Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing The American Palimpsest

Literary Criticism • African American Byrd “Byrd writes so well and so masterfully about these novels that someone wh...

Author: Rudolph P. Byrd

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Literary Criticism

•

African American

Byrd “Byrd writes so well and so masterfully about these novels that someone who has never read Johnson’s work may be compelled to do so.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

His ﬁction bears the imprint of his formal training as a philosopher and his work as journalist and cartoonist, with a well-honed interest in political satire. Johnson is preoccupied with questions of morality, which are informed by his knowledge of Continental and Asian philosophical traditions. In this book, Rudolph P. Byrd examines Johnson’s four novels—Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, the award-winning Middle Passage, and Dreamer—under the rubric of philosophical black ﬁction, as art that interrogates experience. Johnson’s principal themes are identity and liberation. His ﬁction aims at “whole sight,” encompassing a plurality of meanings across a symbolic geography of forms, texts, and traditions from within the matrix of African American life and culture. And like a palimpsest, Johnson’s texts contain multiple layers of meaning imprinted over time of disparate origins with varying degrees of visibility and signiﬁcance. Charles Johnson’s Novels is an indispensable guide to this brilliant contemporary American writer. RUDOLPH P. BYRD is Associate Professor in The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. Byrd has also published Traps and I Call Myself an Artist with Indiana University Press.

Charles Johnson’s Novels

Acclaimed African American writer and National Book Award winner Charles Johnson came of age during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Charles Johnson’s Novels Writing the American Palimpsest

Rudolph P. Byrd

http://iupress.indiana.edu 1-800-842-6796

Indiana Cover photo by Elisheba Johnson

“This is truly a major contribution to African American literary criticism, and it promises to elevate Johnson to the place in the literary ﬁrmament he so richly deserves.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS

Charles Johnson’s Novels

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS

Writing the American Palimpsest

Rudolph P. Byrd

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minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Byrd, Rudolph P. Charles Johnson’s novels : writing the American palimpsest / Rudolph P. Byrd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34564-2 (alk. paper)— ISBN 0-253-21791-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Johnson, Charles Richard, 1948—Criticism and interpretation. 2. African Americans in literature. 3. Slavery in literature. 4. Liberty in literature. I. Title. PS3560.O3735Z59 2005 813’.54—dc22 2004025492 1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06 05

To Henry A. Leonard Our life is the creation of our mind. The Dhammapada

The Self, this perceiving Subject who puffs on and on, is, for all purposes, a palimpsest, interwoven with everything—literally everything—that can be thought or felt. —Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale

Contents •

Acknowledgments

Prologue

•

xi

1

1. Faith and the Good Thing: What Is the Nature of the Good? • 11 2. Oxherding Tale: Slavery and the Wheel of Desire

•

61

3. Middle Passage: What Is the Nature of Freedom?

•

102

4. Dreamer: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?” • 144 Epilogue

•

193

Notes

•

199

Index

•

213

ix

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the following friends and colleagues for their encouragement, and support in the writing of this book: Maximilian Aue, Richard A. Benson, Kimberly Benston, Valerie A. Boyd, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Randall Burkett, John F. Callahan, Clayborne Carson, Ayoka Chinzera, Johnnetta B. Cole, Lydia English, the late John Y. Fenton, Walter L. Fluker, Thomas Flynn, Craig Fort, Frances Smith Foster, John Gallman, Earl Gordon, Cecelia Corbin Hunter, Charles Johnson, Ingrid Saunders Jones, Jeffrey B. Leak, Glenn Lowrey, James D. Manning, Linda Matthews, Walter L. Miller, Barry Nelson, Robert Paul, Arnold Rampersad, Mark A. Sanders, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Wole Soyinka, Cynthia Neal Spence, Alice Walker, and Dewitt Webster.

xi

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS

PROLOGUE

Our experiences thus have lateral relationships of truth: all together, each possessing clearly what is secret to the other, in our combined functionings we form a totality which moves toward enlightenment and completion. . . . We are never locked in ourselves. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic Our faith in ﬁction comes from an ancient belief that language and literary art—all speaking and showing—clarify our experience. —Charles Johnson, Being and Race

I wish to begin this examination of the art and imagination of Charles Johnson with an observation by Stuart Hall concerning the intellectual labor that certain types of metaphors are able to perform by virtue of their rather distinctive qualities. In a memorial lecture delivered at the University of Sussex in 1993, Hall writes of what he terms “metaphors of transformation,” which he maintains must perform at least two functions.1 The ﬁrst function is that they “allow us to imagine what it would be like when prevailing cultural values are challenged and transformed, the old social hierarchies are overthrown, old standards and norms disappear or are consumed in the ‘festival of revolution,’ and new meanings and values, social and cultural conﬁgurations, begin to appear.”2 Along with providing us a means and framework for contemplating cultural change, Hall argues that the second strong function “metaphors of transformation” must possess is “analytic value.” By this, he means that “metaphors of transformation” must “somehow provide ways of thinking about the relation between the social and symbolic domains in this process of transformation.”3 In other words, they pose the challenge of “how to ‘think,’ in a non-reductionist way, the relations between ‘the social’ 1

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS [imagine here the map of the social world in all of its temporal complexity] and ‘the symbolic’ [imagine here the various expressive arts and the traditions in philosophy and science that inform their production].”4 This vital matter of “how to ‘think’ ” is for Hall the “paradigm question in cultural theory.”5 Hall’s formulation of “metaphors of transformation” constitutes a very suggestive point of departure for this consideration of the ﬁction of Charles Johnson. As a writer, Johnson has produced several “metaphors of transformation,” all of which evoke the processes of change and transformation, all of which challenge us to think expansively beyond the boundaries of what is known about the relations between the social and the symbolic, and all of which might be captured in what I would term the master metaphor of palimpsest. Palimpsest is a term that functions metonymically in relation to Hall’s resonant phrase “metaphors of transformation,” and which captures, I wish to suggest here, many of the distinctive features of the art and imagination of Johnson. Palimpsest is also a term and master metaphor that functions as an ordering and stabilizing linguistic presence in a ﬁctional universe of enormous complexity. By analogy, palimpsest functions in Johnson’s ever expanding oeuvre in the same manner that W. E. B. Du Bois’s master metaphor of the veil, his rich, poetic evocation of the color line, functions to unify the various parts of The Souls of Black Folk. And in what ways do we witness the operations of the master metaphor of palimpsest in Johnson’s ﬁction? For example, in Oxherding Tale, Johnson makes the following assertion about the complexity of human subjectivity: “The Self, this perceiving Subject who puffs on and on, is, for all purposes, a palimpsest, interwoven with everything—literally everything—that can be thought or felt.”6 And in Middle Passage, Johnson’s description of the slave ship the Republic—a ship that was “physically unstable, perpetually ﬂying apart and reforming,” a ship that was “from to stem to stern, a process”—depicts a ship that evokes one of the important properties of palimpsest, that is, the processes of change and transformation, though albeit at a greatly accelerated rate. Also, in Dreamer, Johnson writes that Makanda’s Bethel A. M. E. Church was “like a palimpsest, reaching back to the end of the Civil War. . . . The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/ or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit.”7 In his description of the self, a slave clipper, and Bethel A. M. E. Church, Johnson conveys several of the meanings associated with palimpsest, for whether manifested 2

Prologue as a human being, a ship, or an example of architecture, it is a text that contains multiple layers of meaning imprinted over time of disparate origins with varying degrees of visibility and signiﬁcance. In other words, a palimpsest is a text that is always in process in the sense, as I will explain later, theorized by the philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead in his marvelous theory of organism. Above all, as a master metaphor, palimpsest yields in its various operations and conﬁgurations a particular order, unity, and harmony that possesses aspects of the sublime, the transcendent. The master metaphor of palimpsest applies not only to objects in ﬁction, but also to characters in ﬁction. We might recall that Johnson describes Rutherford Calhoun in palimpsestic terms, that is, as a “sort of tissue of world experience.”8 Plainly, this is a description that we could legitimately apply to all of Johnson’s questing protagonists—Faith Cross, Andrew Hawkins, Rutherford Calhoun, and Chaym Smith—for all of them body forth a vision of the beauty, jeopardy, and complexity of human experience; all of them are in process; they are verbs rather than nouns; all of them are, in one sense, an argument against notions of purity, essentialism, authenticity; and ﬁxed meanings. To summon the language and perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they are, ultimately, “never locked” in themselves.9 Without question, Johnson’s complex characters embody his belief “that we are a tissue of cultures. We are a tissue of races,” and, of course, race as a biological concept is a notion that Johnson believes is false, especially in the face of so much evidence in so many quarters of what he terms mongrelization.10 As I will argue in the pages to come, Johnson’s protagonists constitute a point of entry into a discourse on race as a social construction that begins with W. E. B. Du Bois and includes such ﬁgures as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Patricia Williams. The master metaphor of palimpsest is one with applicability not only to creations in ﬁction, as I have mentioned, but also to Johnson’s vision of culture everywhere in evidence in his ﬁction. Reﬂecting upon the particular formations in African American culture, Johnson asserts that it is “not all of a piece but instead a tissue of history interwoven with all the diverse, global contributions that make the Republic a web of European, African, Eastern, and classical inﬂuences.”11 This hybrid, syncretic, and dynamic conception of culture recalls the theory of African American culture advanced by Richard Price and Sidney Mintz in The Birth of African American Culture. Johnson’s vision of culture is one that functions as a counter-narrative to the vision of culture embodied in the metaphor of the “melting pot” set forth in Israel Zangwill’s four-act drama by the same title, a vision of culture and identity 3

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS that gathers its force from a particular valuation of the European immigrant as archetype of the new American, and the devaluation and exclusion of Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans from this conﬁguration of American identity, culture, and citizenship.12 Moreover, Johnson’s complex view of culture also functions as a counter-narrative to the narrow, ideologically based vision of culture central to black cultural nationalism, Addison Gayle’s theory of the black aesthetic, and its current iteration Afrocentrism as set forth in such texts as Moleﬁ Asante’s Afrocentrism. By contrast, Johnson’s palimpsestic vision of culture derives its power, in part, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a work that celebrates and advances an argument about the nature of American culture based upon the national motto of e pluribus unum. These sentiments are expressed everywhere in Ellison’s masterpiece, but in the epilogue his questing narrator strongly articulates the values of cultural pluralism so central to Johnson’s artistic and intellectual project: “Whence all this passion for conformity anyway?—diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description.”13 The master metaphor of palimpsest conveys the high value Johnson places upon a vision of cultural pluralism celebrated by Ellison, a vision of cultural pluralism grounded in the particulars of place and in the processes of history that are global in scope. The master metaphor of palimpsest also speaks to the various forms of ﬁction and their literary antecedents that serve as the site for Johnson’s interrogations and explorations. As an artist, Johnson is most drawn to the endless possibilities and wide discursive space of narrative, that is, the short story and the novel. Of crucial importance here is Johnson’s belief that meaning “accumulates in the form, infuses these ﬁctions with dignity, afﬁrmation, and a timeless sense of value.”14 Johnson places great importance upon form or genre, for he maintains that every artist moves from one universe of forms to another, often combining, in palimpsestic fashion, “elements of several artists who may contradict each other, though each is admired for a unique contribution, until they have achieved mastery of the forms that precede their lives, their times; and into this tradition of literature, this ongoing groping for sense, they project a new vision and invent the ﬁctional vehicles to embody it.”15 Of course, for the purposes of this study, these “ﬁctional vehicles” are Johnson’s four novels—Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage, and Dreamer—which contain the imprint of such literary forms as the fairy tale, the parable, the conversion narrative, the slave narrative, the picaresque, the narratives of the sea, and the bildungsroman. 4

Prologue The master metaphor of palimpsest captures the processes of selection, integration, experimentation, and layering that is a feature of Johnson’s creation and production of literary texts. It also evokes the richness and complexity of the particular literary tradition upon which he has established both a national and international reputation as a writer, or as he prefers, an artist. The four novels that constitute the focus of this study are part of a literary tradition that Johnson terms philosophical black ﬁction. Johnson has taken great pains to carefully deﬁne this important literary tradition, a tradition part of both African American and American literature. He provides a deﬁnition as well as identiﬁes the major ﬁgures in philosophical black ﬁction, in such foundational essays as “Philosophy and Black Fiction” (1980), “Whole Sight: Notes on the New Black Fiction” (1984), “Where Fiction and Philosophy Meet” (1988), and Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970, his phenomenological reading of contemporary African American ﬁction produced since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and the 1970s. In these texts, Johnson deﬁnes philosophical black ﬁction as art that “interrogates experience” and, as a consequence, deepens our perceptual experiences.16 And to what is philosophical black ﬁction a counter-narrative, a counterargument? As an artist, Johnson is responding to the formulaic, ideologically driven representations of the black world that achieved its most concentrated form in the literature of the Black Arts Movement. As a result of the reach and inﬂuence of the Black Arts Movement, Johnson maintains that we have “so stylized our sense of the Black world that gifted white writers can conjure the work and speech of Black maids, athletes, and revolutionaries with apparent ﬁdelity: Black life, in ﬁne, has become a frozen gesture, a onedimensional style of being.”17 The antidote to the proliferation of the “frozen gesture” in African American literature is, Johnson believes, the practice and production of philosophical black ﬁction, an art, in ﬁne, which “interrogates experience” and leads to the liberation of perception and consciousness. And what is a philosophical writer? How might such an artist be described? According to Johnson, the “philosophical writer is simply the man or woman who, all concerns for proﬁt aside, wishes only to be open to the world of culture and consciousness in all the fascinating, constantly changing forms it takes. They leave us gifts of beauty that enrich the world for those who follow. And this, for the philosopher, has always been reward enough.”18 And who are the writers who occupy this literary tradition that Johnson has named and deﬁned? Who are the major ﬁgures in what Johnson refers to as this “small but signiﬁcant metaphysical wing” of African American 5

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS literature?19 For Johnson, the founding ﬁgure in this literary tradition is Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923), a genre-defying work of ﬁction, verse, and drama, signaled the emergence of the New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance. In Cane, the philosopher-poet’s exploration of spiritual values within the context of modernity is informed by his reading and application of Eastern philosophy, most speciﬁcally Buddhism, to the lives of such characters as Karma in the story by the same name. Along with Cane, the other important works by Toomer that Johnson cites as examples of the fusion of philosophy and literature are Essentials (1931), which is a collection of aphorisms, and the Whitmanesque poem “The Blue Meridian,” which evokes, as Johnson argues, “the image of Krishna in Hindu pictorial art, in which that deity’s skin is as blue and borderless as the sky itself thereby suggesting the inﬁnity and non-duality of being.”20 Johnson enjoys a special kinship with Toomer, who would later become a disciple of the Russian mystic Georges I. Gurdjieff,21 for Johnson describes the Washington-born writer as a “spiritual brother; a fellow traveler; a co-member of the Buddhist community or Sanga. A seeker who heroically cleared a path on which I was blessed to ﬁnd such works as Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage, and Dreamer.”22 After Toomer, the second ﬁgure in this literary tradition called philosophical black ﬁction is Richard Wright. Though Johnson is a great admirer of Native Son (Wright’s ﬁnest work of proletarian protest ﬁction), as a writer of philosophical ﬁction Johnson is most drawn to the Mississippi writer’s later works. In the novella The Man Who Lived Underground and in the novel The Outsider, Wright’s exploration of questions related to race and being are informed by his study of French existentialism. Johnson believes that Wright’s experiments with existentialism are “compatible with the most interesting ideas in continental philosophy during the thirties and forties.”23 Perhaps the most important and inﬂuential ﬁgure for Johnson in his efforts to write philosophical black ﬁction is Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man is, as Johnson writes, “a highly symbolic, Freudian tale that declares itself to be, at bottom, about the ambiguities of perception and interpretation in the racial world.”24 “By any measure,” Johnson asserts, “Invisible Man is the most complex, multilayered, and challenging novel about race and being and the preservation of democratic ideals in American literature.”25 Although Toomer, Wright, and Ellison constitute for Johnson the founding ﬁgures in an emerging literary tradition he has both named and deﬁned, I would add to this trinity such authors and texts as Cyrus Colter’s Hippodrome (1973); James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The 6

Prologue Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), and Flight to Canada (1976); Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe´ (1992); and Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man (1995). In these novels we observe the manner in which an exploration and application of such philosophical traditions as existentialism, Christianity, psychoanalytic theory, Egyptian and vodoun mythology, and Continental philosophy are combined with a commitment to produce new treatments and interpretations of being and race. While Johnson regards Toomer, Wright, and Ellison as his literary ancestors in this “metaphysical wing” of African American literature, there are other ﬁgures outside of this tradition whose efforts to forge an artful and meaningful fusion between the sister disciplines of philosophy and literature have been extremely inﬂuential in Johnson’s development as a writer. Johnson was inspired by the example of fellow philosophers many of whom, like Johnson, were formally trained in philosophy and also wrote ﬁction. These early models are George Santayana, Miquel de Unamuno, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Gass, all of whom, as Johnson writes, “worked on ﬁction one day; then wrestled with an essay on epistemology the next.”26 Another important model is Hermann Hesse, whose novels Siddhartha and Demian would serve, respectively, as important examples in Johnson’s efforts to “thematize Eastern thought vis a` vis the black experience.”27 Perhaps the writer who has had the most profound inﬂuence upon Johnson is John Gardner. In Johnson’s “Journal Entries on the Death of John Gardner,” his introduction to Gardner’s On Writers and Writing, and the essay “A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction,” Johnson pays tribute to a teacher, mentor, and artist who provided him “with brilliant literary guidance and friendship.”28 Gardner initiated a young Johnson, then an undergraduate at Illinois State University, into what Ellison terms “the stern discipline of ﬁction,” that is, to the processes of reading, research, and revision, as well as to a sense of devotion to the art of ﬁction and to the “concept of moral ﬁction.” Emerging from Gardner’s meditation on writing entitled On Moral Fiction, Johnson explains that moral ﬁction is “not moral in the sense that there are ideas or precepts that you preach at people; that is the opposite of moral ﬁction. Moral is the process of the work itself, the creative process. . . . I mean that a work of art is moral when you give integrity to all of the principal characters.”29 According to Johnson, moral ﬁction is ultimately a “work of exploration, an intellectual adventure, and adventure of the spirit.”30 In palimpsestic fashion, Johnson has absorbed the language, symbols, and examples of these and other writers to create what he describes as “a genuinely philosophical black American ﬁction.”31 Utilizing M. M. Bakhtin’s 7

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS theory of “heteroglossia” or “double-voiced discourse,”32 I argue in the pages to follow that as an artist Johnson explores a range of moral, ontological, and epistemological questions that have positioned him to be in dialogue with a corresponding range of ﬁgures, forms, and texts. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia is particularly revealing of the manner in which Johnson is, as an artist, engaged in a continuous dialogue with himself, with the discourses that emerge from the literary productions of other writers, with the discourses that emerge from the genres that inform his own literary productions, and with the discourses that emerge from the philosophical traditions that give weight and heft to his literary productions. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia also provides us with a means of describing and characterizing not only Johnson’s art, but also his imagination. It is one of my claims that Johnson possesses what Bakhtin terms a dialogic imagination. In stressing the “intentional dimension of stratiﬁcation in literary language,” that is, the diversity of discourses, styles, perspectives, genres, and traditions that inform literary traditions, Bakhtin tells us that the “whole matter consists in the fact that there may be, between ‘languages’ [the term language in this instance is a metonym for, among many things, literary texts or what Bakhtin terms “individual artistic works”] highly speciﬁc dialogic relations; no matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken as particular points of view on the world.”33 In Johnson’s ﬁction, we ﬁnd many “highly speciﬁc dialogic relations.” As an artist, Johnson summons vast territories of knowledge in order to explore the moral, ontological, and epistemological questions that deﬁne each of his four novels, and the fact that he does so with such control, integrity, and grace is proof of his possessing what I am calling a dialogic imagination. The creation of what Johnson terms a “genuinely philosophical Black American ﬁction” depends upon the existence of such an imagination, and it depends upon such an expansive and integrative approach to the creation of art. The various types of questions that interest Johnson are always grounded in and emerge from his study and application of particular philosophical traditions that serve as the expanding ﬂoor for his creation of black worlds in ﬁction. In chapter 1, “Faith and the Good Thing: What Is the Nature of the Good?” I argue that the central question in Johnson’s debut novel is what is the “Good Thing”? This is a question, I maintain, that takes its life and force from Johnson’s application of Plato’s “idea of the good” in The Republic, the text that Johnson mines for symbols, arguments, and themes to construct his ﬁrst philosophical novel. While Johnson dates the beginning of his proj-

8

Prologue ect called philosophical black ﬁction with the writing of Oxherding Tale, I argue that his efforts to expand the “metaphysical wing” of African American literature begins with Faith and the Good Thing. In chapter 2, “Oxherding Tale: Slavery and the Wheel of Desire,” I argue that the central question of Johnson’s “platform novel” and his ﬁrst work of historical ﬁction is as follows: Beyond the fact of physical bondage, what are the other species of bondage by which we are enslaved? In taking up this and other questions, I reveal the manner in which Johnson masterfully integrates philosophical concepts from a range of texts in Eastern philosophy, but most importantly from The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classic text in Zen Buddhism. In chapter 3, “Middle Passage: What Is the Nature of Freedom?” I argue that the central question in this second work of historical ﬁction concerns the nature of freedom for a newly emancipated slave. In this chapter, I reveal the manner in which Johnson searches for an answer to this question within the framework of works in Continental philosophy, in particular George Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” in The Phenomenology of Mind, as well as in texts in both Hinduism and Taoism. In the fourth and ﬁnal chapter, entitled “Dreamer: ‘If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?’ ” I argue that the central question of the novel is how can we end evil without engendering error or evil? In my analysis of Dreamer, I posit that Johnson draws upon the tradition of the doppelganger, Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of organism in Process and Reality, and the biblical parable of Cain and Abel in order to give shape and heft to his koan or meditation on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These are the claims I make in this examination of the novels of Johnson. Through close readings of the novels, I demonstrate the manner in which Johnson, as both artist and philosopher, constructs ﬁctions of the black world by drawing upon the world’s philosophical systems. In this study, I am concerned only with Johnson’s novels, as I have examined his uses of philosophy in his ﬁrst collection of short stories elsewhere;34 thus, to avoid repetition and for the sake of a certain symmetry, my focus here is exclusively upon the ways in which Johnson experiments with the genre of the novel. In each novel, I argue, Johnson advances and enlarges the ambitious artistic project he terms philosophical black ﬁction, and thereby extends and complicates the wider tradition of the American novel. Through his questing protagonists who embody his cherished theme of identity, liberty, and enlightenment, he also creates “metaphors of transformation” or palimpsests, that is to say, complex and richly drawn characters who embody the human potential and process of change and transformation, and who challenge us

9

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS to think critically and expansively about our relation to both the symbolic and the social. In each novel, Johnson projects a new vision of human experience that afﬁrms our “faith in ﬁction” and our belief that “language and literary art—all speaking and knowing—clarify our experience.”35

10

FAITH AND THE GOOD THING: WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE GOOD?

1 See human beings as though they were in an underground cavelike dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are ﬁxed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a ﬁre burning far above and behind them. —Plato, The Republic It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression. —Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing” The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it, the word is shaped in a dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way. —M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Faith tuned Barrett out, studying him from the great distance of objectivity, the way one reads a novel about philosophical ideas, with haste and indifference. —Charles Johnson, Faith and the Good Thing

In one sense, a writer’s ﬁrst novel is a dialogue in which he or she tests and explores many of the themes and questions that will be revisited in subsequent novels. Often the writer will return to these deﬁning preoccupations because he or she may feel that these aspects were not endowed with the depth and beauty they deserved in the debut novel, or it may be that he or she has discovered in these preoccupations the passions that are the foundations for the art. If the novelist is fortunate, these passions may, in his or 11

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS her brave embrace of them, infuse the writer’s life with an unexpected but always much-sought-after harmony. At the very least, in the inaugural work, we discover a perspective, informed by both experience and art, that infuses each subsequent labor and each subsequent dialogue. In Cane (1923), Jean Toomer inaugurates his investigation of spirituality and the search for wholeness under the increasing pressures of modernity. Native Son (1940) announces Richard Wright’s determination to force the white world to face the realities of the black world it may continue to look away from at its peril. In Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison creates the metaphors and terms that reveal the complexities of identity, race, and culture in this democratic republic; he also charts his enduring faith in the possibilities of American democratic politics. As models and literary ancestors, Toomer, Wright, and Ellison establish a standard in their commitment to the craft and art of ﬁction that Johnson would endeavor to meet not only in his ﬁrst novel, but also in the several others that would follow, in an organic and intentional fashion, from his ﬁrst great labor. In his debut novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974), a very ambitious Johnson sets out, at the improbable age of twenty-six, to begin an artistic and intellectual project that would later link Faith and the Good Thing to Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage (1990), and Dreamer (1998). While Johnson would not articulate the arc and span of this project until after the completion of his second novel, the desire, the intention, and the pattern are nevertheless fully present in the necessary exertions and accomplishment of the ﬁrst novel. I refer, of course, to Johnson’s desire to create new worlds in ﬁction grounded in philosophy. In each of his novels, Johnson sets for himself the challenging task of creating a ﬁctional universe that is simultaneously infused with African American culture and history, as well as a staggering array of philosophical traditions. As an artist, Johnson brings to the craft and art of ﬁction the perspectives of a classically trained philosopher. These perspectives acquire their force and particularity from the beauty, jeopardy, and sense of possibility that is everywhere in evidence in the black world. Johnson ﬁrst articulated the objectives and scope of the artistic and intellectual project he terms philosophical black ﬁction in an early essay entitled “Philosophy and Black Fiction” (1980), and subsequently in such foundational essays as “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction” (1984), “Where Fiction and Philosophy Meet” (1988),1 and Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988). In these texts, Johnson provides us with a deﬁnition of philosophical black ﬁction that, over time, increases in both scope and complexity. He 12

Faith and the Good Thing deﬁnes philosophical black ﬁction as art that interrogates experience and that also deepens our perceptual experience.2 More speciﬁcally, philosophical black ﬁction is a ﬁction that is ﬁrst and foremost a mode of thought and a process of hermeneutics. It is a ﬁction that works to suspend, shelve, and bracket all presuppositions regarding African American life. As Johnson writes, “we might call this retraining of the eye of the artist’s equivalent to the phenomenological epoche, or ‘bracketing’ of all presuppositions in order to seize a fresh, original vision.”3 With this bracketing accomplished, African American experience becomes, Johnson theorizes, a pure ﬁeld of appearances within two poles: consciousness, and the persons and phenomena to which they are related intentionally.4 Drawing upon a diverse range of philosophical systems and traditions, the writer of philosophical black ﬁction describes how these phenomena appear and observes that black subjectivity stains them with a particular sense.5 The principal themes of this ﬁction are, among many, identity, liberation, and enlightenment. Intent upon the liberation of perception, for both the reader and the writer, philosophical black ﬁction produces what Johnson terms “whole sight,” that is, the apprehension of an order in a plurality of meanings across a shifting and expansive symbolic geography of forms, texts, and traditions.6 For Johnson, the new tradition he terms philosophical black ﬁction begins with Toomer’s Cane and includes Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground and The Outsider, and Ellison’s Invisible Man. To this list, I would add several more writers and texts including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe´, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Cyrus Colter’s Hippodrome, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man, and such novels by Ishmael Reed as Mumbo Jumbo.7 Of the many writers in this dynamic tradition in which philosophical systems—Greek philosophy, Asian philosophy, Continental philosophy, parables from the Judeo-Christian tradition, American transcendentalism, existentialism, Egyptian and vodoun mythology, and psychoanalytic theory— are artfully combined with ﬁction to construct a compelling and coherent ﬁctional universe, Johnson is the only writer trained in philosophy. Moreover, he is the most self-conscious in terms of his stated goal of employing diverse philosophical systems to examine questions related to ontology, epistemology, and morality, questions that endow his meditations upon African American life with originality and force. The conceptualization of this well-deﬁned and emerging tradition reﬂects Johnson’s commitment to combine his artistic goals with his catholic intellectual interests while contributing to the shape and direction of the American novel, thus endowing it with greater depth 13

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS and expansiveness. Johnson has placed great emphasis upon the importance of Oxherding Tale in his own growing corpus; indeed, he has called it his “platform novel,” that is to say, the novel that inaugurates his artistic project called philosophical black ﬁction. I would like to suggest here that this vital project is inaugurated in Faith and the Good Thing, for in this philosophical novel Johnson begins his exploration of questions related to epistemology and ontology within the framework of a particular philosophical tradition. Faith and the Good Thing does, as I will demonstrate, mark the Illinois-born writer’s entrance into this twentieth-century literary tradition he has named, enlarged, and transformed.8 Johnson’s debut novel, in actuality his sixth novel but the ﬁrst one to be published, has inspired a range of strong, suggestive, and illuminating readings. Robert Butler has argued that Faith and the Good Thing is an exploration of the urban landscape as a place of possibility, a landscape possessing properties often associated with the frontier.9 Jonathan Little maintains that Faith Cross “accomplishes her aesthetic and spiritual liberation through a gradual conversion from victimized naturalist and realist character to empowered conjurer and trickster ﬁgure.”10 And William Nash argues that Faith and the Good Thing bears the imprint of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. He also argues that Johnson creates a ﬁctional universe informed by his reading of “Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ which explores the conﬂict between an individual’s need for something to believe in and the value of resisting ﬁxed, limiting deﬁnitions of identity.”11 In this chapter, I will advance a different reading of Johnson’s ﬁrst philosophical novel. In Faith and the Good Thing, what drives the novel’s elaborate machinery is the question, What is the “Good Thing”? Or, put in a way that reveals the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, the question might be rephrased as, and here I recall the language of Socrates in his dialectic with Glaucon, What is “the idea of the good”? I would like to suggest that the central question of Faith and the Good Thing has its origins in Plato’s Republic. In his meditation on what constitutes a meaningful and honorable life under a regime most conducive to this desirable end, Plato, through the ironic, probing intelligence of Socrates, offers several commentaries upon the good in The Republic. This powerful concept is given its fullest treatment in Books VI and VII of The Republic, the latter, most crucially for Faith and Good Thing, is the book in which Socrates, in his dialectic with Glaucon, introduces his famous allegory of the cave. And in like manner, Johnson, in his inventive use of allegory, seeks to construct in 14

Faith and the Good Thing the form of the novel “an image of our nature,” as Socrates relates to Glaucon, “in its education and want of education.”12 In other words, Johnson chronicles the journey of Faith Cross from ignorance to “whole sight” or an expansion of consciousness, and her liberation from the various forms of bondage that for periods shackle, in one sense, both her body and imagination. It is Faith Cross’s challenge to understand through lived experience the meaning of the “Good Thing” and its signiﬁcance for the meaning of her own life. This is the artistic and intellectual challenge Johnson has set for himself in his debut novel, one that inaugurates, through his calculated use of the imagery and intellectual concerns of Plato’s The Republic, his ambitious artistic project that he terms philosophical black ﬁction. Johnson’s debut novel opens in the ﬁctional community of Hatten County, Georgia. While he travels back as far as the 1940s, the time period for the novel is the 1970s. The nature of movement in the novel is from Hatten County, Georgia, to Chicago, and back to Georgia: that is, south, north, and south. The nature of movement in the novel is circular, recalling the movement and design of Toomer’s Cane. And like Toomer, Johnson makes the artistic decision to cast the lives and experiences of black women as the point of departure and central focus of his novel. Published in the ﬁrst years of the renaissance in writing by contemporary black women writers that includes such ﬁgures as Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison, as a male writer Johnson takes the bold step of constructing a novel whose protagonist is a black woman who is plagued by many of the challenges and obstacles that shape the lives of the female protagonists in the ﬁction of black women writers of this period. Interestingly, in this debut novel, Johnson dares to imagine a world through the eyes of a woman, a feature that serves to establish a certain kinship between his ﬁrst novel and those by some black women writers of the 1970s. While sharing the commitment of these writers to explore the lives of African American women with greater depth through, among many things, the creative use of African American folklore in the construction of a black world in ﬁction, the vital difference between Johnson and such writers as Walker, Bambara, and other women writers of this period is that he is equally committed to extending, enlarging, and complicating a literary tradition inaugurated by Toomer’s Cane, a literary tradition that he terms philosophical black ﬁction. Faith Cross ﬁrst hears of the good, or rather, the “Good Thing,” from a most improbable source, and under the most stressful and sad circumstances. The source is her mother, the much embittered Lavidia Cross, and 15

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS the circumstances are her dramatic death as told in the novel’s opening chapter. At the time of her mother’s death, Faith is eighteen, “a beauty, a brownsugared soul sister seeking the Good Thing in the dark days when the Good Thing was lost or, if the bog-dwelling Swamp Woman did not lie, was hidden by the gods to torment mankind for sins long forgotten.”13 Twelve years earlier, Faith’s father, Todd Cross, the dreamer and fabulist, was lynched by whites who falsely accused him of the ancient lie, that is, the rape of a white woman. According to Eula May Jenkins, Lavidia’s neighbor, “Death sneezed Todd Cross stiff as a board” (7). Without siblings, Faith is thus both orphaned and alone at the time of Lavidia’s passing. The deathbed scene is one of darkness and mounting terror for a very frightened Faith. Johnson constructs a scene of imminent loss and mourning, framed by a raging storm that threatens to engulf his innocent protagonist. Distraught and weeping, Faith is alone with her mother at the point of death’s dramatic entrance into the bedchamber: “Lavidia’s eyes opened as though to drink in a vision. She stared sightlessly at Faith, and the blankets rose again with the kicking of her legs. Lavidia said, ‘Girl, you get yourself a good thing’; then she gulped once . . . and died” (4). Although distressed by her mother’s passing and keenly aware of the void into which it has cast her, minutes afterward Faith begins to puzzle over the meaning of Lavidia’s deathbed advice. In framing Faith’s quest for the “Good Thing” in this fashion, Johnson recalls and revises another archetypal deathbed scene in African American literature. Faith’s circumstances recall those of Ellison’s nameless and naive protagonist in Invisible Man. In the novel’s ﬁrst chapter, the narrator departs from tradition and describes his grandfather’s death as well as the confusion and alarm that follow in its wake. In contrast to Faith, Ellison’s narrator is not alone but rather at his father’s side at the time his grandfather, a former slave, delivers the following deathbed advice to his startled son: “ ‘Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good ﬁght. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all of my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. . . . Learn it to the younguns,’ he whispered ﬁercely; then he died.”14 Faith’s challenge and predicament mirror those of Ellison’s narrator in the opening pages of his bildungsroman. On the mournful occasion of the passing of a signiﬁcant and powerful ﬁgure, both protagonists are given ad16

Faith and the Good Thing vice whose meaning for a period eludes them, and which infuses their journey of self-discovery with an unexpected depth, a journey that possesses all of the markings of the picaresque. In both novels, death is the catalyst for a process of self-interrogation at a crucial stage in the development of each protagonist, for both are challenged to come to terms with the meaning of a vital question at a moment of great vulnerability. For Ellison’s protagonist, the vital question is, among many, What is the “good ﬁght?” Or put another way, how might the narrator achieve eloquence as well as deﬁne resistance and leadership within shifting social and political contexts? For Johnson’s protagonist, the vital question is, What is the “Good Thing”? Or how might one strive to live a meaningful existence in a world whose deﬁning features are illusion, stasis, and strife? Like Ellison, Johnson summons the narrative possibilities of the allegory in order to advance the tale in which Faith comes to terms with the illusive “Good Thing,” which, as we discover, is advice, curse, and blessing. In confronting the challenge of making meaning out of an enigma, Johnson’s Faith is the female twin of Ellison’s nameless, male protagonist. Faith’s journey of self-discovery, or put another way, her interrogation of the meaning of the “Good Thing,” begins moments after Lavidia’s death. The death of Lavidia marks the end of Faith’s girlhood; in her change of worlds, the mother projects her only child and daughter into the world.15 In her search for meaning and insight, Faith will encounter a number of perspectives on the fabled “Good Thing.” Here, too, her allegorical journey recalls that of Ellison’s questing narrator who also is challenged to apprehend the sense in what he often misperceives as the nonsense that frequently befalls him in the form of such ﬁgures as Jim Trueblood, the Vet, Brother Hambro, and many others. “For the prose writer,” theorizes M. M. Bakhtin, “the object [the word, the speech of a character, the novel, or any other genre] is a focal point for heteroglot voices among which his own voice must also sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they ‘do not sound.’ ”16 Bakhtin’s observation concerning the particular challenges, jeopardy, and possibilities of the prose writer is one that raises for us the fascinating questions of language or the acquisition of voice for the writer, his relationship to other writers or “heteroglot voices,” and the literary tradition of which these voices are a part. Plainly, Ellison is one of several “voices” or writers whose work constitutes “the background” or tradition against which Johnson’s distinctive voice is perceived and heard—that is, sounded. For the writer, this process of achieving voice is one that involves, according to Bakh17

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS tin, appropriation and self-assertion: “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to the moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language . . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.”17 In constructing the deathbed scene that serves to launch Faith into the world beyond Hatten County, Johnson necessarily recalls other deathbed scenes, in this instance the encounter of Ellison’s questing narrator with death. Through a process that involves choice, appropriation, revision, and the projection of his own individual consciousness, Johnson makes the word, this deathbed scene, his own. “With each literary-verbal performance,” asserts Bakhtin, “consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia [emphasis added], it must move in words, a ‘language.’ ”18 Whether it is Faith and the Good Thing or any of the other works of ﬁction in his oeuvre, Johnson positions himself “amidst heteroglossia.” He is thus in dialogue with himself, with other writers, and with other philosophers. Each “literary-verbal performance” is an instance of selfassertion and self-deﬁnition; that is to say, each is the assertion of his own personal voice within the context of a range of literary and philosophical traditions. In positioning himself amid the rich, expressive verbal ﬁeld of heteroglossia, which Bakhtin deﬁnes as “another’s speech in another’s language,” each “literary-verbal performance” by Johnson becomes an illustration of what Bakhtin terms “double-voiced discourse.”19 According to Bakhtin, this is a mode of discourse that “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings, and two expressions. . . . Double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized,” reﬂecting always the discourse of the author, the narrator, or any other character, and the genre itself.20 While appearing to operate at the level of a binary, double-voiced discourse is in actuality a form of discourse that transcends such dualistic conﬁgurations in language, for there is always the voice of the author, the voice of the character or narrator, the voice of the genre, and the voices of those who populate the verbal ﬁeld we might imagine, in this instance, as the broad traditions of humanistic thought that necessarily leave their trace upon each of Johnson’s “literary-verbal performance[s].” All of these discourses, stresses Bakhtin, “are double-voice and 18

Faith and the Good Thing internally dialogized”; in these discourses, a “potential dialogue is embedded in them, one as yet unfolded, a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two world views, two languages.”21 Throughout Faith and the Good Thing and in the other novels that constitute the focus of this study, Johnson positions himself amidst “heteroglossia,” and thus deploys in his vibrant ﬁction what I shall refer to as, quoting Bakhtin, a “double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse.” With regard to Faith and the Good Thing, this is a discourse in which Johnson is in dialogue not only with himself, but also with such writers as Toomer, Wright, and Ellison, such philosophers as Plato, and the anonymous voices within the tradition of African American folklore who achieve voice in the novel through such characters as Todd Cross, Alpha Omega Holmes, and the Swamp Woman. These characters, along with several others, bring Faith to an understanding of the meaning of the “Good Thing.” They complicate and advance, in a variety of ways, her efforts to achieve what Johnson terms “whole sight.” The ﬁrst ﬁgure Faith encounters in her interrogation of the meaning of the “Good Thing” is Rev. Lucius Brown, a friend of the Crosses who has come to offer comfort and guidance to a grieving Faith moments after her mother’s passing. Signiﬁcantly, in this allegorical tale it is through Rev. Brown that Johnson ﬁrst introduces the imagery and view of human existence set forth in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Confronted with Faith’s determination to make sense of the “Good Thing” in a world that has changed dramatically as a result of Lavidia’s death, Rev. Brown imagines himself as intervening at a crucial stage in the young woman’s quest: I ain’t gonna preach sin to you. There’s more involved than that! Your momma, God rest her soul, was tryin’ to tell you on her deathbed that you’ve got to have somethin’ to hold on to now that she’s gone . . . somethin’ that’ll pull the world together. . . . This world we live in—it’s like a shadowy cave fulla crazy sounds if you’ve got nothin’ to light it up. There’s no sun but the Saviour, y’see? There’s no right or wrong, and nothin’s clear-cut—there’s nothin’ but a lot of empty things that keep bumpin’ into each other in the dark. (14)

