The Novel combined literary realism with some romanticism and political-economic analysis to provide a story of two Black protagonists, a man and a woman, who eventually work together to build an economic community -- a community that provided a way to overcome both the overt and the systemic racism of a fictional post-Reconstruction Alabama town and county. The silver fleece of the title referred to cotton, which was the valuable crop that, as Du Bois suggested in the novel, would help rural African Americans become self-sufficient. He who would tell a tale must look toward three ideals: to tell it well, to tell it beautifully, and to tell the truth.
