Middle Passage: Charles Johnson (week 2)
Details
Charles Johnson, the first African American to win the National Book Award following Ralph Ellison, is also his self-acknowledged spiritual successor. Citing his debt to Ellison, Johnson describes his storytelling as likewise aspiring to have "all of the bright magic of a fairy tale" while also being rich and not "driven by ideology or agenda."
The protagonist of The Middle Passage (1990) is Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave who stows away aboard the ship "Republic" to evade marriage and his creditors. Falling under the command of the mad Captain Falcon, he meets the cargo: members of the mystical Allmuseri tribe bound for the Middle Passage--the Atlantic slave route used to bring Africans to the Americas.
Between 1500 and 1865, an estimated 12.5 million slaves were transported through the Middle Passage. The captives were packed on ships below deck, secured in chains, and forced to crouch or lie together in cramped, dark, fetid spaces. An estimated 1.8 million never made it, their bodies thrown overboard, victims of disease, starvation, or violence.
Charles Johnson's novel is unconventional historical fiction, however. Infused with anachronism, philosophy, fable, and religion--a mixture of magical realism and harsh reality--it probes the nature of American society and personal identity through a spirit of transformation, interconnectedness, and a Buddhist metaphysics of non-duality.
The New York Times Book Review calls it "a novel in the tradition of Billy Budd and Moby-Dick…heroic in proportion…fiction that hooks the mind." Critic Rachel Palencia characterizes it as a retelling of Melville's "Benito Cereno," sharing not only theme and setting, but also several deliberate character namesakes: Babo, Diamelo, Francesco, Atufal, Ghofan, and Akim.
We will read:
- Week 1: Entry, the first to Entry, the fourth
- Week 2: Entry, the fifth to Entry, the ninth
Middle Passage: ~140pp
Supplemental:
- Demythifying Melville: Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and the Nightmare of Slavery
- Damn the Absolute: interview with Charles Johnson
Extracts:
- "He had served in Portuguese slavers on the coast of Africa; and with a diabolical relish used to tell of the middle-passage, where the slaves were stowed, heel and point, like logs, and the suffocated and dead were unmanacled, and weeded out from the living every morning, before washing down the decks; how he had been in a slaving schooner, which being chased by an English cruiser off Cape Verde, received three shots in her hull, which raked through and through a whole file of slaves, that were chained." (Redburn, 12)
- "’Tis thou who servedst Mammon’s hate / Or greed through forms which holy are— / Black slaver steering by a star, / ’Tis thou—and all like thee in state. / Who knew the world, yet varnished it; / Who traded on the coast of crime / Though landing not; who did outwit / Justice, his brother, and the time— / These, chiefly these, to doom submit. / But who the manifold may tell? / And sins there be inscrutable, / Unutterable." (Clarel, 2.36)
This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters and celebrating Black History Month.