Kindred, Black Thunder By Arna Bontemps, And Django

There is a common accepted historical narrative that portrays the antebellum era as one fraught with prominent, white figures who owned slaves who were subservient and complacent. This commonly accepted notion of what slavery was like depicts slaves as individuals who simply accepted their fate and did not opt to exercise any form of agency. This notion that slaves did not try to actively resist the confines of slavery is untrue and is illustrated by the work Kindred by Octavia Butler, Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps, and Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino. These creative works of historical fiction do accurately represent how slaves were treated but also, perhaps more important how slaves resisted such unjust treatment.
The three aforementioned pieces were all created at different period of time. Black Thunder was published …show more content…
One of the more controversial methods they used was violent resistance. Gabriel Prosser in Black Thunder organized an uprising which involved hundreds of slaves and even though his rebellion does not manage to be successful in the end it does show that African American did not simply succumb to their lot as slaves. Even before the planning of his uprising Prosser was exercising agency. The free black man in the story, Mingo would read verses from the Bible to Prosser and some of the other slaves and seeing as it was illegal for slaves to read or write this act in and of itself served as a more passive form of resistance, mental resistance. Mingo would enlighten them with verses that said that "He that stealeth a man and selleth him... shall be surely put to death" (Bontemps, 45). Prosser was already freeing himself from the oppression of slavery both spiritually and mentally by listening to Mingo and used the words he heard from the biblical verses in order to motivate him to organize other slaves into the