A Symbolic Messenger of God in Kenan's "The Foundations of the Earth"

In Kenan’s story, Maggie Williams, an elderly black woman living in a conservative religious community, is distraught over the death of her grandson, Edward, who was killed in an auto accident. Williams is trying to comprehend Edward’s antisocial behavior prior to his sudden death. She is left with more questions than answers, leaving her angry with God because she cannot comprehend his judgments. It turns out that Edward was having a homosexual relationship with a young white man named Gabriel. 

William is surrounded by pretentious hypocrites who are critical of Morton Henry for plowing a field on the Sabbath. As a result, Henry is harshly judged by the community’s most prominent hypocrites, including Reverend Barden and Henrietta Fuchee. The latter is described as the “prim and priggish music teacher and president of the First Baptist Church Auxiliary” (50). The narrator describes Reverend Barden as “round and pompous as ever” (50). Maggie does not understand what all the fuss is about. Henry is simply doing what needs to be done to sustain himself and his family. Would a just God fault him for that?

Sleep and dreams play an important role in the story. We are told that the Williams family has a tradition of taking to their beds in times of crisis. Dreams represent a kind of vision quest in the story, a descent into the depths of the subconscious mind. Sleep and dreams have curative powers, suggesting that the answers to Williams’s questions, or at least clues to them, may already lie within her subconscious mind. “She saw herself looking, if not refreshed, calmed and within her the rage had gone…”(60). Anger and judgment is supplanted by humility and awakening that borders on epiphany.

In my interpretation of the story, Gabriel is a symbolic messenger of God, as in the nativity narrative in Christianity. The narrator hints at this when he relates Gabriel’s relevance to the story: “She wanted to know about her grandboy, and Gabriel was the only one who could tell her what she wanted to know” (54). Later, we are told: “Gabriel had come with the body, like an interpreter for the dead” (56). It is significant that God’s messenger is someone, a white gay man, who is despised and viewed with suspicion by the religious community. Gabriel’s persecution can be associated with the Crucifixion of Christ by the hypocrites of ancient Rome. Thanks to her long sleep, Maggie Williams was not going to be one of them.