In seeking to console Faith, Rev. Brown offers his own interpretation of Lavidia’s deathbed advice, and in the process, he reveals his vision of human experience. He ﬁrst assigns an element of concreteness to the illusive “Good Thing” and indeed suggests that it is a thing, that is, “somethin’ that’ll pull the world together. . . .” As a feature of the world of matter and experience, the “Good Thing,” in Rev. Brown’s estimation, will provide Faith with stability, order, and security in a world of chaos, suffering, and illusions. In Platonic fashion, Rev. Brown compares the world of human beings 19

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS to a low form of existence in a cave. In conversation with Glaucon, Socrates, in Book VII of The Republic, describes human existence in the following allegorical manner: “See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are ﬁxed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their heads all the way around. Their light is from a ﬁre burning far above and behind them. Between the ﬁre and the prisoners there is a road above, along which we see a wall, built like the partitions puppet-handlers set in front of the human beings and over which they show the puppets.” “I see,” he said [Glaucon]. “Then also see along this wall human beings carrying all sorts of artifacts, which project above the wall, and statues of men and other animals wrought from stone, wood, and every kind of material; as is to be expected, some of the carriers utter sounds while others are silent.” “It’s a strange image,” he said, “and strange prisoners you’re telling of.” “They’re like us,” I said.22

I have quoted at some length the core formulations of Plato’s well-known allegory of the cave as it appears in The Republic, in order to establish clearly the rich points of correspondence between this text and Faith and the Good Thing. Further, the intellectual concerns and imagery of the allegory of the cave occupy important ground in the exposition of theme not only in Johnson’s ﬁrst novel, but also in his third novel, Middle Passage. Human existence, as it is imagined in the allegory of the cave, is one in which we exist in a kind of prison and as prisoners. To summon Glaucon’s language, we are in bondage to shadows, illusions, and a primal darkness that stains every aspect of our existence. The knowledge we have of ourselves and the world around us is partial, fragmentary, illusory, always and inevitably incomplete. We recall the statues carried by the men who are silent and sometimes not, who carry images of images the troglodytes mistake for the whole or ﬁrst causes. This is our nature, as Socrates sadly tells Glaucon, “in its education and want of education.” While this is true, there also is the possibility, as Socrates informs Glaucon, of escape from the bleak realities of the cave through the process of education. There is the possibility of our slow, laborious ascent from the shadowy center to the light that spills through the cave’s entrance, of “the soul’s journey up to the intelligible place,” where, for the ﬁrst time, the soul apprehends “the idea of the good.”23 As imagined by Socrates in his dialectic with Glaucon, human existence is marked by folly, loneliness, pain, and ignorance, but also the sublime and the transcen20

Faith and the Good Thing dent. Needless to say, the liberation from the realities of the cave, a journey from ignorance to enlightenment, exacts a great toll and is achieved by only a few. To a very large degree, Rev. Brown’s vision of human existence recalls that of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The crucial difference emerges in their respective reﬂections upon the nature of the good. In Plato’s allegory, Socrates likens the good in the visible world to the sun, which, as he describes the soul’s ascent toward the light to an attentive Glaucon, is “the steward of all things in the visible place.”24 As the teacher of Plato explains to Glaucon, the sun in the visible world is analogous to the good in the intelligible world, for the sun is the “offspring the good begot in proportion with itself.”25 Socrates deﬁnes the good in a variety of ways, all of which are restatements in an effort to describe a transcendent reality, a reality that deﬁes description and deﬁnition. He ﬁrst deﬁnes the good as “that which provides the truth to things known and gives the power to the one who knows.”26 He later deﬁnes the good “as the cause of all that is right and fair in everything—in the visible it gave birth to light and its sovereign; in the intelligible, itself sovereign, it provided truth and intelligence.”27 Utilizing the sun imagery to stunning effect, in a third instance of restatement and elaboration in this dialectic, Socrates deﬁnes the good as that “which is and the brightest part of that which is.”28 Of course, Glaucon’s response to Socrates’s efforts to describe the sublime is one many of us share: “You speak of an overwhelming beauty.”29 In his own very ﬁne commentary and translation of The Republic, Allan Bloom brilliantly summarizes the concept of the good in the following manner: “The good is the transcendent principle of the whole, the cause of the being of things and of the apprehension of being, uniting knower and known, the lover of the good and the good things. As experienced by man, the good is an overpowering combination of pleasure and knowledge.”30 And how does Rev. Brown’s concept of the good differ from these elegant iterations of what Bloom terms “the transcendent principle of the whole”? For Rev. Brown, the good is predictably the “Saviour” or Christ Himself who is revealed in all His mystery, power, and love in the several books of the New Testament. As he tells a sorrowing and questioning Faith, there is no sun “but the Saviour.” For the good reverend of Hatten County, the good is not an abstract, remote, impersonal reality, but is rather incarnated in the reality of Christ who is fully and powerfully present in the life of the believer. And is Rev. Brown a believer? He certainly struggles to be one, but he 21

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS is, ironically, plagued by doubt. Several years earlier, Rev. Brown sought comfort, strangely, from an undoubting Lavidia. An exchange of conﬁdences, during which Rev. Brown yielded to Lavidia his pastoral role of comforter to the disbelieving, reveals to us the depth of the pastor’s spiritual crisis. It is important to remember that during this exchange a young Faith was present, but her presence was unknown to her mother and Rev. Brown. When asked by Rev. Brown to describe her experience of salvation, Lavidia offers the following testimony: “It was kinda soft, like the way you’re touchin’ me now,” Lavidia said. “But it wasn’t like the touch of no livin’ man. It was like He put His hands across my breasts, and they exploded, and shot out into the tent, and carried somethin’ inside me through the air, clear up to some dizzy spot above the world. . . . I saw myself shakin’—it was like I was lookin’ at myself from far, far away, right beside Him, or maybe all alone in some dark place like a cave [emphasis added]. And I was watchin’ what was left of me the way you look at the wigglin’ of a chicken with its head wrung off. It didn’t matter none. That thing on the ground wasn’t me. I knew that, reverend.” (77)

After hearing Lavidia’s testimony, Rev. Brown is reassured in his faith; he knows now that the “space between Him and us ain’t so ﬂamin’ wide after all . . .” (78). The mention of the cave in Lavidia’s testimony is not insigniﬁcant. For Lavidia and Rev. Brown, existence in the world without Christ is existence at the lowest, bleakest level. Salvation is the delivery from the bondage of sin, or put another way, from the realities of the cave or the material world. For Lavidia and Rev. Brown, what Socrates describes as the “soul’s journey up to the intelligible place” is achieved through the full commitment of Christians and their resources to Christ. The difference between these two views of the good is the difference between religion and philosophy, and, depending upon one’s perspective and subject-position, Johnson has provided an opportunity to reﬂect upon two discrete realities or two complementary, interlocking realities. Crucially, Faith does not share Rev. Brown’s reading of the “Good Thing” as the embodiment of Christ. After listening to his allegorical rendering of human experience as a cave and Christ’s divine function as liberator from the base existence of the cave, she replies, “I’ve heard different” (14). In the presence of a rattled Rev. Brown, Faith exhibits a rare skepticism as she processes the ﬁrst of many perspectives on human existence that inﬂuence her evolving conception of the good, or as she calls it in the black vernacular speech everywhere in evidence in the novel, the “Good Thing.” In this particular instance, she is able to practice this independence of mind 22

Faith and the Good Thing by recalling the “stunning ﬁctions and well-meant lies” of her father, Todd Cross. Exhibiting his spirit of openness and discovery, she sets out to determine for herself the meaning of the “Good Thing.” The ﬁrst part of this journey toward enlightenment necessarily involves an encounter with one of the novel’s most important characters, in a tale whose many strengths include the creation of richly drawn and distinctive characters: the Swamp Woman. A ﬁgure out of legend and apparently without antecedents, the Swamp Woman is both feared and admired in Hatten County. A conjure woman, fabulist, and seer, she possesses a knowledge of both the manifold and the ﬁrst causes. The Swamp Woman meets Faith at a crucial stage in her philosophic quest. If Faith is to achieve liberation from the bondage of the cave, it will be done, as Johnson makes clear through the careful construction of his tale, not solely through her own efforts but also through the intervention and aid of a teacher. The Swamp Woman functions in this vital capacity. It is she, through her garrulous, cryptic, humorous, and scatological banter which at bottom is a dialectic, who will lead Faith from the shadows to the light. The ascent from the shadows to the light, from the visible world to the intelligible world, is a process of education. It is important to stress that the allegory of the cave is, as Socrates tells Glaucon, “an image of our nature in its education and want of education.”31 As the central symbolic ﬁgure in this allegorical tale, Faith is the very embodiment of our nature before our exposure to the liberating processes of education. She is a soul unaccustomed to the light, but she possesses the potentiality to alter and transform her circumstances. A soul’s ascent from the shadows to the light not only depends upon the support and guidance of a teacher, but also on the possession and application of certain faculties, all of which are set forth in the concept of the divided line. Socrates introduces the concept of the divided line at the end of Book VI, just before he relates to Glaucon the allegory of the cave in the opening paragraph of Book VII. The concept of the divided line is, therefore, the expanding ﬂoor for the allegory of the cave. Without reference to the divided line, the soul’s ascent cannot be fully explained nor apprehended, and the allegory is robbed of much of its beauty and power. The divided line is an illustration of what Socrates calls the “four affections arising in the soul” in its journey from the visible world to the intelligible world. These “affections,” in ascending importance, are imagination, trust, thought, and intellection. Each “affection” corresponds to particular realities in both the visible and intelligible worlds. In the visible world, imagination corresponds to images, and trust corresponds to things. In the intelligible world, thought corre23

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS sponds to mathematical objects, and intellection corresponds to forms. Plainly, through the concept of the divided line Socrates charts the order of phenomena and the faculties we employ in perceiving and apprehending them in their right constellation in our ascent from the shadows to the light. Bloom aptly describes the divided line as a “sketch of a cosmos which can give ground to the aspirations of the philosophic soul. . . . The divided line [describes] the soul’s progress from its lowest level of cognition, imagination, to trust, thought, and ﬁnally intellection, its highest level.”32 As Jacob Klein notes in his analysis of the divided line, “Socrates takes us, in the story of the cave as well as that of the divided line, on a predominantly ascending path.”33 And what is the relationship of the divided line to the deep operations of Johnson’s novel? When Faith meets the Swamp Woman, her teacher and guide in her philosophic quest, Faith exists in a state of innocence. To place her condition within the schema of the divided line, she exists at the lowest level of cognition: imagination. In this regard, it is important to bear in mind that the trajectory of the novel corresponds to the trajectory of the allegory of the cave and the divided line. The transcendent forms of Socrates’s dialectic place all of human life potentially on an “ascending path,” to summon again the language of Klein. While circular in its structure and organization, Johnson constructs a novel that is linear and ascending in its trajectory, in its efforts to map Faith’s philosophical quest. In this philosophical novel informed by the traditions of the bildungsroman, we observe Faith’s difﬁcult, disillusioning, and ﬁnally inspiring ascent from imagination to intellection, the ﬁrst and ﬁnal nodes on the divided line, through a process of education that involves the Swamp Woman at crucial stages. Before departing for Chicago, Faith has a pivotal encounter with the Swamp Woman. To this conjurer who hates visitors, she conﬁdes her deep desire to understand the much desired but mysterious “Good Thing.” In appearance the Swamp Woman is repulsive, but the knowledge she possesses is of the greatest beauty: Faith had almost convinced herself to leave when she ﬁrst perceived a presence behind her: the smell of something old and dry. Heavy breathing, not her own, ﬁlled her ears. Without thinking she turned to face the origin of the labored breath; this she immediately regretted. Crouching at her heels was a hairless old woman whose face held features like those glimpsed in novel arrangements of vegetation, freak potatoes in the shape of cow skulls. It was horrible. Horrible! One tiny eye, the left one, was partially closed and had no pupil—clear it was and the color of egg yolk. The other, a disk, had a green cataract ﬂoating free

24

Faith and the Good Thing in its center. Such a creature could never have been born—only spawned; never grown—only fermented in some ghastly cesspool. Like the swamp. (19)

The Swamp Woman, or the werewitch as she also is called, is the human analogue of the swamp itself. Revolting but also humorous, she lives in a house that contains a library of the occult: “Book shelves held dusty volumes bound with silver rings: The Complete Demonomancer, Domino Divination in 10 Easy Lessons, and The Bedside Cartomancer. Against the western wall, sunken into thigh-deep water beneath diagrams of the Adamic, Hyperborean, Atlantean, Aryan, and Lemurian Root Races (with lacunas left for two more to come), a large machine hummed and played music, its gears powered by the frantic racing of a green Gila monster along a treadmill” (21). Here and throughout this novel, Johnson introduces a mocking, irreverent humor that is one of the hallmarks of his ﬁction, a humor that betrays his training and background as a cartoonist. Not only does the Swamp Woman live, as Faith observes, in a “museum,” but she also practices a magic based in part upon condensed versions of master texts that are the equivalent of Cliff Notes. In this burlesque of the occult, we discover an unexpected limitation of the Swamp Woman’s presumably limitless knowledge. Unable to decipher the language written upon a chicken’s liver while performing a divination, an exasperated werewitch announces to Faith: “The liver’s in Latin! I can’t read no goddamn Latin!” (25). The Swamp Woman’s “museum” contains several strange and magical objects, among them a communicograph and a Thaumaturgic Mirror. It is through the communicograph that Faith unexpectedly receives a message and reminder from the deceased Lavidia that emboldens her in her quest: “Find yourself that good thing” (26). Equally as important, but cryptically, Faith beholds in the dark, churning water of the Thaumaturgic Mirror her unknown, but imminent future: There was ﬁrst her own her reﬂection; then she herself seated sleeping among many empty seats with a sign hung from her neck. Next: the bespeckled face of a wide-eyed man whose thin lips moved faster than the wings of frightened thrushes. Again, the water churned, offering this time phantasmagoric scenes of a stone-and-mortar building surrounded by dense smoke, of a wretched little room overlooking an alley where rats and worms sifted through garbage for scraps of food. Faces were yielded by the water—the image of an old man coughing and clutching a mysterious black book, another man—younger, highyellow, and wearing a wig. She saw the back of a lean man who wore work clothing, and knew she would recognize him if he turned around. The man did not turn. His ﬁgure was replaced by a scene that caught Faith’s breath: an infant girl ringed by rising tongues of ﬁre. (26)

25

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS The shifting images that move upon the surface of the Thaumaturgic Mirror are the principal ﬁgures who will emerge in Faith’s philosophic quest for the “Good Thing.” Up from the glimmering surface of the mirror rises ﬁrst the image of the rapist and neurotic Arnold Tippis. Up, too, rises the image of Dr. Richard M. Barrett, a thief and philosopher who gives Faith a copy of The Doomsday Book. And Isaac Maxwell, the power-obsessed and despotic spouse of Faith. And up from the mirror’s surface rises the lean, muscular form of Alpha Omega Holmes, so named because he is Faith’s ﬁrst and last true love. Up too, lastly and tragically, is the image of the infant girl born of her union with Holmes, a girl who perishes in the ﬁre that destroys the Hotel Sinclair, Faith’s ﬁrst and last home in Chicago. In the home of the Swamp Woman, Faith beholds, unbeknownst to her, the complex workings of her own future. This important fact reinforces the function of the Swamp Woman as guide and teacher. Signiﬁcantly, it also is the Swamp Woman who, in an almost arbitrary fashion, advises Faith to leave Hatten County for Chicago. Along with functioning as both guide and teacher to an innocent but determined Faith, the werewitch also functions as a catalyst who advances the actions and operations of the novel. Along with these, the Swamp Woman possesses one more very important function. In this novel of ideas that possesses the markings of the picaresque and the folk tale, Johnson is concerned with exposing his heroine and his readers to several forms of knowledge. He posits that it is not one form but several forms of knowledge bodied forth in the lives of a variety of carefully drawn characters who will endow Faith’s life with meaning and signiﬁcance, and who will, ultimately, catalyze this philosophic soul’s liberation from bondage. The particular form of knowledge represented by the Swamp Woman is the knowledge of folklore in general, and African American folklore in particular. In grounding Faith’s philosophic quest in pivotal encounters with a conjure woman, our opening into the realm of black folklore, Johnson expresses his belief in the legitimacy of African American folklore as one form of knowledge, and also reveals his kinship with such writers as Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and again Toomer and Ellison, all of whom regard African American folklore as an essential element in their ﬁction. Moreover, Johnson also enters a debate about the uses and functions of folklore in African American literature, a debate that was inaugurated by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Richard Wright in his landmark essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). Reﬂecting upon the value of African American folklore three years before

26

Faith and the Good Thing the publication of Native Son, Wright offers this assessment of black folklore and folk forms: It was, however, in a folklore moulded out of rigorous and inhuman conditions of life that the Negro achieved his most indigenous and complete expression. Blues, spirituals, and folk tales recounted from mouth to mouth; the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, to conﬁdential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns—all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom ﬂowed.34

After identifying some of the important art forms—the spirituals, the blues, folk tales and work songs—that have emerged from the rich and dynamic ﬁeld of African American folklore, Wright issues the following challenge to African American writers: The Negro writer who seeks to function within his race as purposeful agent has a serious responsibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary; a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the ﬂuid lore of a great people, and moulds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today.35

While Wright imagined himself as a “purposeful agent” possessing a “complex consciousness,” he did not always meet in his ﬁction the challenge he issues here to all African American writers. The basis for the tragedy of Bigger Thomas is the absence of any connection to the traditions in black folklore that might have placed his violent life on a different course. Nevertheless, Wright inaugurates a discourse on black folklore in the production of black ﬁction that would be enlarged and deepened by such writers as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.36 In seeking to position himself in this multigenerational debate on the uses and functions of African American folklore in African American literature, the most inﬂuential ﬁgure for Johnson on this important matter is Ellison. In Invisible Man, Ellison argues, in the manner of an artist in supreme command of his material, that folklore is the foundation for the emergence and development of identity. This vital point is delivered in the famous lobotomy scene of his novel, when the narrator wards off the intended effects of a lobotomy by identifying, through the promptings of a so-called scientist, such ﬁgures as Buckeye the Rabbit and Brer Rabbit. Fretting over his identity in a moment of great vulnerability,

27

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS the narrator begins to understand the relationship between identity and freedom, and he begins to understand that “the two things are involved with each other. When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”37 In Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson enters this double-voiced discourse on African American folklore and its applications to the novel. Like Ellison, Johnson signals his appreciation for the complex relationship between folklore and identity, or put another way, between culture and identity. After the manner of Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Johnson constructs a novel that is what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., terms a “talking book,” a “speakerly text.”38 Johnson summons forth such a book and text in the ﬁrst sentence of his novel: “It is time to tell you of Faith and the Good Thing.” In this opening sentence, disarming in its simplicity and stunning in its degree of intentionality, we are given again the title of the novel. Second, we are oriented through the verb “tell” to Johnson’s commitment to orality and aurality, to his efforts to both listen and tell, to both speak and write, to assume the double mask and double burden of storyteller and story writer and, therefore, to conjure a transformation, that is, to make the reader also a listener in this tale whose themes are identity, liberation, and enlightenment. The spell of this conjuration is held throughout the novel through the strategic and careful use of the imperative “Listen,” which sometimes is the ﬁrst word in a chapter. As readers of Johnson’s tale, we are to imagine ourselves always as listeners; the imperative “Listen” underscores our move into that mode. Like Their Eyes Were Watching God, so too is Faith written in the third person, and like the voice of the omniscient narrator of Hurston’s “speakerly text,” Johnson’s narrator possesses the markings of a gifted storyteller who frequently addresses the reader/listener as “Children,” thus effecting yet another transformation in the adult reader/listener who, like a child enthralled by the tale that engulfs her, is both reader and listener, witness and participant. Most importantly, in the novel’s opening sentence Johnson signals to the reader/listener, through the phrasing that evokes the novel’s title, his overlapping passions for folklore, ﬁction, and philosophy. Johnson declares allegiance to the enduring value of folklore to ﬁction, and more speciﬁcally to philosophical black ﬁction, not only through his inspired manner of story writing/storytelling, but also through the masterful integration of magical devices, spells, and stories or lies above suspicion in the tradition of High John the Conqueror: “the great human culture hero in Negro folk-lore” and “the wish fulﬁllment hero of the race.”39 In one such lie, Johnson introduces his own perspective in the discourse on folklore’s 28

Faith and the Good Thing relationship to black ﬁction catalyzed by Wright. He describes, through the consciousness of Faith, how Alpha Omega Holmes rescued her from death at the hands of an enraged Old Man Cragg for pilfering his peach orchard. With only the defense of mother wit and a powerful imagination, Holmes feigns infection with a terminal disease and convinces Old Man Cragg that he has vanquished such foes as Stackalee, High John the Conqueror, and John Henry simply by touching them with his ﬁnger. Wishing to avoid certain death, Old Man Cragg ﬂees at the moment Holmes points one of his ﬁngers in his direction. Within the context of this tale that is delivered in parenthetical fashion on the occasion of the reunion of Faith with Holmes in Chicago after her marriage to Maxwell, a reunion that foreshadows Faith’s liberation from the bondage of this marriage, Johnson posits that folklore saves lives, that the stories are sometimes all we have to protect us from illness, death, and bondage. Further, he advances the argument central to the development and operations of his novel: that black folklore is a valid and rich form of knowledge notwithstanding that it is often viewed as discredited knowledge originating from a discredited people.40 The vision of the cosmos found in the rambling dialectics of the Swamp Woman is juxtaposed against other forms of knowledge that inform and inﬂuence Faith’s ascent up the divided line. Years before the death of her parents, Faith’s vision of the world, one that bears the imprint of her father Todd Cross who is in spirit and outlook a disciple of the Swamp Woman, is challenged by a Dr. Leon Lynch, the ﬁrst of several ﬁgures who, whether in childhood or adulthood, ﬁgure in Faith’s philosophic quest. Crucially, during the memorial service for Lavidia on the eve of Faith’s departure for Chicago, a now orphaned Faith recalls the visit of Dr. Lynch. A fascinating character in a novel ﬁlled with such characters, Dr. Lynch is an intellectual, more speciﬁcally a “man of science,” who literally and ﬁguratively towers above the residents of Hatten County. In the hyperbolic fashion of folk tales, the very learned physician who attended “all the great schools” is so tall that “he could, at the same time, have gotten his hair cut in Heaven and his boots shined in Hell” (34). Like his intellectual nemesis, the Swamp Woman, he is a man of grotesque physical characteristics. On the occasion when Dr. Lynch arrives at the Cross home to administer to a sick Lavidia, Faith remembers the “man of science” in the following manner: He was revolting, hatchet-faced, and had a ﬁgure so scrawny it seemed to have been stretched on a rack; his long arms and legs were gaunt and angular in a blue serge suit shiny with age. Lynch’s right leg must have been artiﬁcial, fashioned from plastic or wood, because whenever his pipe ﬂickered out with a hiss

29

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS from tar and saliva backed into its stem, he would bang the ashes free of its bowl by striking it against his right knee. The sound was that of wood striking wood. A golden watch chain swung from beneath his open suitcoat, and both his shoes seemed enormous—perhaps size thirteen, with inch-thick soles. The back of Lynch’s neck was rufﬂed with obscene little folds, his face and hands looked sedimented with a grimy material that had permanently worked its way under his skin, beneath his broken ﬁngernails and into his large pores. His head was pear-shaped and balding, his mouth was full of gum-line cavities when he smiled, and about him was the smell of rubbing alcohol and sulfur. (35)

If one expects to ﬁnd in Dr. Lynch an attractive representation of the thinking man, of the intellectual, of the “man of science,” then one will have to look elsewhere in Johnson’s ﬁction for such a type. In dress and appearance, Dr. Lynch embodies the fabled country doctor caught between the realm of science and the realm of the quotidian. A loner, outsider and, it seems, bachelor, Dr. Lynch is as forbidding as his name. In many ways, he is the model for the character of Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, the eccentric but nevertheless learned tutor to Andrew Hawkins in Oxherding Tale. As types, Dr. Lynch and Sykes-Withers represent the reasoned, rational approach to human existence, although Andrew’s tutor, in contrast to Lynch, exhibits more respect for a broad range of persons and intellectual traditions. Lavidia has far more respect for Dr. Lynch, notwithstanding his manner and appearance, than the several rootworkers or conjurers her husband consults routinely during family illnesses. When Lavidia asks Dr. Lynch to explain the basis for her illness, he delivers a long monologue that reveals his rational, evolutionary, and mechanical view of the universe that bears the imprint of such philosophers as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Herbert Spencer. Rather than simply say to Lavidia that she is aging, that her heart is not as strong as it was in her youth, he circles around the core concerns of his diagnosis, as he is in love with the sound of his own voice and enamored of his own intellect, such as it is. Proof of his arrogance and his erudition is his cryptic reference to Ockham’s razor—the methodological principle of economy in explanation associated with William of Ockham, who is regarded as the most inﬂuential nominalist philosopher of fourteenthcentury England. In his vanity, Dr. Lynch delivers Ockham’s razor in Latin in order to discourage further interruptions from Faith: “Entia nun sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum [sic]”; the English translation is: “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.”41 At the climax of his dramatic monologue in which he brooks no further interruptions, he comes, at last, to the point:

30

Faith and the Good Thing “You take in close to twenty thousand breaths each day, at about twenty cubic inches of air per breath,” he said. “The air carries oxygen, which the body warms and ﬁlters. It’s moved to the bronchiae, on to the lungs, and ﬁnally to millions of cells that are air sacs surrounded by vessels and capillaries. . . . Blood absorbs the oxygen through these cells and expels carbon dioxide. Fresh blood moves to the heart which pumps eight hundred gallons of blood each hour. . . . “A machine,” he said with slight disgust. “Do you hear the click-clicking of your delicate instruments developed over those billions of years from unliving matter?” [Lavidia] blinked, and seemed to come out of a trance. “Yes . . .” “That’s how you work,” the doctor said. . . . “That’s what you are, no more than that complicated plexus of cells through which energy travels like an electrical current. . . . Tension and release. Mrs. Cross, nothing—absolutely nothing beyond that can be called real. . . . Life is a constant, frenzied motion; death is when the circuit breaks. . . . That explains everything.” (38–39)

As a woman of faith, as the comforter to a sometimes doubting Rev. Brown, Lavidia is repelled by Dr. Lynch’s agnosticism, or worse, atheism. She also is repelled by his characterization of human beings as machines, a claim rising from the pages of La Mettrie’s L’Homme machine. Although deeply disturbed by Dr. Lynch’s mechanical rendering of human existence, the ill Lavidia is not intimidated by the doctor’s coldly reasoned explanation for life and death, which also bears the imprint of Spencer’s law of evolution and dissolution. To her question, “Why do you live?” Dr. Lynch offers the following answer: “We live to die—only to die . . .” (39). Lavidia, fortunately, is not defeated by what she regards as his heretical and inaccurate reading of the operations of the universe. “In the end,” writes Johnson, “she transformed the story to destroy its content. What persisted in her mind was the reference to breathing: ‘Everybody’s got a certain number to draw ’fore they die. That’s His way . . . ’ ” (40). In the mind of Lavidia, science becomes a means of understanding the “way” of God in nature and in human life. Over time, science and religion occupy their respective places in her mind, with science occupying the subordinate position. It is important to remember that Faith is present during the dramatic delivery of Dr. Lynch’s soliloquy on the origins and operations of life, and she, signiﬁcantly, does the forbidden by interrupting him. At the beginning of his lecture on the earth’s evolution, which masquerades as a diagnosis, the doctor explains the origin of the oceans, which for him involves certain combinations of gases, moisture in the form of snow, and ﬂuctuations in the earth’s temperature. Appalled by this explanation, Faith “shouted at Lynch’s back, ‘That’s wrong! Daddy said the oceans were tears from the eyes of

31

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS angels!’ ” (36). What follows is an intellectual standoff, for Faith does not yield her ground, and nor does Dr. Lynch, who proceeds with his scientiﬁc explanation of the earth’s evolution. Of signiﬁcance to us here is Faith’s belief in the vision of the world as revealed in the tales of the master storyteller and her father Todd Cross. So much does she believe in her father’s explanation of the origins of things, that she risks the consequences of contradicting an adult in her mother’s presence. As a consequence of her youth and native courage, Faith is unmoved and undisturbed, in contrast to Lavidia, by Dr. Lynch’s bleak prognostications. When confronted with readings of reality that conﬂict with her own, Faith is not afraid to express a dissenting position. Always, her dissenting position reﬂects her belief in the existence of realities beyond the imaginations of scientists and theologians. Recall that she rejects the vision not only of Dr. Lynch, but also of his counterpart in the church, Rev. Brown. Confronted with the ideologies of science and religion, Faith holds to her cherished beliefs which, at this point in her journey, are beliefs in a species of certainty at odds with both religion and science and closer to myth. In contrast to Ellison’s questing narrator, who is easily inﬂuenced by others, in most circumstances Faith maintains her particular perspective. While she is often mistaken in her reading of the meaning of the “Good Thing,” as I will demonstrate, her point of view is very often her own. The possession of a particular perspective is an authority that Ellison’s narrator achieves at the end of his odyssey; Faith, signiﬁcantly, possesses this authority at the beginning her odyssey, and through perseverance ascends to even higher levels of self-awareness and self-knowledge. It is this faith in the possibilities of the interplay of both human and divine realities that propels Faith forward in her philosophic quest. On the eve of her departure for Chicago, she is undeterred by the recollection of her encounter with Dr. Lynch who, as she learns on a trip to Hatten County after her marriage to Isaac Maxwell, committed suicide when he discovered that “rutabaga and philodendrons had feelings jes like people,” or so the story goes on the porches of Hatten County (133). Surely by arranging for Dr. Lynch’s death, Johnson offers a comic and powerful critique of certain philosophical positions concerning the origins and meaning of life. Rejecting the perspectives of Dr. Lynch and Rev. Brown, Faith accepts the advice of the Swamp Woman and leaves Hatten County for Chicago, where she believes she will encounter and acquire the “Good Thing.” This is her prayer and wish to the moon the night before her departure: “Let me ﬁnd it—the Good Thing” (47). 32

Faith and the Good Thing When Faith’s train arrives in the upsouth city of Chicago almost two days later, she does not encounter the good, but instead ﬁnds evil in the form of violence, or more precisely, one violation after another. The ﬁrst violation assumes the form of robbery. About the robbery and robber I will have more to say momentarily. For the purposes of economy and precision, I will turn now to the ﬁgure who comes to Faith’s assistance minutes after the robbery. Most tragically for Faith, this ﬁgure is Arnold Tippis. Though he is a former dentist and frustrated musician, we learn that Tippis is a rapist for whom psychoanalysis has failed, perhaps even making him more dangerous to himself and to others. In outlook and temperament, Faith and Tippis could not be farther apart and yet their collision possesses all of the markings of fate. In constructing this archetypal scene in literature, Johnson suggests that it is impossible to retain our innocence as we move through the world, that the acquisition of knowledge and insight is frequently accompanied by disillusionment and violence. Tippis is the instrument for Faith’s initiation into the darker realities of Plato’s cave, a fact fully reﬂected in his body, gesture, and attitude: What struck her immediately was his glasses—silver wire-rims hooked over winglike ears and holding lenses so thick his eyes seemed to ﬂoat behind them like dark blowﬁsh. Between those lenses was a thin bridge dropping to a bulbous nose and wide nostrils. And below that—tight lips surrounded by a scraggly goatee. All over he had the hue of coffee colored with skim milk: a hesitant brown. His feet were tiny and delicate, poorly supporting his wide girth and watery, womanly hips. This was he who saved her. Also he who said, “I hate to sound like a pessimist, but there’s no point in calling the police. Your money’s gone. I can take you home if you like.” Again, he licked his thin lips. Faith found him frightening, not because he was intimidating or because he seemed aggressive, but because he appeared ready to ﬂy apart—nervous, put together with phlegm, gristle and paste. (53)

The obsessive and calculating Tippis does not save Faith, but instead delivers her to a more violent form of destruction. Homeless and penniless as a consequence of the robbery, Faith entrusts herself to Tippis, who takes her to a bar. Once seated at a booth, he suggests, wittily and ominously, that she order a Bloody Mary. In fact, Tippis observes: “You look like a Bloody Mary to me” (54). Unfortunately, this foreshadowing of violence is lost on Faith, who is having her ﬁrst cocktail; she has no sense of the very imminent danger bodied forth by Tippis. As they settle into their cocktails, Faith notices Tippis’s eyes, which, as Johnson writes, had the quality of men “judging livestock, or women inspecting fresh eggs at the fair” (55). When the 33

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS predatory Tippis encircles Faith’s hands in his own, for the ﬁrst time she becomes aware of the dangerous nature of her present circumstance: “This was not, in any circumstance, a safe man to be with, not because of what he might do to her but because of some strange thing he’d done to himself. Suddenly, her hand went dry, and she was all thought, pure intellect, and concentrating on the way his lips curled back like proud ﬂesh around a halfhealed wound” (55). Under the inﬂuence of alcohol, Faith shares the purpose of her journey to Chicago; indeed, she blurts out to Tippis that she is “looking for the really good thing.” Tippis’s reply is that of the neurotic who has placed all of his faith in psychoanalysis: “Stop looking. . . . Everybody’s looking for what’s Good and True and Beautiful. It’s damned foolish, really. Be content. Selfanalysis will put you at peace with your problems—really” (56). Elaborating further upon his pessimistic and cynical view of the nature of Faith’s philosophic quest, the frustrated musician delivers his own reading of human existence. At this juncture, Faith, feeling more strongly the effects of the alcohol, listens more than speaks in a deeply encoded exchange that is the foreshadowing of rape: “It’s so damned obvious! Everything you want is an object for the satisfaction of drives developed in childhood, and you, in society, are an object for others, hardly ever for yourself. But society, through the family and peer group, suppresses these drives so civilization doesn’t evaporate in a collective lust involving billions. Tell me . . . what is it you want most in life?” It shot from her lips: “The Good Thing.” Tippis stared, then chuckled, lighting a fresh cigarette, his tenth. “There is no such object. Surely you mean some speciﬁc thing that makes you feel good—like scratching, sneezing, or the pleasurable feeling when the valve to your bladder opens—” “No, I mean—” She stopped, her eyes wide with incredulity. She stared past him to the wall. What did she mean? “You’re in serious trouble if you have a drive for which there’s no object. That’s what the world is really all about—subject-object antagonism. Objectifying a thing, making it no more than an object so it can be grasped, manipulated, and ruled is, obviously, dehumanizing, even cruel, I suppose, if done to another person. But too many of your drives can only be satisﬁed, and only then temporarily, in this way. There is no other way unless you kill off your feelings like a musty old monk or Indian Bodhisattva. So ﬁnd an object. The world provides several, and they’re useful and approved besides. Set an accepted goal for yourself—comfortable living, that’s a good one, or fashion, collecting antique bottles or comic books from World War II. Sublimate, child.” (57–58)

In her journey from Hatten County to Chicago, Faith has moved from science, religion, and folklore to psychoanalysis, that is, from La Mettrie, 34

Faith and the Good Thing Jesus Christ, High John the Conqueror, to Sigmund Freud. This journey, sadly, has brought her no closer to an understanding of the “Good Thing,” whose meaning still eludes her. In the dark and clotted mind of Tippis, all of human existence is a process of objectiﬁcation, and these dehumanizing manifestations of the id are held somewhat in check through the operations of the ego and super ego. The world in all its richness and complexity is reduced by Tippis to “subject-object antagonism.” He predictably pooh poohs something as fanciful and farfetched, in his view, as Faith’s quixotic search for the “Good Thing.” He informs her that there is “no such object.” He recommends, instead, sublimation. Tragically for the unsuspecting and now inebriated Faith, she becomes through rape the object of Tippis’s neurosis. In his description of this most unfortunate conjunction and its aftermath, Johnson descends to deeper insights in this allegorical tale. In the process, he establishes relationships between violations in the present and the past. After the rape and Tippis’s departure, Faith descends to these levels of memory and history and then, somehow, rises to the surface of a new and present reality: On the bed, breathing in the heavy blood-and-semen smell ﬁlling the room, Faith lay spread-eagled, her eyelids closing and her limbs as motionless as those of a wind-up doll now run down and lying like dirt, or defecation, or yesterday’s newspaper, wet and blurred, in the middle of the road. . . . She thought, but did not stir. She started to inch slowly, her eyes shut tight and ﬁsts clenched, along the interior of her memories—some immediate, some older, some perhaps written into her blood, or cells, or synapses before she was born—timidly feeling the impressions etched there, like ancient friezes or the faded images of brown bison in moist mountain caves. From cavern to cavern she moved, like a child lost in the anfractuous corridors of an art museum with high walls, until she saw, for reasons obscure to her, the ﬁrst time her father had taken her into town. (63)

In this passage and others in this section of the novel, Johnson effectively integrates stream of consciousness writing into a tale marked by realism and the supernatural, in order to reveal the confusion, bewilderment, and primeval patterns that Faith encounters as she journeys more deeply into herself. Moving down the circuitous path of memory and also at the lower level of being before memory, at the foundational level of “blood, or cells, or synapses before she was born,” Faith recalls ﬁrst a childhood memory with her father Todd Cross. This memory is the means by which Faith revisits speciﬁc and deﬁning race rituals in whose wake inevitably follow certain violations based 35

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS upon race that deﬁne the lives of blacks and whites in the south. The memory is Faith’s ﬁrst experience of segregation in Hatten County, Georgia. When Todd Cross asks a white male gas attendant if Faith might use the clean and vacant restroom, the gas attendant, after accepting Todd’s payment for gas, refuses this courtesy and points instead to the patch of “bushes . . . behind the station.” The effect of this violation upon Todd is deep and immediate: “And Todd, taking her by her hand, and trembling across his six feet—though now he looked less than ﬁve—led her past the open door of the clean women’s room and set her down in the bushes. He said nothing the remainder of the hot ride into town, nothing as he shopped, and nothing on the way back home” (64). Faith witnesses the humiliation of her father at the hands of a younger male whose only advantage is his white skin. Concerned for the safety and comfort of Faith, Todd accepts this devaluation of his humanity and the humanity of his daughter. In recalling this violation of herself and her father, Faith also recalls Todd’s ultimate and ﬁnal violation: his lynching by white men who accuse him of the ancient lie—the rape of a white woman. For bravely and furiously rejecting this lie, Todd is lynched. From these shaping experiences of racial violation, Faith moves farther down the “anfractuous corridors” of memory to recall other recollections of violations contained within a vast racial memory. As she does so, Faith experiences a revelation concerning the past and its impact upon one’s present and future actions: Each act added to her ongoing essence, was whipped in like batter, or dissolved like sugar in water—invisible, but there nonetheless. Worse, not only your acts but those of others, those who made you an object, were mixed in as well. And these you could not control. What to do, what to do? Tippis had taken her, and paid for his taking; she was placed, placed, and burned deep into her was the label: whore. It was true. A part of her was no longer her own, not for her now, but for another. Had it not always been so? (65)

In exploring the question, “Had it not always been so?” Johnson moves from the speciﬁc violation experienced to a marked degree by African American men—lynching—to the speciﬁc violation experienced to a marked degree by African American women, that is, rape and the reduction of black women to the status of whore or concubine. In meditating upon these violations, Johnson moves deeper into the past, the past of slavery and more speciﬁcally the transatlantic slave trade. As slavery was an institution in which a complex of relationships existed, in recalling these scenes from history within the subconscious of Faith, Johnson does not mean to suggest that only black men were lynched and only black women were concubines. 36

Faith and the Good Thing The lynching of black women is an historical fact and the sexual exploitation of black men by both white men and white women is a reality that Johnson and other African American novelists have begun to imagine in their historical ﬁction.42 In formulating a reply to the question, “Had it not always been so?” Johnson transports us to the deck of a slave ship called the Trinity, where an ancestor of Faith who also is called Faith is picked “as the captain’s concubine: it has always been so” (65). When this ancestral ﬁgure of Faith arrives in the New World, having survived the middle passage and the lusts of the captain and others, she is sold, “after a bath and hasty meal,” for twenty dollars. Crucially, one concubine’s value in the market economy of slavery corresponds to the other concubine’s value in a very modern economy, for twenty dollars is the sum that Arnold Tippis pays Faith for the particular service that she, under force, has rendered him. It is important to emphasize here that the sum of twenty dollars links Faith not only to an ancestral ﬁgure, but also to Alpha Omega Holmes and Isaac Maxwell. Holmes has determined that twenty dollars a week is all he needs to pilfer from others in order to eke out a very modest existence deﬁned by his commitment to art. Maxwell leaves Faith twenty dollars in a ﬁt of guilt and compassion after her near-death experience by ﬁre. Within the deep structure of the novel, the sum of twenty dollars functions not only to join ﬁgures in history, but also to join ﬁgures in the present, and thus to endow Johnson’s novel with greater coherence. Having established the correspondences that exist between Faith and her ancestors, between her personal history and her collective history, Johnson moves deeper into the past. He moves beyond a racial past, that is slavery, to an “eolithic world,” that is, to a world that is the foundation for all of human history. In this earliest and most primitive of worlds, Faith is the “woman-thing” from whose loins, over millennia, would issue “man, society, and history” and who would in turn build “swift clippers and slave ships and manacles to make men, and especially women, the objects of desire; to weave the thick rope that stretched the strong neck of Todd Cross that hot spring day” (67). By coming full circle in this dramatic fashion, in revealing the network of violations that are the ground of history—the violation of Todd Cross by a racist social order, the violation of Faith as a ﬁgure in a sequence of gang rapes that stretches back from Arnold Tippis to the captain of the slave ship Trinity—Johnson seeks to suggest the complexity of the interrelationships that deﬁne our personal and collective history, as well as the manner in which these histories are forces operating upon our present realities. Is it possible to break the hold and cycle of history? While we are 37

