in HARLEMwhen she arrived in NEWYORKCITY
in 1925.
Bibliography
Campbell, Josie. Student Companion to Zora Neale
Hurston.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Drums at Dusk Arna Bontemps(1939)
A historical novel and the third work of fiction for
adults by ARNABONTEMPS. The work, which Bon-
temps proposed to complete while a Rosenwald Fel-
low in 1938, continued to explore themes related to
the enslavement of peoples of African descent. Like
BLACKTHUNDER,the novel about Gabriel Prosser
and his foiled slave rebellion of 1800, this book also
focused on a slave revolt and the complicated poli-
tics of black self-emancipation. Bontemps recreated
the stories surrounding the slave revolt that Tous-
saint Louverture led in HAITIand against French
colonial slave owners and military forces.
The publication of Drums at Duskcoincided
with the 150th anniversary of the fall of the
Bastille. Like Black Thunder, Bontemps’s novel
about Gabriel Prosser and his efforts to organize a
slave revolt, Drums at Duskalso made connections
between the French revolution and African-Amer-
ican resistance during the antebellum period.
The novel, criticized for its thinly constructed
plot, revolved around the romance between Ce-
leste Juvet, a young woman of French descent, and
Diron Desautels, an ardent antislavery aristocrat
with ties to Les Amis de Noirs, a French abolition-
ist group dedicated to ameliorating the plight of
the enslaved Africans on the island. Known as an
“exuberant society of violent anti-slavery parti-
sans” (5), the group adhered to the ideal that “All
men are born and continue free and equal as to
their rights” (5). Desautels makes overtures to the
enslaved people when he can, insisting that
“[t]here are thousands in Paris who abhor slavery”
and encouraging them to seek him out if “ever you
blacks feel strong enough to help yourselves” be-
cause they will “have the active sympathy of many
blancs,including myself” (53). Reviewers noted
that the bulk of the novel focused on white char-
acters. By maintaining his focus on the white Euro-
pean slave-owning class, Bontemps relegated Lou-
verture and the larger plans for resistance to the
background. In so doing, Louverture maintains a
mythical presence; when he emerges, he appears as
a highly ordered and rational man. More than mid-
way through the novel, as the revolt rages and
households are thrown into disarray, Louverture, a
coachman, appears. Bontemps describes him as a
man who is “not a great one for the sort of havoc
this night was producing; his mind was offended by
messiness, confusion and turmoil” (150). The hero
of the Haitian Revolution is not a bloodthirsty
general. In the novel, he exists as an almost unwill-
ing hero, one who “hadn’t the power to draw a
brawling sword” but one who is “thrilled by the
prospect” of saving an oppressed people and also
“ready and anxious to meet a military foe if by
doing so he could strike a blow for the freedom of
the blacks” (150). Bontemps provides a most nu-
anced and subtle fictional portrait of Toussaint
Louverture, the impressive and accomplished
leader of the rebellion that culminated in freedom
for the enslaved people of the island.
Bontemps completed Drums at Duskbefore he
traveled to Haiti on a JULIUSROSENWALDFEL-
LOWSHIP. While there, he found it necessary to
make only minor changes to his representations of
the island and its history. Once the book was com-
pleted, Bontemps was involved in an innovative
radio preview of the novel. Bontemps spoke with
Ethel Reid Winser, director of the CHICAGO-based
radio program “Know Your Authors” during an in-
terview that then was aired with additional details
about the book (Jones 94). Critics suggest that the
novel only would have been strengthened had he
in fact allocated substantial time for research in
Haiti and then incorporated more of his observa-
tions of island life and Haitian historical facts into
the work. Yet, as biographer Kirkland Jones notes,
financial constraints did not make it possible for
Bontemps to proceed in this manner. Reviewer
Charles Poore commented on the “moderation”
that he detected in the novel about “a melodra-
matic time” and urged Bontemps to consider writ-
ing a sequel (Poore, 18). Bontemps’s restraint in
the novel was noticeable, prompting another re-
viewer to observe that “[a]s for Toussaint, who is
worth a novel to himself, we take leave of him at
the tantalizing moment when it occurs to him thatDrums at Dusk 123