Bricks without Straw

Bricks without Straw, novel by A.W. Tourgée, published in 1880. Intended to demonstrate the fallacy of freedom for Southern blacks without the “straw” of an adequate social and economic basis for free development, the story is concerned with Reconstruction days on the North Carolina tobacco plantations.

Mollie Ainslie, a Northern schoolteacher, comes to the black community of Red Wing, where the success of her work arouses the fury of the neighboring whites against presumptuous “niggers” and “nigger‐teachers.” While Mollie is absent at the plantation of Hesden Le Moyne, nursing his dying son and incidentally falling in love with Hesden, a band of “Ku Kluckers” falls upon the Red Wing settlement. They burn the schoolhouse and church, nearly kill the crippled preacher Eliab Hill, and drive out the black farmer Nimbus Desmit. Hesden's haughty mother causes a misunderstanding between her son and Mollie, who takes Nimbus's family to the North with her. Later Hesden, who nurses Eliab and helps him to reestablish the Red Wing school, discovers papers which show that Mollie is the rightful heir to his estate. Notified, she declines the inheritance and only visits the plantation at the insistence of Hesden and his repentant dying mother. Reconciled and married, they resume their dangerous work for the betterment of the blacks.