"To Make up the Hedge and Stand in the Gap": Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder

The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none. Therefore have I poured out mine indignation upon them. . . .¹

As a young minister in my early twenties, I was just glad to be standing in their number, bonding with ministerial mentors, men standing on the front lines of spiritual warfare, or, as the black church memorably refers to it, "standing in the gap": carrying and crying the judgment of the Almighty, opening opportunity for salvation, proclaiming the soul's rescue and the requirements of redemption, and edifying believers with the inscrutable, wholly uncompromising, tell-it-like-it-is, to-be-preached-in-season-and-out-of-season gospel of the living God.²

Early in Arna Bontemps's historical novel of the 1800 Virginia slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser, Gabriel, the slave, is watching the operations of a printing press: "Standing at the window he felt one chill after another run along his spine. He knew that he was delaying longer than he should, but his feet were planted. He was as helpless as a man of wood. He stood facing the funny little typesetter but seeing nothing; he was bewitched. . . . Gabriel reeled a trifle, but his feet were hopelessly fastened."³ Although at first glance whatever might be bewitching about a printing press is not apparent, it is worth noting that the fixation of Gabriel's stance, his position vis-â-vis the press, is underscored here in Bontemps's description. His feet are "planted," "fastened" in the place where he stands, as if the action of the press is itself working to press or interpellate him into his "place." What, or where, might such a place be? Bontemp's novel offers a clue. After hearing this biblical passage from the book of Ezekiel read aloud, Gabriel takes upon himself the duty that attends a certain kind of stance: "'It say so in the book, and it's plain as day,' Gabriel said. 'And, let push come to shove, He going to fight them down like a flog of pant'ers, He is. Y'-all heard what he read. God's aiming to give them in the hands of they enemies and all like of that. He say he just need a man to make up the hedge and stand in the gap. He's going to cut them down his own self. See?'" (47).

Gabriel's exegesis of the passage is remarkable, for what might be read as a threat of divine violence—performed because there was no one to "hedge" the people against God's wrath—is interpreted by Gabriel as a promise of divine vengeance on the condition that there exists someone "to make up the hedge and stand in the gap" that divides God from the land.⁴ That is, Gabriel hears the passage as promising the deliverance of divine justice precisely not because the man in the middle is missing, but by means of one who will be able to stand in the gap. He understands this as signaling his duty to make up the hedge, not in order to shelter the people but to bridge the gap between God and the land, to provide a conduit for divine justice. Could one, then, be justified in reading Gabriel's stance before the printing press as an instantiation of such a bridge? Can Gabriel's fixation here be understood as a type of mediation? In what follows, I will argue that Bontemps's Black Thunder can be read as a narrative that is deeply concerned with the problem of mediation: in this context, a...