseer.

  “Well, nigger, what are you going to do about it?” he growled insolently.

  Zora’s eyelids drooped, her upper lip quivered.

  “Nothing,” she answered softly. “But I hope your soul will burn in hell forever and forever.”

  They proceeded down the plantation road, but Zora could not speak. She pushed them slowly on, and turned aside to let the anger, the impotent, futile anger, rage itself out. Alone in the great broad spaces, she knew she could fight it down, and come back again, cool and in calm and deadly earnest, to lead these children to the light.

  The sorrow in her heart was new and strange; not sorrow for herself, for of that she had tasted the uttermost; but the vast vicarious suffering for the evil of the world. The tumult and war within her fled, and a sense of helplessness sent the hot tears streaming down her cheeks. She longed for rest; but the last plantation was yet to be passed. Far off she heard the yodle of the gangs of peons. She hesitated, looking for some way of escape: if she passed them she would see something—she always saw something—that would send the red blood whirling madly.

  “Here, you!—loafing again, damn you!” She saw the black whip writhe and curl across the shoulders of the plough-boy. The boy crouched and snarled, and again the whip hissed and cracked.

  Zora stood rigid and gray.

  “My God!” her silent soul was shrieking within, “why doesn’t the coward—”

  And then the “coward” did. The whip was whirring in the air again; but it never fell. A jagged stone in the boy’s hand struck true, and the overseer plunged with a grunt into the black furrow. In blank dismay, Zora came back to her senses.

  “Poor child!” she gasped, as she saw the boy flying in wild terror over the fields, with hue and cry behind him.

  “Poor child!—running to the penitentiary—to shame and hunger and damnation!”

  She remembered the rector in Mrs. Vanderpool’s library, and his question that revealed unfathomable depths of ignorance: “Really, now, how do you account for the distressing increase in crime among your people?”

  She swung into the great road trembling with the woe of the world in her eyes. Cruelty, poverty, and crime she had looked in the face that morning, and the hurt of it held her heart pinched and quivering. A moment the mists in her eyes shut out the shadows of the swamp, and the roaring in her ears made a silence of the world.

  Before she found herself again she dimly saw a couple sauntering along the road, but she hardly noticed their white faces until the little voice of the girl, raised timidly, greeted her.

  “Howdy, Zora.”

  Zora looked. The girl was Emma, and beside her, smiling, stood a half-grown white man. It was Emma, Bertie’s child; and yet it was not, for in the child of other days Zora saw for the first time the dawning woman.

  And she saw, too, the white man. Suddenly the horror of the swamp was upon her. She swept between the couple like a gust, gripping the child’s arm till she paled and almost whimpered.

  “I—I was just going on an errand for Miss Smith!” she cried.

  Looking down into her soul, Zora discerned its innocence and the fright shining in the child’s eyes. Her own eyes softened, her grip became a caress, but her heart was hard.

  The young man laughed awkwardly and strolled away. Zora looked back at him and the paramount mission of her life formed itself in her mind. She would protect this girl; she would protect all black girls. She would make it possible for these poor beasts of burden to be decent in their toil. Out of protection of womanhood as the central thought, she must build ramparts against cruelty, poverty, and crime. All this in turn—but now and first, the innocent girlhood of this daughter of shame must be rescued from the devil. It was her duty, her heritage. She must offer this unsullied soul up unto God in mighty atonement—but how? Here now was no protection. Already lustful eyes were in wait, and the child was too ignorant to protect herself. She must be sent to boarding-school, somewhere far away; but the money? God! it was money, money, always money. Then she stopped suddenly, thrilled with the recollection of Mrs. Vanderpool’s check.

  She dismissed the girl with a kiss, and stood still a moment considering. Money to send Emma off to school; money to buy a school farm; money to “buy” tenants to live on it; money to furnish them rations; money—

  She went straight to Miss Smith.

