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66 4 Slave Rebellion, the Great Depression, and the “Turbulence to Come” for Capitalism Black Thunder The “now” of reading and writing history at once determines the readability of historical images and is determined by them, as they are always already written. The “truth” of such history is neither timeless, nor arbitrarily associated with the temporality of a historical consciousness, but rather is inscribed within the temporality of the rhetorical structure functioning in any given present. —Timothy Bahti, “History as Rhetorical Enactment” When Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder revisited the meaning of subaltern revolt in the form of a historical slave rebellion, the intellectual fine points of racial and class solidarity that baffled Chesnutt’s post-Emancipation milieu were being rendered insignificant by the gritty deprivations and cruelties of the Great Depression era. To individuals who cannot fulfill basic needs, the most pressing social problem was not the harmony of white and black bourgeoisie but figuring a way to overcome the material and spiritual lack threatening to overwhelm the society, particularly the working classes. Nineteenth-century slave rebellions gave Arna Bontemps the historical precedence and intellectual confidence to deliberate on the possible heroic actions oppressed peoples might undertake to free themselves and take a decisive charge of the course of events. Upon its release in 1936, Black Thunder earned the author, in his words, “no more than its advance” (xxix), promptly going out of print and not reissued until 1968, amidst the civil rights maelstrom. On the two occasions it was released, great political and cultural changes trailed the novel. In 1936, the cultural renaissance centered at Harlem had long waned, and many of Adeeko, Slave's Rebelion 5/5/05 3:56 PM Page 66 its leaders, including Bontemps, had moved out of New York. Also, the long legal saga of the Scottsboro Trials that began in 1931 was reaching one of its many contested resolutions. The latter event brought to international attention the Jim Crow cruelties that had been exacerbated by the widespread deprivations brought about by the Great Depression.1 Certainly, similarities between the impatient political mood of 1968 and the general apprehensiveness of the mid-1930s justified the novel’s second release. But that is not the subject of discussion here. This chapter puts forth the view that the novel’s use of a historical slave rebellion to contemplate the ability of slaving workers to strive for their freedom commemorates less the specific heroism of nineteenth-century African Americans and concentrates more on the meaning of the slaves’ rebellion for how to anticipate the range of actions open to working peoples in a depressed capitalist economy. The main significance of the novel, it is suggested, is in its use of a historical slave rebellion to draw attention to the general struggles of the downtrodden in desperate economic circumstances. The fictional recreation of rebelling slaves in 1800 Richmond, Virginia, is an allusion to what workers laboring under the severe economic climate of the Great Depression, but creatively managing their own nationalist (historical) materialism, might be pushed to do.2 There are three parts to the chapter. The first section relates the rebellion theme to the dominant tendencies of early-twentieth-century African American writing and remarks how the theme introduces to black American fiction an early version of what Richard Wright called “radical perspective” in his essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The two other sections analyze Bontemps ’s interpretation of the slaves’ material and expressive cultures as structures of working-class transcendence. Presenting the slaves’ “folk” culture as a discourse of transcendence, it would be suggested, constitutes the very means the novelist uses to denote the relevance of the historical slave rebellion to the novel’s contemporary society. slave rebellion and the blueprint for black writing Bontemps remarks in the retrospective preface to the 1968 edition of his novel that the revolutionary heroism exhibited by nineteenth-century slave rebels captures for him the essence of the response which the repressive atmosphere of the 1930s will eventually provoke among the oppressed. The “self-emancipation” efforts of nineteenth-century rebellions, Bontemps writes, are “a possible metaphor of turbulence to come.” The writer discovers after moving out of Harlem that chattel slaves who had next to little chance of success once rose against their owners, and that fact encouraged him to believe that the drudgery of scrounging for an existence does not exslave rebellion and the “turbulence to come” 67 Adeeko, Slave's...

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