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS always the products of history (a history that is both static and dynamic), our present circumstances, as Faith’s journey reveals, are determined not solely by the operations of history, but also by our choices that reﬂect the depth of our understanding not only of history but also of present realities. In search of the “Good Thing,” Faith must determine for herself if she is only a product of history or instead a purposeful agent for the future. At a later point in the novel, this challenge is put to Faith in the form of the following question by Richard M. Barrett, who robs her of all her money minutes after her arrival in Chicago: “What is the relationship between thought and being? Does what you think direct what is, or is it that what is controls what you think?” (89). As Barrett points out to Faith, the ﬁrst path is the way of magicians, and the other is the way of automatons. In reﬂecting upon these questions and their implications, Faith has, signiﬁcantly, a vision of Arnold Tippis, whom she regards, having acquired some distance from the rape, as a ﬁgure occupying the second path. Within hours after leaving the train station, our questing protagonist is robbed of many things, but initially of two hundred dollars, which is all the money she has in the world. The thief is Dr. Richard M. Barrett, a former professor of philosophy at Princeton, who has fallen on hard times. Without a job, rejected by his wife and two children, and in the ﬁnal stages of an illness that appears to be cancer, Barrett is an unlikely thief but his impoverished condition has reduced him to criminality. In the instant before he purloins Faith’s bag, he reveals himself to be a philosopher driven to meet the practical concerns of existence on the street: “Pray that the poets were right—that someday, someday the rich will ﬁnd themselves governed in a hell ruled by philosopher-kings. But until then, child . . . give me your bag!” (52). Of course, Barrett’s veiled mention of Plato’s Republic is a means of maintaining the focus and coherence of Johnson’s tale, but even more importantly, it is a means of revealing the unexpected point of intersection between two persons who could not be more unalike. The diverging paths of Faith and Barrett intersect once again after her rape by Tippis and her decision to work as a prostitute at the Hotel Sinclair. What could a black woman from a rural county in Georgia, raised on folk tales, have in common with a white classically trained, published scholar of philosophy formerly of Princeton, who is now a vagrant reduced to stealing from the innocent? Although articulated in different terms, what they share is a vision of the good and a passion bordering upon obsession to know and lose themselves in that transcendent vision. There is, however, a crucial difference between them. Barrett—older, more experienced, and brutalized 38

Faith and the Good Thing by the world yet strangely resilient—apprehends the good and its manifestations at a much deeper level, whereas Faith, at this stage in her quest, perceives the good in only pragmatic terms. Like Ellison’s questing narrator, Faith’s odyssey brings her in contact with individuals who offer her, at critical junctures, important advice that, if she possesses sufﬁcient insight and judgment, may enhance and advance her philosophic quest. Like the Swamp Woman and even Arnold Tippis, Barrett functions in this manner for Faith. Elements of Barrett’s advice remain obscure to Faith, not only because she has imagined a particular trajectory and clings to its certainty, but also because he delivers parts of it in German. A learned man like Dr. Lynch, Barrett’s frame of reference is not La Mettrie or Spencer, but rather J. W. von Goethe’s Faust. After learning Faith’s name, Barrett makes this reply: “Und Wunderbarist der Glaubens liebstes Kind, eh?” (87). The English translation of Barrett’s German is “And wonderful is Faith’s most favorite child, isn’t that right?” Found in “Night” in part one of Goethe’s Faust, this statement uttered by Faust is sometimes translated as “A miracle is Faith’s most favorite child.” These variations of a statement uttered sarcastically by Faust follow his exchanges with the Earth-spirit and Wagner. In psychological and spiritual terms, at this point in Faust, Goethe’s protagonist is despondent and at the point of suicide, for he has lost all faith, and has lost the sense of the miraculous and the wonderful that would lift him out of this dark state. In this dark moment, he is visited by a choir of angels who draw him back from the despair that would engulf him. In this instance of “doublevoiced, internally dialogized discourse,” we discover that Faust’s condition at this juncture recalls certain aspects of Faith’s condition. While not contemplating suicide, she is disillusioned and is surviving as a prostitute on the streets of Chicago. Later, when Faith confesses to Barrett that “People fail when they start looking for the ‘Good Thing,’ ” the philosopher again replies in the German of Faust: “Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt” (89). In this instance, Barrett delivers a line from the “Prologue in Heaven” in which God is in conversation with Mephistopheles. Translated as “Mankind makes mistakes, as long as it is striving,” Barrett delivers a statement by God who agrees to give Mephistopheles, following his wager, complete freedom in his efforts to corrupt Faust. The line Barrett utters in German to a bewildered Faith is the very essence of Faust. The setbacks, disappointments, and mistakes that have beset her since leaving Hatten County are intrinsic to her philosophical quest for the “Good Thing.” Striving is the very essence of human experience, or what Barrett later terms the human adventure, and in the process of living, men and women make mistakes, but it is the striving 39

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS and not the mistakes that is most important. Striving is humankind’s most essential quality. It is Barrett’s charge to convince Faith to continue to strive for the “Good Thing,” to pursue her ideal even though she is discouraged and disillusioned.43 In addition to being the vehicle for a certain wisdom, it appears that Barrett is a thief with a conscience and one who functions, as we discover, as Faith’s conscience in her striving for the “Good Thing.” Proof of Barrett’s moral approach to existence is his decision to return the items and money he stole from Faith on the day of her arrival in Chicago. Supporting herself as a prostitute at the Hotel Sinclair, she has changed considerably; indeed, she has hardened but still dreams of the “Good Thing.” When she enters her room to ﬁnd Barrett seated on her bed engaged in a pedicure, her ﬁrst thoughts move her to vengeance and then to violence. After squeezing his thumb in the doorframe until it is bloody and disﬁgured, Faith orders a very bruised and contrite Barrett to leave. He refuses. We learn that Barrett returns to Faith out of a need to help and protect her, and also to advance and encourage her in her philosophic quest. Appreciative of his return of her stolen property and also sensing his sincerity, Faith reveals her vulnerability to this dying philosopher who comforts her, addresses her as “daughter,” and, like the Swamp Woman, engages her in a dialectic on the nature of the good. Nursing an injured thumb and having elevated Faith in his mind to the status of “daughter,” Barrett engages his “co-worker” in the following dialectic: “We all need a guiding principle—we must have one, or our world falls apart. But the catch is that when we start seeking that principle it must ﬁrst, in every instance, be wholly removed from us and exist in some absolute, unsullied, perfect form. Yes, I know the principle originates in us—yes!—but it’s better to say it’s realized through us. But to be what we desire, that principle must seem completely other, greater than we are—something tangible, a thing of some sort like wood from the Cross at Calvary, or the grail, or a shred of the Saviour’s robe. . . . But that has problems. If it’s a thing we’re after, and if that thing is absolute goodness and perfection, then we’ll never have it. It’ll escape us at every turn—that is, until we bring it a little closer to us. . . .” Something went tight in Faith’s stomach. She cautiously said, “How?” “Historically, men could turn to good works to ﬁnd the realization of that principle; in your case that might be difﬁcult, but I suspect even as constricted by circumstances as you are, you can do a little good in this world.” (92)

In a relatively brief period of time, Barrett perceptively describes Faith’s approach to existence and the nature of her experiences up to this juncture. 40

Faith and the Good Thing For the innocent, trusting and believing Faith, the search for the “Good Thing” is the “guiding principle” that directs and uniﬁes her existence. It is the “guiding principle” that emboldened her to set out for territory unknown to her, in spite of such nay sayers as Dr. Lynch and Rev. Brown, in search of something as rare, in one sense, as the holy grail. In contradistinction to Barrett’s reading of her life to this point, the concept of the good or “Good Thing” does not originate in Faith but rather in Lavidia, but this “guiding principle” will be realized, ultimately, through Faith’s dynamic engagement with the forces of life. As Barrett explains and as Faith has discovered, the apprehension of the good as one thing has its “problems.” The objectiﬁcation and reduction of the good into thinghood, into a speciﬁc concrete reality, into something, only leads to an impasse and not to illumination. If the good is, as deﬁned by Socrates, that “which is and the brightest part of that which is,” then it would be impossible to reduce such knowledge, beauty, and pleasure to a single manifestation, however powerful and resplendent. This, sadly, is the mistake Faith makes throughout her philosophic quest and it explains why the good remains for her, at this and other moments, only a chimera. While Faith is receptive to Barrett’s argument and the possible means by which she might liberate herself from her narrow perception of an immensity, she ultimately, as Johnson writes, “tuned Barrett out” (92). And why does she reject Barrett’s position and his suggestion to “bring” the “Good Thing” “closer to us”? There are several reasons. First, Barrett’s dialectic recalls a homily that Faith heard days earlier at the Church of Continual Light, a storefront church on Chicago’s south side. Drawn to the black preacher’s message of hope, security, and happiness, Faith seriously considers his argument, which is that the “guiding principle” for which we search in the world is not an external but an internal reality: “It’s in here! That’s the only place it is, or could ever be—in your hearts!” (74). However, Faith rejects the argument of the preacher because, in her words, “There’s nothing inside, and there’s nothing outside—” (79). Driven by practical realities, it is impossible for Faith to imagine the “Good Thing” as anything other than an external reality, as something that will deliver her from the squalor of the Hotel Sinclair, or put another way, the lowest and darkest point in Plato’s cave. While Faith endorses certain features of the preacher’s argument, she adapts his message to meet the goals of her philosophic quest and the very narrow manner in which she currently imagines the “Good Thing”: “The minister had, in a small sense, been right: you had to bring your goals closer. Call them by another name. It was too hard to look, to suffer frustration, and keep searching in the face of probable defeat. It was 41

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS true: you had to settle on something, to make your peace with your dreams and take, when the chance came, what you could get. Peace of mind. . . . She would number her days, but only to squeeze from each whatever comfort could be secured” (81). Days later, when Barrett advises Faith that she should bring the thing “we’re after . . . a little closer to us . . .” she rejects his position as forcefully and as quickly as that of the storefront preacher. For Faith, things are clearer than ever: “She decided he was dead wrong. She knew what she needed and could see it in the possible, pleasing image of a younger man, someone who would wait on her as she now waited on others, a man who would save her from the sick, tossed thing she saw each day in the mirror above her sink: Faith Cross. . . . One had only to survive; only that was certain” (92). At this juncture in her odyssey, Faith is motivated by only practical realities. She remains convinced that the “Good Thing” is something as opposed to the ground for all things. She attributes the power of liberation from the bondage of the cave to someone else and not herself because she stubbornly clings to her particular and narrow perspective of the “Good Thing.” Sadly, the wisdom of Barrett is lost on her. Existing only in the visible world and employing the faculties of imagination and trust, Faith has not yet moved up the divided line to the intelligible world of forms where the meaning of things is apprehended through the faculties of thought and intellection. Shortly before his death, Barrett offers Faith this crucial and insightful perspective: “This Good Thing of yours . . . it is a reality like so many things on the horizon of faith and reason, but it’s certainly not a . . . thing” (92). Faith challenges Barrett to deﬁne this expansive reality and he informs her that their shared quest for the “Good Thing” is actually “the human adventure. . . . But you must believe; it’ll never appear otherwise” (92). The philosopher’s insight fails to penetrate Faith’s consciousness; so invested is she in her reading of this “guiding principle,” a narrow reading that endows the “Good Thing” with all the permanence of breath upon a mirror. Through his gift of the Doomsday Book moments before his death, Barrett provides Faith with images, rising from blank pages, of this very human adventure imagined as the “Good Thing”: On the ﬁrst page she saw her father crossing the dung-brown ﬁelds behind his farmhouse, ﬁelds splattered with rivulets and pools by late summer rain. . . . Then, because she willed it, she saw Lavidia splitting thick logs from the woodpile by the toolshed, singing some old, warm hymn and making up new verses while blackbirds ﬂew as tiny specks in formation above her head with a sound

42

Faith and the Good Thing like clothes ﬂapping on a line. . . . She saw Alpha Omega Holmes waving to her from a wind-rufﬂed cane ﬁeld, walking in a drying wind through its golden, swaying stalks to sweet-gum trees where she . . . waited. As long as she looked and ﬂipped the stiff pages of the book, she could see the farmhouse with clouds of gray smoke curling from its chimney in the dead of wintertime, then the lilting sewing bees and barnyard suppers in the spring, goats nibbling turnips, the picnics in Indian summer by the quiet ponds near the woods—the particular magic and music of a world to which she might never return, but loved all the more because it was unattainable. (94–95)

In a book that possesses the magical properties of the Thaumaturgic Mirror, Faith sees again all the people she has ever loved situated in the only place she has ever known and loved. Barrett’s Doomsday Book does not contain the census and survey of lands desired by William the Conqueror, but rather images of an idyllic, pastoral existence enshrouded in the past and far removed from the urban realities by which Faith is now challenged daily. The enchanting and beautiful images that rise from the blank pages are manifestations of the “Good Thing” for which Faith now searches, but which she already has known and which she recalls through the power of her imagination. These images, however, remain only images of what Faith perceives as a very remote past, rather than as powerful manifestations of what Barrett has termed the “guiding principle” or the “Good Thing.” This failure of vision and imagination on Faith’s part leads her to yet another ﬁgure in her philosophic quest, Isaac Maxwell, who is very far being “the pleasing image of a younger man” she imagines as her “Good Thing.” When Faith Cross meets Isaac Maxwell, she has made some progress in terms of improving her material circumstances. She has moved from the Hotel Sinclair to an apartment complex called Eden Green, and, as Johnson writes, has “cut back her streetwalking to supply only what she needed to balance her budget, and enrolled in secretarial school” (98). These improvements notwithstanding, our “ethical adventurer” is perhaps at her lowest point in terms of her concept of the “Good Thing.” At the time of their meeting, Maxwell’s constricted vision of the world corresponds, in many ways, to Faith’s own narrow vision. Like Faith, Maxwell is an outsider, for he is not from Chicago but Columbus, Ohio; they are both, therefore, negotiating an alien and difﬁcult landscape. As already stated, in appearance Maxwell is not “the pleasing image of a younger man” who embodies the good, but is instead a caricature of the values that are diametrically opposed to the ideals so important to Richard Barrett, and that inspired Faith to leave Hatten County at the prompting of the Swamp Woman:

43

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Some folks might say that Isaac Maxwell looked a bit queer, as though, at birth, he’d been unable to make up his mind about what he wanted to be. There was a little goat in his long head, the look of a cow in his moist eyes and, in his slight ﬁgure, you could see the outline of, perhaps, an upright wolf. His chin was weak and peppered with shaving scars, slightly blue at the edges. . . . The color of his skin, it seemed to Faith, was yellow and had the same chroma as the yolk of his eggs—like urine from enﬂamed kidneys. Though he was only twenty-four he was balding, which explained his wig and why he tugged at its corners whenever it slipped back on his head, loose like a yarmulke. (99)

There is in this description of Maxwell a combining of both aggression and vulnerability, absurdity and the grotesque. An assistant editor for The Sentry, a local newspaper, Maxwell aspires to be a major ﬁgure in the world of journalism and imagines his position at the Chicago newspaper as the platform for his carefully planned ascendancy. Signiﬁcantly, we are introduced to Maxwell after the publication in The Sentry of his editorial entitled “The Contest of Wills.” Proud of this achievement, he is holding forth over breakfast in the most obnoxious fashion in the presence of a now very beguiling and calculating Faith. Like Dr. Lynch, Rev. Brown, Richard Barrett, and Arnold Tippis, Maxwell has his own conception of the “Good Thing,” which for him is manifest in the most basic operations of the world—power: “All that garbage about black and white and gay power misses the mark . . . everybody’s out for Number One—Nu-u-u-mero Uno, and anybody who tells you different is a goddam liar. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Society’s composed of individuals, and every one of ’ems got an individual will. Society thrives on the clash of those wills. . . . Power . . . is what it’s all about. . . . But everybody won’t get it. . . . Some people are naturally weak and, to tell it like it is, deserve to be ﬂunkies, others—like myself—are strong,” he tapped his chest with the stem of his fork, “way down deep, I mean. The weak ones go out to demonstrate, march, boycott, strike, picket—and they try to change the world, you understand? The point is to use it.” He shook his head, his free hand pressed to his forehead to hold down his wig. “Those people will never know what real power is. You know what it is? You know what’s really good? . . . It’s cash,” he announced, “cash money.” Then he slapped the checkered tablecloth with his palm. “Why, you can be as ugly as a witch, you can be evil and selﬁsh and wicked, but cash money can make you beautiful, right?” He saw her face freeze up and softened his voice. “If you haven’t got talent, you can buy folks who do—whatever you want, whatever your Will points to is yours. That’s what I said in there,” and he tapped the back of the newspaper in her hand. (99–100)

Maxwell’s elaboration of his thesis contains claims that link him to none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, the dominant but unnamed ﬁgure in John44

Faith and the Good Thing son’s invention, “The Power Book Library,” and also to such ﬁgures as Horatio Alger, Colin Wilson, Norman Vincent Peale, and, strangely, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche argues that the will to power, a central concept in the work of this German philosopher who was deeply inﬂuenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, is basic to all human interactions. According to Nietzsche, human beings desire nothing more than power, and it is this desire to wield power that is the source of both pleasure and pain in human existence. Further, Maxwell’s division of the world into the weak and the strong also reﬂects the thinking of Nietzsche as expounded in the concept of “aristocratic radicalism” where the philosopher posits that there is a hierarchy among human beings, with some occupying the category of the “herd” and others, a minority, occupying the category of the “superior man” who is “richly endowed with vigor, gaiety, the will to afﬁrm himself in action, and the willingness to ﬁght for his mode of life and thought. At the same time, he spurns pettiness, all resentment rooted in jealousy . . . and all gratuitous cruelty. Instead he shows himself open-minded, magnanimous, and never falsely modest.”44 While Maxwell aspires to occupy a superior or powerful position, he does not possess the humane attributes of Nietzsche’s “superior man.” On the contrary, in his relationship with Faith and others he is abusive, violent, exploitative, insecure, sexist, and concerned only with maintaining the superiority of his position. Finally, Maxwell is bourgeois in his outlook, for his worship of “cash money” is evidence of his aspirations to secure a position of power among the propertied class. Signiﬁcantly, Maxwell’s praise of wealth is an approximation of an observation made by Karl Marx, who understood the transformational qualities of capital, notwithstanding his rigorous critique of capitalism. In reﬂecting upon wealth, the German political philosopher and economist observed the following: “I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman for myself. Consequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, is annulled by money. . . . I am a detestable, dishonourable, unscrupulous and stupid man, but money is honoured and so also is its possessor.”45 While Maxwell embodies the insights of Nietzsche and Marx and thereby seeks to attain a position of privilege in the modern economy, his efforts to do so are undermined, ironically, by his asthmatic condition. In this use of double-voiced discourse, Johnson’s decision to make Maxwell, his black, pathetic, and comic version of Nietzsche’s Super Man, an asthmatic is a not-so-subtle critique of the journalist’s pretensions as well as further evidence of the irreverent humor everywhere in the novel. Such humor recalls, as we shall see, Johnson’s decision to make the egoist and colonizer Ebenezer Falcon of 45

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Middle Passage a midget. As we take note of the intertextual relationships that exist in Johnson’s growing corpus, his most withering critique of the positions of Isaac Maxwell and Ebenezer Falcon emerges in Dreamer in the characters of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his greatly transformed double, Chaym Smith. The ominously entitled editorial “The Contest of Wills,” an elaboration of his valedictorian address entitled “The Power of Will,” is not only an opening through which Johnson introduces both Nietzsche and Marx and thereby frames the thought and actions of Maxwell, but it also is a means by which he frames the power dynamics that characterize the relationship and subsequent marriage of Faith and Maxwell, a marriage deﬁned almost exclusively by a clash of wills. As Nash argues, in this clash of wills “Maxwell cannot defend himself because he cannot see her machinations; at the heart of his theory of Will Power are a series of preconceived notions about power and gender that keep him from understanding his struggle with Faith.”46 In this struggle for supremacy, Faith emerges as the stronger, although her victory takes a great toll in both psychic and spiritual terms. Adept at feigning both concern and passion, within days after their meeting Faith begins imposing her will upon a much weaker Maxwell: He was incredibly slow, but could be cajoled into anything she willed through an elaborate process of innuendo and suggestion that left her fatigued and frustrated, but always victorious. Indeed, he seemed dull to her, as simple as a three-headed, treasure-guarding troll, but, she told herself, intrinsically good . . . and harmless in a cow-like way. She bent forward, powdering her cheeks, certain that Dr. Lynch had been so right: everything was stimulus and response. Machinery. She remembered the occasion when Maxwell, set in motion by her elaborate act of submissiveness, made his ﬁrst advances toward her. (104)

Patient and skilled at manipulation, Faith, in a rather short period of time, achieves mastery over The Sentry’s rising star who is not, it seems, her equal intellectually or in other ways. In her relationship with Maxwell, Faith has assumed the views of Dr. Lynch, that is that life is only “stimulus and response,” a view she had at one time rejected. At this juncture in her search for the “Good Thing,” Faith has assumed not only the view of Dr. Lynch, but also that of Arnold Tippis, the neurotic dentist who rapes her and thus initiates her descent into the lowest parts of the cave. Faith does not regard Maxwell as a human being but as an object: “He was her object, pure and simple, and she was his, and between them this twirling exchange for supremacy of wills, as he called it, built a tension or bond that she was willing 46

Faith and the Good Thing to call, for want of a better word, love. You took what you could get. Somehow it was all right” (109). No longer the dreamer and idealist, Faith has now become cynical and pragmatic in her approach to living. “The Good Thing, after all was here—it weighed about one hundred and ﬁfty pounds, received paychecks twice a month, and would do anything she asked” (105–106). Committed only to the acquisition of ﬁnancial security and material comfort, Maxwell embodies for Faith the “Good Thing” as she now conceives of it. This philosophic soul has reduced this sublime notion to merely “comfortable living,” to recall the prophetic language of Tippis. And for the achievement of middle-class security, Faith endures Maxwell’s sexism, his competitiveness, his many insecurities, and his absurd pretensions to power. Although haunted by Barrett, who functions as her conscience throughout her philosophical quest, Faith nevertheless accepts the implications of her choice of Maxwell: “And she would feel grief build in her chest, and for no apparent reason at all, except that she felt ﬁlled with some oceanic, painful-pleasurable awareness of her self-betrayal in contrast to her life’s half-forgotten promise” (109). Although conscious of her “self-betrayal” and the vulgar reduction of the “Good Thing” to material comfort, Faith resists this bleak vision when it is given back to her through Maxwell in an exchange that takes place on their way to the theater: He seemed to remember something and lowered his hand, glancing sideways at her. “But you have to direct the Will toward what’s right and good, of course.” Faith slid up in her seat. “What is right?” “Security and comfort,” Maxwell laughed, still sucking at his teeth. “Being on top of things, having nice things, respect, a little authority—feeling like a man. Things like that.” She left that alone. It hung heavy in the close space of the car, like gas from a sick person’s bowels, until she, to clear the air, said, “I guess.” It didn’t matter what he thought, or if he thought at all, which was still questionable, as long as he was sweet. Sometimes. “That’s your theory?” she asked ﬁnally. “That’s all ?” Maxwell reddened a little. “I know it needs some work. I’m not writing it up for Mind or the Philosophical Review, you know! All the implications aren’t worked out—I know that—but it’s how I feel about things and it helps me stay in the race.” (117)

Confronted again with the uninspiring reality of her choice, her self-betrayal, Faith continues, at least inwardly, to strive for something greater, something closer to her ideal. This moment of striving, however, passes. 47

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS After an unexpected encounter with Arnold Tippis, who is now employed as an usher while pursuing studies in nursing, Faith watches in horror as this encounter degenerates into a physical altercation between Tippis and Maxwell. Wishing to fend off the advances of what he believes to be a stranger, Maxwell physically subdues Tippis in the aisle of the theater. Confronted with a ﬁgure from a past that she wishes to forget, Faith chooses the future as embodied in Maxwell. Returning home from the theater, Faith manipulates Maxwell into proposing marriage: “Yes,” she whispered, “I do need you, Isaac.” “Faith, I’m nuh-nuh-NOTHING! I’m nuh-nuh-NOBODY, but I-I swear I’ll work for y-you. I luh-luh-love you!” And he heaved a long sigh. Good she thought, very good. And she closed her eyes and clenched her ﬁsts. Her ear to his chest, she could hear his heart, a loud, throbbing, roiling in his breast . . . and the words were on her lips, had been there since the day she’d met him, and now, as he fought for breath and squeezed her tight enough to cause her pain, she could say automatically, quickly and without a thought: “Be my good thing. . . .” “Y-Yes!” shot from Maxwell’s lips. His arms went slack with exhaustion. “Wuh-Wuh-Will you marry me?” She opened her eyes, casting her gaze upward through the darkness to the round ﬁgure of a faded rosette in the center of the ceiling, then to the picture window where Barrett’s disembodied hazel eyes closed in something like defeat. A shiver of triumph swept over her. The contest of wills. She shut her eyes again, relaxed. “Yes.” (123–124)

For the moment, Faith feels victorious, for in accepting Maxwell’s proposal of marriage she has at last acquired the “Good Thing,” as she now conceives of it. It is important to stress that Faith’s imperative to Maxwell, “Be my good thing,” has a special meaning in the black vernacular speech of the 1970s, the decade during which the novel was published. Such phrasing as “Get yourself a good thing,” or “I got myself a good thing” implied the search for and the achievement of ﬁnancial and material success in a society that placed great value upon such things. Within this context, the “Good Thing” does not possess the elements of a philosophical quest, but rather the attainment of a vulgar materialism. The “Good Thing” has evolved from deathbed advice to something like a curse. It is to this low point that Faith has descended; she is now done with striving. In witnessing this act of self-betrayal, Barrett, her conscience and symbol of an ideal she has abandoned, vanishes from her consciousness “in something like defeat.” The consequences of her self-betrayal are soon painfully impressed upon 48

Faith and the Good Thing Faith. While there is a dramatic improvement in her external life and circumstances, the marriage to Maxwell constitutes a betrayal of the process and goals of her philosophical quest. During her marriage to Maxwell, Faith is at a low point in her psychological and spiritual development. She has reduced the “Good Thing” to a thing, an object. In seeking to acquire an object, Maxwell, Faith has become an object to herself: Objects have no name. They are Its, and this is what Faith saw reﬂected in her bedroom mirror on the day of her ﬁrst wedding anniversary. IT was portly, IT stared with puffy eyes at her from the smooth glass, IT’s body was well fed, but was losing IT’s health; IT was lugubrious with a gleam along IT’s round limbs, as swollen as a corpse in its seventh day. . . . The fruit of her body had gone bad. Each day she looked in the mirror she saw deeper lines around IT’s mouth and darker circles under IT’s eyes. IT was beginning to lose IT’s hair rapidly from overuse of a sizzling black straightening comb; IT changed clothes three times a day but still looked terrible; IT had spare tires around IT’s waist that no amount of morning isometrics with that muscular man on daytime television could reduce. IT, she feared, was a hopeless case. (125–127)

Only one year into her marriage to Maxwell, Faith has undergone a metamorphosis in physical terms that corresponds to her psychic and spiritual state. In her reduction of the “Good Thing” to a speciﬁc object, Maxwell, she herself has become an object. In this sad and ironic state, Faith experiences a novel species of slavery, for as Johnson writes: “It seemed that she wasn’t out of bondage, not one bit. . . . What had been a life of need was now a life of relative ease. . . . She had more than ample food, a purse bulging with special plastic cards to purchase, on the spot, anything that caught her eye. She had everything, children, all the good things” (132). With Faith as his example, Johnson redeﬁnes the concept of slavery. It is not only, as he suggests in the voice of a storyteller, chattel slavery of the kind practiced within the context of the peculiar institution and described in slave narratives, but also a species of slavery that assumes a metaphysical form. Even though free in physical terms, Faith is in bondage in metaphysical terms, that is, in bondage to an idea, a way of life, a preoccupation. In Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson introduces for the ﬁrst time an expansive concept of slavery that he develops and reﬁnes with powerful effects in all of his subsequent novels, but most especially, as we shall see, in Oxherding Tale. Even though in bondage to an exceedingly reductive concept of the “Good Thing,” Faith possesses sufﬁcient self-awareness and objectivity not to blame Maxwell, who also is similarly enslaved, for her present circum49

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS stances. She knows that it would be wrong to accuse Maxwell of her loss of faith, of her failure to continue to strive, as Barrett would have her do. In a marriage deﬁned by the contest of wills and in which each partner is motivated by self-interest, Faith and Maxwell exist in a perpetual state of conﬂict. After Faith reveals to Maxwell in a moment of weakness her secret life as a prostitute at the Hotel Sinclair, their unpromising marriage takes a downward turn. Maxwell, aware for the ﬁrst time that he has married a former prostitute, actively seeks to prostitute Faith to his employers in order to advance his now not-so-promising career at The Sentry. At this crucial juncture in her marriage and her philosophical quest, Faith is reunited with Alpha Omega Holmes, her ﬁrst and indeed last lover from Hatten County. Ironically, the reunion is facilitated by Maxwell, who has convinced Holmes to collaborate with him on a special series focusing upon prison life that is scheduled for publication in The Sentry. The focus of the special series is an ironic commentary upon the bondage in which Faith and Maxwell are both entrapped in their marriage, in contrast to a free and liberating Holmes, an ex-convict. Much to Maxwell’s disappointment, this series is never published, and the cynical, scheming journalist soon ﬁnds himself unemployed as a result of a series of errors in judgment that place the newspaper under special scrutiny from the white elite of Chicago. While Maxwell’s disillusionment mirrors Faith’s own state, and while he functions to reveal the inward stretch of Faith’s journey at this point, he also functions to facilitate the outward reach of a series of vital intersections. Crucially, Maxwell writes the obituary of Barrett, who expires in Faith’s presence in a public park in Chicago. He also is the point of intersection for Faith’s unexpected reunion with Arnold Tippis almost a year after her departure from the Hotel Sinclair, the site of her rape by Tippis and her subsequent descent into prostitution. Finally, Maxwell is the point of intersection for Faith’s reunion with Holmes, a romantic ﬁgure whose return signals her return to Hatten County and her liberation from the bondage of her marriage. Of these several intersections, Maxwell comes to be aware of only the third and ﬁnal one, one that results in the dissolution of his doomed marriage. Within moments of their reunion, Faith recognizes Holmes as the ﬁgure she had beheld in the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror but only now he “seemed somewhat taller, more muscular than before, with bulging veins that moved under the skin on his forearms and neck like snakes. . . . His clothes were simple. . . . Anyone who dressed so simply, who disregarded his exterior, had to be rich inside, as complex and intricate as an old gold watch” 50

Faith and the Good Thing (141–142). It is not only this memory borne of the wizardry of the Swamp Woman that unites Faith and Holmes, but also their shared struggle in the alien, exploitative milieu of Chicago where they both ﬁnd themselves preying upon others for subsistence. While Faith earns her living as a prostitute, Holmes earns his living as a thief. In monetary terms, both deﬁne subsistence in twenty-dollar increments; this is the amount that Faith once charged her customers for an evening of sexual favors and storytelling, and beyond this amount Holmes will not steal from others as he has carefully budgeted his needs. So scrupulous is he about this matter, that he is apprehended by the police in the act of returning ﬁve dollars to an individual who has fallen prey to his thievery. In this regard, Holmes betrays the same degree of scrupulousness as Barrett, for although reduced to exploiting others, both take only what is essential to their survival and nothing more. Predictably, Faith, in her unhappy marriage with Maxwell, once again becomes romantically involved with Holmes. The storyteller, ex-convict, and now painter is not only an escape from the multiplying disappointments of her marriage, but he also functions, like the other male ﬁgures in Faith’s life, as a representative of a particular ethical and philosophical point of view. He is not only a reminder of an existence she has left behind, a ﬁgure bodying forth the values of a rural, agrarian folk culture in an urban industrial milieu, and a harbinger of her eventual return to that existence, but he also, like Barrett, challenges Faith to re-examine her concept of the “Good Thing.” In a conversation with Holmes in which the focal point is his painting of the Swamp Woman, Faith asks the aspiring painter to deﬁne the “Good Thing.” Holmes’s response is revealing of his simple but complex approach to existence: Holmes laughed. It sounded like barking. “You were good.” He looked down at the tablecloth and their empty plates. “That story was good. The dinner was good. . . .” Somehow it made sense. Faith went again to the Swamp Woman’s portrait. She could almost hear it sniggering. The good things were the things of the moment, the things that had been felt and tasted and touched in the past, and might be tasted still. (156–157)

Holmes’s homespun observations are the foundation for a revelation for Faith who, for the ﬁrst time, is receptive to a concept of the “Good Thing” that is different from her own. She is open to this new knowledge because of the power of Holmes’s example, and also because of her growing awareness, borne of his commitment to painting, that she has been striving in her marriage to Maxwell for the wrong things. 51

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS In watching Holmes complete his painting of the Swamp Woman, a painting that is in a vital sense a portrait of Faith, given the novel’s denouement, Faith begins to apprehend to what degree Holmes has been transformed not only by experience but also by his commitment to art. Conversely, she apprehends how little she has changed during the course of her own odyssey and also how she has failed to discover an art that would facilitate a similar transformation in herself: Holmes to her seemed no longer a boy. But not a man either. An eternal child, perhaps. Yes. It came through now as clear as the lines in a wet leaf: when he created, he tried to create himself anew. . . . Then he began: the unﬁnished corners of the Swamp Woman’s face were conjured beneath his brush, as were shadows and illusions of light, depth, and space in images as clear as those she’d seen on the blank pages of Barrett’s Doomsday Book. Every inch of the lush, rolling background, every curve of the hills and angle of the farmhouse, every line of the ﬁelds crisscrossed with primitive industry was incredibly precise. . . . He was, she realized, calling these things, changing, twisting, and transforming them into—what? Order. The scene puzzled her because there could be no doubt that Holmes, though he had no reason to be happy in his present situation, was, when he painted, freer, happier, and more whole than anyone she’d seen since she arrived in Chicago. She was slightly touched, slightly saddened by the truth of it all. There was Holmes and his canvas, his objects, but through his object, not in spite of it, he seemed to ﬁnd release: the Good Thing. She envied him, then felt terrible, for since she could not create, how then could she realize her goal? (157– 158)

Through Holmes’s portrait of the Swamp Woman, Faith returns to a revelation she experienced through the gift of Barrett’s Doomsday Book. To a disbelieving Faith intent upon realizing the “Good Thing” in the very constrained terms in which she has imagined it, Barrett makes the critical observation that this phenomenon “is a reality like so many things on the horizon of faith and reason, but it’s certainly not a . . . thing” (92). By means of the example of Holmes before his canvas, she revisits the special knowledge and insight passed on to her through her encounter with the striving philosopher. While in modest circumstances, Holmes knows a degree of prosperity and wholeness that Faith can only imagine. This awareness induces in Faith both sadness and envy. In describing to Faith the personal signiﬁcance of his art, Holmes makes the following observation: “All I know is that doin’ hit makes me feel good, the way goin’ to Sunday meeting with Reverend Brown never could. In fact, if I paint on Sunday I don’t even feel like I need to go to church!” (159). For Holmes, art is a form of prayer, a 52

Faith and the Good Thing meditation that is the nexus to the transcendent, the sublime: the “Good Thing.” Interestingly, Holmes spurns the label of artist for himself and asserts that “the only real artist I ever knew was the Swamp Woman,” whose vehicle as an artist is neither paint, nor stone, nor sheet music but ideas transformed through the power of storytelling. Even though Johnson seems to be privileging the art of the writer through the example of a visual artist, the power of Holmes’s assertion is not diminished, as every artist, the medium notwithstanding, begins ﬁrst with an idea, a vision of a form he or she is committed to realizing in the world. Ideas, stresses Holmes, are what matter. This emphasis upon ideas, intangibles, alarms Faith, who even at this critical juncture still clings to certainty and to the belief that the “Good Thing” is something: “You have to have something to compare things by, don’t you? The Good Thing—isn’t that the standard?” He laughed. It did not sound wholly sane. “There ain’t no standard.” Faith said no more of this. Like so many ideas she’d been exposed to, she tucked this one away deep in her memory, refusing to dwell on it now and reserving it for those hours when she was alone, aching with wonder, and could inspect it like the contents of a lost purse one ﬁnds on the street. (160)

In conjuring the image of a lost purse, we return to Faith’s arrival in Chicago and her fateful meeting with Tippis set in motion by Barret’s theft. Moreover, Johnson reveals the subtle shifts in Faith’s consciousness catalyzed by this exchange with Holmes, the embodiment of a folk wisdom that apprehends the good or the “Good Thing” in all the operations of existence. Envying Holmes’s sense of wholeness acquired through the processes of painting, Faith seeks a corresponding means to wholeness for herself. This she discovers during the stages of her pregnancy, for she becomes, inevitably, pregnant with Holmes’s child. After expressing his shock and disbelief along with his unwillingness to give up his art for fatherhood, Holmes leads Faith to believe that he will accept the consequences of his involvement with her and that he will inform Maxwell of this deception, but, as we discover, he fails to do this. One deception leads to another. While Faith is disappointed in Holmes’s reaction to the fact of the pregnancy and his subsequent failure to honor his paternity, through him and through the process of pregnancy she feels that she is initiated for the ﬁrst time into life’s profoundest mystery: He couldn’t be blamed for his reaction. After three years of living away from the sunlight in a tiny cell he had a right to his freedom. Just the same, it

53

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS disturbed her. From the moment she knew she was pregnant she realized that a portion of her bondage had come to an end. The thing moved inside her in some warm, deep place like sea depths where insects are spawned. . . . She could not hate him. Through him she was no longer apart from the mysteries of the earth, but involved in them. . . . But he, like all men, was a stranger to her, to the earth, and was driven by a restlessness, a disease she only now understood. It had stricken Lynch, and Brown and Barrett alike, had laid its heavy hand on Big Todd—suffocating them with a sense of fragility and foolishness before the rhythm of the world. She knew that was it—life was music and they could not dance, had no steps, so to speak, and stood there on the gigantic dance ﬂoor of existence, sulking and sneering at those who did dance. They could not be content as the humble caretakers of the garden of creation, could not create as she, or God, or a risible old witch woman could; they could not conjure beauty from the nothingness of all our lives. They were the dead living. Yet she had that connection with things, that capacity to dance if the universe said so, to sing if it demanded song. Unable to create, to conjure life from darkness, men railed against the world. Brown worshiped it to gain its favor, Lynch dissected it, Alpha painted it, Tippis—unable to change it—changed himself, Maxwell ignored it. Creation—conjuring, dancing to the world’s grim mi, fa, mi, for all men was a queer thing—it couldn’t be controlled, couldn’t be bought, or captured on canvas, or bent to ﬁt a desperate dream; above all, it couldn’t be ignored. Then how did a woman . . . seize the mystery? Deep within, Faith knew she harbored that secret. In a man’s world she was denied so much. Conquest was forbidden; passion was forbidden; freedom was impossible; what remained? the biological superiority? creation? and how then creation? The child, in an odd way, was the answer—it was all history focused on a single point. . . . She did this, created this new subject of the world. (167–168)

Through the pregnancy, Faith achieves a sense of harmony and an involvement with the processes of creation. For the ﬁrst time in her life and certainly for the ﬁrst time since leaving Hatten County in search of the “Good Thing,” she feels centered, powerful, and purposeful; she is able to dance to what Johnson terms the “world’s grim mi, fa, mi.” Through the process of the pregnancy, of creating new life out of her own body, Faith is able to “seize the mystery” at the center of all existence and in the process liberate herself from the species of bondage by which she is plagued. While it is clear that through the pregnancy Faith has arrived at broader insights and deeper connections to the fundamental operations of existence, these insights and connections are not achieved through her mind but through her body. While this construction may speak to the complexity of Faith’s particular existence, to insist that it applies to all women is problematic. To suggest that it is only through pregnancy and the process of giving birth that women participate in the complex processes of creation is to propound an essentialist reading of the lives of women. And also, by extension, 54

