"Black Thunder's" Call for a Conjure Response to "American Negro Slavery"

Abstract

In American classrooms in first half of twentieth century, students using popular history textbook Growth of American Republic were taught that slaves suffered less than any other class in South from its 'peculiar institution.' ... There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization. The negro learned his master's language, and accepted in some degree his moral and religious standards (Morrison and Commager 415). This idea of slavery stems directly from U. B. Phillips's massive history American Negro Slavery (1918), which dominated historiography of slavery well into 1950s. In Phillips's words, the plantations were best schools yet invented for mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which bulk of American negroes represented, and Phillips emphasizes that process of transition from barbarism to civilization was essentially slow (343). White plantation owners, in this metaphor, instill order and attempt to teach methods of rationality to superstitious and ignorant slaves. It is not surprising then to find that Arna Bontemps, when researching slave narratives before writing his historical novel of slavery, Black Thunder (1936), rejected Nat Turner's rebellion as basis for his novel because he was uneasy about the business of Nat's 'visions' and 'dreams' (Introduction xii). Instead, he chose Gabriel Prosser and his attempt to capture Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, because Prosser had not depended on trance-like mumbo-jumbo, and he emphasizes that Prosser had not been possessed, not even overly optimistic (xiii). Bontemps appears to have valued Prosser's logical planning and organization, his strategy, and his dignity. It would be easy to read this as revealing Bontemps's desire to counter dominant image of slaves as superstitious and ignorant, except for fact that Bontemps depicts in his novel slaves who fear and bad hands, who visit conjurers for protection, and who see ghost of slave Bundy, who was beaten to death by his master. It is true that Gabriel himself dismisses other slaves' superstitions, and this has led Eric Sundquist to note that, although conjure has undeniable power in slave world recreated in Black Thunder, it is set in contrast to decidedly foundation provided for Gabriel's bid to be free (97); Sundquist argues that conjure remains ambivalent in this novel, since it both causes a disabling fear of 'stars,' 'signs,' and 'bad hands' that dooms rebellion, and ultimately becomes a mechanism for power and revenge within community (121-22). While I find Sundquist's insightful and comprehensive in relation to slaves themselves, my own draws on Houston Baker's theory of conjure as narrative and William Covino's theory of magic rhetoric to explore how this conflict between rationality and conjure within novel's plot is mirrored at level of novel's discourse, inviting reader to participate actively in choosing conjure over type of rationality that Phillips's text presents. Many of slaves in Black Thunder are caught in an epistemological dilemma between trusting rational word that comes to them from masters and books, and trusting a conjure epistemology that they themselves often dismiss as superstition. Ben, slave who confesses and thus reveals Gabriel's plot to overthrow Richmond, is haunted by ghost of Bundy, a slave beaten to death by his master, and yet rejects ghost's call for retribution. Gabriel himself, at more than one crucial juncture, faces choice between reading world according to an empiricist mode and reading events in natural world as signs or symbols that would reveal a conjure knowledge based on assumption of an animate and interconnected world. By revealing Ben and Gabriel as tragic misreaders, and by providing reader with opportunities to interpret text through a conjure epistemology, Bontemps argues not only for a revised history of slavery that acknowledges slaves as sources, but also for a way of knowing both past and contemporary reality that does not rely on objectivist discourse. …