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16. Sundquist notes that “Josh is a ¤gure of folk consciousness apparently drawn from no actual participant in the Wilmington riot” (To Wake the Nations 441). 17. Here Gilmore, like many critics, consciously calls to mind the surname of Alexander Manly, the black journalist whose editorializing on the subject of race and sexuality so angered the white establishment. 18. Referring to Skaggs as a “blues detective,” Houston Baker claims, “The narrator . . . seems willing to recommend even the reportage of yellow journalism if it offers conditions of possibility for a just means of apprehending the world” (135). 19. For accounts of the involvement of the white and black press in the Wilmington riot, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations 414–22, and Prather, “We Have Taken a City” 22–32. 20. See Glenda Gilmore, “Murder, Memory, and the Flight of the Incubus” 77– 78, Sundquist, To Wake the Nations 419–25, and Prather, “We Have Taken a City” 23–30. 21. According to Rampersad, A. C. McClurg, publisher of The Souls of Black Folk, gave Du Bois the idea of writing a novel: “Struck by the lyric intensity of many of the essays, and perhaps by the power and effectiveness of the only short story in the collection ‘Of the Coming of John,’ McClurg had suggested that its author think of writing a novel to dramatize what Du Bois had called the ‘problem’ of being black in white America” (Foreword 5–6). The title of this novel alludes to the chapter of Souls entitled “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,” an economic treatise on Southern cotton production which, in turn, alludes to the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts. 22. The title change from the chapter of Souls re®ects concerns over David Graham Phillips’s then-recent Golden Fleece. See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 444–45. 23. In “Race and Romance: The Quest of the Silver Fleece as Utopian Narrative,” Keith Byerman suggests that Du Bois’s realistic message is undone by the romantic elements of the story. 24. One of many interesting parallels between Norris’s and Du Bois’s novels is the reference to death in the place names: “Los Muertos Ranch” and “Toomsville.” In both cases, though with quite different degrees of sympathy, the narratives depict a way of life doomed to extinction. 25. The speech might be usefully compared with Presley’s address to the Ranchers ’ League in The Octopus, into which he pours his passion and skill, and out of which he receives thunderous applause, but also a hollow sense of ineffectuality (1016–18). 26. In the course of the novel, “Caroline” Wynn becomes “Carrie”—perhaps an allusion to Dreiser’s heroine and her role in the downfall of Hurstwood. 27. In fact, the most extended use of black dialect in the novel occurs in the 200 / Notes to Pages 150–162 portrayal of the simple-minded and corrupt Preacher Jones, who condemns Zora as “de ebil one” when she enters his church to encourage the community’s economic self-determination (Du Bois, Quest 373). 28. It is worth noting that Du Bois, like Norris, attended Harvard University , the epicenter of American upper-class masculinity. In “Manhood at Harvard: W. E. B. Du Bois,” Kim Townsend explores the in®uence of Harvard on Du Bois’s notion of muscular, virile manhood and its place in the advancement of the black race. 29. And, of the remaining three, only Chesnutt could easily pass for white, as he did on various occasions. Critics of the day, as Joseph McElrath has observed, were obsessed with the degree of “white blood” in black writers, and many early essays on Chesnutt, for instance, “were focusing on Chesnutt primarily for the purpose of gleaning the signi¤cance of his racial makeup rather than measuring the quality of his thought and art” (Introduction 7). 30. One of Du Bois’s primary objections to Jack Johnson as cultural hero, in fact, stemmed from Johnson’s marriages with white women, which Du Bois saw as evidence of racial shame. 31. I am using the American spelling of “Colored,” as it appears in the 1912 edition. The 1927 reprint, which reached a much larger audience, uses the British “Coloured.” 32. Several critics convincingly argue that Johnson’s novel effectively dismantles the essentialized “scienti¤c” assumptions about racial identity and demonstrates the porous nature of the color line. See, for example, Kawash 138–155, Neil Brooks, “On Becoming an Ex-Man” 18...

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