and ARTHURHUFF FAUSET, who was the step-
brother of CRISISeditor JESSIEFAUSETand the editor
of the first issue. The magazine also published works
by MARITABONNER,LANGSTONHUGHES, Jessie
Fauset, and other Renaissance writers.
Bibliography
Johnson, Abby Arthur, and Ronald Maberry Johnson.
Propaganda & Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of
African American Magazines in the Twentieth Cen-
tury.Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1979.
Jubilee, Vincent. Philadelphia’s Afro-American Literary
Circle and the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University Microfilms, 1980.
Black Sadie T. Bowyer Campbell(1928)
A novel by T. BOWYERCAMPBELLabout a woman
known as Black Sadie and her life as a dancer.
Campbell, a missionary, began writing the book
when his ambitious plans for religious outreach
began to fail. Houghton Mifflin accepted the
manuscript for publication on the basis of two
paragraphs.
Bowyer described the novel as “a story of Col-
ored people in three social and economic brackets:
in Virginia some two decades after the emancipa-
tion, in the north as house servants with higher
wages, and lastly entering into professional and
creative work.”
NELLA LARSEN penned a rather frank and
ironic review of the work for OPPORTUNITY.In her
article, Larsen noted that the novel was “an awk-
wardly written and disorderly book,” filled with
“inaccuracies that would therefore make much of
the book very amusing—especially to the Negro
reader.” As scholar Anna Brickhouse notes, Larsen
dismissed Campbell’s work, referring to it impa-
tiently as “twaddle concerning the inherent quali-
ties of the Negro” (Brickhouse, 538).
Bibliography
Brickhouse, Anna. “Nella Larsen and the Intertextual
Geography of Quicksand.” African American Review,
35, no. 4 (winter, 2001): 533–560.
Campbell, T. Boyer. “Thomas Bowyer Campbell.” Catholic
Authors.com. URL: http://www.catholicauthors.com/
campbell.html. Accessed January 2005.
Larsen, Nella. “Black Sadie.” Opportunity (January
1929): 24.
Black ThunderArna Bontemps(1936)
One of the earliest 20th-century novels about an
American slave revolt, Black Thunderrepresented
ARNABONTEMPS’s attempt to revisit the story of
the thwarted 1800 Gabriel Prosser rebellion in Vir-
ginia. He chose to re-create the story of the rebel-
lion after encountering the substantial collection of
slave narratives in the library of FISKUNIVERSITY.
Bontemps’s account revolved around the
characters of Gabriel Prosser, his brothers,
Solomon and Martin, his love interest, Juba, his
ally and a free man, Mingo, his white owner,
Thomas Prosser, and the two slaves who betrayed
him, Ben and Pharaoh. The revolt, which is
thwarted, in part by a storm, is motivated by
Prosser’s desire to avenge the beating death of an
elderly slave man on his plantation. Like Nat
Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave revolt in
Southampton, Virginia, Prosser outlines his ratio-
nale and list of potential victims. He and his sup-
porters agree to spare any whites who are Quakers,
Methodists, or Frenchmen. Ultimately, though,
their plan is not realized. In the chaos that follows,
Gabriel escapes, but he eventually surrenders in
order to save one of his loyal supporters.
The novel is divided into five books, entitled
“Jacobins,” “Hand Me Down My Silver Trumpet,”
“Mad Dogs,” “A Breathing of the Common Wind,”
and “Pale Evening... A Tall Slim Tree.” Bon-
temps used historical documents as he recreated
the life of Prosser and the tumultuous events that
Prosser engineered. Set in Richmond, Virginia, the
novel focuses on Gabriel, a man whom reviewers
have described as “a mischievous slave who is sub-
jected to cruel and excessive punishment” or as a
man with “a thirst for freedom, for himself and his
kind” and “a man of destiny” (Tompkins, BR7).
Bontemps’s character emerges early in the novel as
part of the plantation owned by the white man
Thomas Prosser. Gabriel is “almost a giant for size”
with “features... as straight as a Roman’s, but he
was not a mulatto. He was just under twenty-four
and the expression of hurt pride that he wore was
in keeping with his years and station. He was too
old for joy, as a slave’s life went... too young for
despair as black men despaired in 1800” (16).
Gabriel, who recalls his older brothers’s herculean
efforts to escape, is motivated to organize a revolt
in the wake of a slave owner’s brutal murder of an46 Black Sadie