Faith and the Good Thing the lives of men. If we accept the premise of this argument, then how do we read the life of Holmes, who as an artist believes that his life is not his own—“hit’s for art—the idea of perfection!” (166). As stated earlier, through painting and its processes, Holmes has achieved a sense of wholeness that continues to elude Faith. He is, through the manipulation of brush upon canvas, participating in the processes of creation, dancing, as it were, to the “world’s grim mi, fa, mi.” Through the interplay of intuition, intelligence, and technique, Holmes gives birth, in one sense, to new forms or interpretations of existence that we may call art. He is conjuring “beauty from the nothingness” of his life. Consequently, he is, I would suggest, very far from being what Johnson terms “the dead living.” While it would be legitimate to assert that some men feel inadequate before the mysteries of creation, and that some women achieve a connection to the mysteries of creation through pregnancy and the process of giving birth, it is essentialist to argue for the “biological superiority” of women over men in the broad domain of creation. Within the context of the novel, it also is contradictory, for again how do we read the aspirations and achievement of Holmes in such a framework? And further, how do we interpret the lives of men and women who do not yearn for children, who do not wish to experience creation in this particular form, who do not regard children as a means of liberating themselves from various forms of bondage, but rather who regard children as another form of bondage? Put another way, how do we interpret the lives of men and women who, like Janie Crawford, Sula Peace, Andrew Hawkins, and Ellison’s questing narrator, choose to give birth to themselves? Who strive for a self-awareness within the context of history, and through their commitment to a vocation, an art form, or any other passion? The processes of creation are not conﬁned only to biology. As Johnson states earlier through Holmes, ideas also are a vital means by which human beings express, participate in, and inﬂuence the dynamic and volatile processes of creation; ideas are the foundation for the execution of a vision in all the domains in which human beings seek to interrogate the meaning of the “Good Thing,” and to know its wisdom and beauty. In propounding this gendered reading of creation, Johnson unwittingly robs Faith and Holmes of some of their individuality, beauty, and force as characters who enrich and expand the world of the American novel, and who also test and stretch our conception of what it means to be feminine and masculine. This gendered reading of the processes of creation is a recurring feature of Johnson’s ﬁction, one that emerges again in Oxherding Tale.47 Unfortunately, Faith’s excitement is short-lived. When she reveals the 55

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS fact of her pregnancy to Maxwell—who refuses to be duped and guesses correctly the paternity of the child—she ﬁnds herself once again on the streets of Chicago. Through his tears, a sobbing and violent Maxwell informs Faith: “You just lost your good thing” (174). Without friends and signiﬁcant resources, she returns to the Hotel Sinclair, indeed, to the very room she once inhabited. Having come full circle, it is in the grimy rooms of the Hotel Sinclair, the site of an earlier and distinct existence, that Faith gives birth to an infant girl. Tragically, for Faith even motherhood is short-lived, for her child perishes in a ﬁre that destroys the hotel, a ﬁre foretold, like all the other major events in her life, in the Swamp Woman’s Thaumaturgic Mirror. When she regains consciousness in a hospital, she is administered to by none other than Arnold Tippis, who is now a male nurse. Faith is subsequently visited by a contrite Maxwell, who leaves her, signiﬁcantly, with twenty dollars, a sum that links her to both the living and the dead, before she expels him from her room. Again, in signiﬁcant ways Faith has come full circle. The ﬁre serves an important function in advancing Johnson’s tale. First, it in part redeems his questionable theory of the “biological superiority” of women commented upon earlier. While we mourn the loss of life of her child, Faith is challenged to continue her search for the “Good Thing.” In the process, she, like Hurston’s Janie Crawford, gives birth to herself. Second, the ﬁre functions as a purgative device that liberates Faith from all the “respective stances she’d endured: Lynch, Tippis, Lavidia, Brown, Maxwell, Barrett, and Big Todd. Their voices tramped through her mind with the force of a hunter’s bootheel—being and not being, life cannot support itself, sublimation of instinctual drives, get yourself a good thing. . . . She had suffered, and what had she now? Ash on her tongue” (183). Signiﬁcantly, Holmes is not mentioned in this conﬁguration of stances, a fact that suggests that in spite of his failure to honor his paternal obligations, he still advances Faith’s journey in meaningful ways. Along with the Swamp Woman, it is the ex-convict who catalyzes Faith’s liberation from the bondage of the cave. Third, and ﬁnally, the ﬁre effects a disﬁgurement that also is a transformation, for Faith is now the striking image of the Swamp Woman to whom she now returns, still in search of the meaning of the “Good Thing.” Summoned by the Swamp Woman’s familiar, our questing protagonist returns to Hatten County for what will be her ﬁnal encounter with the ﬁgure who set her on this philosophical quest. Upon entering the shanty of the Swamp Woman, Faith comes quickly to the point. Wishing to understand the genesis and meaning of the “Good Thing” after years of searching, Faith is impatient with the jokes and cryptic 56

Faith and the Good Thing musings of the Swamp Woman, who begins to reveal to her the mystery of the “Good Thing” through, initially, a commentary on the hybrid nature of identity: “Don’t ya think I’m more than a werewitch, just like everybody’s much more than whatever they have to be at one given time? It’s like this: everybody looks for the Good Thing in different ways, right?” (187). The Swamp Woman senses that Faith is uncertain in her understanding of this point and provides her with the ﬁrst of several explanations that bring her closer to a realization of the meaning of the “Good Thing”: “Do ya really understand that a man or woman or werewitch has a thousand ’n one ways to look for what’s good in life? Do ya see that ya have to start with the limitations that ya ﬁnd y’self in, say, as a preacher, then follow the preacher’s path as far as that’ll take ya . . . ; then, ya take a scientist’s path ’n see how far that’ll take ya?” Across the Swamp Woman’s face was a seriousness and intensity Faith had never seen. “Ya take every path: the oracle’s, teacher’s, the artist’s, and even the path of the common fool, and ya learn a li’l bit from each one. That’s life, girlie. Ya keep right on steppin’ and pickin’ up the pieces until ya gets the whole thing—the Good Thing. As for me, werewitchin’ is pretty played out. . . . I think maybe I’d like to try a young girl’s way—innocence, faith and all that. Might be a lot of laughs—.” (187–188)

In an exchange that recalls Socrates’s dialectic with Glaucon on the nature of the good, the Swamp Woman stresses to a somewhat confused Faith that life is process, improvisation, and experimentation, and that the “Good Thing” manifests itself in numberless ways and on numberless paths. Signiﬁcantly, the Swamp Woman indicates that her current path has run its course and that it is time for her to try a new path, the path of the young girl, the path on which Faith has been traveling. Through language and concepts that reﬂect Johnson’s indebtedness to Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the Swamp Woman’s expression of a desire to try a new path is a foreshadowing of the transformation that she will undergo before leaving her shanty and assuming the path of Faith—and Faith, as we discover, assuming the path of the Swamp Woman. But before these transformations take place, more explanations are needed before a still confused and questioning Faith achieves a full understanding of the “Good Thing.” In a manner that is both compassionate and ironic, the Swamp Woman critiques the shortcomings of Faith that have obscured for her the meaning of the “Good Thing.” First, Faith has “clung desperately with both arms to the belief in certainty,” a condition, according to the Swamp Woman, that made it impossible for her to conjure, that is, to imagine the world in its interrelationships, mystery, and beauty (192). In addition to a “belief in cer57

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS tainty,” Faith, as the Swamp Woman points out, placed far too much importance upon objectivity. As she explains to Faith, instead of “bein’ one with every object, every object became a thing apart from ya-ya even became a thing to y’self! So ya broke your bonds with the world when ya got smart” (192). A belief in certainty and objectivity results in a certain arrogance, in a belief that the richness and complexity of the world can be reduced and explained by systems that are the results of rational processes. Love, as the Swamp Woman implies, is a phenomenon that ultimately transcends systems, taxonomies, categories, and tables of judgment. Still uncertain, Faith then asks the Swamp Woman if the “Good Thing” is love. The conjure woman, predictably, counters in the following manner: “Don’t pin me down!” the werewitch wailed. “If you ask me ’gain, I’ll say it’s hate. Ask me thrice, and I’ll say it’s neither, ’cause the Good Thing’s spontaneous; it’s absolutely nothin’, but particularly it’s everythin’ ” (193). Here again, Faith encounters a variation of an observation on the “Good Thing” made by Barrett, who informs Faith at the beginning of her quest that the “Good Thing” “is a reality . . . but not a . . . thing” (92). At that point in her journey, Faith’s belief in certainty and objectivity made it impossible for her to appreciate Barrett’s insight. Still somewhat uncertain of the direction of the Swamp Woman’s dialectic, Faith remains adrift. Sensing her confusion, the Swamp Woman attempts a ﬁnal illustration. She escorts Faith to a window in her shanty and invites her to take in the operations of the dawn, of a new day coming into being. Afterwards, the Swamp Woman remarks to Faith: “ ‘Hee hee! Systematize that!’ The Swamp Woman laughed. ‘It makes ya feel stupid, don’t it?’ Then she was dead serious. ‘Who says ya gotta understand the universe to love, to conjure it, girlie? . . . On every path you take you’ll ﬁnd a li’l bit of the Good Thing and vexations as well. Try my path, why don’t ya?’ Faith for the ﬁrst time understood” (194). In the instant of this epiphany, the transformation in process is achieved: Faith becomes the Swamp Woman, and the Swamp Woman becomes Faith; or put another way, they exchange one path for another. Through the intervention of the Swamp Woman, Faith is liberated from the dark realities of Plato’s cave. She has completed the difﬁcult ascent from the darkness to the light, and thus achieved a liberation from the bondage by which she has been plagued. At the end of her quest or path as Faith Cross, Johnson’s questing protagonist assumes her new path as the Swamp Woman, and she does so with this knowledge: She’d suffered several roles: the innocent, the whore, the housewife. And now, the werewitch herself. There would be others. There had to be. She was more

58

Faith and the Good Thing than any one path, or the total of them all. She would glean from each its store of the Good Thing, would conjure it up: the enthusiasm and naivete of youth, the sacriﬁce of the streetwalker, and the love that even the most miserable housewife received—exhausting them, moving on to another path, and another. That was life, children. And when she’d traveled the existing paths, she would create a new, untrodden one. That was progress. If she discovered X number of paths and traveled them all, then she, before she died, would leave X-plus-1. That was responsibility: factoring the possible number of paths to the Good Thing, but not becoming ﬁxed, or held to those paths in her history, or the history of the race. Moving always on . . . (195)

In the exchange of paths there is a crucial exchange of knowledge and insight. In assuming the path of the Swamp Woman, Faith discards objectivity and certainty, factors that blinded her to the knowledge, power, and beauty of the “Good Thing.” Instead, she embraces process, transformation, interrelatedness, and mystery: properties associated with the master metaphor of palimpsest. For the ﬁrst time, she is able to conjure in the sense spoken of by the Swamp Woman, that is, to become a “midwife to mystery” (191), or to think beyond the boundaries of what is already known and approved. Committed to living fully in life’s processes, she also is committed to adding to this richness other paths that represent other ways of being in the world. In this vital exchange of energy and insights, Faith will remain cognizant of the impact of her individual and collective histories, but will not be a prisoner of them, for history, as Johnson suggests, is not the point of conclusion but rather the point of departure. Eventually, Faith will move from the path of the Swamp Woman to other paths, slipping in palimpsestic fashion into these new ways of being as easily as she dons the discarded skin or self of the Swamp Woman, moving always on, exhibiting always the properties of a verb rather than a noun.48 Now as a “sort of tissue of world experience”49 after the manner of the Swamp Woman, Faith has successfully traversed “the predominantly ascending path” of the divided line: the rich, expansive ground for Plato’s allegory of the cave. She has moved, after considerable hardship, effort, and self-examination, from the lowest level of cognition, imagination, to trust, thought, and ﬁnally, in the role of Swamp Woman, to intellection, the highest level of cognition. Or put another way, as a palimpsest or metaphor of transformation, Faith has achieved what Johnson terms “whole sight,” or what I would deﬁne as the apprehension of an order in a plurality of meanings across a shifting and expansive symbolic geography. Further, as a palimpsest or metaphor of transformation, Faith embodies not only the processes of change and transformation—“X-plus-1”—but she becomes both a link to and a manifestation of a transcendent reality. Lavidia’s deathbed 59

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS advice, no longer a curse, has become, at last, a blessing, a liberation from the bondage of the cave. In Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson, in recounting the philosophical quest of Faith Cross, delivers “an image of our nature in its education and want of education,” to recall again Socrates’s commentary on the allegory of the cave to a deeply rapt Glaucon. In the process of relaying through the power of storytelling, Faith’s difﬁcult but inspiring ascent from the darkness of the cave to the light, from the visible world to the intelligible world, from lower forms of consciousness to higher forms of consciousness, Johnson reveals his deep afﬁnities to the tradition of Platonic thought. Both Socrates and the Swamp Woman imagine the ascent from the cave or low forms of human existence as marked by folly, loneliness, pain, and ignorance, and also the sublime. As articulated by the Swamp Woman in the last and vital exchange with Faith that precedes their exchange of paths, the werewitch informs her successor that the “Good Thing” is “absolutely nothin’, but particularly it’s everythin’.” Of course, the Swamp Woman’s deﬁnition of the “Good Thing” is a variation on Socrates’s deﬁnition of the good as shared with Glaucon: that “which is and the brightest part of that which is.” Johnson’s artful translation and reinterpretation of Platonic thought is delivered always through the medium of African American folklore. In successfully combining these two traditions of thought, he establishes a rich framework for the exploration of the question at the novel’s center: What is the nature of the good, or to recast this question in the black vernacular that is the vehicle for thought and action, what is the “Good Thing”? In interrogating with acumen and a growing mastery of technique, Johnson inaugurates, through the character of Faith Cross, the intellectual and artistic project he terms philosophical black ﬁction, and establishes his central theme of identity, liberation, and enlightenment. In the wake of such an auspicious beginning, Johnson, like his questing protagonist, moves on always to other questions that will be probed within the framework of a stunning range of philosophical systems, and thus, always on to other novels that expand the tradition of the American novel, and the emerging tradition he has termed philosophical black ﬁction. We turn now to a consideration of the forms of slavery, both metaphysical and physical, that deﬁne our lives as human beings. Of course, this is a theme and question that Johnson has treated in his debut novel, but one to which he returns with renewed force and intensity in Oxherding Tale.

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OXHERDING TALE: SLAVERY AND THE WHEEL OF DESIRE

2

Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me a team of unbroken oxen. He told me which was the in-hand ox, and which the off-hand one. He then tied the end of a large rope around the horns of the inhand ox, and gave me the other end of it, and told me, if the oxen started to run, that I must hold on upon the rope. I had never driven oxen before, and of course I was very awkward. —Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life Searching for the Ox: The beast has never gone astray, and what is the use of searching for him? The reason why the oxherd is not on intimate terms with him is because the oxherd himself has violated his own inmost nature. The beast is lost, for the oxherd has himself been led out of the way through his deluding senses. His home is receding farther away from him, and byways and crossways are ever confused. Desire for gain and fear of loss burn like ﬁre; ideas of right and wrong shoot up like a phalanx. —Kaku-an Shi-en, The Ten Oxherding Pictures If you are only peacefully calm and quiet, without motion, without stillness, without birth, without destruction, without coming, without going, without judgments of right and wrong, without staying and without going—this then is the Great Way. —The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

Johnson’s meditation on bondage and enlightenment unfolds, with all its force and beauty, on a southern landscape. The setting for Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson’s second novel, is Spartanburg, South Carolina. Composed between 1975 and 1980, Oxherding Tale was originally entitled The Last Liberation. In its present incarnation, Johnson describes Oxherding Tale as his “platform” book. The reference is to the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Pa61

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS triarch, a foundational text in Buddhism. In a novel where Buddhism permeates every level of meaning, it is not at all surprising that Johnson would summon up Buddhist symbols to suggest the artistic process as well as the artistic challenge of this ambitious example of philosophical black ﬁction. While the setting for Oxherding Tale is South Carolina and the timeframe for thought and action is 1841 to 1865, the intellectual framework for Johnson’s tale has its origins very far from the antebellum South. In order to fully interrogate the questions at the very heart of his koan or meditation on slavery, Johnson continues to practice what Bakhtin terms “double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse.” Johnson draws in large measure upon the philosophical traditions of East Asia. Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism are the philosophical traditions that anchor Johnson’s expansive, comic, and ironic mode of storytelling that bears the imprint of the historical novel, the picaresque, the romance, and most importantly the conversion and slave narratives. It is to the classic traditions in Eastern thought and the canonical forms in American, African American, and European literature that Johnson turns to frame and ponder such questions as these: Beyond the obvious and painful fact of physical bondage, are there other species of bondage? What forms might resistance assume under such oppressive circumstances? How is freedom to be achieved in a social and political order in which slavery is the principal force in deﬁning not only one’s existence, but also one’s identity? Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism provide Johnson, I would like to suggest here, with a rich framework within which to contemplate a range of political, moral, and ontological questions. Further, these ancient ways of knowing also provide Johnson with an astonishingly fertile ﬁeld from which he creates and selects important principles of organization that endow Oxherding Tale with its many layers of meaning as well as its complex pattern of movement. As his “platform” or foundational text, Oxherding Tale would pose new challenges for Johnson in intellectual, formal, and artistic terms, as well as serve as the foundation for future ﬁctional projects. In this regard, the promise of Oxherding Tale has been richly realized. During the novel’s ﬁve-year period of research and composition, Johnson wrote two short stories: “China,” which appears in his exceedingly ﬁne collection of stories The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), and “Kwoon,” originally published in Playboy (December 1991) and reprinted in O’Henry’s Prize Stories (1993). While ordering the complex world of Oxherding Tale, Johnson also prepared the ground that would eventually give rise to Middle Passage (1990), the novel that earned him a National Book Award and ﬁrmly established him as a national ﬁgure in American letters. The Allmuseri, a ﬁctional African clan whose cosmology 62

Oxherding Tale is decidedly more Asian than African, is a deﬁning inﬂuence in Oxherding Tale and a dominant presence in Middle Passage. Plainly, the “platform” or “dream novel” imagined by Johnson is not only the foundation for many important works of ﬁction in his ever expanding corpus, but Oxherding Tale is also the very suggestive site from which he advances his ambitious project to thematize Eastern thought vis-a`-vis African American history and culture. The uses of Eastern thought in this highly experimental novel are original and wide-ranging. Johnson’s provocative translation of Eastern philosophy into the province of the novel has brought a certain strangeness as well as a certain force to contemporary African American ﬁction. In 1980, members of the publishing establishment were more impressed by Oxherding Tale’s strangeness than with its force. As this second novel represented a departure from the subject matter and focus of Faith and the Good Thing, and also from those who were shaping much black ﬁction of this period, Johnson received one rejection letter after another. This dark situation brightened in 1982 when John Gallman, then senior editor at Indiana University Press, accepted Oxherding Tale for publication. Johnson’s decision to write against what he terms the “racial and sociological presuppositions” that deﬁned a resurgent black cultural nationalism accounts in part for the reluctance of editors to publish Oxherding Tale. Predictably, these editors were uncertain of the audience for a novel that posed such a clear challenge to the then rather facile conception of black ﬁction very much in circulation at that time. Although respectful of the example of such artists as Amiri Baraka, in Oxherding Tale Johnson rejects the formulaic and ideologically driven portrayal of African American life championed more than a decade earlier by Baraka and other artists associated with the Black Aesthetic or Black Arts Movement. The theories of the new black aesthetic set forth by Baraka in the anthology Black Fire (1968) and by Addison Gayle in The Black Aesthetic (1971), an aesthetic that subordinated art to politics, left Johnson intrigued but ultimately alienated. Although appreciative of the fact that art possesses a political dimension, Johnson’s belief in the autonomy of the artist led to his adoption of an independent stance toward politics that he has maintained from that period forward.1 While the legacy of the Black Arts Movement shaped the expectations and taste of both the white and black literary establishment of this period, there is an additional artistic and cultural phenomenon that must be borne in mind in this assessment of the critical reception of Johnson’s second novel. Oxherding Tale was published in the same year as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a novel that was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the American 63

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Book Award. The year 1982 also saw the appearance of The Women of Brewster Place, a novel that earned Gloria Naylor an American Book Award. The year before Tar Baby was published, Toni Morrison’s immensely successful fourth novel. As this brief survey of the major works of ﬁction published during this period makes plain, Oxherding Tale appeared at the apex of what is sometimes referred to as the renaissance in African American women’s writing. In many ways displaced by the formidable trinity of Morrison, Walker, and Naylor (who had seemingly displaced the earlier trinity of Wright, Ellison, and Baldwin), Johnson’s second novel did not have the wide impact he had hoped for during an era when male writers, black and white, were no longer in vogue. While Oxherding Tale was published during a particularly fruitful period in the history of African American women novelists, Johnson’s second novel did not go unnoticed. Of course, there were the expected and predictably brief notices in Choice and Library Journal, which were more descriptive than analytical. Although Johnson must have been pleased by the notice in the New York Times Book Review in early 1983, it was, like those others just mentioned, only an acknowledgment of the novel’s existence as opposed to an estimation of its value. The ﬁrst substantive review of Oxherding Tale appeared in the Londonbased New Statesman in December 1983. Grouped with Michel Tournier’s The Fetishist and Allison Ward’s The Glass Boat, Oxherding Tale opened and received the lion’s share of Angela McRobbie’s survey of recently published novels. McRobbie’s ambivalence about Oxherding Tale is sounded in the ﬁrst sentence of her very clipped review. She asserts that the novel is “a little too measured,” a fact that prevents it from achieving the “visionary quality towards which it so clearly moves.”2 After suggesting likenesses between Oxherding Tale and the ﬁction of such authors as Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Faulkner, McRobbie concludes her review by sadly noting that Johnson’s “tale [is] caught in the circularity of the myths with which it overidentiﬁes.”3 Strangely, McRobbie’s review contains no mention of the philosophical inﬂuences everywhere in evidence in Oxherding Tale. Savkar Altinel’s review of Oxherding Tale, published in the Times Literary Supplement, was an important review not only because of the prestige of this publication, but also because of the patterns and inﬂuences he was so careful to identify. Altinel addresses the striking omissions of McRobbie’s review by calling attention to the inﬂuence of Zen Buddhism in the very ﬁrst sentence of his somewhat lengthy assessment. He then proceeds to praise Oxherding Tale as “a work of some real depth and humor.”4 In his synopsis of the novel, 64

Oxherding Tale Altinel is the ﬁrst and only reviewer to mention Johnson’s indebtedness to The Ten Oxherding Pictures of Kaku-an Shien, and to suggest that the philosophical systems of the East are the framework for Johnson’s exploration of identity, race, and slavery. The most important review of Oxherding Tale was written by Stanley Crouch, the journalist, cultural critic, and novelist. Published in The Village Voice (July 1983), Crouch’s “Charles Johnson: Free At Last!” exceeds all other reviews in importance because of its length and very substantive commentary. Although he makes no mention of the inﬂuence of Eastern philosophy, the chief value of Crouch’s review lies in his decision to place Oxherding Tale in the evolving tradition of American literature. Crouch praises Johnson for his inventive manipulation of the slave narrative. He also identiﬁes the narrative strategies Johnson adapts from his careful study of the ﬁction of such writers as Herman Melville. In addition to providing subtle analysis of the relationships of power within the framework of slavery that churn at the novel’s core, Crouch praises Oxherding Tale as “a work of . . . courage and compassion, virtuosity and intelligence.”5 According to Johnson, Crouch’s laudatory assessment of Oxherding Tale was a signiﬁcant factor that led to the novel’s “paperback purchase by Grove Press.”6 In 1983, Oxherding Tale received the Washington State Governor’s Award for Literature. This award and the laudatory reviews by Altinel and Crouch were doubtless reassuring proof to Johnson that his daring contribution to American literature had been duly noted during a period when African American writers were contending with the legacy of a powerful black cultural nationalism, as well as witnessing the ascendancy of African American women novelists. It was within this cultural and literary ferment that Johnson now positioned himself with a second novel that set him apart in striking and dramatic ways from his contemporaries in American and African American letters, a second novel that would signiﬁcantly advance his artistic project called philosophical black ﬁction. The title and deep structure of Oxherding Tale have their origin in The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classic in Chinese Zen Buddhism. Published in the twelfth century, there are two English translations of this work, the ﬁrst of which is The Ten Oxherding Pictures that appears in D. T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism. The second is M. H. Trevor’s The Ox and His Herdsman. According to Suzuki, Kaku-an Shi-en, a Zen master of the Sung Dynasty belonging to the Rinzan School, was the author of Ten Oxherding Pictures. Shien was not the ﬁrst Zen master to illustrate the various stages of Zen discipline. Earlier attempts had been made by Seikyo, who was also a Zen master and a contemporary of Shien. To further complicate matters, Suzuki 65

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS informs us that there are two other pictorial treatments of the several stages of Zen discipline by other Zen masters. The third is by Jitoku Ki, and the author of the fourth version is unknown. It is vital to note that what distinguishes these four pictorial treatments of Zen discipline is the number of pictures in each one. Shien’s treatment contains ten pictures. Seikyo’s treatment contains half that number. Ki’s treatment goes one better with six pictures. The treatment by the anonymous author contains, like Shien’s, ten pictures. Aside from the number of pictures, another important factor that serves to distinguish Shien’s treatment of Zen discipline from the others is that the ox, who is represented as black, does not undergo a whitening process in the four pictures (three through six) in which it appears; however, in the other three treatments, “the gradual development of the Zen life,” writes Suzuki, is “indicated by the progressive whitening of the animal.”7 While aware of this interesting element common to three versions of this classic in Zen Buddhism, Johnson has chosen The Ten Oxherding Pictures by Shien, which are more widely known and more often reproduced, as the framework for his novel. As we shall see, the “progressive whitening of the animal” will have profound implications for the manner in which we evaluate the position of Johnson’s protagonist, who, by the novel’s conclusion, is ensconced, by marriage and class, in the white elite of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Ueda Shizuteru describes The Ten Oxherding Pictures as a graphic portrayal of “the process of human self-realization in ten stages.”8 Shien’s blackand-white circular drawings seem to ﬂoat in their square frames. Each drawing is accompanied by a title as well as a brief but very tersely written prose statement followed by a poem that elaborates and completes the thought ﬁrst expressed in prose. Picture IV, “Catching the Ox,” illustrates this pattern: Long lost in the wilderness, the boy has at last found the ox and his hands are on him. But, owing to the overwhelming pressure of the outside world, the ox is hard to keep under control. He constantly longs for the old sweet-scented ﬁeld. The wild nature is still unruly, and altogether refuses to be broken. If the oxherd wishes to see the ox completely in harmony with himself, he has surely to use the whip freely. With the energy of his whole being, the boy has at last taken hold of the ox: But how wild his will, how ungovernable his power! At times he struts up a plateau, When lo! he is lost again in a misty unpenetrable mountain-pass.9

According to Shizuteru, “each drawing depicts a distinct mode and dimension of existence on the way to the true self.”10 The “ox,” writes Shizuteru, 66

Oxherding Tale “serves as a provisional symbol for the true self that is being sought, and the herdsman represents the individual on the quest for the true self.”11 In psychological and spiritual terms, the circumstance and trajectory in The Ten Oxherding Pictures correspond to the circumstance and trajectory in Johnson’s tale. The many correspondences between Johnson’s novel and The Ten Oxherding Pictures have been ably examined by William Gleason, Jonathon Little, and William Nash.12 While Johnson does not replicate each of the ten stages of the herdsman’s symbolic search for the ox in his novel, nevertheless Andrew Hawkins, who at the novel’s end has assumed the name and identity of William Harris, is on a journey of self-discovery and selfknowledge, a journey whose telos is enlightenment. Occurring largely within the framework of slavery, Andrew’s journey toward enlightenment, like Faith Cross’s philosophical quest, is advanced through contact with a range of individuals who function, in one form or another, as his teachers. The ﬁrst of these teachers is George Hawkins, Andrew’s father, who Johnson describes as “one of the avant-garde of the African Revolution.”13 As the embodiment of the ideology of black cultural nationalism, Hawkins is doomed to a life of slavery at Cripplegate until a failed insurrection ends with his death at the hands of Horace Bannon, the soulcatcher. Hawkins seeks to instill in his son, the fruit of his comic but catastrophic union with his mistress Anna Polkinghorne, a sense of racial pride and a duty to realize the “world-historical mission of Africa.” While he values black resistance and black pride, Andrew rejects the essentialist constructions of race and culture that fuel his father’s ideology of black supremacy. Mired in a world of distinctions and multiplicity, George Hawkins operates on the mistaken notion that skin connotes kin. The danger of such romantic presuppositions is revealed in the reversals and betrayals that mark Hawkins’s failed friendship with Nate McKay, a fellow slave and philanderer, who attempts to seduce Mattie Hawkins, Hawkins’s deeply mystical and loyal spouse. While retaining affection for his father, ultimately Andrew rejects Hawkins’s narrow ideological positions on race and culture as alienating. Another teacher whom Andrew encounters on the path, whose destination is moksha or release, is Ezekiel William Sykes-Withers, a tutor contracted by Jonathan Polkinghorne, the master of Cripplegate and Andrew’s stepfather. Polkinghorne wishes to provide Andrew with the advantages of an education not only because he feels a certain affection for his stepson, but also because the master of Cripplegate is interested in improving his property. Eccentric, obsessive, and a member of George Ripley’s Transcendental Club, Ezekiel is completely devoted to Andrew, providing him with 67

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS an education equal to that received by such nineteenth-century ﬁgures as John Stuart Mill. During his period of service, Ezekiel discovers that Cripplegate is very far from being Brooks Farm. Johnson’s calculated insertion, into the very lap of slavery, of a ﬁgure associated with one of American Transcendentalism’s well-known experiments in communalism is an opening through which he censures the tendency of some of the best minds in antebellum America to invest their energies in utopian experiments that constitute a retreat from the actualities of slavery. In contrast to his teacher George Ripley, Ezekiel, whom Andrew later describes as “subversive,” has made the daring commitment to use his considerable training to confront and counteract the effects of slavery in the very place where it is ﬂourishing. Another teacher whom Andrew encounters on his journey from bondage to freedom, which is the very essence of the Zen process according to Suzuki, is Flo Hatﬁeld, the mistress of a plantation ominously called Leviathan.14 Andrew is essentially banished to Leviathan by Polkinghorne after expressing a desire for his own manumission and that of George Hawkins, his stepmother Mattie, and Minty, his betrothed. Polkinghorne’s expectation is that Flo Hatﬁeld will purge Andrew of his absurdly placed ambitions for freedom. Interestingly, Flo Hatﬁeld is to Andrew Hawkins what William Covey is to the young Frederick Douglass. In contrast to Covey, the “Negro breaker,” the mistress of Leviathan employs narcotics and a powerful eroticism in her attempts to break Andrew’s spirit, rather than using the whip that is doubtless a prop in her expanding sexual repertoire. The nature of instruction at Leviathan differs dramatically from that at Cripplegate, and here again Polkinghorne would have been displeased with the results. As a slaveholder and pragmatist of the ﬁrst order, Polkinghorne favors instruction that would endow Andrew, his property, with such “useful skills . . . [as] book-keeping, market research, and furniture repair” (18). In contrast to the curriculum at Cripplegate, which, as determined by Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, prized the development of the intellect above all else, the curriculum at Leviathan is driven by an educational philosophy that elevates desire above reason, the senses above the intellect. Shortly after arriving at Leviathan, Andrew ﬁnds himself enrolled in what he humorously terms “Sensuality 101, Section A” (64). Andrew soon discovers that his training at Leviathan would prepare him for work neither in “book-keeping” nor in “market research” but instead, to use the rich language everywhere in evidence in Johnson’s novel, as a “voluptuarian.” Johnson’s emphasis upon Andrew’s education within the framework of slavery is an ironic and comic recasting of Booker T. Washington’s absurd metaphor of slavery as a “school.”15 In emphasizing the classical nature of 68

Oxherding Tale Andrew’s education at Cripplegate and the erotic dimensions of his education as well as bondage to Flo Hatﬁeld, Johnson spoofs Washington’s metaphor of slavery as a school and infuses new meaning into the Wizard’s ludicrous observation in Up From Slavery that the “black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did.”16 The last, and perhaps most important, teacher Andrew encounters on his journey from bondage to freedom in the terms understood by Zen masters is Reb, property of Flo Hatﬁeld. Reb is Leviathan’s cofﬁnmaker. Though I will develop more carefully Reb’s powerful and transformative role in Andrew’s attainment of moksha or release later in this chapter, at this point it is enough to state that the Cofﬁnmaker’s example of self-denial and asceticism is meant to undermine and to function as a powerful alternative and corrective to that path of the senses shamelessly advocated by Flo Hatﬁeld. Each of these four teachers—George Hawkins, Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, Flo Hatﬁeld, and Reb—summon up in Andrew’s slowly expanding consciousness an awareness of aspects of the self—the racial self, the noetic self, the sensing self, and the spiritual self—that he must both embrace and discard in his quest for the true self: that radiant presence just beyond the empirical self in all of its various manifestations. The oxherd’s lonely, enervating, and, in the end, illuminating search for the ox is suggested in broad outline in Oxherding Tale. Johnson’s masterful use and evocation of The Ten Oxherding Pictures endows his tale with its title as well as its deep structure. Further, the oxherd’s search for the ox is the site upon which Johnson builds and enlarges certain correspondences between Eastern and Western works in this ﬂuid and expansive meditation on identity, slavery, and enlightenment. In Oxherding Tale, Johnson very adroitly establishes correspondences between the ontological concerns enunciated in Zen Buddhism and those set forth in the foundational forms of American and African American literature: the conversion and slave narratives. In a chapter entitled “On the Nature of Slave Narratives,” an “essayist interlude” that recalls the narrative strategies of Melville, Johnson argues that the conversion and slave narratives contain “nearly a Platonic movement from ignorance to wisdom, nonbeing into being” (119). As we know, this is also the nature of movement in ontological terms in The Ten Oxherding Pictures. Johnson very masterfully combines the journey from slavery to freedom with the journey from ignorance to knowledge. One process cannot be achieved without the other. That is to say, self-knowledge or the wisdom that is the product of the union and communion with the true self is the ﬁrst step on the path from slavery to freedom. Recall, for example, the transformative effects of John Morrant’s 69

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS encounter with the evangelist George Whiteﬁeld, or Douglass’s confrontation with Hugh Auld over the question of literacy. These complex and complementary patterns endemic to the conversion and slave narratives are artfully deployed in the novel and churn in the consciousness of Andrew Hawkins. It is in Johnson’s double-voiced, internally dialogized narrative, which is a ﬁctionalized antebellum slave narrative written in the ﬁrst person, that these timeless concerns with Being assume their temporal and human form. Like the conversion and slave narratives, Oxherding Tale chronicles the evolution of what William L. Andrews terms a “liberating subjectivity” that speaks to Andrew Hawkins’s quest for both liberty and enlightenment.17 While the etymology and variants of the terms oxherding and oxherd are linked neither to slavery nor to enlightenment, Johnson forges a new taxonomy to meet the narrative and philosophical concerns of his metaphysical antebellum slave narrative. We ﬁrst encounter the term oxherd in a conversation between Andrew and Horace Bannon, the “soulcatcher” who is “Shiva’s hitman,” an assassin who would have an honored place among the Thugees, a band of professional assassins formerly active in northern India, and who, in the ﬁnal paragraphs of the novel, assumes the form of a god. Like Hawkins, Bannon is a racial hybrid, but in contrast to our runaway slave, he symbolizes not the positive, but rather the more negative attributes of hybridity. As Jonathan Little has argued, “Bannon’s portrait reveals the monstrous aspect of Johnson’s preferred aesthetic” of “intercultural unity and integration,” although, as I will demonstrate, even Bannon is not beyond transformations that produce a positive outcome.18 The ﬁrst conversation between Andrew and Bannon is a highly stylized ritual of artfulness and evasion: “You favor somebody,” said Bannon. “Would yo father be an oxherd in Hodges? A George Hawkins?” “Nossir.” I stepped back. “My mother’s name is Anna Polkinghorne.” He made a bow. All mockery. “Mah mistake, suh. . . .” “The oxherd Ah mentioned had a boy named Andrew.” “Stillbirth,” I said. Bannon pursed his lips. “Ah see. So you are the legitimate Polkinghorne heir? What might yo name be, son?” “It might be James.” “Well put,” the soulcatcher slapped his knee—he was deﬁnitely enjoying himself. “And it might not be James, eh? You’s clever, James,” he said. “You’ll go far in the world.” (68)

In this contest of wits, the ﬁrst among many, the prize for Andrew is both life and liberty. In this exchange, Johnson not only preﬁgures in language 70

Oxherding Tale and gesture what Andrew will do in life, which is to conceal his African ancestry in order to secure a place for himself as a free man, but he also infuses the term oxherd with meanings necessary to a full appreciation of the meanings ordering his tale. As used by Bannon, the term oxherd is a synonym for bondsman, slave, and chattel. As used in The Ten Oxherding Pictures, the term oxherd or herdsman is a symbol of the individual in search of the union with the true self. In Johnson’s calculated use of the term oxherd, both meanings converge. Here as elsewhere in this novel that has all of the markings of a palimpsest, the “meanings accumulate in layers of tissues as the form [and tale]” evolve (119). In this meditation on slavery and enlightenment, Johnson moves in a deliberate and unfettered fashion not only between genres and taxonomies, but also between schools of Eastern philosophy. While The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a masterwork in Zen Buddhism, invests Johnson’s tale with its title, deep structure, and organizing principles, Taoism, as enunciated in The Writings of Chuang Tzu, also supports and advances the tale’s trajectory from slavery to freedom, from ignorance to wisdom. Further, Taoism provides Johnson with the platform upon which to test, challenge, and ﬁnally redeﬁne concepts of resistance and freedom within the framework of slavery. Several of the tenets of Taoism assume their most concentrated form in Reb, Leviathan’s Cofﬁnmaker. We encounter Reb, a character in Johnson’s expanding ﬁctional universe, for the ﬁrst time in Oxherding Tale, but we have encountered his kind or his clan in earlier works. Reb is a member of a ﬁctional African clan called the Allmuseri, descendants of whom ﬁrst appeared in “The Education of Mingo” (1977) and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1983), stories Johnson wrote during the period in which he was also writing Oxherding Tale. The name Johnson gives to his ﬁctional African clan has a fascinating provenance. He ﬁrst encountered the word al-museri, a term for an African meeting place for performing spiritual or magical ceremonies, while conducting research on magic for Faith and the Good Thing. Liking the word and its meanings, in the writing of “The Education of Mingo” Johnson decided to use the word al-museri for Mingo’s tribe, and in the process dropped the hyphen and added the letter l.19 These early ventures into the marvelous and apocryphal world of the Allmuseri, that is to say “The Education of Mingo” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” were subsequently published in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), Johnson’s ﬁrst collection of short ﬁction. As mentioned earlier, the Allmuseri also would assume a pre-eminent place in Middle Passage and, as we shall see, in Dreamer. 71

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS The great-grandson of Rakhal, an Allmuseri wizard with extraordinary powers, Reb occupies an extremely important place in Johnson’s metaphysical slave narrative. It would not be an exaggeration to assert that he is the linchpin around which much of the action of the narrative revolves, the intelligence at the center of pivotal events in Andrew’s quest. The Cofﬁnmaker, as Reb is often called, is Andrew’s introduction to Leviathan; indeed, his ironic welcome takes place within minutes of Andrew’s last words with George Hawkins. In this transfer from his father to a father-ﬁgure, Andrew is confronted again with the question of racial allegiance and racial deﬁnition that dominates the last exchange with George Hawkins. “You folks, I say, or white people?” asks Reb, after carefully assessing the ambiguities of Andrew’s physical appearance. “Oh, folks,” replies Andrew in an effort to reassure Reb, “Deﬁnitely folks.” Keenly aware of the rhythms of life at Leviathan and strangely aware of Andrew’s preordained place within them, Reb replies: “You ain’t folks or white. . . . You fresh meat, boy. . . . Oh, she gonna like you awright—all that curly hair and them brown eyes. And that ain’t good” (36). In this ﬁne moment of humor and prophecy in which a paternal feeling prevails, Reb not only names Andrew’s condition as it will soon be deﬁned by Flo Hatﬁeld, but in fatherly fashion also renames Andrew. Much to the chagrin of our hero, he is now called “Freshmeat,” a new name suitable to his new duties at Leviathan. And just as Reb is the one who shows Andrew, now christened “Freshmeat,” the way to Hatﬁeld’s extravagantly decorated house—“an oak-paneled high-ceilinged boudoir of whorehouse luxury”—so he is also the one who will direct Andrew toward the path or Way, in that ﬁnal and deeply philosophical sense, out of slavery into freedom. Caught by slavers while washing in the river, Reb is a ﬁgure out of the African past with whom Andrew is both fascinated and perplexed. Andrew is transported by Reb’s stories detailing his forced separation from the “ancient clan-state of the Allmuseri, concealed for centuries in the bush between Cape Lopez and the Congo River” (48). In one of the many instances of teaching, Reb describes his “voyage of a hundred days into history” on the slave ship The Fortunata, which, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, anchored “at a hidden cove in Cuba.” Reb recalls for Andrew his experiences in the “Seasoning camps,” including his ownership by three masters in as many states before he was purchased by Earl Hatﬁeld and transported to Leviathan. In his many exchanges with the Cofﬁnmaker, Andrew is keenly aware of Reb’s strangeness, his difference, his way of being an Allmuseri, which is manifested in a variety of ways, but most noticeably in his speech. In the 72

Oxherding Tale ﬁnal and tense moments of part one of this two-part novel, Andrew and Reb are making their escape from Leviathan. At this point, Andrew notes the distinctive manner of Allmuseri speech: “He hated personal pronouns; the Allmuseri had no words for I, you, mine, yours. They had, consequently, no experience of these things, either, only proper names that were variations on the Absolute. You might say, in Allmuseri, all is A. One person was A1, the next A2” (97). As these are “Western analogues,” Andrew advises us not to make too much of this translation of Allmuseri speech patterns. Nevertheless, in Reb’s mode of speech, which rejects completely the emphasis upon a self that is associated with personal pronouns, is revealed a worldview that potentially functions as a Way for Andrew on his journey from slavery to freedom. Known as “the most disagreeable man in South Carolina,” Andrew notes that Reb was the man at the “country market, who looked at the stands and rejoiced at what he didn’t need; the man who, when most vigorously at work, seemed resting” (46). Soon after arriving at Leviathan, Andrew begins to collect the many stories about Reb that have become part of the lore of the plantation: It was said that when he ﬁrst arrived at Leviathan he found himself confronted by two white hunters on a backroad. They’d caught no game that day. They leveled their shotguns at Reb. When he failed to run, one hunter said, “Nigguh, you lookin’ at somebody who kin blow off yo head without battin’ an eye.” It is said the Cofﬁnmaker blinked, pushed aside both shotguns like treelimbs in his path, and, passing on, replied, “You lookin’ at somebody who can be shot without blinkin’ an eyelash.” (46–47)

Reb’s abstemiousness, his curious manner of storing energy at the very moment in which he is expending it, and what seems to be cowardice in the face of physical danger, are the cultural markings, as Andrew so carefully notes, of the complex worldview of the Allmuseri. When visiting the Cofﬁnmaker’s shed, Andrew realizes that Reb’s discipline of self-denial is a feature not only of his speech and conduct but also of his environment. Alone in his shed while Reb is away attempting to negotiate a truce with Hatﬁeld following a raucous evening of sex that ends in a physical assault, Andrew is struck by the ordering of space in Reb’s quarters: Reb’s quarters left no residue of its lodger. He appeared busy—the hardest worker at Leviathan—but his shed and many carvings, the wood sculptures that ranged from ﬁnely wrought caskets to footstools in Flo Hatﬁeld’s boudoir,

73

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS had the anonymity of Egyptian artifacts. He was not in the shed. Not in his work. Not truly in the thickness of the world web, as I was—boomeranging from desire to desire—and, waiting, I wondered if Reb hungered for freedom as I did. What did he want? Seldom, if ever, did Reb take the initiative in producing anything. He waited, quiet as a cat. Something acted upon him, a pressure, a shove, a cosmic ﬁnger on the spine, and only then did he move. (75)

Immersed in the Cofﬁnmaker’s environment, Andrew notes how Reb appears to be standing on the outside of the push and pull of existence. Even in the artifacts that Reb uses each day, there is not the investment of the self in the activity of daily life. Turning his gaze from the objects to the man, Andrew is also cognizant of what appears to be Reb’s passivity, the curious way in which he does not act upon things but instead the way in which things act upon him. It is important to stress that Reb’s discipline of self-denial emerges not only from a culture that does not place a value upon the self, but also emerges from his own very traumatic experiences as a slave. “So often had food, property, and loved ones been snatched away,” observes Andrew, “that now he treated whatever he had as someone else’s property, with the same care and attention that another’s property deserved” (76). Like Paul D in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Reb has felt the impact of the tremendous force of slavery in both physical and psychological terms. Over the years, both men have developed a strategy for confronting the desolation and loss inﬂicted upon them by slavery that reﬂects the fundamentally different conceptions of slavery and freedom ordering Beloved and Oxherding Tale. In his state of freedom Paul D struggles to wrest some meaning out of the wreckage of the past and the confusion of the present, with his goal being to secure some place of meaning and safety through the establishment of a network of relationships in a much embattled postbellum North. And in his own state of slavery, Reb struggles to transcend his circumstances and relationships through the practice of an extreme asceticism that has profound consequences for himself and others in the antebellum South. In Beloved, the cultivation of desire in Paul D leads to his attainment of a free state in psychological terms. In Oxherding Tale, the absence of desire in Reb leads to the attainment of a free state in both psychological and physical terms. For Morrison, desire is a metonym for freedom; for Johnson, by contrast, desire is a metonym for bondage. Unlike Paul D, the Cofﬁnmaker makes no effort to position himself in the affairs of the world. He says “Yes” to liberation and “Yes” to misfortune. “Reward he did not expect. Nor pleasure. Desire was painful. Duty was everything. . . . This was his Way. It was,” 74

Oxherding Tale writes Andrew, “a Way of strength and spiritual heroism—doing what must be done, dead to hope—but . . . it was not my Way” (76–77). While expressing admiration for Reb’s discipline of duty and non-engagement, Andrew also states that he is on a different path. While Reb’s Way has meaning, it is not, Andrew is very careful to assert, his way. In one of his rare moments of insight in part one of the novel, Andrew describes Reb as “subversive.” He very quickly qualiﬁes his use of this particular adjective because Reb, one of approximately ﬁfty slaves owned by Hatﬁeld, does not employ the subversive tactics of George Hawkins, who organizes an unsuccessful slave revolt at Cripplegate. “Torching a master’s house, Mau Mauing his property was ﬁne,” but these are not, as Andrew concludes by comparative analysis, Reb’s tactics. The kind of subversion practiced by Reb is, according to Andrew, “a much softer and more devastating Old World way that made Harper’s [sic] Ferry look foolish” (75). While Andrew attributes Reb’s mode of resistance to what he terms an “Old World way,” he cannot, in his fragmentary knowledge of the culture of the Allmuseri, name the source of Reb’s power but can only describe its various manifestations. Although he is unaware of it, the foundation for Reb’s “Old World Way,” or the platform for his subversive tactics, is ﬁrst revealed to Andrew in one of the earliest instances of storytelling. Initially irascible but ﬁnally tolerant of Andrew’s not so subtle effort at ingratiating himself, Reb, in the following instance of teaching and storytelling, responds to Andrew’s comments and questions regarding the process of making a cofﬁn, a process for which the Cofﬁnmaker apparently has no peer: “It’s a beautiful casket. You do ﬁne work.” “I didn’t do anythin,” said Reb. He looked up for an instant, straight ahead, scowling at something I couldn’t see in his mind. “Things are done, that’s all.” Often he had this way of talking, which bafﬂed me. “Each casket you do is different, though,” I said. “There must be some technique. . . .” “Technique?” Reb laughed. “You wanna know what I do? I don’t do nothin, Freshmeat, leastways, nothing you’d understand. Before I even open my toolbox I go off by myself into them woods yonder for a week. I try to forget about every casket I’ve made. After a day I can’t remember none of ’em. After two days, I forget whatever instructions the family of the dead person gave me, and whether they gonna like it or not. After ﬁve days, I forget the fact that I makes cofﬁns. Seven days go by, and I forget all about myself, and that’s when I start looking round for a tree that wants to be a cofﬁn.” (47)

Reb’s description of the stages involved in making a cofﬁn is nothing less than a description of a Way or path to enlightenment that, within the frame75

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS work of Oxherding Tale, is also a path from slavery to freedom. The Cofﬁnmaker’s characteristically brash, cryptic, and self-deprecating commentary is the opening through which Johnson introduces Taoism. As stated earlier, Taoism assumes its most concentrated form in Reb, Leviathan’s Cofﬁnmaker. The worldview of the Allmuseri is the opening through which Johnson introduces the worldview of Taoism. These two worldviews are, in many ways, one and the same. While mentioned early in the novel in an almost dismissive fashion—“reading Chinese thought was a little like eating food: the more one read Lao tzu and Chaung tzu, or ate subgum chop suey, the emptier one’s head and stomach felt hours later” (13)— Johnson’s deep respect for the Taoism of Chuang-tzu is revealed in his decision to employ it as the platform for Reb’s “Old World way” of subversion. Reb’s process of making a cofﬁn mirrors that of Khing, the master carver in the Taoist parable entitled “The Woodcarver,” which appears in The Way of Chuang Tzu. As craftsmen working in the medium of wood, both Reb and Khing, through a highly ritualized process, embody and profess a Way of being in the world that places them, not surprisingly, at odds with the world. The parallels in temperament and outlook between the Cofﬁnmaker and the Woodcarver are quite striking. The tale of Khing goes as follows: Khing, the master carver, made a bell stand of precious wood. When it was ﬁnished, all who saw it were astounded. They said it must be the work of spirits. The Prince of Lu said to the master carver: “What is your secret?” Khing replied: “I am only a workman: I have no secret. There is only this: When I began to think about the work you commanded I guarded my spirit, did not expend it on triﬂes, that were not to the point. I fasted in order to set my heart at rest. After three days fasting, I had forgotten gain and success. After ﬁve days I had forgotten praise or criticism. After seven days I had forgotten my body with all its limbs. “By this time all thought of your Highness and of the court had faded away. All that might distract me from the work had vanished. I was collected in the single thought of the bell stand. “Then I went to the forest. To see the trees in their own natural state. When the right tree appeared before my eyes, the bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond doubt. All I had to do was to put forth my hand and begin. “If I had not met this particular tree there would have been no bell stand at all. “What happened? My own collected thought encountered the hidden potential in the wood; from this live encounter came the work which you ascribe to the spirits.”20

Wishing to avoid fragmentation, I have provided the full text of the parable of “The Woodcarver.” The similarities in temperament and outlook 76

Oxherding Tale between the Woodcarver and the Cofﬁnmaker are quite remarkable and clearly not accidental. In both instances woodcarving is not merely a vocation, although that is important, but a way of life, a philosophy of Being: Taoism. Like the Woodcarver, Johnson’s Cofﬁnmaker exhibits a number of the values propounded by this ancient Chinese philosophy whose root translates as “road” or “path,” and which functions quite frequently, according to Herrlee G. Creel, as the word and sign “denoting the sum total of reality.”21 Like his counterpart in the parable of “The Woodcarver,” Reb’s process of making cofﬁns is a process that requires meditation, fasting, puriﬁcation, the absence of anything as intrusive and destructive as will, an indifference to both praise and criticism, and a total extinguishing of the ego or the empirical self. As one who is on the “path,” Reb exhibits Taoist values not only in his making of cofﬁns, but also in the manner in which he positions or does not position himself in the world. It is important to recall the many stories Andrew tells us about Reb that emphasize his curious manner of speech, his stance in the presence of danger, his abstemiousness, his asceticism, his apparent passivity, and the complete absence of self or what we have termed in the West since the emergence of Sigmund Freud the ego. While these stories complete Johnson’s portrait of Reb as a character of considerable complexity, they also reveal the almost invisible manner in which Johnson plants key tenets of Taoist philosophy. Interestingly, Reb is the greatgrandson of Rakhal, an Allmuseri wizard. According to ancient Chinese cosmology, the Tao was the “efﬁcacious power of kings and magicians [emphasis added] who knew how to make the three spheres of the world— Heaven, Earth, and Man—communicate with one another.”22 As an artist who employs the novel as a framework for philosophical discourse, Johnson is careful not to try our patience with a lecture on Taoism, or equally as bothersome, with clumsily translated philosophical concepts into ﬁction. In contrast to Jean Toomer’s ﬁction after Cane (1923), most of which bears the marked inﬂuence of the teachings of the Russian mystic and psychologist Georges I. Gurdjieff, Johnson’s Oxherding Tale is not a work of propaganda but rather a work of art grounded in classical Chinese philosophy. While Reb is a believable and almost endearing curmudgeon, he is also a kind of Taoist monk who possesses great spiritual powers and who is, as we know from Andrew’s careful observation of his speech and actions, free of desire, fear, will, and ego. The great importance Taoism places upon the absence of these traits, which are the source of considerable suffering in human existence, is illustrated in such parables as “The Five Enemies,” which re77

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS counts the injuries done to the self through the senses; “Action and NonAction,” which reveals the positive relationship between “non-action” and “emptiness”; and “The Useless Tree,” which posits a very clear and beneﬁcial relationship between “uselessness” or the absence of self and longevity.23 These parables reﬂect the Taoist worldview of Chuang Tzu, and the Taoist truth at the center of each one is fully reﬂected in the choices and pronouncements of Reb. As a “subversive,” to use Andrew’s language, Reb’s strategy of resistance does not have its origins in the embattled and unreconstructed imaginations of confederate generals dreaming of secession, but instead in the Taoist concept of wu-weii. According to Creel, the concept of wu-weii is found in both the Taoist schools of Chuang-tzu and Lao-tzu, but in each of these philosophical traditions the concept denotes two diametrically opposed meanings. As taught by the school of Chuang-tzu, wu-weii denotes “an attitude of genuine non-action, motivated by a lack of desire to participate in the struggle of human affairs.”24 As taught by the school of Lao-tzu, wuweii denotes a “technique [through which the practitioner acquires] enhanced control over human affairs.”25 Creel deﬁnes the ﬁrst concept of wuweii as “contemplative” Taoism, and the second as “purposive” Taoism. Through his practice of non-action—“He waited, quiet as a cat”—Reb is plainly a practitioner of “contemplative” Taoism. Through the character of Reb, Johnson radically redeﬁnes the concept of resistance. For it does not entail action, but, paradoxically, non-action. Resistance does not entail will, but, again paradoxically, it demands complete surrender. As embodied by Reb, resistance does not translate into proﬁt and self-aggrandizement but rather duty and self-denial. Through the practice of non-doing or nonaction, or by saying “ ‘Yes’ to illness. ‘Yes’ to suffering. ‘Yes’ to liberation. ‘Yes’ to misfortune” (76), the Cofﬁnmaker, appropriately named because he seems to have achieved the Taoist balance between the place of life and death in the totality of existence, has achieved the status of what Andrew terms a “saint.” According to Andrew, Reb’s discipline of non-action, his method of subversion, makes “Harper’s [sic] Ferry look foolish” (75). Doubtless some would differ with Andrew’s reading or misreading of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Andrew’s very bold statement, however, leads to an important question: Does Reb’s practice of wu-weii or nonaction, this species of resistance at the center of the worldview of the Allmuseri, produce results that matter in the world of slavery? But before answering this question, it is important to identify the forces against which Reb is rebelling. In this metaphysical contest in which the weapons, as it 78

Oxherding Tale were, are the practice of non-doing, non-action, the total extinguishment of desire, fear, and other aspects of the empirical self, who is the opponent? The answer to both these questions resides within the body and the worldview of Flo Hatﬁeld. Soon after Andrew’s arrival at Leviathan, he learns of the “uneasy truce” that exists between the Cofﬁnmaker and the Mistress of Leviathan: Reb the Cofﬁnmaker avoided Flo Hatﬁeld at all costs. My mistress bothered him a whole lot. Everything about Flo raised his Ebenezer: her laughter, her clothes, every order she gave, orders she didn’t give. Was Reb, I wondered, as scarred by slavery as my father? As unﬁrm in his gender as Ezekiel? Clearly, it was Flo Hatﬁeld’s air we breathed . . . , but Reb’s feeling of discomfort sprang, I discovered, from a different source, a deeper outrage. (46)

Reb’s deep sense of discomfort and outrage are at the heart of his rebellion against the tyranny of Hatﬁeld as well as, paradoxically, her own peculiar species of bondage and the nihilism that it produces in many of her victims. The tyranny of Hatﬁeld is a fundamental principle of life at Leviathan. When Andrew ﬁrst meets his new mistress, she makes this point quite emphatically: “I am Leviathan’s sovereign, its soul. All others are, in a manner of speaking, the joints, tendons, nerves, and tissues that sustain the soul” (38). This is a voice and a language that emanate directly from the pages of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Hatﬁeld’s language is almost identical, in word and rhythm, to the language found in Hobbes’s introduction where he imagines the “sovereignty” as the “artiﬁcial soul” of the commonwealth. Early in his introduction, as he prepares the ground for his argument of the state as the “body politic,” Hobbes poses the following questions: “For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say, that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artiﬁcial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artiﬁcer?”26 Interestingly, Andrew’s ﬁrst impression of Reb is cast in language that recalls that of Hobbes and foreshadows that of Flo Hatﬁeld: “Moving along like a wind-up doll, locomotively, both arms ﬂat at his sides, he looked back at me and laughed” (36). Johnson’s masterful correspondences are meant to reveal the imprint of the ruthless hand of the state as it is manifested within the institution of slavery upon the life of one with spiritual resources great as those of Reb. A slave may be many things in the all too active imagination of Flo Hatﬁeld, but he is always property, always an object, always equipment for her living. 79

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS By identifying herself as Leviathan’s sovereign, Hatﬁeld reveals to Andrew the sweeping nature of her powers as well as the great misfortune of those who fall within her sphere of inﬂuence. In a chapter entitled “Of Dominion Paternal and Despotical,” Hobbes sets forth what he terms “the rights of sovereignty”: His power cannot, without his consent, be transferred to another: he cannot forfeit it: he cannot be accused by any of his subjects, of injury: he cannot be punished by them: he is judge of what is necessary for peace; and a judge of doctrines: he is the sole legislator; and supreme judge of controversies; and of the times, and occasions of war and peace: to him it belongeth to choose magistrates, counsellors, commanders, and all other ofﬁcers, and ministers; and to determine of rewards, and punishments, honour, and order.27

The value of this passage is that it provides us with the framework to fully apprehend the tremendous force and power that stand behind Hatﬁeld’s ﬁrst conversation with Andrew. Doubtless, Andrew studied Hobbes’s Leviathan as a student of Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, but neither in his initial nor subsequent encounters with Hatﬁeld does he betray an awareness of the dangers of which his new mistress is the incarnate symbol. An innocent at the time of their ﬁrst meeting, in the well-trained mind of Andrew Hawkins the relationship between theory and practice is at best tenuous. Like all slaves in all ages, Andrew is a man whom Hatﬁeld “can raise without Envy and destroy without Danger.”28 Or put another way, as a slave, Andrew possesses only obligations, not rights. In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia J. Williams tells us that “[in] the law, rights are islands of empowerment. To be unrighted is to be disempowered, and the line between rights and norights is most often the line between dominators and oppressors.”29 Confronted with the incontrovertible fact of the “rights of the sovereign” as they are articulated under the regime at Leviathan, Andrew occupies the position of the oppressed while acquiring a knowledge of the psychology and needs of the dominators. As Leviathan’s sovereign, Hatﬁeld has labored to realize the full import of Hobbes’s philosophy of materialism. Reﬂecting upon this dehumanizing fact years later in a state of freedom, Andrew makes the following observation regarding slavery at Leviathan: Although nearly anything you said about slavery could be denied in the same breath, this much struck me as true: the wretchedness of being colonized was not that slavery created feelings of guilt and indebtedness, though I did feel guilt and debt; nor that it created a long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, which it did indeed create, but the fact that men had epidermalized

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Oxherding Tale Being. The Negro—one Negro at Leviathan—was needed as a meaning. So it was; so it was. A mist dispelled. (52)

Johnson’s brilliant phrase “epidermalized Being” succeeds in conveying the terrible consequences of applying the philosophy of materialism to slavery. Moreover, he suggests that Hatﬁeld and other American slaveholders had elevated the philosophy of materialism to its most grotesque and advanced levels. Although Andrew and all other slaves at Leviathan were “needed as a meaning,” that is, as some base element in the establishment of deeply immoral hierarchies, they were never perceived as sentient beings with histories and souls but as matter. Life did not exist in the slave; life existed only in the consciousness of the master. The slave achieved something approaching existence through the will of the master. This dispiriting fact of slave existence emerges with considerable force in the following exchange between Andrew and Hatﬁeld. It should be remembered that this dialogue takes place moments after their ﬁrst kiss: “What do you feel when you touch me?” “Me.” Now her lips were on my ﬁngertips. “I feel my own pulse. My own sensations.” She laughed. “I have pulse everywhere.” “That’s all you feel?” “Yes.” (53)

Hatﬁeld may be beautiful and desirable, but she is also dangerously solipsistic. In refusing to grant Andrew sense, consciousness, and interiority, she reduces him to matter and condemns him to what Orlando Patterson terms a “social death.”30 Patterson deﬁnes slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”31 All of the aspects of this deﬁnition of slavery are at play in Andrew’s complex relationship with Flo Hatﬁeld. Even during moments of intimacy there is no intimacy, and the concepts of mutuality and reciprocity perish under the intensity of Hatﬁeld’s limitless self-regard. After receiving a letter from Anna Polkinghorne, Andrew’s biological mother, detailing the slave insurrection at Cripplegate (a letter that strangely contains no clues about the fate of Minty as well as of George and Mattie Hawkins), Andrew’s mind is ﬂooded with questions and anxiety. Immediately sensing the impact of external events upon Andrew’s consciousness Hatﬁeld remarks: “Andrew, you’re acting introspective again. You’re no fun when you act introspective” (65). Whenever Andrew’s mind appears closed to her inﬂuence, Hatﬁeld immediately reasserts her power. Existing in a state of “natal alienation” at Leviathan, Andrew’s “claims on, and obligations to, his parents and living blood relations 81

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS [and] all such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and on his [potential] descendants” are denied by Hatﬁeld.32 A “genealogical isolate” condemned to what Patterson terms a “social death” or a “secular excommunication” during his period of bondage to Hatﬁeld, Andrew “lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular.”33 While exhibiting the ruthlessness and self-absorption we would expect from Leviathan’s sovereign, Hatﬁeld is also, as Reb informs Andrew, “a slave like you’n me . . .” (62). The concept of the master as slave is intriguing. As Hatﬁeld is the sovereign of Leviathan, how is she enslaved? How is one with such sweeping powers without power? The clues that lead to something approaching an answer to these questions are in the very telling titles Johnson gives to the two chapters in which Hatﬁeld appears: “In the Service of the Senses.” While the wording is meant to convey the carnal service that Andrew provides almost hourly to an insatiable Hatﬁeld, it is also meant to reveal the peculiar character of the sovereign’s slavery. It is crucial to note that the ﬁrst chapter in Leviathan is entitled “Of Sense.” In this chapter, Hobbes describes the state of human existence in nature, which is an existence directed only by the senses or by what he terms “original fancy.” Hobbes’s commentary on the senses has interesting implications for our understanding of Hatﬁeld, who is guided solely by “original fancy,” and who appears to exist in the chaotic and barbaric state in nature that Leviathan, as conceived by Hobbes, is meant to control if not prevent. Clearly, this is the ironic reading that Johnson invites us to make of Hatﬁeld’s circumstances, but as is true in so many instances in Oxherding Tale, there is an additional layer of meaning. But where is the meaning to be found? In conversation with Hiram Groll, Leviathan’s veterinarian and strangely Hatﬁeld’s last lover, Andrew refers to the “wheel-spinning life of desire I shared with Flo Hatﬁeld: a male fantasy, I realized, with both Flo and me victims enslaved to an experience” (71). A wheel-spinning life? Sex? Slavery? We are now making our ascent out of the cave, as it were, toward the light. I would like to suggest here that the world of sense or what Hobbes terms “original fancy,” in which Hatﬁeld is both sovereign and slave, has something approaching an analogue in the cosmology of Buddhism. In Buddhism there is what Roger J. Corless terms a “spectrum of suffering.” This suffering falls within three realms: the sensuous realm, the realm of form, and the formless realm. “These realms are depicted,” writes Corless, “in the standard Tibetan image of the Wheel of Existence (bhava-chakra) in which a monster sym-

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Oxherding Tale bolizing samsara [or cyclic existence] is devouring a wheel containing the beings of the sensuous realm in its ﬁve or six segments.”34 Interestingly, the world of Hobbes’s Leviathan as it appears in Oxherding Tale is analogous to the sensuous realm in Buddhist cosmology. In this novel, hybridity is plainly the dominant mode for diverse literary forms, radically different philosophical systems, and, as we shall see, destabilizing constructions of race are the dominant elements within an extremely ﬂuid narrative. In Buddhism, the sensuous realm is ruled by kama or “sensuality” or “sensuous desire.” This realm is inhabited by animals, human beings, a range of deities with temperaments both peaceful and wrathful, and pretas or ghosts. Of special importance to us in our effort to shed additional light upon the special character of Hatﬁeld’s slavery are the pretas. Sometimes called “hungry ghosts,” writes Corless, “pretas are characterized by insatiable thirst and hunger. In a previous life they did not control their appetites and now they cannot. They try to eat and drink everything they can, no matter how revolting it might be. Their particular suffering is that of constant hunger and thirst.”35 Corless’s fascinating description of the pretas brings Hatﬁeld’s species of slavery into even sharper focus. We now have a broader framework, beyond that provided by Hobbes, within which to examine her “constant hunger” or systematic sexual exploitation of Andrew, Patrick, and the other countless black male slaves, now dead, who preceded them. Equally drawn to both Patrick and now to the recently arrived Freshmeat, Hatﬁeld is, so Andrew tells us, “like a woman comparing chunks of pork at Public Market” (41). In the preta-like imagination of Hatﬁeld, who is described by Reb as a “dead person,” food and sex are indissolubly linked. After reproving Andrew for his vegetarianism, Hatﬁeld tells her soon-to-be sexual slave that “Eating a good piece of meat is like making love.” Seconds after making this pronouncement, she indiscreetly ogles Patrick “as if he might be a six-foot chicken quiche” (42). Without regard for Patrick’s feelings, Hatﬁeld boldly prepares the way for her seduction of Andrew with the following observation: “I wonder what you’d taste like” (45). With Patrick soon dead, a messy suicide in which he uses the method “for disemboweling a deer,” Hatﬁeld, even before the funeral, shamelessly directs the full force of her senses upon Andrew, Freshmeat, the new object of desire. Assessing and savoring their ﬁrst kiss, Hatﬁeld remarks to Andrew: “Just as I thought. . . . You taste milky” (53). Ironically, the sovereign of Leviathan is also a slave. Like kama, Hatﬁeld

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS reigns crudely but powerfully in the sensuous realm. A slave to her appetites, she is more pointedly a slave to sexual desire, which most frequently assumes the form of an erect black phallus. Andrew, whose cognomen is Freshmeat, is Hatﬁeld’s most recent sexual slave. Behind him stand a long line of black men (and some white) who have been victimized to the point of death by her extreme sexual aggression. As we would expect, the sovereign of Leviathan is a demanding lover. Condemned to exist in a permanent state of desire, she is insatiable and unwavering in her determination to bend Andrew’s will and body to conform strictly to the mounting pressures of her desires. In addition to being insatiable, Hatﬁeld also possesses a demeaning sense of humor, for she requires her lovers to dress like gigolos and to wear dog collars. Predictably, only the sovereign of Leviathan can appreciate the humor in such emasculating dress and adornment; from her exalted station, only she can laugh. And it is laughter, let us be clear, of the most cruel and dehumanizing kind. During their brief courtship, which is a genteel way of describing her unsentimental displacement of Patrick and her orchestrated seduction of Andrew, Hatﬁeld lists, while in conversation with our attentive but naive philosopher, the traits most desirable in a male lover: “Is wanting tenderness too much?” Flo snatched her hand away. “Or intelligence in a man?” Thoughtful, she munched her lower lip. “Of course, I also want sexual satisfaction compliments gifts ﬁdelity a great body cleverness sophistication yet boyish exuberance a full head of hair good teeth and the ability to know my moods.” Flo gave me a side glance, cagey. “Is that too much?” “Oh no—if you’re going to dream,” I offered, “dream big.” “You’re the dream, Andrew.” She kissed me on both eyes. “You can handle it.” (60)

There is a certain symmetry in this moment because Andrew, like his father before him, will soon ﬁnd himself between his mistress’s sheets. The outcome of this dalliance with power for both father and son is calamitous. Even though he gives himself over completely to fulﬁlling Hatﬁeld’s multiplying appetites, demands, whims, and insistence that he be “always there,” Freshmeat concludes, not surprisingly, that it “would have been easier to pick cotton” (61). While there is something doomed and decidedly Sisyphean in any effort to accommodate Flo Hatﬁeld’s fanciful notions of a male ideal in love, it should be noted that the sovereign of Leviathan is initially pleased with her slave’s sexual performance. After an evening of histrionic sex of the most taxing (for Andrew) and voluble (for Flo) kind, Hatﬁeld conﬁdes to an exhausted Freshmeat: “La, Andrew, you are the best servant I have ever had” (64). After a year of service of this kind, predictably this dream of love 84

Oxherding Tale and desire becomes a nightmare of drug addiction, sexual terrorism, revenge, rage, and ﬁnally revolt. These reversals are a function of Andrew’s heightened awareness of his vulnerable and provisional status as Hatﬁeld’s sexual slave. During a visit with Hiram Groll, Andrew discovers the rotting corpse of Moon, the “boy who was replaced by Flo’s butler Patrick” (69). In conversation with the Vet, as Groll is called, Andrew acquires deeper insight into his condition as a slave. At this moment, Johnson again establishes certain interesting correspondences between his novel and Ellison’s Invisible Man, a landmark work in the evolving tradition of philosophical black ﬁction. Johnson’s philosopher narrator is in many ways as naive as Ellison’s questing narrator. Both, at pivotal moments, are given critical advice concerning the nature of power as well as the nature of being by a ﬁgure called the Vet. In Oxherding Tale, the Vet is a white and failed physician reduced to practicing the science of veterinary medicine upon a people for whom, given their status, homeopathic remedies would be regarded as absurd. Groll is profoundly pessimistic in outlook, but even in his pessimism he correctly diagnoses, without resorting to an autopsy, the causes of death for Moon and the other black male slaves in bondage to Hatﬁeld. According to Groll, Moon and his kind are afﬂicted with the absence of “life assurance,” that is, the absence of hope, of meaning and purpose. These slaves are plagued by an overwhelming sense of despair as they appear to have accepted the unlikelihood of escaping, outliving, resisting, or transcending what Andrew describes as a “style of being characterized by stasis, denial, humiliation, thinghood, and, as the philosophers said, ‘relative being’ ” (70). Plainly, the causes of death for Moon, Patrick, and potentially Andrew are not physical but metaphysical. Groll’s diagnosis explains the nihilism of Moon and the other black males who are the property of the Mistress of Leviathan. In their lives and in their deaths, we apprehend the grotesque progress of the philosophy of materialism within the matrix of slavery, as well as the full import of Johnson’s painfully apt and resonant phrase “epidermalized Being.” Turning our attention now to Invisible Man, Ellison’s vet is black and a veteran of World War II who aspired to serve his country through his specialized knowledge of medical science. Thwarted in this desire by the racism of the military, which could not fathom the notion of a black physician, Ellison’s vet suffers a profound psychological dislocation that possesses shadings of the psychological condition of Moon and many of the other black male slaves in Oxherding Tale. In spite of this trauma, the Vet’s vision of life is not grounded in pessimism, in marked contrast to Groll, but instead is 85

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS grounded in a realism and an optimism from which emerge a vision of life that is, above all, afﬁrmative. In spite of the assaults upon his character and psyche, Ellison’s vet asserts that the “world is possibility.” Crucially, the vet’s diagnosis or advice to Ellison’s questing narrator is “Be your own father,” that is, honor the authority of one’s own lived experience and intuition.36 During his period of enslavement at Leviathan, Andrew, like Ellison’s narrator, unfortunately suffers a range of reversals. Soon after his palaver with Groll, Andrew begins to plumb the dark meanings beneath the surface realities of Leviathan. Increasingly cognizant of the implications of Moon’s rotting corpse, Andrew returns to the “big house” all business and formality, determined to reach an agreement with Hatﬁeld over his year of unpaid wages. Notwithstanding Hatﬁeld’s unexpected but nevertheless suspect declaration of love, Andrew, to his credit, remains focused upon the legitimate issue of wages. He remembers, now, his purpose for leaving Cripplegate for Leviathan. “I came here to earn,” Andrew reminds Hatﬁeld, “enough to buy my freedom. That’s all changed now. Everything has changed. I don’t know what to do, but if you’ll at least pay me in part what I have coming, then . . .” (72). Finding this conversation about wages tedious and insulting, Hatﬁeld spurns what she predictably characterizes as “vulgar talk about money” (72). At this particular moment, the sovereign of Leviathan is interested in sexual commerce, not commerce of a monetary kind, and sets out to weaken Andrew’s resolve with seductive blandishments and near fatal servings of cocaine and wine. In his stupor, Andrew, again to his credit, insists upon discussing his wages even as he undresses Hatﬁeld. Having looked forward to yet another afternoon of sex, Hatﬁeld discovers that Andrew does not share her mood. Exasperated, the sovereign of Leviathan coldly turns to him and decrees: “Andrew, you’re spoiling everything. Just get it over with” (73). Ever the obedient slave, Andrew yields to the will of the sovereign but this time desire takes an unexpected turn: As I mounted her, I felt dizzy, a blur of disorientation, and to center myself I tried to reconstruct Minty’s face from memory, only to ﬁnd that I’d forgotten certain features—her skin, nose, and I could not remember her ears. How could I forget the ears of the ﬁrst woman I’d ever loved? Vertigo washed over me. The chandoo played hob with my sense of touch. Then Flo began to rub against me in a raw, hard way. It was, I thought, like using me as a kind of scratching post. What this action said was: What good are you? You have failed to rouse me. Be still while I satisfy myself. And ever she did this the pain was quick, the insult deep, the self-hatred more complete, and I did not, as she worked toward detumescence, truly exist. Suddenly, I wanted to hurt her. My ﬁst shot

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Oxherding Tale up without telling my brain what it had in mind—these things happen—then smashed ﬁve times, straight from the shoulder, into Flo Hatﬁeld’s nose, which ﬂattened like soft clay—I watched all this in a daze, distant—and the next thing I knew I was standing across the room, wringing my hands. (73)

Without question, this is one of the most complex scenes in contemporary American ﬁction. The humor of this scene is dependent in part upon Andrew’s explanation and stance following this unexpected slave revolt in Hatﬁeld’s boudoir. Cognizant of the physical and psychological damage he has inﬂicted upon Hatﬁeld, Andrew makes a series of statements that are meant to comfort the bleeding and humiliated sovereign: “I didn’t mean that!”; and seconds later, “Something came over me!”; and ﬁnally with doubtless the image of a decaying Moon ﬂitting through his narcotic consciousness, “It’s been a terrible day.” These apologetic statements provide little in the way of solace to Hatﬁeld, and they, as Johnson surely intends them, reveal and sustain the scene’s comic elements. Although outwardly calm, Hatﬁeld is furious and in her fury she banishes her sexual slave to the quarters that foreshadow, as we discover, his banishment to the Yellowdog Mine. Plainly, Flo Hatﬁeld does not, and this is the obvious pun and irony at the core of this complex moment, go with the ﬂow. The comic elements in this scene are fully exploited in Andrew’s subsequent exchanges with Reb, to whose quarters he descends after his expulsion from Leviathan’s big house, where he is burdened with a “heavy portmanteau . . . crammed with gifts” from a now much alienated Hatﬁeld. In his immense innocence and profound confusion, Andrew is unable to read and translate the implications of this calamity. The scene recalls George Hawkins’s fall from grace at Cripplegate, and gives new meaning to Andrew’s phrase, “sexual warfare.” “She loves me—it was a lover’s quarrel,” he conﬁdes to Reb. “These things straighten themselves out, don’t they?” Stunned by the question that reveals Andrew’s naivete, the Cofﬁnmaker, ever the reluctant father ﬁgure guiding our orphaned philosopher, plainly identiﬁes the parameters of Freshmeat’s true relationship to Leviathan’s chief voluptuarian while also providing hilarious commentary on the pivotal and seminal scene that has just taken place in the bedroom of the big house: “Where you been, boy?” Reb cackled. “On the moon? You didn’t hit yo mistress. You hit yo master two seconds befo’ she got her cookies. Think about it” (74). Reb’s frankness as well as this unexpected lapse into modern colloquial speech through the practice of double-voiced discourse, one of many linguistic anachronisms that endows this subversion of the historical novel with its appeal, advances the comic elements in this episode while also revealing the 87

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS complexity of the conﬁguration of desire and power, dependency and autonomy that deﬁne the master’s relationship to the slave. Andrew’s revolt against the sexual tyranny of Hatﬁeld is presented in an enormously complex scene whose success is a function of Johnson’s artistry, for he is able, in contrapuntal fashion, to load this charged scene with a range of competing tensions. On one level, we applaud Andrew’s long overdue rebellion against Hatﬁeld, which is ignited by a deep sense of insult to his humanity and masculinity. Doesn’t Andrew write that Hatﬁeld uses him as if he were a “kind of scratching post”? On another level, we are disturbed by the fact that a man strikes a woman not once but ﬁve times in the face, apparently breaking her nose, during a moment when she is, theoretically, the most vulnerable. But bearing in mind Reb’s insightful reading of this complex and violent encounter, this is neither an instance of misogyny nor of domestic abuse, although Johnson artfully evokes and exploits such associations, but a frontal assault upon slavery and patriarchy set in motion by a series of calculated inversions designed to provide us with fresh and original insights into the nature and operations of power. In one sense, Hatﬁeld’s gender is beside the point, for what is important here, her glib and disingenuous observations concerning the special kinship between black men and white women within the framework of slavery notwithstanding, is her complete and total identiﬁcation with power as the sovereign of Leviathan and the paradoxical dependencies, not fully appreciated by her, that it produces. In examining the peculiar slavery of the slave, Johnson also examines the peculiar slavery of the master, or in this instance, the sovereign. While perhaps endowing the Chinese philosophical concept of yin-yang with an entirely new set of meanings that cannot be analyzed here, the perverse dynamics of the relationship between Hatﬁeld and Andrew is an illustration of Patterson’s theory of slavery as not only a “relation of power,” but also as a “relation of parasitism.” Patterson argues that on an “intersubjective level the slaveholder [feeds] on the slave to gain the very direct satisfactions of power over another, honor, enhancement and authority. The slave, losing in the process all claims to autonomous power, [is] degraded and reduced to a state of liminality.”37 In his vanquishment at the hands of a ruthless Hatﬁeld, who feeds upon her sexual slave with all the voraciousness of a preta, Andrew has been reduced to a “state of liminality” but through his degradation we apprehend what Patterson suggestively terms the “paradox of domination.” In her domination, Hatﬁeld reveals, paradoxically, her dependency, for she is completely dependent upon Andrew to make her existence, as she has deﬁned it, meaningful. Patterson’s very suggestive theories of domination 88

Oxherding Tale within the framework of slavery and Corless’s perceptive reading of Buddhist cosmology lead us to the same conclusion: Hatﬁeld’s “constant hunger” or bottomless sexual appetites are the basis for her enslavement and her own very complex dependency. Yet it is within this sexually charged domain that Andrew instinctively and very appropriately enacts the ﬁrst of many acts of rebellion that lead to both liberty and enlightenment. In expanding the conception of slavery from the obvious one of physical bondage to include the psychological and spiritual conception of bondage posited in Buddhism, Johnson daringly creates the narrative space within which to explore both the bondage of the master and the sexual exploitation of black men in American slavery. Except for the mention of the humiliating treatment of a slave called Luke in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), very little is known of the sexual exploitation of black men within the framework of American slavery.38 In contrast to Douglass, Andrew does not acquire an expanded knowledge of his condition through literacy, but, like Jacobs, this crucial knowledge is born of the body in his struggle to acquire agency in contesting a despotic manifestation of desire. The slave narratives fall silent on this question of the sexual exploitation of enslaved black men, and it has become one of the artistic challenges of contemporary African American writers to imagine the speciﬁc forms these humiliations assumed.39 The very creation of Hatﬁeld in a novel written in the tradition of a ﬁrst-person antebellum slave narrative alerts us to this silence, and advances this important project in African American literature. While ﬁctionalizing taboo subjects that emerge only obliquely in Douglass’s The Narrative of the Life (1845) (I am thinking of the many sexually charged, sadomasochistic whippings a young, partially clad Douglass endures at the hands of Covey), Johnson complicates the nexus between racism and sexism, reminds us that every kind of human relationship was possible within the framework of slavery, introduces novelty into our reading of slavery, and inverts traditional constructions of power and sexuality.40 “Sexuality,” as Michel Foucault reminds us, “must not be described as a stubborn drive . . . but rather as an especially dense transfer point of relations of power.”41 As Leviathan’s sovereign, Hatﬁeld is a “dense transfer point” in what Foucault terms a “multiplicity of force relations” that also include Jonathan Polkinghorne, the master of Cripplegate, and Horace Bannon, the Soulcatcher. In exposing the range of appetites that shape and control Hatﬁeld’s complex dependencies, we apprehend the breadth and depth of what Andrew perceptively terms Reb’s “discomfort” and “outrage” (46). The despotism of Hatﬁeld’s appetites, whether expressed in her sweeping powers as the sov89

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS ereign of Leviathan or as its chief volupturian, is at the very heart of Reb’s rebellion, which manifests itself as a discipline of self-denial whose goal is a mastery of the senses and passions. Very predictably, this is a discipline Hatﬁeld contemptuously dismisses as “lowbred” (42). It is essential to remember that the ﬁnal cofﬁn the Cofﬁnmaker carves while at Leviathan is for Patrick, his son, one of the last doomed lovers ensnared on Flo Hatﬁeld’s spinning wheel of desire, of suffering, of samsara. While acknowledging this waste of human life and potential, Reb positions himself on the outside of this endless cycle of destruction and desire. But does Reb’s positioning, this practice of the stern discipline of wu-weii or non-action, produce meaningful results within the world of slavery as it is described in Johnson’s metaphysical slave narrative? I raised this question at an earlier point in this chapter and its answer, I believe, is found in the last chapter of Oxherding Tale, a chapter very signiﬁcantly entitled “Moksha.” While it is impossible to note, study, and translate every sign Johnson dutifully posts for us along this immensely rich and stimulating journey from slavery to freedom, moksha is one sign that requires decoding. A Sanskrit word more frequently used in Hinduism than in Buddhism, its meanings include release, deliverance, enlightenment, and liberation.42 As the last of four goals for human life in Indian culture, moksha is liberation or escape from samsara: the wheel of existence, the indeﬁnite cycle of life and death. The positing of this Eastern philosophical concept within the framework of a ﬁctionalized antebellum slave narrative has enormously rich implications, and they are fully realized in the ﬁnal chapter of Johnson’s novel. Carefully and patiently in the novel’s climatic scene, Johnson, through Horace Bannon, the soulcatcher, reveals the exceptional manner of Reb’s escape. Shortly after Minty’s horrible death by pellagra, Bannon arrives at the home of Andrew Hawkins, who is passing, masquerading as William Harris, an actual historical ﬁgure who, like our narrator, is a philosopher who earns his keep by teaching. Agreeing to leave with Bannon, Andrew believes that the moment of death has ﬁnally arrived, but Bannon, as we discover, grants Andrew a release of a different kind. On the outskirts of Spartanburg, Bannon parks his wagon under a fruit tree. Descending from the wagon, Andrew observes that “Bannon moved like the Cofﬁnmaker” (172). This shifting of forms preﬁgures others soon to come. Of the several questions pressing on Andrew’s mind, chief among them is the whereabouts of Reb. This question and others are answered very appropriately when the men are seated under the fruit tree which, as Andrew remembers this moment, “was weighted with fruit, the lower plum-heavy branches of the tree 90

Oxherding Tale doming round us, like a sermon on regeneration” (173). In this carefully constructed scene in which Johnson once again uses expertly double-voiced discourse, the fruit tree recalls two transformative moments in Hinduism and Buddhism. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the gospel of Hinduism, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna of the Aswattha, the ﬁg tree “rooted in heaven” with branches that stretch earthward and whose buds are “things of the senses.” Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that if Arjuna “cuts through the ﬁrmly rooted Aswattha tree” with the “axe of his nonattachment,” he will secure release from samsara.43 This richly symbolic exchange between Bannon and Andrew also recalls the moment in Buddhism when Siddhartha sets out to ﬁnd the Bodhi Tree, the tree under which all Buddhas have attained enlightenment (bodhi). While seated under the Bodhi Tree, Siddhartha is tempted by the powerful deity Mara, Lord of Samsara, whose name literally means “He of Death.” Through his resolve and discipline, Siddhartha vanquishes Mara and achieves “enlightenment” or moksha, release from samsara. These pivotal moments of instruction in Hinduism and Buddhism are the background and foundation for this important scene in Oxherding Tale. Horace Bannon, whose vocation is that of assassin, is the incarnation of Mara who is both vanquished and liberated; Andrew Hawkins, who is very far from being a Siddhartha, nevertheless like the Buddhist sage achieves a greatly enlarged understanding of his own personal history, potentiality, and place in a cruelly stratiﬁed world. It is Reb, the Cofﬁnmaker, who brings about these transformations in the lives of Andrew and Bannon. Prompted by Andrew’s question concerning Reb’s whereabouts, Bannon continues his “sermon on regeneration,” and describes the manner in which Reb secured his escape from slavery: Nothin! That’s hit right there—what threw me off, why hit took so long to run him down: you friend didn’t want nothin. How the hell you gonna catch a Negro like that? He can’t be caught, he’s already free. Not legally, but you know what Ah’m sayin’. Well suh, Ah had to think a spell about strategy. Ah’s always worked on the principle that the thing what destroys a man, what ﬁnally unstrings him, starts off ﬁrst as an appetite. Yo friend had no appetites. There wasn’t no way Ah could git a handhold on the nigguh, he was like smoke. (173)

Reb’s discipline of self-denial, his faithful adherence to the discipline of nonaction and non-attachment are the means by which he acquires his freedom. As Reb is free of desire, he is, as Bannon tells Andrew, “already free.” Reb defeats the considerable assassinative techniques and resources of the Soulcatcher because, as Bannon tells Andrews, he “wasn’t positioned nowhere” 91

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS (174). After Reb sells his ring, the last physical link to his Allmuseri origins, the Soulcatcher can ﬁnd “no place inside” Reb to settle. Entirely free of anything that would link him to this world, the Soulcatcher loses sight of Reb, who disappears into his name. Reb is, as Andrew had hoped and believed, “a Never-Returner” (147). In attaining moksha, Reb transforms his life as well as the lives of others. It is vital to Johnson that Reb’s Way, which might be dismissed as selfabsorption and escapism, have an impact in the world of slavery. Reb’s emptiness, his absence of desire in that liberating sense posited by Taoism and Buddhism and presented within the novel as the deﬁning features of Allmuseri culture, has liberating effects not only for himself but for others. Reb’s Way or his “life-afﬁrmative vision,” to borrow a resonant phrase belonging to the cynical and parasitic Hiram Groll, has very concrete consequences for Bannon, the slave catcher, and Andrew, the fugitive slave. Faithful to his word, Bannon, who honors the oath he made to Andrew and Reb prior to accepting the bounty placed on their heads by an outraged Flo Hatﬁeld— “If Ah ever meet a Negro Ah can’t catch, Ah’ll quit!” (116)—throws his “derringer into the weeds” after announcing his decision to marry Mamie, a prostitute. To Andrew’s great astonishment, his life has been spared, and in the same instant he discovers that he is, at last, a free man. In characteristic fashion, Andrew, who has blundered into so many things has also, in his own words, “blundered into manumission” (159). Through the spiritual discipline practiced by Reb, the world as Andrew once comprehended it has been completely altered. Reb is a free man; Bannon is a changed man; Andrew is a free man. This epiphanous moment in Johnson’s tale is not entirely free of sorrow. Bannon informs Andrew that he has assassinated, murderously true to his former vocation, George Hawkins. Andrew is devastated by the fact as well as the details of his father’s death, which the Soulcatcher blithely, proudly, shares with him: “Ah did indeed snuff George Hawkins after the Cripplegate uprisin’, but he was carryin’ ﬁfty-’leven pockets of death in him anyways, li’l pools of corruption that kept him so miserable he begged me, when Ah caught up with him in Calhoun Falls, to blow out his lights . . .” (174). But in this moment of loss for Andrew, there is also understanding. Paradoxically, the vehicle for this deeper understanding is the Soulcatcher himself, who offers Andrew a glimpse into the past and the future. The site for this revelation is the Soulcatcher’s densely tattooed body: Not tattooes at all, I saw, but forms sardined into his contour, creatures Bannon had killed since childhood; spineless insects, ﬂies he’d dewinged; yet even the

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Oxherding Tale tiniest of these thrashing within the body mosaic was, clearly, a society as complex as the higher forms, a concrescence of molecules cells atoms in concert, for nothing in the necropolis he’d ﬁlled stood alone, wished to stand alone, had to stand alone, and the commonwealth of the dead shape-shifted on his chest, his full belly, his fat shoulders, traded hand for claw, feet for hooves, legs for wings, their metamorphosis having no purpose beyond the delight the universe took in diversity for its own sake, the proliferation of beauty, and yet all were conserved in this process of doubling, nothing was lost in the masquerade, the cosmic costume ball, where behind every different mask at the party—behind snout beak nose and blossom—the selfsame face was uncovered at midnight, and this was my father, appearing brieﬂy in the dead boy Moon as he gave Flo Hatﬁeld a goodly stroke and, at the same instant of convulsive orgasm, opened his mouth as wide as that of the dying steer Bannon slew in his teens, was that steer, then several others, and I lost his ﬁgure in this ﬁeld of energy, where the profound mystery of the One and the Many gave me back my father again and again, his love, in every being from grubworms to giant sumacs, for these too were my father and, in the ﬁnal face I saw in the Soulcatcher, which shook tears from me—my own face, for he had duplicated portions of me during the early days of the hunt—I was my father’s father and he my child. (175–176)

In this singular instance of metamorphosis, which I have necessarily quoted at length, Johnson returns again to the Bhagavad-Gita. The Soulcatcher, once Lord Mara, is now Sri Krishna, who reveals to Arjuna his transcendent, divine, and universal Form. Enlightened and overwhelmed by the power of this divine image, Arjuna proclaims to Sri Krishna: “Ah, my God, I see all gods within your body; each in his degree, the multitude of creatures; . . . Universal Form, I see you without limit, inﬁnite of arms, eyes, mouths, bellies—see, and ﬁnd no end, midst, or beginning.”44 Previously mired in a dream of loss and multiplicity, Andrew understands, like Arjuna, the “mystery of the One and Many.” He understands that mourning the dead is a misapprehension of the processes of life and death, since nothing of life is ever lost to death. “Death is certain for the born. Rebirth is certain for the dead. You should not grieve,” explains Sri Krishna to an enraptured Arjuna, “for what is unavoidable.”45 In this unexpected turn, the Soulcatcher, in his ﬁnal metamorphosis as Sri Krishna, does not inﬂict suffering but grants Andrew a release from suffering through the transformative power of revelation. The Soulcatcher’s “sermon on regeneration” ends “with a life-afﬁrmative vision” of the kind that infuses Andrew’s new life as a free man with even deeper meaning. And what, precisely, are we to make of the life of Andrew Hawkins, now William Harris, who is, it seems, passing for white in Spartanburg, South Carolina? The ending of Oxherding Tale is problematic for many read93

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS ers, but to problematize, of course, is Johnson’s intention. Johnson aims to be problematic while also offering innovative readings and fresh interpretations of African American culture, history, and race. The ending possesses, I believe, a logic that is elegant in the extreme. “Aesthetically speaking,” observes Johnson’s literary ancestor Ralph Ellison, “when form is blended successfully with function, elegance results.”46 Returning to the evolving condition of the oxherder in the several versions of The Ten Oxherding Pictures, we recall that the gradual development of the Zen life results in what Suzuki terms a “progressive whitening” of the ox. Andrew Hawkins’s assumption of the new identity of William Harris corresponds, it seems, to the Zen process illustrated in the several versions of The Ten Oxherding Pictures. In negotiating the immensely difﬁcult journey from “House and Field” to “The White World”—that is to say, in traversing the presumably hermetic but porous social spheres of this two-part novel—Johnson’s protagonist, in terms of consciousness, ultimately resides within a third sphere or dimension through the attainment of moksha in the novel’s ﬁnal chapter. Observe the manner in which Johnson explodes the binary opposition of the black world and the white world with the introduction of a third point of view that provides us with a release, as moksha certainly should, from a dualistic or Du Boisian double consciousness. In moving from one identity to another, a motion that recalls in part the transformation of identity and social status chronicled in conversion and slave narratives, Andrew Hawkins, now William Harris, undergoes an expansion of consciousness that occurs in his ﬁnal revelatory encounter with Horace Bannon. No longer mired in surfaces, chained to distinctions, or sinking beneath a multiplicity of meanings that marked the life of Hawkins, Harris, in psychological and spiritual terms, dwells above Du Bois’s veil. In attaining the ideal posited in The Souls of Black Folk, Johnson’s protagonist apprehends the unity in human experience, the transcendent meaning in a plurality of meanings that reside within “the profound mystery of the One and the Many.” If we conclude that Harris is merely passing for white, we remain, Johnson suggests, in the world of distinctions, differences, and chronic binary oppositions that Hawkins, now Harris, has transcended. The creolization or hybridity of forms and philosophical systems that endow Oxherding Tale with its particular unity and force are reﬂected in Harris’s, formerly Hawkins’s, person and consciousness. Harris is neither black nor white, but paradoxically a composite of these strains and more. In achieving moksha, or what Johnson terms in another context “whole sight,” or the liberation of perception and the apprehension of meanings in their proper constellation, Harris stands within as well as on 94

Oxherding Tale the outside of the conventional constructions of race and consciousness embedded within the dualistic structures of the novel itself.47 By virtue of this complex positioning, he literally and ﬁguratively bodies forth an alternative mode of being in the world “that constitutes an afﬁrmation beyond opposites of all kinds.”48 Or put another way, Andrew is an example of what Stuart Hall terms “metaphors of transformation,” for as a character in ﬁction he possesses analytic value in that he challenges us “to think, in a nonreductionist way, [about] the relations between the social and the symbolic.”49 In his ﬁnal location or position of enunciation, Johnson’s protagonist possesses the very complex traits and sensibility that are speciﬁc to what Hall deﬁnes as “diaspora identities.”50 Rejecting as problematic notions of essence or purity, Hall contends that the “diaspora experience is deﬁned . . . by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities,” theorizes Hall, “are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”51 Hall’s theory of diaspora identities corresponds to Johnson’s theory of the self set forth in the second of two “essayist interludes” entitled “The Manumission of First-Person Viewpoint.” “The Self,” theorizes Johnson in a chapter in which the narrator’s voice, in Melvillian fashion, is temporarily suspended, “this perceiving Subject who puffs on and on, is, for all purposes, a palimpsest, interwoven with everything—literally everything—that can be thought or felt” (152). Plainly, Johnson’s protagonist illustrates the presuppositions that propel his metaphysical slave narrative forward, and he also concretizes the properties that deﬁne Hall’s theory of identity. As a symbol of “diaspora identities,” the self as “palimpsest,” in other words, the deessentialized black subject,52 Andrew Hawkins, now William Harris, achieves a radical expansion of consciousness in ways marvelously consistent with the Zen process through his acceptance and afﬁrmation of the unity and continuity of human experience. This harmony complements the positive value Hall places upon diversity and hybridity. Ultimately, for Hall and Johnson the crucial word in identity formation is process, which accounts for the fact that Reb’s four-sided bust of Andrew remains, signiﬁcantly, unﬁnished, that is, a work-in-progress. In Johnson’s extremely advanced treatment of the mulatto in this metaphysical slave narrative, we apprehend what Paul Gilroy astutely terms “the emphatic modernness of western black experience.”53 Gilroy argues that the “concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marked out 95

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS blacks as the ﬁrst truly modern people, handling in the nineteenth century dilemmas and difﬁculties which would only become the substance of everyday life in Europe [and the United States] a century later.”54 Originating from within the holocaust of slavery, this sense of modernity or what Gilroy terms “emphatic modernness” is characterized by migration and transformation. This complex condition is reﬂected in the consciousness, voice, and body of Johnson’s extremely erudite and questing protagonist. The condition accounts, in part, for the profoundly contemporary feel and relevance of this ﬁctionalized antebellum slave narrative. For Americans of African descent, the “dilemmas and difﬁculties” that attend the shifting and complex process of identity formation are part of an historical process marked by dislocation, migration, and transformation. This charged terrain is successfully negotiated by and integrated within the consciousness of Johnson’s protagonist who reconstructs his odyssey as a slave from a position which reﬂects his “emphatic modernness” as well as his achievement of both liberty and enlightenment. As a ﬁgure within the protean tradition of American literature, Andrew Hawkins/William Harris is a protagonist who speaks to the possibilities that exist in the spheres of consciousness and in the construction of racial identities. Further, Johnson’s protagonist reﬂects the evolution of the image of the mulatto in the ﬁction of American writers from the 1850s to the present. Rejecting static and monolithic constructions of race, Johnson’s creation of Hawkins/Harris is clearly a radical recasting of the mulatto as this ﬁgure emerged over time in the ﬁction of such writers as Hannah Crafts, Frances Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis. In Oxherding Tale, the mulatto Andrew Hawkins, who has become William Harris, is neither a tragic ﬁgure nor a symbol of moral degeneration, but is instead the incarnation, like Paul Johnson in Jean Toomer’s Cane, of the emancipatory potentiality of hybridity and of our capacity for enlarged and expansive states of consciousness that plainly belie our external circumstances as well as the biological constructions of race. In the creation of Andrew Hawkins/William Harris, Johnson has introduced an entirely new ﬁgure to African American literature: the deessentialized black subject. Without question, this is one of Johnson’s most remarkable contributions and achievements. The creation of Andrew Hawkins/William Harris functions as a critique of what Johnson terms the “onedimensional style of being” privileged in the literature of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.55 The creation of such a character also 96

Oxherding Tale is an announcement that Johnson intends to introduce into African American literature an entirely new set of concerns and positions vis-a`-vis black subjectivity and identity. Or put another way, the creation of Hawkins/Williams marks the end of a particular kind of innocence in African American literature, and marks the end of what Hall argues as the “innocent notion of the essential black subject.”56 There is much at issue in Hall’s claim: What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category “black”; that is, the recognition that “black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of ﬁxed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature. What this brings into play is the recognition of the immense diversity and differentiation of the historical and cultural experience of black subjects. This inevitably entails a weakening or fading of the notion that “race” or some composite notion of race around the term black will either guarantee the effectivity of any cultural practice or determine in any ﬁnal sense its aesthetic value.57

Hawkins/Harris is an illustration of the complexity of black subject positions and black subjectivity of which Hall speaks. Given his hybrid, multiracial position, Hawkins/Harris bodies forth this complex species of subjectivity. At the conclusion of the novel, he is keenly aware of the fact of race and the category black in the social relations of nineteenth-century South Carolina, yet he also, as a consequence of his experience of moksha, is keenly aware that race or the category black is an illusion, a function of consciousness shaped by distinctions and multiplicity, that is, samsara. Again, Hawkins/ Harris is the ﬁrst of several characters in Johnson’s oeuvre to embody this complex subject position. He is followed by such characters as Rutherford Calhoun of Middle Passage and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Chaym Smith, and Matthew Bishop of Dreamer. While Johnson has created male protagonists who function as an eloquent argument against the essentialized black subject, he has not been as successful and consistent in the creation of black female protagonists whose complexity corresponds to that of his male protagonists. While Faith Cross is a powerful example of change and transformation, Johnson limits her potentiality to her biology, through the birth of her only child, although this problematic development is transcended in Cross’s ﬁnal metamorphosis into the Swamp Woman. Johnson’s problematic treatment of the black female subject continues in the character of Minty, who strangely manifests aspects of the mammy ﬁgure in her relations with Andrew and his white wife Peggy Undercliff. While Faith Cross and Minty 97

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS serve as examples of the ways in which Johnson’s portrayal of the black female subject is compromised by a reductive application of gender as a biological category and cultural stereotypes, it is vital to note that in his subsequent novels, there is a striking improvement in his portrayal of the black female subject. In Isadora Bailey of Middle Passage and Amy Grifﬁth of Dreamer, Johnson has created black female protagonists who possess the force and complexity of his black male protagonists. In these female protagonists, we discover ample proof that Johnson has abandoned the problematic portrayal of black female subjectivity that weakened his ﬁrst two novels. Bailey and Grifﬁth emerge, like their black male counterparts, as deessentialized black subjects whose gender identities neither overshadow nor obscure their many other subject positions, nor compromise their potential for change and transformation. In the creation of de-essentialized black subjects, in his efforts to imagine black subjectivity in the most expansive and complex terms, in Oxherding Tale we also observe a kinship in Johnson’s position on race as a social construction that corresponds to a number of both canonical and contemporary works that treat race as a discursive concept. In his pioneering work, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), Du Bois, rejecting a scientiﬁc or biological reading of race advanced in his essay “The Conservation of the Races” (1897), deﬁnes race as a social, historical, and cultural construct.58 More particularly, Du Bois deﬁnes race as a “group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies.”59 In his “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985), an anthology of essays that advanced in certain ways Du Bois’s revised position on race in Dusk of Dawn as well as served to highlight the new arguments of race as a social construct, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., characterizes race as a “dangerous trope.” Examining the use of race in the “study of literature and the shaping of critical theory,” Gates argues that race is the “ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application. The biological criteria used to determine ‘difference’ in sex simply do not hold when applied to ‘race.’ Yet we carelessly use language in such ways as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. To do so,” argues Gates, “is to engage in a pernicious act of language, one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural and ethnic difference, rather than to assuage or redress it.”60 In his stimulating and provocative In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), Anthony Appiah advances a now well-known critique of Du Bois’s reading of race, for he maintains that Du Bois never “fully transcended” the hold and inﬂuence of the scientiﬁc concept of race.61 98

Oxherding Tale “In his later writings, Du Bois . . . was unable to escape,” Appiah argues, “the notion of race he explicitly rejected.”62 While sharing Du Bois’s commitment to abandon the scientiﬁc concept of race, Appiah, emphasizing the centrality of culture in the formation of identity while also rejecting concepts of racial purity, asserts that “we are all already contaminated by each other.”63 In “Subjects in History” and “Race: The Floating Signiﬁer,” Stuart Hall assumes a position on race as a discursive concept that reveals the ways in which he agrees and disagrees with Appiah, who argues, within the context of Africa, for a continental identity that would supplant an identity based on race.64 While not addressing Appiah’s concept of a continental identity, Hall’s strong afﬁnities with Du Bois would make it difﬁcult for him, I believe, to argue in favor of Appiah’s concept of a continental identity.65 While sharing Du Bois’s view that race is a “sociohistorical concept,” Hall is also drawn to Du Bois’s use of the term badge in Dusk of Dawn to suggest the various values, both positive and negative, that are attached to race; indeed, Hall uses the Du Boisian term badge as the basis for his argument that race is a language, a discourse that “operates through the movement of the signiﬁers.”66 Likewise in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991), the legal scholar Patricia J. Williams advances a reading of race and rights that bears several striking similarities to those of Gates, Hall, and Appiah. For Williams race is also a sociohistorical concept whose shifting, unstable meanings are captured in the discursive concept of the ﬂoating signiﬁer.67 In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000), Paul Gilroy argues that the “pursuit of liberation from ‘race’ is an especially urgent matter for those peoples who, like modern blacks in the period after transatlantic slavery, were assigned an inferior position in the enduring hierarchies that raciology produced.”68 Gilroy also maintains that there are “very good reasons why it [the liberation from race] should be enthusiastically embraced by others whose antipathy to race-thinking can be deﬁned, not so much by the way it has subordinated them, but because in endowing them with the alchemical magic of racial mastery, it has distorted and delimited their experiences and consciousness in other ways. They may not have been animalized, reiﬁed, or exterminated, but they too have suffered something by being deprived of their individuality, their humanity, and thus alienated from species life. Black and white,” argues Gilroy, “are bonded together by the mechanisms of ‘race’ that estrange them from each other and amputate their common humanity.”69 Where are the points of divergence and convergence in Johnson’s posi99

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS tion on race in Oxherding Tale and in subsequent novels vis-a`-vis Du Bois, Gates, Appiah, Hall, Williams, and Gilroy? The point of convergence is that Johnson rejects the scientiﬁc or biological concept of race, and throughout his ﬁction advances a reading of race as a sociohistorical and discursive concept. Certainly, this is a position Johnson shares with these scholars, but also a position he complicates, a fact that brings us to the vital point of divergence which is not a disagreement, but a further reﬁnement of this cross-generational and intergenerational dialogue on race. For Johnson, race is not only a discursive concept, a social construction, but it is also a chimera, an illusion, a feature of the world of distinctions and multiplicity known in Buddhism as samsara. This particular reading of race is revealed in Andrew’s ﬁnal, revelatory encounter with Horace Bannon which I examined at some length earlier. Through the achievement of moksha, Andrew apprehends that race is an illusion, and thus transcends the binary constructs of race encoded in the novel’s deep structure. In constructing such a scene in literature, Johnson signals his belief that race is a “dangerous trope,” to summon again the suggestive language of Gates, one that has served to dehumanize and devalue blacks, but also whites whose humanity and consciousness have been distorted by the operations of this false concept. As a novel characterized by a hybridization of forms and ideas, the destabilization of constructions of gender and race, and a relentlessly interrogative stance concerning the nature of being, Oxherding Tale possesses for Johnson a certain instrumentality. This novel is the vehicle by which Johnson explores and critiques slavery as practiced in the United States. This exploration and critique is not rendered through the matrix of Christianity, as is so often the case in slave narratives, but instead this redemptive search for meaning is undertaken through the calculated transplanting of East Asian philosophical systems upon an American landscape whose boundaries and theories of race and liberty have been determined in large part by the ideals of the Enlightenment. The result of this transplanting or unbracketing is that Johnson explodes the traditional constructions of identity, race, power, and slavery, achieving a welcomed innovation and strangeness in artistic terms while concurrently revealing the varying modes of resistance and the spiritual resources of African Americans under slavery. In Oxherding Tale, Johnson has redeﬁned and complicated conceptions of slavery and resistance, identity and liberation: conceptions at the very heart of African American literature as well as his ambitious project called philosophical black ﬁction. Beyond a radical recasting and valuation of slavery and its effects, Oxherding Tale is a means by which Johnson initiates a dia100

Oxherding Tale logue with other writers. In a novel enlivened by double-voiced discourse, Oxherding Tale is in large part a reply to Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1951), a novel that Johnson has identiﬁed as pivotal in his intellectual and artistic development. The trajectory of Oxherding Tale, the relationship of Andrew Hawkins to Reb that mirrors that of Govinda and Siddartha, and the intellectual concerns at the novel’s center recall Hesse’s masterpiece.70 In Oxherding Tale, Johnson is in dialogue not only with European writers who share his passion for philosophy and ﬁction, but also with African American writers who share his aesthetic interests as well as his interest in politics, but not his brand of politics. As already stated, Oxherding Tale is the novel in which Johnson deﬁnes himself against the ideology of the Black Arts Movement, which, as he writes in Being and Race, “produced preciously little ‘good art,’ and even less capable of lasting.”71 As the embodiment of black cultural nationalism of this period, George Hawkins, a slave to an ideology of black supremacy grounded in distinctions, does not fair well in Johnson’s novel. While Johnson has written admiringly of the example of Baraka and others writers of the Black Arts Movement, in Oxherding Tale there is clearly a condemnation of the rhetoric and politics of black separatism with its corresponding essentialist constructions of African American identity and culture. In Johnson’s ﬁctional universe, those who exhibit such tendencies are rejected and deﬁned as “untouchable” (142). In political and ideological terms, Johnson has more sympathy and admiration for the inclusive and expansive politics advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr., who is evoked obliquely in Reb’s nonviolent, subversive, and transforming practice of non-action. As we shall see, King emerges as an inspirational symbol of resistance and transformation in Dreamer, Johnson’s fourth novel. But before examining the philosophical underpinnings of Dreamer, we must engage the ontological questions at the core of Middle Passage, another prize-winning novel in which Johnson extends as well as ampliﬁes a line of reasoning begun in Faith and the Good Thing and one that he develops fully in Oxherding Tale. As we have observed, in his ﬁrst and second novels Johnson is intent upon contesting, among many things, the traditional conception of slavery. In the following chapter, we shall examine the various ways in which Middle Passage is the framework within which Johnson, ever faithful to his twin callings of artist and philosopher, explores and problematizes not only traditional conceptions of slavery, but also slavery’s opposite: freedom.

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MIDDLE PASSAGE: WHAT IS THE NATURE OF FREEDOM?

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The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will: Cinquez its deathless primaveral image life that transﬁgures many lives. —Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage” “Great is the Maker,” said the sick one, “Who has made me as I am!” —Chuang Tzu, “Metamorphosis” The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman. —George Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

The third novel in a corpus of four, Middle Passage established Johnson as a national and international ﬁgure in letters, and earned him the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990: he was the ﬁrst African American male author so honored since Ralph Ellison was awarded this prize for his ﬁrst novel, Invisible Man (1952). This fortuitous event links two writers who have broken consistently new ground in the writing of ﬁction. In a tribute on the occasion of receiving the National Book Award, Johnson generously acknowledged his indebtedness to Ellison, whose great novel of ideas contains, the younger writer asserted on this occasion, many instances “where ﬁction and philosophy meet.”1 Middle Passage is the site upon which Johnson advances the ambitious project he terms philosophical black ﬁction, and in the process he continues his interrogations, through a double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse, that possesses both a moral and ontological cast always within the framework of speciﬁc philosophical systems. Like Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage is a work of historical ﬁction, or to 102

Middle Passage be more precise, it is a philosophical novel rooted in the past. At every turn in a novel that is a great sea yarn, a profound meditation on freedom, and a revisiting as well as revising of some of the most important works by Herman Melville and Jack London, Johnson collapses the historical distance between us and his very artful narrator Rutherford Calhoun. Like his contemporary Andrew Hawkins of Oxherding Tale, Calhoun strikes us as our contemporary as a result of the masterful manner in which Johnson integrates modes of contemporary speech as well as contemporary political and cultural debates (on afﬁrmative action, the lonely condition of modern black women, the meaning of masculinity, and the rise of black leadership in declining American urban centers) into a novel that takes place in 1830. Moreover, like Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage is a deeply masculinist text in the sense that Johnson has created a narrator who addresses and seems only to imagine a male readership, and who, as the author of the ship’s log, explores many of the themes and questions that shape the lives of men. These themes and questions include father–son relationships, the rivalry between male siblings, the special appeal of a bachelor’s existence in contrast to the bondage of wedlock, the manner in which a man deviates from or accepts normative standards of masculinity, and perhaps most importantly the degree to which he, as a free and purposeful agent, negotiates and creates for himself a place in the world that surpasses or at least rivals the accomplishments of his father or other signiﬁcant male ﬁgures.2 Needless to say, such themes are deeply complicated by race and caste, for Johnson’s narrator is a newly emancipated bondsman who is uncertain of what to make of the possibilities and responsibilities of freedom in an era of slavery and marked racism. Certainly, one of the central questions in Middle Passage, I would like to suggest here, is what is the nature of freedom for a newly emancipated slave? Or put another way, how is freedom to be realized, used and interpreted in the life of a man who has known only its opposite? How does Rutherford Calhoun imagine and deﬁne freedom? And what are the forces and events that catalyze him to imagine freedom in communal rather than individualistic terms? These are the issues I will engage in throughout the course of this chapter. In taking up these questions, I also am interested in examining the manner in which Johnson, as an artist and philosopher, stains these questions with the sense and meanings derived from Continental philosophy, most speciﬁcally phenomenology, as well as Platonism and Taoism. As I will demonstrate, these are the philosophical systems that constitute the rich ground for Johnson’s posing of the several questions related to freedom that undergird thought and action in Middle Passage. 103

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS The several questions that are central to the novel are given substance and signiﬁcance through the character of Rutherford Calhoun, who undergoes a series of dramatic and life-altering transformations during the course of a transatlantic voyage as a cook on a slaver signiﬁcantly called the Republic. We ﬁrst meet Calhoun in 1830, only one year after his manumission from bondage by his master, a Rev. Peleg Chandler of Makanda, Illinois. Calhoun tells us that Rev. Chandler “hated slavery,” and that “out of Christian guilt, taught us more than some white men in Makanda knew.” Before his death, Rev. Peleg manumitted Calhoun, his brother Jackson Calhoun, and the other slaves he had inherited from his father.3 Of the many things Rev. Chandler taught Calhoun and the other slaves in his possession, chief among them was the ability to read and write. Although he does not receive the patrician education of Andrew Hawkins of Oxherding Tale, Calhoun is literate. And unlike his contemporary Hawkins, Calhoun is capable, in most instances, of reading the meaning ingrained in the deep structures that shape and determine the social world. It is through the unmediated consciousness of this newly manumitted bondsman that we are told, in the form of a ship’s logbook, the story of the Republic’s Middle Passage, its strange cargo, the slave revolt and mutiny, the loss of life, property and goods, and the signiﬁcant, unexpected personal metamorphosis born of these events. In addition to being literate and a perceptive reader of human behavior, Calhoun also is a self-described “petty thief” who is quickly accustoming himself to the criminal and sensual life of New Orleans, his new home subsequent to his migration with his free papers from Makanda, Illinois. As he tells us in the ﬁrst entry of the ship’s logbook, though New Orleans was for Calhoun unexplored territory, it was far from an alien place: New Orleans, you should know, was a city tailored to my taste for the excessive, exotic fringes of life, a world port of such extravagance in 1829 when I arrived from southern Illinois . . . that I dropped my bags and a shock of recognition shot up my spine to my throat, rolling off my tongue in a whispered, “Here, Rutherford is home.” So it seemed those ﬁrst few months to a country boy with cotton in his hair, a great whore of a city in her glory, a kind of glandular Golden Age. She was if not a town devoted to an almost religious pursuit of Sin, then at least to steamy sexuality. To the newcomer she was an assault of smells: molasses commingled with mangoes in the sensually damp air, the stench of slop in a muddy street, and, from the labyrinthine warehouses on the docks, the odor of Brazilian coffee and Mexican oils. And also this: the most exquisitely beautiful women in the world, thoroughbreds of pleasure created two centuries before by the French for their enjoyment. Mulattos colored like magnolia petals, quadroons with breasts big as melons—women who smelled

104

Middle Passage like roses all year round. Home? Brother, for a randy Illinois boy of two and twenty accustomed to cornﬁelds, cow plops, and handjobs in his master’s hayloft, New Orleans wasn’t home. It was Heaven. But even paradise must have its back side too, and it is here (alas) that the newcomer comes to rest. Upstream there were waterfront saloons and dives, a black underworld of thieves, gamblers, and ne’er-do-wells who, unlike the Creoles downstream (they sniffed down their long, Continental noses at poor, purebred Negroes like myself ), didn’t give a tinker’s damn about my family tree and welcomed me as the world downstream would not. (1–2)

Arriving in what he terms “Heaven” at the age of twenty-two, a newly emancipated Calhoun has found his way into a city that mirrors in every way his own hedonistic and criminal nature. Addressing a male reader, he tells us that he has found his low, dark niche in New Orleans’s “underworld of thieves, gamblers, and ne’er-do-wells. . . .” As a character in ﬁction, Calhoun contains elements of the bad man, or the outlaw ﬁgure in African American folklore. Notorious for their contempt for conventions, the quintessential ﬁgure in this tradition in African American folklore is Stackalee. Like Stackalee, Calhoun is a scoundrel who ﬂouts conventions and absolutely delights in transgressions and prevarications for their own sake. His survival depends upon mother wit as it is applied to the weakness and gullibility of others. The crucial difference, however, between Calhoun and Stackalee is that Calhoun lacks the propensity for cruelty and violence for which Stackalee is legendary. In addition to emerging from a long line of outlaw ﬁgures in African American folklore, Calhoun also shares the cynical disposition and outlook of the quintessential hustler in American ﬁction. I am thinking of the protean ﬁgure in Melville’s The Conﬁdence-Man. New Orleans also serves as the stage for many of the Conﬁdence-Man’s exploits. Although there are many differences between them—caste, race, and the potentiality for transformation being the most important—both Melville’s protagonist and Calhoun are professional swindlers, both trafﬁcking in the misery of others. Signiﬁcantly, while sorting through the life-and-death choices occasioned by the slave revolt on the Republic, one of the Allmuseri remarks to a beleaguered Calhoun: “I’ve no doubt that you were a good conﬁdence man in New Orleans” (136). A conﬁdence man “hooked on sensation, . . . a lecher for perception and the nerve-knocking thrill,” Calhoun, although now free for little more than a year, is nevertheless still in bondage (3). But in what sense is this newly emancipated bondsman still in chains, as it were? Here again, Johnson introduces and complicates an important and recurring theme in his ﬁction.

105

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Ever committed to examining fully and in their complexity the various modes of slavery, he reveals that the species of slavery to which Calhoun is here entangled is not physical, but rather metaphysical. This fact complicates in immensely fascinating ways the many questions related to freedom that are so central to the novel. Like Flo Hatﬁeld and, for a period, Andrew Hawkins, Calhoun is a slave to desire, to the world of the senses, and to sensation, as he tells us. Although emancipated by the very pious Rev. Chandler, the randy and unscrupulous Calhoun has moved from one species of bondage to another. So deeply enmeshed is he in this new form of slavery—the sensual and corrupt life of the petty thief—that he attaches to it a meaning and value that is religious: “Theft, if the truth be told, was the closest thing I knew to transcendence” (46). In the articulation of this species of transcendence, Calhoun recalls his counterpart in twentieth-century African American verse and a fellow Illinoisan: Satin Legs Smith, a denizen of the ﬁctional black underworld of Bronzeville memorialized by Gwendolyn Brooks in her classic poem “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith.”4 For Satin Legs Smith, sex is a means to the transcendent; for Calhoun, theft is a means to the transcendent. As outlaw ﬁgures, both men have discovered and chosen unconventional routes to a sublime reality. Like his counterparts in folklore, ﬁction, and verse, Calhoun bodies forth a hybrid, virile, sensual, and transgressive form of black masculinity. Put another way, he is the worse nightmare of his contemporary William Lloyd Garrison and a justiﬁcation for the continuation of American slavery advocated by John C. Calhoun. This black Calhoun is deeply committed, in the most perverse and self-serving sense, to the trinity of ideals penned by Thomas Jefferson and that were the foundation for the American revolution: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like the backwoods man, the Yankee, and the Cavalier, as a former bondsman Rutherford Calhoun is a fully American type possessing both mongrel interests and background. He is another variation of the many variants of American masculinity that has its genesis in the peculiar and dynamic interplay of caste, class, gender, race, geography, and the contradictions of the American democratic order of the 1830s.5 For such a man, the acquisition of the state of freedom means only, at this juncture, the fulﬁllment of his own multiplying appetites and the pursuit of hedonism in all of its forms. Attachments function only to enlarge, sustain, and fulﬁll his pleasure; this is their sole function for a restless and outwardly emancipated Calhoun. Freedom for Illinois, as he is sometimes called, is the freedom to satisfy himself, along with “pilfering food and picking money belts off tourists” (3). These are the values of the Conﬁdence Man, of the 106

Middle Passage scoundrel, of the one who will not be held accountable, of the sensualist, of the one who somersaults from sensation to the sensation, of the one who deeply resents any restraints upon the operations of a fertile, seductive, at turns patriotic though base imagination. These are the elements that constitute the new species of slavery for the newly manumitted Calhoun. Lest I appear to be too harsh in cataloguing Calhoun’s traits that serve as markers for his metaphysical form of slavery, I should add that he is not the only hustler and sensualist in this magniﬁcent tale of the sea who is a slave to desire and materialism. There is Philippe “Papa” Zeringue and Ebenezer Falcon, about whom I will have more to say momentarily. I would pause here to assert that what distinguishes these hustlers from one another is this: scale as well as the potentiality for transformation. It is to such a man that Ebenezer Falcon, the captain of the Republic, entrusts the ship’s logbook; therefore, it is through such a man that we are given the details of each stage of this transatlantic voyage, and it is his voice we hear from the ﬁrst logbook entry to the last. In some ways, we could not have a narrator who is more unreliable. It is important to stress, however, that Calhoun relates the genesis and dramatic turns of this singular voyage after its conclusion, in other words, only after he has undergone, crucially, several signiﬁcant and pivotal transformations in consciousness. Questions pertaining to Calhoun’s reliability and trustworthiness as a narrator are overruled by virtue of the profound alterations in consciousness and values that take place in him as the novel increases in momentum and power, and which he describes with such accuracy and force. Taking place in 1830, Middle Passage is a work of nine chapters, or rather nine logbook entries, the ﬁrst of which is dated June 14, 1830, and the last August 20, 1830. The novel opens in medias res, for Calhoun informs us that his voyage aboard the Republic began on April 14, 1830. The action of the novel is therefore highly condensed, occurring during the period of approximately four months at sea. Very probably, Calhoun had assumed that he would continue indeﬁnitely as a landlubber in the mode of petty thief and sensualist, that is to say, in this mode of bondage, until he was killed by another swindler like himself, or collapsed in dramatic fashion from an over-taxation of the senses. The love in the heart of a woman, however, catalyzes a process that sends him out to sea, and in so doing saves him from such an ignominious and predictable end. In the novel’s opening paragraph, Calhoun sets forth the combination of events and forces that catapult him most unexpectedly from land to sea, from New Orleans, his new home and the site of many transgressions, to the Republic, the site for his most unexpected metamorphosis: 107

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment—especially if you knew Isadora. So I went to sea, sailing from Louisiana on April 14, 1830, hoping a quarter year aboard a slave clipper would give this relentless woman time to reconsider, and my bill collectors time to forget they’d ever heard the name Rutherford Calhoun. (1)

In contrast to Herman Melville’s Ishmael, whose sea voyages are motivated by a death wish, “This is my substitute for pistol and ball,” Calhoun masquerades as a sailor in order to avoid the “disaster” of marriage.6 Like Jack London’s Humphrey Van Weyden, who describes himself as “the veriest landsman,” Calhoun is a “landlubber” who overcomes his fear of the ocean in order to avoid creditors who are determined to collect their debts.7 At this point in the novel, while the reality of debt is an important fact, it is the possibility of marriage to Isadora Bailey that represents for Calhoun a fate “worse than imprisonment.” And why? As a man who “longed for high adventure,” marriage, or more speciﬁcally “the bondage of wedlock,” would translate into a mode of existence that Calhoun would ﬁnd impossible to bear as well as a transformation into the type of man he was “determined not to become: ‘a gentleman of color.’ The phrase made me hawk, then spit in a corner of my mind. It conjured (for me) the image of an Englishman, round of belly, balding, who’d been slightly brushed with brown watercolor or cinnamon” (9). At this juncture, Calhoun rejects this mode of black masculinity, which represents for him conventionalized existence in the extreme. In ﬁne, marriage to Isadora would result in the total extinguishment of his life and dreams as an adventurer, thief, and sensualist. Although Rutherford insists to Isadora that life is “too short for me to shackle myself to a mortgage and marriage,” and, parenthetically, to “a houseful of gimped cats,” the schoolteacher who possesses all of the traits of the spinster, who had been beaten as a child by her father, and who “was constitutionally unable to swear,” ignores his protestations. And more than this, so in love is she with Calhoun and so determined is she to marry him that she enters into an agreement with Philippe Zeringue, a “brown-skinned black man with gray-webbed hair, [who] dressed in rich burgundy waistcoats and had a princely, feudal air about him, the smell of a man who loved Gothic subterfuges and schemes, deceits, and Satanic games of power” (13). 108

Middle Passage The agreement that Isadora strikes with what Calhoun describes as the “very Ur-type of Gangster” is a simple one that will lead, she hopes, the protesting bachelor into the blessed and civilizing state of matrimony. Zeringue sets forth the terms of their agreement to a disbelieving Calhoun, who has been dragged into his presence by an oversized thug and henchman called Santos: “That schoolteacher Miss Bailey has saved yo’ behind. Out of the goodness of her heart, she has come forward and offered to liquidate yo’ debts with her meager savings, provided you agree—as I know you will—to the simple condition of holy matrimony” (15). Calling Isadora’s deal with the devil by its right name, blackmail, a very beleaguered Calhoun inveighs to a lovesick Isadora: “You’re twisting my cullions, but you haven’t won my consent!” (16). More appreciative of Isadora’s trap after imbibing large amounts of gin and beer at a local pub, Calhoun decides to ﬂee what he derisively terms “the bondage of wedlock.” The thief leaves the spinster and the gangster standing at the altar, and predictably steals the papers of a much inebriated Josiah Squibb, the cook aboard the Republic. Wishing to avoid the “disaster” of marriage to Isadora, Calhoun decides to stow away on the Republic, which unbeknownst to him at the time, is a slave clipper. In ﬂeeing responsibilities on land, Calhoun will soon be introduced to even deeper responsibilities at sea. In confronting these responsibilities and determining his ever ﬂuid place among them, he comes to understand, as I will show, the meaning of freedom and its responsibilities. Calhoun describes the ship he has made the mistake of boarding as a stowaway in language that suggests the symbolic function of this slave clipper called the Republic: Standing aft, looking back at the glittering lights ashore, I had an odd sensation, difﬁcult to explain, that I’d boarded not a ship but a kind of fantastic, ﬂoating Black Maria, a wooden sepulcher whose timbers moaned with the memory of too many runs of black gold between the New World and the Old; moaned, I say again, because the ship—with its tiered compartments and galleys, like a crazy-quilt house built by a hundred carpenters, each with a different plan— felt conscious and disapprovingly aware of my presence when I pulled back the canvas on a ﬂat-bottomed launch and laid myself down in its hull, which was long and narrow, both hands crossed on my chest. And then the waves lapping below the ship gently swung me left then right as in a hammock, sinking me like a ﬁsh, or a stone, farther down through leagues of darkness, and mercifully to sleep. (21)

The prescient stowaway’s ﬁrst impression of this slave clipper as a “wooden sepulcher” moaning under “the memory of too many runs of black 109

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS gold” is a means by which Johnson establishes his important themes of death and bondage. It also is a means by which Johnson, through the use of double-voiced discourse, summons again Melville’s “cannibal . . . craft” the Pequod as well as London’s the Ghost. Interestingly, the language that Ishmael uses to describe his ﬁrst impressions of the Pequod could be easily applied to Calhoun’s initial reading of the Republic: “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!”8 Later, Ishmael informs us that Captain Ahab perceives his own cabin as a “tomb.”9 Like Ishmael, Calhoun often summons the imagery of death to describe the atmosphere, character, and operations of the ship to which he is now bound. In subsequent log entries, he describes this slave clipper as a “hearse,” a “shrinking casket,” “a cofﬁn,” and ﬁnally a “pesthouse.” Like Wolf Larsen’s fatefully named schooner the Ghost, which a member of the crew describes as a “hell-ship,” Falcon’s slave clipper is burdened with Stygian associations. In consistently invoking the imagery of death while chronicling his experiences aboard the Republic, Calhoun prepares us for the several guises in which death will appear during the course of this journey across what speculators in the business of slavery called the Ethiopic Ocean. These various references to death portend ﬁrst the death of many of the crew and the cargo, the Allmuseri, during the course of a slave revolt and many storms. These references also portend the appearance of death in the form of the various diseases that infect all aboard the Republic, diseases born of inadequate sanitation, indifference to hygiene, and scarcity of food, all of which ineluctably undermine the constitutions of both crew and cargo. Moreover, the several references to death also reveal the selfdestructive psychology of Ebenezer Falcon, who, as we learn from the First Mate Peter Cringle, yearns for his own death in much the same fashion as the monomaniacal Captain Ahab yearns for his own. Perhaps most signiﬁcantly, these calculated references to death also portend the death of personalities or selves of Calhoun himself, a former bondsman who undergoes, in psychic and spiritual terms, as I will show, a metamorphosis that results in the painful molting of modes of being antithetical to more expansive and humane conceptions of freedom. When the stowaway assumes the position and attitude of the dead before falling into a sleep that resembles death, he signals the several psychic and physical transformations that will take place in his midst and within his own person during the course of the Middle Passage. In addition to being a ﬂoating sepulcher, the Republic is also sentient, for as Calhoun recalls, the instant he boarded her she “felt conscious and disapprovingly aware of my presence” (21). As he suggests, this sentience is 110

Middle Passage born of the countless deaths of slaves who did not survive the many hazards of the Middle Passage. As we will learn, this peculiar sentience is also fed by the many competing and conﬂicting interests between captain and crew, and crew and cargo, that assume the forms of both a mutiny and a slave revolt aboard this slave clipper. These shifting levels of consciousness, chaos, and revolt are reﬂected in the architecture of the Republic, a ship that resembles “a crazy-quilt house built by a hundred carpenters, each with a different plan.” Crucially, by investing the Republic with a peculiar sentience, Johnson prepares the ground for his skilled manipulation of the ship itself as a synecdoche for the operations of dynamic political and social processes. In naming his slave clipper the Republic, Johnson invites us to evaluate and to remain cognizant of the irony, jeopardy, contradictions, and failures of the republic called the United States of America, a republic in the 1830s that aspires to realize the practice of democracy while also tolerating and sheltering the continued growth of slavery. As a novelist in the tradition of Melville, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison, Johnson is committed to communicating a “vision of experience” that challenges us to reﬂect upon the contradictions and the possibilities of the American experiment in a decade three decades before the “great convulsion,” as Henry James characterized the Civil War to Nathaniel Hawthorne, that “introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difﬁcult.”10 The loss of innocence (for many but not all) brought about by the Civil War is already present in the troubling contradictions of American life of the 1830s, the decade in which Johnson’s novel takes place. As Ellison tells us, in “the beginning was not only the word, but the contradiction of the word.”11 For Ellison, “the word” constitutes the great documents of state: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For Ellison, the “contradiction” is the acceptance and protection of slavery in a political order that championed equality, a political order in which the slave was always the ultimate test of the nation’s limitations and possibilities. In Middle Passage, Johnson challenges us to confront again these limitations and possibilities. As it was for Ellison, in the very capable hands of Johnson, the novel becomes again “a moral instrument possessing for us an integrative function,” one that seeks to unite the seeker with the truth, one that seeks to inculcate within the citizen an awareness of the urgency of the uncompleted work of democracy.12 Johnson’s treatment of what Ellison succinctly terms “the contradiction of the word” is enriched further by the careful application of arguments from 111

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS a text that takes as its subject the kind of regime or political formation most conducive to living an honorable life. I am thinking of Plato’s Republic, a text central to Johnson’s exploration of the concept of the “Good Thing” in Faith and the Good Thing, and a touchstone for his ﬁction. In The Republic, Socrates considers the “theme of the relationship of the philosopher to the political community.”13 Similarly, in Middle Passage, Johnson considers the theme of the relationship of a former bondman to a “political community,” or as I have been arguing, our American democracy as imagined in the great documents of state during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who, along with other presidents beginning with Washington, was a slaveholder. A democracy, as Socrates informs us, is an imagined political community that in dignity and goodness follows timocracy and oligarchy and precedes tyranny. That is to say, it is a form of government that occupies a low position in Socrates’s hierarchy of governments. Crucially, Socrates employs the analogy of a ship with a mutinous crew in order to convey to Adeimantus the complexity of the relationship of “the cities in their disposition toward the true philosophers.”14 Similarly, Johnson not only employs a ship upon which a mutiny is foiled by a slave revolt in order to carry his narrative forward, but his strong afﬁnities to Platonic thought are also revealed by his calculated comparisons of the cabin of Falcon as well as the slave clipper’s hold to a “shadowy Platonic cave” (120). It is within this dynamic, convulsive political framework that the former bondsman, stowaway, and cook Calhoun must both determine and declare his allegiances and in the process also determine for himself the meaning of freedom. It is vital to stress here that the Republic is, as I have stated, a synecdoche for a range of dynamic processes that are mostly political in nature, a fact that is reﬂected in the very body of the slave clipper from its stem to stern. Early on in the voyage, Calhoun notes this particular quality of the Republic: All in all, she was a typical ship, I learned those ﬁrst few days from Cringle, and by this he meant that she was stinking and wet, with sea scurvy and godawful diseases rampant; but even queerer than all this—strange to me, at least— the Republic was physically unstable. She was perpetually ﬂying apart and reforming during the voyage, falling to pieces beneath us, the great sails ripping to rags in high winds, the rot, cracks, and parasites in old wood so cancerously swift, springing up where least expected, that Captain Falcon’s crew spent most of their time literally rebuilding the Republic as we crawled along the waves. In a word, she was, from stem to stern, a process. She would not be, Cringle warned me, the same vessel that left New Orleans, it not being in the nature of any ship to remain the same on that thrashing Void called the Atlantic. . . . And a seaman’s ﬁrst duty was to keep her aﬂoat at any cost. (35–36)

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Middle Passage The very subtle emphasis that Johnson gives to “process” in his description of the Republic recalls Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of organism as set forth in Process and Reality. According to Whitehead, the theory of organism “is combined with that of ‘process’ in a twofold manner. The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the ﬁrst meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of its expansion is the ﬁrst meaning of ‘organism.’ ”15 In his theory of organism, Whitehead maintains that “each actual entity [or actual thing] is itself only describable as an organic process. It repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm. It is a process proceeding from phase to phase, each phase being the real basis from which its successor proceeds towards the completion of the thing in question.”16 In other words, all of human experience and the operations of nature, or what Whitehead terms “living immediacies,” do not comprise isolated, independent phenomena but rather are organic, integrated, and dynamic operations that, in their changing totality, yield a meaningful, intelligible, and ultimately spiritual order. Hopeful and afﬁrmative, Whitehead’s theory of organism rejects fragmentation and dislocation as necessarily permanent conditions, for, as he theorizes, “to be something is to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.”17 For Whitehead, the dynamic interplay of these “living immediacies” or “organisms” within ﬂuid environments constitutes the most advanced reading of the processes of the universe. The concept of process at the core of Whitehead’s theory of organism is reﬂected not only in the strange operations of the very “unstable” Republic that is “perpetually ﬂying apart and re-forming” itself, but is also reﬂected in the interior world of Johnson’s protagonist who is himself, it must be remembered, a man in process. Certainly as a human being and a newly emancipated bondsman, Calhoun is an “incompletion in process of production,” for like the Republic, he will not be the same person at the end of this strange and lifetransforming journey. As a palimpsest or “metaphor of transformation,” Calhoun’s metamorphosis is adumbrated and reﬂected in the slave clipper’s very own occult process of dissolution and repair. Further, Whitehead’s theory of organism provides us with certain assurances concerning Calhoun’s potentiality as a human being within a political and social order, for, as Whitehead theorizes, “to be something is to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.” As the improbable nexus between rival factions, Calhoun, through a painful process of transformation, acquires for the ﬁrst time, as I will show, a “real unity” or sense of community and kinship with others 113

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS and in the process remakes and re-forms himself into a purposeful and ethical subject.18 In Middle Passage and his several other novels, Johnson is always, in one sense, exploring the impact of change and process upon personality within the framework of political and social formations. This is a perspective on Johnson’s ﬁction that I will return to in my analysis of Dreamer. Unbeknownst to Calhoun, in stowing away on the Republic he has exchanged one species of bondage, wedlock, for another: life aboard a slave ship under the monomaniacal command of Captain Ebenezer Falcon. As a character, Falcon is one of Johnson’s most extravagant and provocative creations who possesses, among many things, the monomania and hypnotic powers of Melville’s Ahab, and the cruelty and whimsicality of London’s Wolf Larsen. We are ﬁrst introduced to Falcon by Josiah Squibb, the drunken and good-natured cook aboard the Republic, and the only member of the crew who will survive the ravages of the Middle Passage. Squibb informs an equally beleaguered and intoxicated Calhoun that shipping out with Falcon is a fate as good “as a hangin’, that, to hear some men tell it” (19). We also learn from a drunken but strangely lucid Squibb some of the legends in which the legendary Falcon is enshrouded: “He’s a descendant of Colonel Blood who stole the crown jewels, some say, a buccaneer at heart, and proud of it” (19). This information does not, however, prepare Calhoun for his ﬁrst meeting with the captain of the Republic after his discovery by Peter Cringle, the ﬁrst mate. Calhoun ﬁrst meets Falcon in his cabin just moments after he has sodomized Tom O’Toole, the cabin boy who possesses the innocence and appeal of Melville’s Billy Budd. Predictably, the captain’s cabin possesses not only, as I have mentioned, the atmosphere of a cave, but also as Johnson writes “the bacterial odor of tabooed pleasures” (27). Calhoun’s ﬁrst awareness of Falcon is through his voice, which, as he recalls, is “a small voice, like that of a genie in a jug” (27). The “small voice,” a “shocking voice thin and shrill and strung like catgut” portends in every way the physical and spiritual features of the great man himself (28). In a humorous exchange in which the petty thief seeks to acquire, through the use of “racial savvy,” some advantage over a man who practices theft on a global scale, Calhoun remains for a period of time only aware of the “shocking voice.” When at last Falcon chooses to reveal himself, Illinois is stunned, repelled, and fascinated: as I saw his face, I felt skin at the nape of my neck tingling like when a marksman has you in his sights, because the master of the Republic, the man known for his daring exploits and subjugation of the colored races from Africa

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Middle Passage to the West Indies, was a dwarf. Well, perhaps not a true dwarf, but Ebenezer Falcon, I saw, was shorter even than the poor, buggered cabin boy Tom. Though his legs measured less than those of his chart table, Captain Falcon had a shoulder span like that of Santos, and between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus dorsi a long head rose with an explosion of hair so black his face seemed dead in contrast: eye sockets like anthracite furnaces, medieval lines more complex than tracery on his maps, a nose slightly to one side, and a great bulging forehead that looked harder than whalebone, but intelligent too—a thinker’s brow, it was the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy. His belly was unspeakable. His hands, like roots. More remarkable, I’d seen drawings of this gnarled little man’s face before in newspapers in New Orleans, though I never paid them much attention, or noted the name. He was famous. In point of fact, infamous. That special breed of empire builder, explorer, and imperialist that sculptors loved to elongate, El Greco-like, in city park statues until they achieved Brobdingnagian proportions. He carried, I read, portraits of Pizarro and Magellan on every expedition he made. (29)

In many ways, Falcon is nothing short of grotesque. Calhoun tells us that as a dwarf with an oversized head and a massively developed upper body, the captain of the Republic is, in physical terms, very far from being the “empire builder” captured in high forms of Spanish renaissance art. These unusual physical attributes further distinguish Falcon from such ﬁgures as Ahab and Wolf Larsen. When Ishmael ﬁrst beholds Ahab, he is struck by the captain’s obvious grandeur and dignity: “He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the ﬁre has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.”19 Similarly, Humphrey Van Weyden’s ﬁrst impressions of Wolf Larsen are of a wellformed man of average height, possessing great reserves of strength whose source, he imagines, is in primal forms of existence: “It was a strength we are wont to associate with things primitive, with wild animals, and the creatures we imagine our tree-dwelling prototypes to have been—a strength savage, ferocious, alive in itself, the essence of life out of which the many forms of life have been molded.”20 Later when attending to Wolf Larsen’s injuries after a mutinous struggle with members of his crew, Van Weyden remarks in stunned admiration of the captain’s naked body: “God made you well.”21 While there are striking physical differences between Falcon and his two sea-faring counterparts, the psychological attributes he shares with these men are an indomitable will, a contempt for the weak, an arrogance that is bottomless and boundless, and a demonic nature. Ahab’s well-known and riv115

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS eting self-description is one that could serve for Falcon, who, as an egotist, fears nothing and seeks to dominate everything: “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad . . . ; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!”22 Ahab concludes this soliloquy with his deﬁant, Luciferian challenge to the powers of event concerning the operations of fate: “Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my ﬁxed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the riﬂed hearts of mountains, under torrent’s beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”23 Wolf Larsen’s demoniac nature is revealed in his complete identiﬁcation with Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.24 Although a dwarf, Falcon, like Ahab and Wolf Larsen, is perceived by Calhoun and other members of his crew as “the Devil,” and like his models in literature, he imagines himself in Olympian proportions, and seeks to bend all and everything to his “ﬁxed purpose” and “iron way.” Through Calhoun, we subsequently learn of some of the captain’s eccentricities: that he wears boots whose toes are reinforced with steel plates, and that he writes, oddly, in the nude. Later in the novel, when Calhoun returns uninvited to Falcon’s cabin and peruses Falcon’s journal, we discover that the “empire builder” “grew up determined to outperform his father (and most other men).” Coming of age in a world marked by both danger and opportunity, Falcon’s strategy was to make “himself dangerous, more frightening than all the social and political ‘accidents’ that might befall him. He was, in a way, a specialist in survival. A magister ludi of the Hard Life” (51). Falcon’s small, but “shrill, adenoidal” voice and his small, muscular, strangely proportioned body serve only to magnify the preposterous size of his ego and aspirations which were “to Americanize the entire planet” while also enriching himself. More, while these striking physical characteristics are doubtless the evidence of some dark humor on Johnson’s part (the notion of an “empire builder” as a dwarf with a voice that recalls a chipmunk is hilarious), they also are revealing of Falcon’s spiritual state. The mad effort “to Americanize the planet” and to plunder everything in his path has diminished Falcon in spiritual terms. In the gross practice of materialism and the vulgar acquisition of wealth, he has reduced and devalued himself. In an instance of both economy and genius, Johnson has created a character whose body mirrors that character’s psychological and spiritual state. Needless to say, in spiritual and psychological terms, Falcon is the very antithesis of the

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Middle Passage Allmuseri, the ancient African tribe he has presumed to enslave, along with their god, and to offer for sale to his black and white underwriters in New Orleans. A very useful and suggestive framework for examining Calhoun’s position vis-a`-vis Falcon and the Allmuseri, and the operations of power and domination that mark the complex relationship between master and slave, is George Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage” from The Phenomenology of Mind (1807). In this account, Hegel is concerned primarily with elucidating the risks, beneﬁts, and paradoxes of power and recognition, that is to say, with the complex needs of the individual and his or her ego in relationship to others. In the opening sentence of “Lordship and Bondage,” Hegel writes: “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized.’ ”25 He states that while self-consciousness or an individual exists for himself or herself, an individual is also dependent upon others for forms of acknowledgment or recognition in order to achieve a meaningful existence. Hegel posits that an individual’s struggle to win recognition from others may often lead to a “life-and-death struggle” that produces, if both individuals survive, a relationship marked by inequalities. The relationship born of such a struggle, he writes, produces two types of individuals. The ﬁrst is the individual or “pure self-consciousness,” that exists for himself or herself, and this individual Hegel calls the “Master or Lord.” The second is an individual who does not possess “pure self-consciousness” for this is the distinguishing attribute of the master, but rather this ﬁgure possesses “a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood.”26 Hegel calls this second individual the “Bondsman” or slave. The master, Hegel maintains, possesses “pure self-consciousness” and the slave possesses only an “existent consciousness,” an inferior form of consciousness that in civil society produces “thinghood.” There is a decisive moment that further deﬁnes the relationship between master and slave, the long-battledfor moment “of recognition” when the “other consciousness [the slave] cancels itself as self-existent, and, ipso facto, itself does what the ﬁrst [the master] does to it.” In other words, this is the moment of victory for the master, and resignation and defeat for the slave. This is the moment that contains within it the alteration in the consciousness of the person who now occupies the status of master, and also in the person who now occupies the status of slave. Victorious in this “life-and-death struggle,” the master discovers his

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS “essential nature,” that is to say, that he possesses an “independent consciousness.” Conversely, the slave discovers that his “essential character is thinghood.”27 According to Hegel, the victory of the master is not free of certain perturbations and imponderables that undermine and weaken his power over the slave. While possessing an “independent consciousness,” the master discovers that he is dependent upon another or an “unessential consciousness” for recognition: In all this, the unessential consciousness is, for the master, the object which embodies the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is evident that this object does not correspond to its notion; for, just where the master has effectively achieved lordship, he really ﬁnds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved. He is thus not assured of selfexistence as his truth; he ﬁnds that his truth is rather the unessential consciousness, and the fortuitous unessential action of that consciousness.28

What is revealed here is the paradoxical nature of the relationship between master and slave, in other words, the degree to which the master does or does not possesses an “independent consciousness.” This is the moment Alexandre Kojeve has termed the “existential impasse” of the master, for the master discovers that he is dependent upon a person occupying a discredited existence in order to make his own existence meaningful.29 Buried within this paradox is yet another paradox that contains within it the elements that will yield, over time, unexpected reversals for the master. “The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly,” writes Hegel, “the consciousness of the bondsman. . . . But just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence.”30 Having come to occupy a discredited existence following a “life-and-death struggle,” the slave is conscious of the idea of freedom through the contemplation of his own condition and that of the master: an “existent consciousness” assumes now the properties of a “pure selfconsciousness.” Or put another way, repression produces a consciousness in the slave that yearns for independence or freedom. In his own insightful commentary on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage,” Orlando Patterson captures these involutions in the following manner: “The idea of freedom is born, not in the consciousness of the master, but in the reality of the slave’s condition.”31 The questions to ponder now are these: Where in Johnson’s 118

Middle Passage deeply philosophical novel do we apprehend the application of Hegel’s wellknown account of “the play of forces” between master and slave? And in the “play of [these] forces” how does Johnson combine his theme of bondage with that of freedom? The “life-and-death struggle” for “recognition” that serves as the expanding ﬂoor for the development of the relationship between master and slave in Hegel’s account takes place in Middle Passage within the wide context of the transatlantic slave trade. In particular these aspects of the German idealist philosopher’s account of the struggle for power and recognition are registered in Falcon’s worldview as set forth in conversation with Calhoun: “Conﬂict . . . is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other— these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through . . . is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound” (97– 98). Summoning the dualistic imagery of the self that constitutes the two central doctrines of Rene Descartes’s Meditations, Falcon restates in the brutal and predatory language that is a sign of his character, Hegel’s thesis in “Lordship and Bondage.” According to the captain of the Republic, conﬂict and murder arise from the fact that, to summon Hegel’s language, “Selfconsciousness exists in itself and for itself.”32 All of human existence, in Falcon’s view, is deﬁned by conﬂict, division, and a murderous struggle for recognition and the consequences that ﬂow from it. While characterizing human existence in such bleak terms, he also offers an explanation for slavery, and, by extension, other forms of oppression based upon race. Slavery, Falcon suggests, is a rupture in Being itself, a manifestation of humankind’s failure to move beyond the plane of conﬂict and the base struggle for power and mastery. More, bondage is a dark sign, a tragic manifestation of humankind’s incapacity to transcend division, violence, and multiplicity, to remain locked for all eternity in the competing and dualistic positions of subject and object, perceiver and perceived. As a “magister ludi of the Hard Life,” Falcon can only imagine existence as a series of violent struggles for power, recognition, and dominance. In such “life-and-death” struggles, one prevails, as Calhoun notes, by making oneself dangerous. Like Wolf-Larsen whose view of human existence bears the stamp of social Darwinism, Falcon is a “specialist in survival” (51). As the captain of the Republic, Falcon’s pre-eminent place within the 119

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS immoral hierarchy of slavery is assured by his ability to exploit a wellestablished and well-organized system of economic exchange. The principal means by which Falcon is able to access the trade in human beings is through an intermediary. In this instance, the intermediary is “Owen Bogha, the halfbreed son of a brutal slave trader from Liverpool and the black princess of a small tribe on the Rio Pongo” (44). Calhoun writes that Bogha was educated in England, and “returned to take advantage of his father’s property and his mother’s prestige in Bangalang, overseeing from his great hilltop home the many warehouses, bazaars, harems, and Moslem caravans that crawled from the interior during the Dry Season” (44–45). As a result of the effective operations of Bogha and his collaborators in the slave trade, Falcon’s “life-and-death struggle” with others, such as it is, takes place on the decks of the Republic, for his cargo, the Allmuseri, arrives already in chains, the brutal “moment” of recognition in the Hegelian sense already accomplished. Once aboard the Republic, there are, of course, instances in which Falcon has to reassert his authority as master, that is to say, to underscore the bitter outcome of the earlier “moment” of recognition. This occurs when the Allmuseri are transferred from one of Bogha’s warehouses to the Republic. Calhoun tells us that when “the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the pressure against his heart— after seeing this, the Africans panicked” (65). Believing that they were the captives of not only slave traders, but also cannibals through whom they were passing into “the madness of multiplicity,” their mounting sense of panic soon metamorphosed into bedlam and then revolt. Consistent with his name and character, Falcon, in the imposition of his will in this “life-anddeath struggle,” exhibited a marked brutality in restoring order to his ship: He beat them until blood came. The male slaves he double-ironed, removing the ladder to the hold and lowering them by ropes so none could climb back up. Women he had sleep in the cabins, young children were jummixed on deck in the longboats beneath sheets of tarpaulin, and if any Negro even looked as if he was thinking of rebellion, that man was to be birched and taught the sting of noose and yardarm. (66)

For the time being, Falcon has succeeded in re-establishing his authority on the Republic. He has prevailed in the Hegelian “life-and-death struggle,” and in their desolation the Allumeri accept, for the time being, their transformation from personhood into “thinghood.” In this low state, the Allmuseri, 120

Middle Passage to paraphrase Hegel, do to themselves what Falcon has done to them; that is to say, they adjust to this new social order and to their subservient place within it. This moment of “recognition” has a different set of meanings and consequences for Calhoun. As a former bondsman, Calhoun is not subject to the same forms of treatment as the Allmuseri; he is not, as they are, cargo and slaves, but a member of the crew and a free man. As I will argue shortly, however, bondage will assume yet another form for Calhoun, who ﬁnds himself increasingly more vulnerable to the will of Falcon. At this juncture, recognition in the Hegelian sense for our narrator involves an increasing awareness of the culture and values that the Allmuseri embody. It also involves for him developing the capacity to absorb and process this clash of opposites or incompatibilities, a clash as dramatic and marked as the one between slave and free, east and west, the New World and the Old. Above all, recognition involves the development of empathy in Calhoun for the culture and the humanity of the Allmuseri. The capacity for empathy in this self-described social parasite is the expanding ﬂoor of a metamorphosis in both psychological and spiritual terms, a metamorphosis that is evidence of his growing identiﬁcation with the condition and worldview of a tribe who are ﬁrst described to him by Cringle as “sorcerers.” Our very ﬁrst description of the Allmuseri comes from Calhoun himself, a fact that emphasizes and portends the depth of the transformative relationship now in process. Shortly before their transfer to the Republic, he has his ﬁrst glimpse of Falcon’s highly prized cargo: Looking at them, at their dark skin soft as black leather against knee-length gowns similar to Greek chitons, you felt they had run the full gamut of civilized choices, or played through every political and social possibility and now had nowhere to go. A tall people, larger even than Watusi; their palms were blank, bearing no lines. No ﬁngerprints. But all Allmuseri, I had been told, had a second brain, a small one at the base of their spines. . . . Physically, they seemed a synthesis of several tribes, as if longevity in this land had made them a biological repository of Egyptian and sub-Saharan eccentricities or—in the Hegelian equation—a clan distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier. Put another way, they might have been the Ur-tribe of humanity itself. I’d never seen anyone like them. Or felt such antiquity in the presence of others. . . . Indeed, what I felt was the presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had created. (61)

The distinctive characteristics of the Allmuseri—the blank palms, the absence of ﬁnger prints, the second brain, their hybrid appearance, their sense of antiquity—set them apart from the other peoples of the world in 121

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS dramatic and striking ways. It is their marked strangeness that Calhoun ﬁnds so appealing and fascinating. He learns more about the alien and complex culture of the Allmuseri from Ngonyama, a member of this tribe whom Falcon elevates to the status of a kind of “shipboard” major-domo in order, as he wrongly supposes, to create divisions among the enslaved Africans that he might more productively exploit. From Ngonyama, Calhoun learns that the Allmuseri were great mariners who traveled often from Africa, to the Caribbean, to Central America, and back again to the ancestral continent. He also learns of “their martial-art techniques that resembled Brazilian capoeira,” and the complexity of their spoken and written language, the former containing little in the way of nouns “or static substances,” and the latter which consisted of “pictograms.” As “the most sought-after blacks in the world,” Calhoun writes that “Allmuseri elders took twig brooms with them everywhere, sweeping the ground so as not to inadvertently step on creatures too small to see. Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal. They fell sick, it was said, if they wronged anyone. As I live,” rhapsodizes the stowaway, “they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own, if in fact Ngonyama spoke truly” (78). Throughout the novel, Calhoun catalogues other features of the culture of the Allmuseri. Again, in conversation with Ngonyama, he takes particular note of the Allmuseris’ belief in the relationship between thoughts and events: “As within, so it was without. More speciﬁcally: What came out of us, not what went in, made us clean or unclean” (164). He also recalls the Allmuseri practice of “setting aside one day each month for giving up a deep-rooted selﬁsh desire; . . . the Day of Renunciation, as they called it” (180). While he is aware of their distinctive physical and cultural attributes, Calhoun concludes that the “Allmuseri seemed less a biological tribe than a clan held together by values. A certain vision” (109). As I have mentioned, this is not the ﬁrst time in which the Allmuseri have made an appearance in Johnson’s ﬁction, but it is the ﬁrst time he has devoted signiﬁcant discursive space to their full development as characters in his growing corpus. Johnson invests the Allmuseri with increasing depth and complexity as they occupy greater discursive and symbolic space in his ﬁction. Our ﬁrst encounter with this mythical African clan is in “The Education of Mingo,” a story that appeared in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations (1986), Johnson’s ﬁrst collection of short stories.33 We encounter them again in Oxherding Tale. As I argue in chapter 2, the Allmuseri are bodied forth in the character of Reb, the Cofﬁnmaker, slave to Flo 122

Middle Passage Hatﬁeld, and the liberator of Andrew Hawkins. In “The Education of Mingo,” the mention of the Allmuseri functions only as a fascinating biographical fact of Mingo, the story’s protagonist. By contrast, in Oxherding Tale, the Allmuseri represent through the character of Reb a distinctive set of cultural values and worldview that stands in marked opposition to the market values that sustain and advance slavery and other forms of capitalism as embodied by Flo Hatﬁeld. In Middle Passage, the Allmuseri function in a similar capacity, the difference being that for the ﬁrst time we encounter them not as isolated individuals, Mingo and Reb for example, but rather as a group who represent an ancient African civilization. Unlike Mingo and Reb, who are detached representatives of this tribe, Ngonyama is a member of a group of forty Allmuseri who dominate the world of the novel at many levels. Another important difference between the treatment of the Allmuseri in both Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage is that in the former they are the means by which Johnson introduces Eastern thought, most notably Taoism; in the latter, the worldview of the Allmuseri includes not only Taoism but the histories and tenets of belief systems of peoples from Africa, India, and China. In other words, in Middle Passage Johnson radically expands the cosmology of this ﬁctive African clan to include elements, as he tells us, from a range of “so-called Third World cultures.”34 The Allmuseri are, as Calhoun initially observes to himself, the very “Ur-tribe of humanity itself.” As already mentioned, Johnson’s inclusion of elements from various world cultures is reﬂected in Calhoun’s careful cataloguing of the Allmuseri’s history, culture, and worldview as relayed to him by Ngonyama. The ascription of the Allmuseri as mariners whose voyages took them to both sides of the Atlantic recalls Ivan Van Sertima’s argument about the impact of Africans upon the New World, in his very well-known They Came Before Columbus. The balletic martial arts form practiced by the Allmuseri, called capoeira, has its origins in Angola; by means of the slave trade it was carried by slaves from that region of Africa to Brazil, where some of the best practitioners of this martial art are located in Salvador, Bahia. The extreme respect of Allumeri elders for all forms of life reﬂected in their practice of clearing paths with brooms so as not to kill anything is a borrowing from the practice by Jain priests of Kerala, India who utter, as they walk, “Whatever it is, it is you.”35 More, the manner in which the Allmuseri impose a discipline upon themselves that makes them mindful of the relationship between thought, speech, and events possesses elements of the Buddhist moral system found in The Dhammapada: “What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: 123

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS our life is the creation of our mind.”36 The spiritual asceticism practiced and celebrated in the “Day of Renunciation” recalls a ceremony by the Hindus in Kerala, India.37 Signiﬁcantly, Ngonyama’s skill with a knife, manifested in the extraordinary manner in which he carves a pig in the presence of a disbelieving Calhoun and Squibb, which is the way this now major-domo “slipped metal through meat as if it wasn’t there” (76), is a means by which Johnson seamlessly introduces Taoism into the rich philosophical underpinnings of the novel. Ngonyama’s seemingly magical carving of the pig in the ship’s galley is a dramatization of the Taoist parable “Cutting Up an Ox.”38 The god of the Allmuseri captured by Falcon and stored in the ship’s hull possesses features of the shape-shifting, trickster god Esu of the Yoruba cosmology, as well as the transcendent and universal form of the god Sri Krishna of Hinduism. And ﬁnally, the name of this ﬁctional African tribe reﬂects Johnson’s study of African mysticism as well as the uses of technology within the context of the Arab world. As mentioned in chapter 2, the name of this ﬁctional African tribe, Allmuseri, has its provenance in the word almuseri, an African meeting place for performing spiritual or magical ceremonies. In the writing of “The Education of Mingo,” Johnson added an l and removed the hyphen, thus creating the term Allmuseri. Sometime later, Johnson learned that the national airlines for Egypt is called Al-museri, and that its passengers derisively refer to the carrier as “Air misery.”39 In the Allmuseri, Johnson has created a hybrid people embodying a range of cultural traditions, who are the vehicle, as it were, for the transmission of powerful spiritual values that are reﬂected in their complex worldview. They are, as Calhoun observes, a clan “held together by values. A certain vision” (109). As should be clear by now, the values of the Allmuseri have their foundation in the immensely rich histories, cultures, and religions of Africa and Asia. The vision or worldview of the Allmuseri that places considerable emphasis upon harmony, unity of being, moderation, respect for all forms of life, asceticism, and the absence of ego are derived from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Plainly, the values and vision of the Allmuseri are diametrically opposed to those espoused by Falcon, who asserts that “Mind was made for murder” (98). In the creation of the Allmuseri, Johnson advances an argument not only about the possibilities of our spiritual growth and development, but also about the hybrid nature of American and African American culture. His argument reveals his afﬁnities to such ﬁgures as Ellison and Albert Murray, as well as indicating the impact of his ﬁction upon such scholars as Paul Gilroy and Anthony Appiah. By means of the All-

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Middle Passage museri, Johnson also develops further his ongoing critique of black cultural nationalism and such iterations as Afrocentrism. This critique is reﬂected in the romanticized readings of culture and history enunciated by Calhoun’s father, Riley Calhoun: “We was kings once” (170). It also emerges in Johnson’s treatment of the Allmuseri, for the righteous and purist positions on culture are enforced by Diamelo, a character whose namesake appears in Melville’s Benito Cereno and who is yet another caricature of black cultural nationalism. As a kind of living palimpsest of the cultures, histories, and values from the African and Asian diasporas, the Allmuseri not only embody these disparate cultures, histories, and values, but they also illustrate the manner in which we, as human beings, are all heir to as well as bearers of the imprint of the cultures and histories of the world. As I say, through the Allmuseri Johnson advances an argument about the hybrid nature of African American culture that Appiah would give voice to sometime later in the following manner: “If there is a lesson in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by each other, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous echt-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists (just as there is, of course, no American culture without African roots).”40 Calhoun’s growing recognition and appreciation of the very hybrid culture, vision, and values of the Allmuseri place him, as I will show, on the path to resistance, transformation, and an expansive concept of freedom. In examining the Hegelian “play of forces” in Middle Passage, thus far I have examined the manner in which Johnson treats “the life-and-death struggle” as well as the concept of “recognition” set forth in “Lordship and Bondage.” We turn now to an examination of another concept in Hegel’s account of the dynamics of power between master and slave, namely the development of a “dependent consciousness” in the master. As played out in the world of Johnson’s novel, this is a process that has profound consequences for both Falcon and Calhoun. Shortly before the Allmuseri are brought on board the Republic, Falcon proposes a new arrangement with Calhoun, one that reveals the emergence of what Hegel terms a “dependent consciousness”: “I need a colored mate to be my eyes and ears once the Africans are on board. Same with the crew. I want to know what each man’s thinkin. . . . Once weekly I’ll want a full report. If there’s any talk you’ll tell me.” “Be your Judas?” I asked. “A spy?” His eyes ﬁlled with hurt, slipped to a corner of the room, as if the correct

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS word he wanted was there. “Nay, a friend! I need someone to keep his eyes open and tell me of any signs of trouble.” (57)