  “Miss Smith, how much money have you?” Miss Smith’s hand trembled a bit. Ah, that splendid strength of young womanhood—if only she herself had it! But perhaps Zora was the chosen one. She reached up and took down a well-worn book.

  “Zora,” she said slowly, “I’ve been going to tell you ever since you came, but I hadn’t the courage. Zora,” Miss Smith hesitated and gripped the book with thin white fingers, “I’m afraid—I almost know that this school is doomed.”

  There lay a silence in the room while the two women stared into each other’s souls with startled eyes. Swallowing hard, Miss Smith spoke.

  “When I thought the endowment sure, I mortgaged the school in order to buy Tolliver’s land. The endowment failed, as you know, because—perhaps I was too stubborn.”

  But Zora’s eyes snapped “No!” and Miss Smith continued:

  “I borrowed ten thousand dollars. Then I tried to get the land, but Tolliver kept putting me off, and finally I learned that Colonel Cresswell had bought it. It seems that Tolliver got caught tight in the cotton corner, and that Cresswell, through John Taylor, offered him twice what he had agreed to sell to me for, and he took it. I don’t suppose Taylor knew what he was doing; I hope he didn’t.

  “Well, there I was with ten thousand dollars idle on my hands, paying ten per cent on it and getting less than three per cent. I tried to get the bank to take the money back, but they refused. Then I was tempted—and fell.” She paused, and Zora took both her hands in her own.

  “You see,” continued Miss Smith, “just as soon as the announcement of the prospective endowment was sent broadcast by the press, the donations from the North fell off. Letter after letter came from old friends of the school full of congratulations, but no money. I ought to have cut down the teaching force to the barest minimum, and gone North begging—but I couldn’t. I guess my courage was gone. I knew how I’d have to explain and plead, and I just could not. So I used the ten thousand dollars to pay its own interest and help run the school. Already it’s half gone, and when the rest goes then will come the end.”

  Without, the great red sun paused a moment over the edge of the swamp, and the long, low cry of night birds broke sadly on the twilight silence. Zora sat stroking the lined hands.

  “Not the end,” she spoke confidently. “It cannot end like this. I’ve got a little money that Mrs. Vanderpool gave me, and somehow we must get more. Perhaps I might go North and—beg.” She shivered. Then she sat up resolutely and turned to the book.

  “Let’s go over matters carefully,” she proposed.

  Together they counted and calculated.

  “The balance is four thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight dollars,” said Miss Smith.

  “Yes, and then there’s Mrs. Vanderpool’s check.”

  “How much is that?”

  Zora paused; she did not know. In her world there was little calculation of money. Credit and not cash is the currency of the Black Belt. She had been pleased to receive the check, but she had not examined it.

  “I really don’t know,” she presently confessed. “I think it was one thousand dollars; but I was so hurried in leaving that I didn’t look carefully,” and the wild thought surged in her, suppose it was more!

  She ran into the other room and plunged into her trunk; beneath the clothes, beneath the beauty of the Silver Fleece, till her fingers clutched and tore the envelope. A li
ttle choking cry burst from her throat, her knees trembled so that she was obliged to sit down.

  In her fingers fluttered a check for—ten thousand dollars!

  It was not until the next day that the two women were sufficiently composed to talk matters over sanely.

  “What is your plan?” asked Zora.

  “To put the money in a Northern savings bank at three per cent interest; to supply the rest of the interest, and the deficit in the running expenses, from our balance, and to send you North to beg.”

  Zora shook her head. “It won’t do,” she objected. “I’d make a poor beggar; I don’t know human nature well enough, and I can’t talk to rich white folks the way they expect us to talk.”

  “It wouldn’t be hypocrisy, Zora; you would be serving in a great cause. If you don’t go, I—”

  “Wait! You sha’n’t go. If any one goes it must be me. But let’s think it out: we pay off the mortgage, we get enough to run the school as it has been run. Then what? There will still be slavery and oppression all around us. The children will be kept in the cotton fields; the men will be cheated, and the women—” Zora paused and her eyes grew hard.

