Making It New: 1900–1945 487dozen tales of the South, eventually collected in The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy”
and Other Stories of the Thirties (1973); a novel about a black jockey, God Sends
Sunday (1931), that was turned into a successful musical, St. Louis Woman (1946), by
Countee Cullen; poetry that, during the 1920s, was to win him several prizes in
contests with other New Negro poets; and a history of the black race since Egyptian
civilization, The Story of the Negro (1948). His two most distinguished works, however,
express his lifelong commitment to the cause of black freedom through the retelling
of two major slave revolts. One of them, Drums at Dusk (1939), describes the
celebrated eighteenth-century black revolution in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
The other, and his finest work, transforms a slave revolt that took place in Virginia in
1800, led by Gabriel Prosser, into fiction. It is called Black Thunder (1936).
Bontemps began Black Thunder after he had come across a rich and apparently
forgotten collection of narratives by former slaves at Fisk University. Using the few
contemporary resources available to him, he then wrote the novel while living in the
black urban community of Watts. When it was published, it was greeted with acclaim
by a number of radical writers, some of them black like Langston Hughes and
Margaret Walker, and some of them, like Jack Conroy, white. Reading the book now,
it is easy to see why the book touched a nerve and granted Bontemps entry into
radical literary circles. For it fuses historical facts and imaginative changes into a
story of the struggle of liberation that reflected on both the scene of the fiction and
the scene of writing. “The times were hopeful,” a character reflects during the course
of the narrative. The “times” are, of course, those of slave society during the 1800s,
disrupted as they were by the libertarian spirit of the new republic, egalitarian ideas
imported from revolutionary France, and, not least, religious doubts – expressed by
the Quakers and some Methodists, among others – about controlling the destiny,
and the soul, of another man. But they are also those of the 1930s, when many artists
and intellectuals believed in the imminent triumph of radical socialism brought
about by revolution. To that extent, Bontemps was clearly thinking of the
environment he was writing in, as much as the one he was writing about, when
he allowed one character – a white lawyer from Philadelphia – to observe that “the
revolution of the American proletariat would soon be something more than an idle
dream.” “Soon,” he muses, “the poor, the despised of the earth would join hands
around the globe: there would be no more serfs, no more planters, no more classes,
no more dreams, no more slaves, only men.”
At the center of the action is Gabriel Prosser, the instigator of the abortive revolt.
He is described as “a man of destiny”; he is not, however, allowed to dominate. No
single character or voice is. Liberally using interior monologue, Bontemps explores
a variety of consciousnesses, with multiple points of view. There are those, like
Gabriel and a free black called Mingo, who are dedicated to the cause of freedom.
There are other African-American characters, like one called “Old Ben,” who
vacillate, torn between defiance and dejection, the desire for liberty and simple
cowardice or sentimentality. There is also one character, called Pharaoh, based like
so many of the others on an actual historical figure, who betrays the revolt and,
when it is over, testifies against the others. Equally, among the white characters, theGGray_c04.indd 487ray_c 04 .indd 487 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM