enslaved man. His love interest, Juba, is a “tempes-
tuous brown wench” (29) who listens often to
Gabriel’s ruminations about freedom. When he fi-
nally begins to plan, Gabriel’s leadership is marked
by his economy of language and precise instruc-
tions. In meeting with his coconspirators, there are
“[n]o greetings, no useless words passed... No
preliminary words, no Biblical extenuations pre-
ceded the essential plans” (59). Ben, an enslaved
coachman who curries favor with his master and
relishes the status that he achieves once he has re-
vealed what he knows about the planned revolt,
betrays the group. He witnesses the hangings of
the perpetrators but is unable to remain completely
immune from the awful proceedings. “A mournful
dignity bow[s]” his head and “though his shoulders
stood back fairly strong... his lips parted now and
again and his tongue slipped between them, but
they were never moistened. They remained as
white as if they had been painted” (169).
Black Thunderis perhaps the earliest African-
American historical novel to focus on a slave
conspiracy and rebellion. The most notable 19th-
century work about slave rebellions and resistors
that preceded his was Dred, or Tales of the Dismal
Swamp(1856) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Black
Thundercertainly predates The Confessions of Nat
Turner, the controversial 1967 novel by white
writer William Styron that prompted a general
outcry among African Americans for what were
deemed to be unsavory and problematic depic-
tions of Nat Turner. Bontemps’s novel also builds
an important bridge between the 19th-century
slave narratives and memoirs such as Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl(1861) by Harriet Jacobs
that allude to rebellions and African-American
resistance and 20th-century considerations of en-
slavement. Kirkland Jones, Bontemps’s biogra-
pher, reiterates this point, noting that “Bontemps
succeeded in showing, contrary to the propaganda
of many non-black writers of the post-Recon-
struction and pre-Harlem Renaissance periods,
that African Americans as a whole did not accept
injustice lying down” (Jones, 81). Bontemps also
made a deliberate effort to contextualize the
African-American struggle and to relate it quite
specifically to the French Revolution and history
of resistance. The character Monsieur Creuzot,
who owns a print shop in town, provides white
European perspectives on enslavement and the
prevailing American rationalizations of the perni-
cious system. In his conversations, Creuzot con-
templates the inconsistencies of American
ideology and practice, noting that although he
has read works such as Jefferson’s Notes on Vir-
giniaand has kept abreast of arguments advanced
by leading public figures associated with the Col-
lege of William and Mary, “it all seems hopeless in
this country” (21). The novel ends with the scene
in which Gabriel is murdered. That the proceed-
ings are reported through the eyes of the man
who betrayed him underscores the limits of racial
solidarity and suggests that slavery will persist as
an unrelenting reality.
Bontemps wrote the novel while living in
Watts, California, where he and his family had re-
located to live with his parents. He did not have
the luxury of a study in which to write but was de-
termined to proceed with the novel. He had to
write “the book in longhand on the top of a folded-
down sewing machine in the extra bedroom” of his
parents’ home because there was no convenient
place where he might set up his typewriter. These
circumstances, however trying, were much less op-
pressive than the hostile Alabama community in
which Bontemps had been teaching recently.
Knowing that he could not “tell them about
Gabriel’s adventure,” Bontemps made the decision
to leave the white Seventh-Day Adventist school
community that scrutinized his reading materials,
questioned his friendships with writers who visited
or wrote to him, and finally demanded that he
prove his blind patriotism and civic docility by
burning his books publicly. In a 1972 autobio-
graphical essay, Bontemps recalled that during the
year in which he wrote the novel, he was “brood-
ing over a subject matter so depressing that [he]
could find no relief until it resolved itself as Black
Thunder” (Bontemps, 260). Reviewer Lucy Tomp-
kins encouraged readers who might be “looking for
a sort of prose spiritual on the Negroes themselves”
to seek out the novel, which she believed offered a
tribute that “one could not find... more movingly
sung” (Tompkins, BR7). Bontemps created an in-
spiring character, one whose honor, fidelity to his
race, and earnest hope for a viable life as a free
man would inform subsequent accounts of these
tumultuous antebellum times.Black Thunder 47