  She began again rapidly: “We must have land—our own farm with our own tenants—to be the beginning of a free community.”

  Miss Smith threw up her hands impatiently.

  “But sakes alive! Where, Zora? Where can we get land, with Cresswell owning every inch and bound to destroy us?”

  Zora sat hugging her knees and staring out the window toward the sombre ramparts of the swamp. In her eyes lay slumbering the madness of long ago; in her brain danced all the dreams and visions of childhood.

  “I’m thinking,” she murmured, “of buying the swamp.”

  Thirty-three

  THE BUYING OF THE SWAMP

  It’s a shame,” asserted John Taylor with something like real feeling. He was spending Sunday with his father-in-law, and both, over their after-dinner cigars, were gazing thoughtfully at the swamp.

  “What’s a shame?” asked Colonel Cresswell.

  “To see all that timber and prime cotton-land going to waste. Don’t you remember those fine bales of cotton that came out of there several seasons ago?”

  The Colonel smoked placidly. “You can’t get it cleared,” he said.

  “But couldn’t you hire some good workers?”

  “Niggers won’t work. Now if we had Italians we might do it.”

  “Yes, and in a few years they’d own the country.”

  “That’s right; so there we are. There’s only one way to get that swamp cleared.”

  “How?”

  “Sell it to some fool darkey.”

  “Sell it? It’s too valuable to sell.”

  “That’s just it. You don’t understand. The only way to get decent work out of some niggers is to let them believe they’re buying land. In nine cases out of ten he works hard a while and then throws up the job. We get back our land and he makes good wages for his work.”

  “But in the tenth case—suppose he should stick to it?”

  “Oh,”—easily, “we could get rid of him when we want to. White people rule here.”

  John Taylor frowned and looked a little puzzled. He was no moralist, but he had his code and he did not understand Colonel Cresswell. As a matter of fact, Colonel Cresswell was an honest man. In most matters of commerce between men he was punctilious to a degree almost annoying to Taylor. But there was one part of the world which his code of honor did not cover, and he saw no incongruity in the omission. The uninitiated cannot easily picture to himself the mental attitude of a former slaveholder toward property in the hands of a Negro. Such property belonged of right to the master, if the master needed it; and since ridiculous laws safeguarded the property, it was perfectly permissible to circumvent such laws. No Negro starved on the Cresswell place, neither did any accumulate property. Colonel Cresswell saw to both matters.

  As the Colonel and John Taylor were thus conferring, Zora appeared, coming up the walk.

  “Who’s that?” asked the Colonel shading his eyes.

  “It’s Zora—the girl who went North with Mrs. Vanderpool,” Taylor enlightened him.

  “Back, is she? Too trifling to stick to a job, and full of Northern nonsense,” growled the Colonel. “Even got a Northern walk—I thought for a moment she was a lady.”

  Neither of the gentlemen ever dreamed how long, how hard, how heart-wringing was that walk from the gate up the winding way beneath their careless gaze. It was not the coming of the thoughtless, careless girl of five years ago who had marched a dozen times unthinking before the faces of white men. It was the approach of a woman who knew how the world treated women whom it respected; who knew that no such treatment would be thought of in her case: neither the bow, the lifted hat, nor even the conventional title of decency. Yet she must go on naturally and easily, boldly but circumspectly, and play a daring game with two powerful men.

  “Can I speak with you a moment, Colonel?” she asked.

  The Colonel did not stir or remove his cigar; he even injected a little gruffness into his tone.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Of course, she was not asked to sit, but she stood with her hands clasped loosely before her and her eyes half veiled.

  “Colonel, I’ve got a thousand dollars.” She did not mention the other nine.

  The Colonel sat up.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Vanderpool gave it to me to use in helping the colored people.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, that’s just what I came to see you about. You see, I might give it to the school, but I’ve been thinking that I’d like to buy some land for some of the tenants.”

  “I’ve got no land to sell,” said the Colonel.

