Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value

Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with the harvest,—its golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billows from Carolina to Texas across that Black and human sea?

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

The Southern Black Belt, a crescent-shaped region extending from Virginia to Texas, derives its name from two sources. One is its dark and fertile soil, a loamy alluvial sediment left by receding oceans some 85 million years ago. The other is the tens of thousands of enslaved Africans brought there to cultivate short-staple cotton, whose descendants at the end of the nineteenth century represented more than three quarters of the region's population. This doubled semantic value was widely embraced in Reconstruction era debates concerning economic recovery and the Black Belt. Thus, black educator Roscoe Conkling Bruce could refer to the "agricultural and social black belt" as a single object of analysis (295), and white supremacist writer and planter Alfred Holt Stone could cite a "lifetime spent in the 'blackest' of the [S]outh's 'black belts'" as credential for advising the American Economic Association on how to revive the plantation system ("The Negro" 235). Booker T. Washington also correlated black people with Southern fields. Writing about poor urban communities in Up From Slavery (1901), he wishes "that by some power of magic, I might … plant them upon the soil … where all nations and races that have ever succeeded have gotten their start" (43). His term "plant" evinces Washington's longing for stability, his hope that maintaining position within prevailing economic and racial orders would protect black communities from white violence and foster their growth. But Washington also recognized the damning conflation performed by Stone's coy "blackest of the black"—where a racialized people's historic relation to dirt is rewritten as essence, metonym as metaphor. If he strove to "plant" African Americans "upon the soil" he also fought hard to disassociate them from it. A zealous advocate of personal and domestic hygiene, Washington advised Tuskegee students that whites "would not excuse us for dirt" (84). Addressing the Black Belt's two meanings, he shuns word play: he concedes an original connection to "the colour of the soil," but insists that since emancipation the term is "used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white" (52).

W. E. B. Du Bois—who wrote extensively about the Black Belt, beginning with his Atlanta University studies of its black farming communities—was also interested in how the region's name and history linked black soil with racial blackness. Like Washington, he saw the dangers of this association. But rather than suppress conceptual and linguistic linkages, Du Bois used his writing to push these into surplus production. The above passage from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers illustration, with its exuberant figurative excesses and, especially, its closing phrase that casts the Black Belt as "that Black and human sea," naming its dirt and laboring population together, placing them in both metaphoric and metonymic relation (89). There the "black earth" from earlier in the sentence is made to signify simultaneously for and beside the human. Dirt and laborer coincide in the metaphor of the black sea, moving—per Gérard Genette—to "release the common essence" that transcends their syntagmatic and historical difference (204). But they also do not coincide. Placed in series, they map the historical proximity that has created their metonymic connection. More, the destabilizing insertion of "and" prevents the phrase—and especially the word "black"—from resolving into a single figurative operation. Here blackness travels. It moves across the syntax—linking now with "black earth" and now with "human" (the "and" flickering in and out of view). "Blackness" renders its own value undecidable and, in so doing, renders unpredictable the structure that produces it.

This essay focuses on writing in which Du Bois exploits the figurative versatility of Black Belt dirt to expose—but...