  “I was thinking you might sell a bit of the swamp.”

  Cresswell and Taylor glanced at each other and the Colonel re-lit his cigar.

  “How much of it?” he asked finally.

  “I don’t know; I thought perhaps two hundred acres.”

  “Two hundred acres? Do you expect to buy that land for five dollars an acre?”

  “Oh, no, sir. I thought it might cost as much as twenty-five dollars.”

  “But you’ve only got a thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, sir; I thought I might pay that down and then pay the rest from the crops.”

  “Who’s going to work on the place?”

  Zora named a number of the steadiest tenants to whom she had spoken.

  “They owe me a lot of money,” said the Colonel.

  “We’d try to pay that, too.”

  Colonel Cresswell considered. There was absolutely no risk. The cost of the land, the back debts of the tenants—no possible crops could pay for them. Then there was the chance of getting the swamp cleared for almost nothing.

  “How’s the school getting on?” he asked suddenly.

  “Very poorly,” answered Zora sadly. “You know it’s mortgaged, and Miss Smith has had to use the mortgage money for yearly expenses.”

  The Colonel smiled grimly.

  “It will cost you fifty dollars an acre,” he said finally. Zora looked disappointed and figured out the matter slowly.

  “That would be one thousand down and nine thousand to pay—”

  “With interest,” said Cresswell.

  Zora shook her head doubtfully.

  “What would the interest be?” she asked.

  “Ten per cent.”

  She stood silent a moment and Colonel Cresswell spoke up:

  “It’s the best land about here and about the only land you can buy—I wouldn’t sell it to anybody else.”

  She still hesitated.

  “The trouble is, you see, Colonel Cresswell, the price is high and the interest heavy. And after all I may not be able to get as many tenants as I’d need. I think though, I’d try it if—if I could be sure you’d treat me fairly, and that I’d get the land
if I paid for it.”

  Colonel Cresswell reddened a little, and John Taylor looked away.

  “Well, if you don’t want to undertake it, all right.”

  Zora looked thoughtfully across the field—

  “Mr. Maxwell has a bit of land,” she began meditatively.

  “Worked out, and not worth five dollars an acre!” snapped the Colonel. But he did not propose to hand Maxwell a thousand dollars. “Now, see here, I’ll treat you as well as anybody, and you know it.”

  “I believe so, sir,” acknowledged Zora in a tone that brought a sudden keen glance from Taylor; but her face was a mask. “I reckon I’ll make the bargain.”

  “All right. Bring the money and we’ll fix the thing up.”

  “The money is here,” said Zora, taking an envelope out of her bosom.

  “Well, leave it here, and I’ll see to it.”

  “But you see, sir, Miss Smith is so methodical; she expects some papers or receipts.”

  “Well, it’s too late tonight.”

  “Possibly you could sign a sort of receipt and later—”

  Cresswell laughed. “Well, write one,” he indulgently assented. And Zora wrote.

  When Zora left Colonel Cresswell’s about noon that Sunday she knew her work had just begun, and she walked swiftly along the country roads, calling here and there. Would Uncle Isaac help her build a log home? Would the boys help her some time to clear some swamp land? Would Rob become a tenant when she asked? For this was the idle time of the year. Crops were laid by and planting had not yet begun.

  This too was the time of big church meetings. She knew that in her part of the country on that day the black population, man, woman, and child, were gathered in great groups; all day they had been gathering, streaming in snake-like lines along the country roads, in well-brushed, brilliant attire, half fantastic, half crude. Down where the Toomsville-Montgomery highway dipped to the stream that fed the Cresswell swamp squatted a square barn that slept through day and weeks in dull indifference. But on the First Sunday it woke to sudden mighty life. The voices of men and children mingled with the snorting of animals and the cracking of whips. Then came the long drone and sing-song of the preacher with its sharp wilder climaxes and the answering “amens” and screams of the worshippers. This was the shrine of the Baptists—shrine and oracle, centre and source of inspiration—and hither Zora hurried.