Although Falcon has, in Hegelian terms, “effectively achieved lordship,” he nevertheless ﬁnds himself, mutatis mutandis, dependent upon another or an “unessential consciousness” for recognition, or more speciﬁcally, to maintain his authority. In proposing that Calhoun function as his “eyes and ears,” Falcon reveals not only his calculating nature, but also his vulnerability and dependency. He reveals, to summon again the language of Hegel, that he has achieved “not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness.”41 The white supremacist and world colonizer has discovered that his fate is not only linked, but is also now dependent upon, a former slave and stowaway, that is to say, what Hegel terms an “unessential consciousness, and the fortuitous unessential action of that consciousness.”42 While it is important to remember that Calhoun is not a slave, he is, nevertheless, the “unessential consciousness” in this equation of shifting relations of power. Ironically, by accepting Falcon’s proposal, Calhoun discovers that he now occupies a new species of bondage, one he thought he had escaped by leaving New Orleans. While observing a sleeping Falcon, Calhoun makes the following discovery: “I leaned over him, wanting to empty into his head the pistol he had given me, but found myself transﬁxed by the crude ring twinned on his left hand and mine, as if, heaven help me, we were married, and the very thing I’d escaped in New Orleans had, here off the unlighted coast of Senegambia, overtaken me” (58). In this carefully orchestrated series of reversals that takes place within the framework of Falcon’s proposal to Calhoun, Johnson reveals the emergence of Falcon’s “dependent consciousness” as well as the strange and unexpected loss of freedom experienced by Calhoun. By becoming “Captain Ebenezer Falcon’s shipboard bride,” Calhoun is, in one sense, reenslaved. The very concept of wedlock has assumed very speciﬁc and unexpected meanings for Calhoun, as he is now bound to Falcon not out of duty and love as he would be, potentially, to Isadora, but rather out of fear: “I feared Falcon’s Jovian wrath” (96). It is from this low and vulnerable position that Calhoun submits to the captain’s imperious will and functions as his “eyes and ears.” Like the questing narrator of Invisible Man and his grandfather before him, Illinois ﬁnds himself a “spy in the enemy’s country.”43 For Ellison’s narrator, the “enemy’s country” is the Brotherhood; for Johnson’s narrator, it is the competing, strife-ridden camps of the crew whose members are planning a mutiny, and the cargo or the Allmuseri who are planning a slave revolt. In negotiating a place between these rival camps, Calhoun is 126

Middle Passage introduced, as I have mentioned, to even deeper realities, obligations, and choices. It is within the context of the slave revolt that Johnson considers one of Hegel’s most important positions in “Lordship and Bondage.” In this philosophical novel grounded in the past, Johnson expertly adapts Hegel’s account of power and recognition in order to reveal the new realities, obligations, and choices by which Calhoun—the thief, the drifter, the nonconformist—is now confronted. As I say, Calhoun confronts these ethical dilemmas within the context of a slave revolt and its aftermath, and within the shifting relations of master and bondsman, relations that are marked, according to Hegel, by a series of reversals. “But just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed,” argues Hegel, “pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence.”44 The transformation in consciousness that Hegel describes here, that is to say, the shedding of a “dependent consciousness” in the bondsman and his assumption of an “independent consciousness,” is fully realized within the violent and bloody framework of the slave revolt. The desire for freedom, what Robert Hayden in the majestic language of “The Middle Passage” called “The deep immortal human wish, / the timeless will . . . ,” is bodied forth in the noble ﬁgure of Ngonyama.45 Warned by Ngonyama of the impending slave revolt, Calhoun, sandwiched between the rival and mutinous camps of the Republic, decides to cast his lot with the Allmuseri. Fearful of Falcon and also suspicious of crew members who would exploit his status as stowaway in order to dispatch Falcon, Calhoun decides that he can trust neither Falcon nor the mutineers who are led, most reluctantly, by Cringle. Under the extreme pressure of these warring camps, for a period of time Calhoun could not, as he writes, “ﬁnd my loyalties” (92). As an intermediary and a witness to what will be a “life-and-death struggle,” he begins to weigh and consider for the ﬁrst time his choices in relation to others. “But what were my interests?” he asks himself after a dispiriting and coercive exchange with Cringle and his mutinous comrades (92). In the chaotic world of the Republic, Illinois comes to realize that he and everyone else on board “would be sunk to the bottom of the briny unless unbeknownst to these camps someone played a trump, a whole card, none knew existed. I realized that I held that card” (105). The trump card to which Calhoun refers is the key to the leg-irons of the Allmuseri, a key that he believes he has stolen from Falcon. Calhoun makes 127

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS the crucial decision to give this key to Ngonyama, after receiving assurances from him that the warriors among the Allmuseri will not harm the crew. Calhoun later discovers through Ngonyama that the key he has stolen from Falcon will not unlock the leg-irons, but the fact that Calhoun passes along the wrong key unintentionally is unimportant. What is important is that he has decided to play this trump card. And why does Calhoun, the prevaricator and gambler, play this card? He takes this bold step not out of self-interest, but out of concern for Baleka, the young Allmuseri girl he adopted after the death of her mother. “I could not let her die, a dark pawn,” writes Calhoun in the ship’s log, “caught between Falcon and the ship’s proletariat. I knew that now” (118). For the time being, Calhoun’s “loyalties” and “interests” are concentrated in Baleka, and by extension in the Allmuseri. In playing this trump card, Calhoun declares his allegiance to the values and vision of the Allmuseri, and not to the camps of Falcon and Cringle. In casting his lot with the Allmuseri, Calhoun hopes to avoid a slaughter, but these hopes, as he discovers, are in vain. While the Allmuseri are victorious in the bloody struggle to wrest control of the Republic from the crew, their victory is achieved at great physical, psychic, and spiritual costs. The very legitimate slave revolt orchestrated by Ngonyama and his supporters has shaken the ethical and spiritual order by which he and his tribesmen live. While this “life-and-death struggle,” which eclipses the planned mutiny, is waged only to secure the freedom of which they had been wrongly deprived, in the aftermath of this triumph Ngonyama and his tribesmen feel dispirited and defeated: Perhaps even more important to them than freedom was the fact that no leaf fell, no word was uttered or deed executed that did not echo eternally throughout the universe. . . . For a people with their values, murder violated (even mutilated) the murderer so badly that it might well take them a billion billion rebirths to again climb the chain and achieve human form. Ngonyama wondered, I could see, if it had all been worth it, this costly victory in exchange for their souls, for that indeed was what was at stake. Ironically, it seemed that Falcon had broken them after all; by their very triumph he had defeated them. From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made Ngonyama and his tribesmen as bloodthirsty as himself, thereby placing upon these people a shackle, a breach of virtue, far tighter than any chain of common steel. The problem was how to win without defeating the other person. And they had failed. Such things mattered to Ngonyama. Whether he liked it or not, he had fallen; he was now part of the world of multiplicity, of me versus thee. (140)

Although now liberated from their enslavers, the Allmuseri feel diminished by this bloody, costly victory. In their efforts to achieve what Hegel 128

Middle Passage terms “real and true independence,” the Allmuseri have doomed themselves to another species of slavery, for as a consequence of the loss of life they wear a “shackle . . . far tighter than any chain of common steel.” In treating the psychic and spiritual costs of the Allmuseris’ victory, Johnson explores a reversal within the relations of power between master and slave that goes unaddressed in Hegel’s account. In examining “Lordship and Bondage,” Kojeve has written persuasively of the master’s “existential impasse,” that is to say, of the master’s dependency upon the slave. The Allmuseri also experience an “existential impasse,” but one very different from that set forth by Kojeve. For Ngonyama and his tribesmen, the “existential impasse” is borne of their failure to “win without defeating the other person.” In failing to negotiate this moral paradox successfully, the Allmuseri have dishonored themselves and also have inﬂicted upon themselves a deep ontic wound. In treating a dimension of the shifting power dynamics between master and slave unaddressed by Hegel, Johnson continues to stretch and to test conventional conceptions of bondage and freedom. Here and elsewhere in his treatment of the Allmuseri, Johnson, through the masterful use of double-voiced discourse, revises the image of the African slave who valiantly risks everything in order to secure freedom. In taking up this subject, Johnson revises and complicates the image of the rebellious slave as set forth in the pages of Melville’s Benito Cereno. In contrast to Babo, the leader of the slave revolt in Melville’s tale, who is regarded by Don Benito as the embodiment of evil and who also is regarded by Captain Delano, his Yankee rescuer, as cheerful and tractable as “Newfoundland dogs,” Johnson’s Ngonyama is subtle of mind and a man of courage.46 While Falcon sought to exploit him, Ngonyama uses his position as a “major-domo” in order to plot the liberation of his tribesmen. Ngonyama’s admirable commitment to maintain order after the slave revolt and to minimize the carnage often puts him in conﬂict with Diamelo who, like his namesake in Melville’s tale, does not survive the Middle Passage. A tragic ﬁgure, Ngonyama is the embodiment of the culture and worldview of the Allmuseri and is a catalyst for Calhoun’s metamorphosis. While there has been some debate among scholars regarding Melville’s abolitionist sympathies and his depiction of the African in Benito Cereno, it is very clear that Johnson holds a positive view of the Allmuseri, and by extension of the African, for he casts them as symbols of a noble and high form of human existence degraded by contact with “the lowest strata of Yankee society” aboard the Republic (124). While Peter Cringle was initially fearful of the Allmuseri and mightily resisted for a period the outcome of the slave revolt, his voluntarily offering of himself as food 129

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS to the starved Africans and crew is a powerful afﬁrmation of their humanity, an act of reconciliation, and a dramatic recasting of the dreadful death of Melville’s Don Alexandro, who was butchered by the Africans and whose skeleton was grotesquely “substituted for the ship’s proper ﬁgure-head.”47 Calhoun is not unaffected by the dynamics of power between master and slave that he witnesses during the course of the Middle Passage. In many ways, he is completely unprepared for what he encounters during his voyage across the Atlantic. This is true not only because of the strangeness and novelty of the voyage itself, the hyper-masculine culture of the Republic, and the peculiar challenges of life at sea for a landlubber, but also because of the rather benign form of slavery Calhoun experienced under the Rev. Peleg Chandler in Makanda, Illinois. As already mentioned, Rev. Chandler “hated slavery.” The minister’s hatred of the peculiar institution resulted not only in the practice of a paternalistic form of slavery marked by the absence of violence, but also in the manumission of Calhoun after Chandler’s death. This being true, the dignity of the Allmuseri and the violent nature of their enslavement by Falcon and his crew have profound and far-reaching effects upon Calhoun, whose identiﬁcation with the culture and condition of this deeply spiritual tribe deepens during the course of the Middle Passage. The subjugation and revolt of the Allmuseri, along with his enlarging attachment to their culture and worldview, are the expanding ﬂoor for Calhoun’s dramatic transformation in consciousness and values. This transformation gives birth to a conception of freedom that is radically different from the one that shaped his existence as a newly manumitted bondsman in Illinois and subsequently in Louisiana. To repeat, the shift in values that takes place in Calhoun is catalyzed by his contact with the Allmuseri, and in particular by the relationships he develops with Ngonyama and Baleka. This process of change in Calhoun is accelerated by the mutiny and the slave revolt, events that challenge the ex-bondsman to revise previously held conceptions of freedom. I have already examined some of the signiﬁcant shifts in values and outlook that occur in Calhoun in that stressful and chaotic period before the slave revolt. I refer to those moments in which he struggles to clarify his “interests” and “loyalties,” as well as his crucial decision to aid Ngonyama in the execution of the slave revolt. There are other experiences that reveal the process of change and transformation in the stowaway and thief, to which I shall now turn. These experiences occur, in my view, in four stages, and they mark the dramatic shifts in Calhoun’s consciousness. These four stages are framed by a range of what I would term secondary experiences that constitute 130

Middle Passage the conﬁrmation and articulation of Calhoun’s psychological and spiritual metamorphosis. In their totality, these four stages catalyze Calhoun to imagine freedom, the central meditation in Johnson’s philosophical novel, in radically different ways. The ﬁrst stage of Calhoun’s metamorphosis takes place just hours before the mutiny and slave revolt. Falcon orders Calhoun to assist Ngonyama and Meadows in throwing overboard an Allmuseri who has died. In the execution of this order, which requires him to handle a corpse already in the advanced stages of rigor mortis, Calhoun undergoes a signiﬁcant shift in consciousness that signals his ﬁnal metamorphosis later in the novel. In the ship’s log dated July 3, 1830, Calhoun, the cook and stowaway, writes: I cannot say how sickened I felt. The sight and smell of him was a wild thing turned loose in my mind. Never in my life had I handled the dead. It did not matter that I knew nothing of this boy. Except for Ngonyama, the males had generally been kept below, but I’d seen him among the others when Falcon made the Africans dance. Judging by what little was left on his face, hard as wood on one side and melting into worm-eaten pulp on the other as rigor mortis began to reverse, he was close to my own age, perhaps had been torn from a lass as lovely as, lately, I now saw Isadora to be, and from a brother as troublesome as my own. His open eyes were unalive, mere kernels of muscle, though I still found myself poised vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes deeper into the empty hulk he had become, as if his spirit had ﬂown and mine was being sucked there in its place. (122–123)

What is striking about this moment is the deep level of identiﬁcation that Calhoun feels for an Allmuseri close to him in age, and, as he speculates, close in experience. The identiﬁcation he feels for the condition of Baleka, the young Allmuseri girl for whom he comes to function as a father, expands to include this stranger. With perhaps the exception of Squibb and later Cringle, Calhoun is the only member of the crew who perceives the humanity of the Allmuseri. It is the awareness on Calhoun’s part of this shared humanity that is evidence of his alteration in consciousness. Increasingly, he sees himself in relation to others, as connected to others, and of occupying the place of others. This deepening sense of identiﬁcation is strengthened by his awareness of caste and race. Like the Allmuseri, Calhoun understands what it means to be a slave, to possess only obligations as opposed to rights, to live for others rather than for one’s self. And like the Allmuseri, Calhoun understands that race is both a badge and sign of this mode of servitude. Whatever divisions there were before that separated Calhoun from the Allmuseri have fallen away as a consequence of his ﬁrst handling of a corpse. 131

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Conﬁrmation of this reality is reﬂected back in Ngonyama’s own eyes, for of them Calhoun writes that “I saw a displacement, an emptiness like maybe all of his brethren as he once knew them were dead. To wit, I saw myself. A man remade by virtue of his contact with the crew” (124). As I am attempting to make plain here through an examination of this ﬁrst and subsequent stages in his metamorphosis, Calhoun, like Ngonyama, is a “man remade” by virtue of his contact with both the crew and the cargo. The second stage of Calhoun’s metamorphosis takes place only minutes after the disposal of the corpse. Compression has been always a feature of Johnson’s ﬁction, and he masterfully manipulates this feature in order to produce powerful and dramatic effects at this juncture in the novel. Signaled by Cringle that it is now time to dismantle the booby traps in Falcon’s cabin in order that those in Cringle’s camp might advance the goal of mutiny, Calhoun sets about to complete this task. While he fully expects to dismantle the many traps in Falcon’s cabin, Calhoun discovers that he is unable to execute this order: Falcon’s cabin was as I remembered it from my previous visits. . . . Closing his door I bent down on all fours and began feeling with the tip of my knife for the hair-thin wires closest to the entrance. And then suddenly I could not breath. I felt caged. Wrong if I did as the ﬁrst mate asked. Wrong if I sided with Falcon. I began hiccuping uncontrollably (my body’s typical response to dilemmas that had no solution). . . . With so many men at odds, each willing something so different from the others, like factions at war during the French Revolution, and some not even fully aware of their will, the result could only be something unforeseen that no one willed or wanted. . . . On my knees, I did nothing, though it felt as if the room, and ship even, fell away. Some part of me was a fatherless child again. Alone in an alien world. Wanting to belong to somewhere and to someone. . . . Then, involuntarily, my hands clamped together in a bedside, precynical posture I’d not taken since boyhood, one of surrender and bone-felt frailty in the face of troubles so many-sided my mind trembled to think of them. “God,” I asked, “is this some kind of test?” My worldly wits were gone, and I knew, there on my aching knees, the personal devastation that was my brother’s daily bread: burning for things to work out well, knowing the lives of his loved ones depended on this, but having no power or techniques or strategies left except this plea for mercy ﬂung from an inner wasteland into the larger emptiness, the vast silences, the voiceless shadows out there. But no answers came. Only an inexplicable calm, as if I were the sea now, and the dam of my tears—the poisons built up since I left southern Illinois—burst, and I cried for all the sewage I carried in my spirit, my failures and crimes, foolish hopes and vanities, the very faults and structural ﬂaws in the blueprint of my brain (as Falcon put it) in a cleansing nigh as good as prayer itself, for it washed away not only my hurt after hurling the dead boy overboard but yes, the hunger for mercy as well. My hands were moist from

132

Middle Passage this hoarse weeping. My face was swollen and, searching myself, I discovered I no longer cared if I lived or died. The passion for life in me, that ﬂame, was dead. (126–127)

I have quoted this rather long passage in its entirety for a variety of reasons. First, it represents the ﬁne and beautiful writing everywhere in evidence in the novel. Also, in summoning such language to describe the condition of a now much tormented Calhoun, Johnson carefully interjects humor. The marvelous inclusion of Calhoun’s hiccuping spell, as well as the question that many of us have asked ourselves when confronted with our own demons—“God is this some kind of test?”—further endear us to Johnson’s protagonist. Such elements introduce a welcomed and necessary levity into a scene that, in the hands of a less gifted writer, could deteriorate into melodrama. These comic elements also inspire in us empathy for a protagonist without options in circumstances growing more dangerous and volatile by the minute. Confronted with such circumstances, Calhoun, “involuntarily,” ﬁnds himself kneeling in prayer, and in such an uncharacteristic position he acquires for the ﬁrst time insight into his brother Jackson’s longsuffering and prayerful existence. One insight quickly follows another as Calhoun, in this vulnerable and receptive state, acknowledges his many faults through a paroxysm of tears. What follows this purgation, one “as good as prayer itself,” as Calhoun notes, is an unexpected serenity that reconciles the “hurt after hurling the dead boy overboard,” a complete surrender to the circumstances in which he now ﬁnds himself, and perhaps most importantly the extinguishment of dread, desire, fear, and other emotions that signify an attachment to his earthbound existence. In this empty state, that is to say, one in which the ego has been for the ﬁrst time extinguished, Calhoun is later able to assert to an enraged Cringle who is struggling to accept the reality of the successful slave revolt and who has accused him, rightly, of collusion with the Allmuseri: “I’m not on anybody’s side! I’m just trying to keep us alive! I don’t know who’s right or wrong on this ship anymore, and I don’t much care! All I want is to go home!” (137). At this point in the novel, this sentiment is certainly true, for Calhoun is committed to the peaceful reduction of the violence and the carnage on all sides. Like Humphrey Van Weyden in The Sea Wolf, Calhoun cultivates a position of neutrality on a ship marked by division and conﬂict. Operating out of this position, his emphasis is now not upon himself, but upon others. The altruism that Calhoun discovers following his purgation on the ﬂoor of Falcon’s cabin is manifest in a marked degree in his efforts to comfort the Allmuseri who despair of returning to Senegambia, and also in the profound sense of indebtedness, which is the 133

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS other face of altruism in the context of the novel, that he feels as he continues to re-examine the various parts of his life. The shifts in consciousness that I have highlighted here all take place within Calhoun on the same day, that is to say, as recorded in the log entry dated July 3, 1830. As mentioned earlier, compression is a deﬁning feature of Johnson’s ﬁction, for the ﬁrst and second stages of Calhoun’s psychological and spiritual metamorphosis take place within a twenty-four-hour period. Almost a month later, in the eighth log entry dated August 1, 1830, Calhoun undergoes the third stage in his four-part metamorphosis. This stage involves his encounter with his father, Riley Calhoun, as bodied forth in the protean form of the Allmuseri god imprisoned in the hull of the Republic. And why does Johnson make the artistic decision to make Calhoun’s metamorphosis somehow contingent upon this reckoning with his father? Perhaps because it is necessary for Calhoun to come to terms with his father’s dubious legacy, and to purge himself of the anger he feels for him before he can achieve the ﬁnal stage of a metamorphosis now in process. “All my life I’d hated him,” writes Calhoun, “because he had cut and run like hundreds of ﬁeld hands before him” (169). The hate that Calhoun feels for his father is an impediment to Calhoun’s psychological and spiritual growth. In one sense, he cannot achieve the freedom he has been so long seeking until he frees himself of his deep and crippling hatred of his father. The climactic encounter with the Allmuseri god, who has assumed the form of Riley Calhoun, is one in which Calhoun moves beyond the hatred to a reconciliation beyond the grave: A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangling senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his, the result being that as the loathsome creature, this deity from the dim beginnings of the black past, folded my father back into the broader, shifting ﬁeld—as waves vanish into water—his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all ﬁctions; and then I could not ﬁnd him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god’s name: Rutherford. And the feel of the ship beneath the wafer-thin soles of my boots was different. . . . Then I fainted. Or died. Whatever. (171)

Although collapsing under the weight and power of this revelation, Calhoun apprehends, through the shape-shifting body of the Allmuseri god, the unity 134

Middle Passage of Being. Far outstripping Queequeg’s “black little god” Yojo, the Allmuseri god recalls in his description and properties Sri Krishna, the Hindu god who reveals his divine and universal form to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita.48 Through the Allmuseri god, Calhoun apprehends his father in the great cycles of existence, in the “shifting ﬁeld,” in the “We.” As a result of this revelation, Calhoun no longer thinks in fragmented terms; he no longer focuses upon only his feelings of loss and abandonment occasioned by his father’s escape, but moving beyond pain, disillusionment, and multiplicity, he is now cognizant of the deeper connection he has not only to his father but to all of creation. The false divisions created by the self—“the greatest of all ﬁctions”—all fall away. In this state, Calhoun is able to call the god by one of its names, his own name not because he has achieved the status of divinity through the power of this revelation, but because he is now aware that even as man he is, like the African god, the embodiment of the whole. Calhoun’s revelatory encounter with his father possesses many of the same elements that frame Andrew Hawkins’s encounter with his father George Hawkins when Horace Bannon, the Soul Catcher, metamorphoses from Lord Mara, the Hindu god of death and destruction, to Sri Krishna. The difference between these episodes in Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage is manifested in that unlike his contemporary Andrew Hawkins, Rutherford Calhoun does not experience moksha or enlightenment. Rather, Calhoun experiences an expansion of consciousness and a release (another meaning associated with moksha) from the dream of multiplicity and the anger that has stained his memory of his father. Put another way, like Hawkins, Calhoun “apprehends the profound mystery of the One and the Many.”49 Days after his revelatory encounter with the Allmuseri god, Calhoun, diseased and delirious, voids “black clumps I can only liken to an afterbirth or a living thing aborted from the body—something foul and shaped like the African god, as if its homunculus had been growing inside me” (178). In this painful and violent voiding that follows his revelatory encounter with the Allmuseri god, Calhoun purges himself of the hatred of his father. This hatred passes out of his spirit in the same manner that the “black clumps” pass out of his weakened body. This voiding complete, he is now spiritually and psychologically prepared for the fourth and ﬁnal stage of his metamorphosis. This climactic stage occurs only minutes after the symbolic voiding. The backdrop for this ﬁnal stage is a violent storm that results in the implosion of the Republic. A beautiful and terrible symmetry emerges here, for the upheaval and disintegration of the external world is reﬂected in the ﬁnal stage of Calhoun’s metamorphosis. Conscious of the destruction taking place 135

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS all around him, he believes that he is dying. In this weakened and disoriented state, Calhoun’s only concern is for the safety and survival of others and not for himself. The altruism he exhibited earlier has deepened: “I did not care for myself anymore, only that my mates should survive” (181). This is Calhoun’s state of mind as he surrenders to the mysterious and powerful operations of his body that signal the death of a former existence and the ﬁnal stage of his metamorphosis: At six bells Ngonyama left, and I lay, as in a chrysalis, until I could hear no longer, then fell again through leagues and leagues of darkness, the paralysis of my legs spreading upward toward my groin, deadening and numbing as it went. There came tremors, as if I were bursting or splitting apart. For a few seconds I was blind. Huge, frosty waves pitched the Republic, rolling her so prodigiously the ﬂoor shook and the cabin walls panted. (181)

In this Kafkaesque scene, Johnson describes the ﬁnal stage of Calhoun’s metamorphosis. The very carefully chosen language points to the shedding of an old self—“I lay, as in a chrysalis”—and the emergence of a new self. The lean and beautiful language underscores the pain, in both physical and psychological terms, of the ﬁnal stage of this metamorphosis. As the process moves toward its denouement, the semi-conscious and exhausted Illinois is for a period deaf, his body engulfed by paralysis. He is at the mercy of tremors that produce a strange dehiscing, and, at the end, there is a temporary blindness. The outward sign of the inward change is that Calhoun’s hair is, as noted earlier by Squibb, “sugah white.” This particular physical change began when Calhoun witnessed Falcon’s cruel treatment of the Allmuseri when they boarded the Republic, and it completes itself after Calhoun’s encounter with the Allmuseri god. Interestingly, by the time of his reunion with Isadora, the twenty-two-year-old Calhoun is bald and wearing a beard that is “Biblical in length.” Appropriately, Calhoun leaves the wreckage of a former self with the wreckage of a collapsing ship. Plainly, he is, by all accounts, a “man remade” by virtue of his voyage upon the Republic. It is important to stress that the context for Calhoun’s metamorphosis is not only the changing hull of the Republic, but also the wider context of the thrashing void of the Atlantic Ocean, which Johnson signiﬁcantly describes as a “shifting cauldron of thalassic force, form superimposed upon form, . . . [a] theater of transformations” (79). As Jonathan Little has insightfully observed, Johnson’s description of the Atlantic Ocean is informed by his study and application of Buddhist cosmology.50 In Buddhism, the void signals not an emptiness, but rather a fullness, for all of the forms of exis136

Middle Passage tence—“forms superimposed upon form”—have their origins in it. In contradistinction to the West, where the void is a sign of absence, of emptiness, in Buddhism the void is, paradoxically, the fecund symbol of creation itself. It is this “theater of transformations,” this living and transcendent symbol of the whole, that is the context for Calhoun’s own transformation or metamorphosis. I have examined the four stages of Calhoun’s metamorphosis because they are crucial to our understanding and appreciation of his profound shift in consciousness and his evolving conception of freedom; indeed, his metamorphosis is the platform upon which the former social parasite delivers, as it were, testimony of the interior changes that are the sign of his greatly revised vision of freedom. Without this metamorphosis, Calhoun’s testimony in the ninth and ﬁnal log entry remains only insubstantial, supported not by a ﬁrm foundation but rather only by the currents of the air. After his rescue by the captain of the Juno, he gives voice to the many alterations in outlook and values brought about by the Middle Passage: Looking back at the asceticism of the Middle Passage, I saw how the frame of mind I had adopted left me unattached, like the slaves who, not knowing what awaited them in the New World, put a high premium on living from moment to moment, and this, I realized, was why they did not commit suicide. The voyage had irreversibly changed my seeing, made of me a cultural mongrel, and transformed the world into a ﬂeeting shadow play I felt no need to possess or dominate, only appreciate in the ever extended present. (187)

This is the voice and sensibility of a man markedly different from the one who, upon his arrival in New Orleans, described his new home as “tailored to my taste for the excessive, exotic fringes of life” (1). Changed in radical ways as a consequence of his Middle Passage and contact with the Allmuseri, Calhoun practices non-attachment in a manner that recalls the “true men” of the Taoist parable “The True Man”: “The true men of old / Knew no lust for life, / No dread of death. / Their entrance was without gladness, / Their exit, yonder, / Without resistance. / Easy come, easy go.”51 In adopting this outlook, Calhoun abandons the emasculating forms of masculinity everywhere in evidence on the Republic, and redeﬁnes not only an untenable concept of manhood, but also his own concept of freedom.52 The changed Calhoun also informs us that as a consequence of the Middle Passage he now “wept easily,” is overwhelmed by having to make choices when confronted with so much abundance, and is indifferent to the rewards and beneﬁts of status and power. His preoccupation with power, pleasure, and materialism did not make sense, Calhoun writes, “after the Middle Passage.” 137

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Finally, he also confesses that by surviving he sometimes feels that he had “stolen life from Cringle, or was living on time belonging to Ngonyama and the other mates” (188). Ironically, Calhoun feels “like a thief to the bitter end” (188). Again, this is testimony that speaks to Calhoun’s dramatic shift in consciousness. The sensualist enthralled by all forms of desire, the adventurer who embodied largely normative standards of masculinity, and the Conﬁdence Man who regarded theft as a transcendent experience are now dead to this bald, bearded ﬁgure who resembles a Taoist monk and who proposes marriage to an equally changed Isadora. In his exchanges with Isadora, we ﬁnd further evidence of Calhoun’s metamorphosis. Taking in the strange ﬁgure standing before her, Isadora tells Calhoun, “You don’t look or sound the same” (194). Perhaps the most striking evidence of Calhoun’s sea change, as it were, is made manifest in his description of his love for Baleka: She’s one of the children orphaned by the voyage. And no, I’m not her father, if that’s what you’re thinking, but I might as well be. Whenever Baleka is out of my sight I am worried. If she bruises herself, I feel bruised. Night and day I pray all will go well for her, even after I am gone. Sometimes she drives me to distraction with all the things she shoves under my nose for me to see— Yankee things she wants me to explain, but I cannot eat, if you must know, until I am sure she has eaten ﬁrst, nor sleep if she is restless and, to make matters worse, if she is quiet too long, I worry about that as well. (195)

In describing his love for Baleka, the child whose vulnerability challenged him to reﬂect upon his “loyalties” and “interests” at a crucial stage in the Middle Passage, Calhoun exhibits some of the cultural traits of the Allmuseri—empathy, spirituality, and asceticism—as well as the habits of mind of a devoted parent. Calhoun’s testimony concerning Baleka segues to a proposal of marriage, a proposal that Isadora, now afﬁanced to Philippe Zeringue, is unable, for the moment, to accept. To be sure, Calhoun’s eventual and successful rescue of Isadora from the machinations of Zeringue is telling proof of his metamorphosis. Was it not what he once called the “disaster of marriage” to this schoolteacher and the deal she strikes with Zeringue to secure it that sent him ﬂying from the land to the sea? From the clutches of one thief and hustler, Zeringue, to the clutches of another equally as corrupting, Ebenezer Falcon? In making this proposal of marriage to Isadora, Calhoun, who was once violently committed to a kind of dissipated bachelorhood which he regarded as the full expression of freedom, has come full circle and also comes to imagine freedom in radically different terms. 138

Middle Passage Calhoun’s testimony of the impact of the Middle Passage upon his values and worldview is fully described and documented in the ship’s log, which functions for him, in one sense, as a kind of diary. In Johnson’s philosophical novel rooted in the past, the Middle Passage is constructed not only as the site of great violence and cruelty, but also as the site of a profound transformation in both consciousness and values, the site where exploitation on a global scale is contrasted with a growing awareness of the value of an individual life within the context of a warring, factionalized community whose dissolution is imminent. By contrast, Calhoun’s new conception of freedom is revealed to us not directly, but rather indirectly. We begin to gather some conclusions about the former galley swab’s now revised vision of freedom by the manner in which he evaluates the conception of freedom he imagines others hold, namely Zeringue and Falcon, as well as by the manner in which he continues to conduct himself in relation to Isadora. In his exchange with Zeringue, one of three investors in the Republic, Calhoun, operating from the position of principle, demonstrates that he is more than equal to the machinations of this “very Ur-type of Gangster” (13). After manipulating Zeringue into establishing an endowment to support the surviving Allmuseri children by revealing the incriminating evidence of his involvement in the slave trade contained in the logbook he plans to hold as “insurance,” Calhoun registers his contempt for this entrepreneur/hustler’s brand of freedom: “Possibly, he was lying to me about his involvement in the slave trade. Possibly, he still had deep pockets and a web of criminal connections in Louisiana and planned to have me and the logbook conveniently disappear once we were on shore . . . ; but possibly, too, his equating of personal freedom and racial pride with fantastic wealth and power had gotten the blighter in over his head. Needless to say, I had little sympathy for him. I wanted to give him a good drubbing” (203). Calhoun rejects the conception of freedom practiced by Zeringue, who believes that freedom is an opportunity to acquire wealth and power even if it means exploiting and enslaving others. As a black capitalist seeking to acquire wealth from a market in which he is largely excluded because of racism, Zeringue is the embodiment of values to which Calhoun is now unalterably opposed. In his last interview with Falcon before the latter’s suicide, Calhoun learns of Zeringue’s investment in the Republic and of the strange fact that “Papa,” not Falcon, “was my real boss.” Calhoun learns, in short, that Falcon’s rather narrow conception of freedom, to “Americanize the entire planet,” had, in effect, made him the slave of his investors. In the captain’s admission of the implications of his contractual obligations to Zeringue and 139

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS others to a stunned Calhoun, Johnson continues to explore the subtle and various ways in which slavery is manifest in human experience. This point is powerfully made through the process of inversion and irony because Falcon, a free white male, is in one sense in bondage to Zeringue, a free black male, who in turn has enslaved other blacks. In the ﬁnal interview with Falcon, which precedes his ﬁnal and equally revealing interview with Zeringue, Calhoun rejects the captain’s notion and practice of freedom as well as mourns the manner in which he and the Allmuseri are now bound to him: All at once I found that I was still ensorcelled by a leader who lived by the principle of Never Explain and Never Apologize. But I pitied him too, for his incompleteness. I pitied him, as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously for the better and worse, made himself the silent prayer in all their projects to come. A cruel kind of connectedness, this. In a sense we all were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock. Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like an ex-lover, a despised husband, a rapist who, though destroyed by a mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams: a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did. (143–144)

While initially admitting that he is still, in a peculiar way, admiring, and is even bewitched by Falcon, and also admitting, as does Humphrey Van Weyden in his assessment of Wolf Larsen’s impact upon his development, the effect of Falcon’s worldview upon his own, Calhoun nevertheless feels “pity” for the captain. The “incompleteness” Calhoun perceives in Falcon is a function of the manner in which the captain has chosen to develop only the parts of himself that will advance his exploitative goal of imperialism. Calhoun suggests that Falcon is missing those parts—empathy, compassion, a moral outlook—that would constitute his humanity. Keenly aware of the manner in which he and the Allmuseri are “all . . . ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock,” for Calhoun Falcon is a negative example, a model to reject not to afﬁrm, “a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought and did.” While acknowledging the dark connection to Falcon and by extension to Zeringue, and while simultaneously rejecting the vision of freedom espoused by each of them, Calhoun reveals implicitly his own conception of freedom. In marked contrast to Falcon and Zeringue, freedom for Calhoun is not the unencumbered pursuit of one’s appetites and ambitions, but rather the honoring of one’s duties and obligations to others. Moreover, it is the realization of one’s potentiality in communion and com140

Middle Passage munity with others. Perhaps most important of all, it is the choice to transform oneself into an ethical subject committed to self-control, justice, and the creation of an ethical community in which certain potentialities might be achieved. Calhoun’s much altered conception of freedom is articulated in both words and deeds, that is to say, in the several observations he makes about himself and others during and after the Middle Passage. Illinois’s new concept of freedom is also reﬂected in his decision to return to Illinois with Baleka and Isadora in order, it seems, to establish a family that also would include Jackson Calhoun, a brother the rehabilitated Calhoun understands better after his voyage across what he terms the “Flood.” As already mentioned, proof of Calhoun’s commitment to honor and live this concept of freedom is revealed in his desire to ﬁnally marry Isadora. This movement is signaled and foreshadowed for us, as Little observes, in Calhoun’s rescue by the captain of a ship appropriately name Juno who, in Greek mythology, is the “queen of the gods and goddess of marriage.”53 In the novel’s ﬁnal paragraphs, Johnson reveals the complex manner in which Calhoun’s now completed metamorphosis and his new concept of freedom are combined in a comic attempt at lovemaking after his proposal of marriage: We groped awkwardly for awhile, but something was wrong. Things were not progressing smoothly as they were supposed to. (“Your elbow’s in my eyeball,” said I; “Sorry,” said she; “Hold on, I think I’ve got a charley horse.”) I was out of practice. Rusty. My body’s range of motion was restricted by the bruises I had taken at sea, yet my will refused to let go. I peeled off my blouse, determined to lay the ax to the root like a workman spitting on his palms before settling down to the business at hand; but, hang it, my memories of the Middle Passage kept coming back, reducing the velocity of my desire, its violence, and in place of my longing for feverish love-making left only a vast stillness that felt remarkably full, a feeling that, just now, I wanted our futures blended, not our limbs, our histories perfectly twined for all time, not our ﬂesh. Desire was too much of a wound, a rip of insufﬁciency and incompleteness that kept us, despite our proximity, constantly apart, like metals with an identical charge. (208)

For the time being, Calhoun is unable, because of the memories of the Middle Passage, to perform sexually. These powerful memories and his critical engagement of them are evidence of Calhoun’s growth and development, as well as an indication of his new concept of freedom. He and Isadora realize that they do not desire detumescence but a merging of their “futures” and “histories” rather than their bodies. It is not the expression of carnal desire that will bridge the distance that now exists between them as a con141

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS sequence of the Middle Passage, but only, as Calhoun notes in the novel’s ﬁnal paragraph, a “very chaste . . . embrace that would outlast the Atlantic’s bone-chilling cold” (209). In the “chaste” embrace of Isadora, Calhoun arrives at an understanding and appreciation of freedom, toward which he had been moving since his manumission. Put another way, at this crucial juncture his body is chaos but his “mind is in order.”54 In this moment of tenderness, Johnson treats an important element in Hegel’s concept of freedom. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, Paul Franco reminds us that Hegel believed that “we have access to [freedom] in the ‘form of feeling,’ in love and friendship.”55 In developing this argument, Franco cites the following passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Here [that is, in love and friendship] we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to an other, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves. In this determinacy the human being should not feel determined; on the contrary, he attains selfawareness only by regarding the other as other.”56 Hegel’s concept of freedom as “being with oneself in an other” is fully realized in Johnson’s beautifully drawn embrace between Calhoun and Isadora.57 Plainly, Calhoun has now embraced, as it were, a concept of freedom diametrically opposed to those held by Falcon and Zeringue. As the central ﬁgure in a community that includes not only Isadora but also Baleka, Calhoun believes that freedom is to be realized through self-determination, duty, self-control, and communion in community with others. As a palimpsest or “metaphor of transformation,” the former thief now deﬁnes freedom in deeply spiritual, ethical, and moral terms. He also imagines freedom as the site of continuity and also as a place where individual histories and futures converge to form a collective history and future that might serve as the foundation for the creation of an ethical community. In positing such a vision of freedom at the conclusion of Middle Passage, Johnson recalls, through the use of a double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse, the trajectory of many of the foundational texts in African American literature in which the narrative point of view and movement is toward the realization and acquisition of freedom. This is a pattern expressed very powerfully in Douglass’s Narrative of the Life (1845) and also in Hannah Crafts’s The Bondswoman Narrative (circa 1850). Sometimes the acquisition of freedom is accompanied by a certain incompleteness, as in the case of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). While the manifestation of the operations of freedom vary in character and force from text to text, one of many important characteristics that Johnson’s ﬁction shares 142

Middle Passage with these and other canonical texts in African American literature is the achievement of greater states of freedom within the context of community.58 The trajectory and movement of African American literature, that is to say, the acquisition of greater states of freedom within the context of civil society, is analogous to the vision of history and freedom set forth in the works of Hegel, a philosopher, as I have shown, very important to Johnson’s treatment of freedom in Middle Passage. In the Philosophy of History, Hegel states that the movement of history in the world involves the realization of greater states of freedom—this, in ﬁne, is the goal of history: “In the process before us, the essential nature of freedom—which involves in its absolute necessity—is to be displayed as coming to a consciousness of itself . . . and thereby realizing its existence. Itself is its own object of attainment, and the sole aim of Spirit. This result it is, at which the process of the World History has been continually aiming; and to which the sacriﬁces that have ever and anon been laid on the vast altar of the earth, through the long lapses of ages, have been offered.”59 As Peter Singer has pointed out, the “notion of change, of development through history is fundamental to Hegel’s view of the world.”60 What is of interest to us here is the almost seamless manner in which Johnson’s artistic project converges with elements of Hegel’s philosophical project; indeed, in one sense Middle Passage is, to paraphrase Hegel, the dramatic and beautiful portrayal of “the process of the World History” within the framework of the novel. Like the other novels in Johnson’s expanding corpus, this prize-winning meditation on freedom is the site where ﬁction and philosophy meet. The theme of freedom treated so ably in Middle Passage emerges again, with some striking variations, in Dreamer, a novel to which we now turn.

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DREAMER: “IF THOU DOEST WELL, SHALT THOU NOT BE ACCEPTED?”

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It is reasonable to believe that if the problems of Chicago, the nation’s second largest city, can be solved, they can be solved everywhere. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. —The Book of Genesis Out of the vast repertoire of Western myth, one myth stands apart for the extraordinary longevity and variousness of its appeal. This is the Cain–Abel story, which has been present to the Western consciousness since the biblical era as one of the deﬁning myths of our culture. —Richard J. Quinones, The Changes of Cain The community of actual things is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production. —Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

In Dreamer, Johnson continues to explore a range of ontological and moral questions. Dreamer is a deeply philosophical novel that, like its predecessors Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, is rooted in the past. In this instance, the past is not Spartanburg, South Carolina, of the 1840s, nor New Orleans of the 1830s. In Dreamer, all thoughts and actions are grounded in the more recent past of Chicago of the 1960s; indeed, in this fourth novel Johnson returns to the landscape and period that served as the chief site and framework for his ﬁrst philosophical novel, Faith and the Good Thing. As a work of creative historical ﬁction, the subject of Dreamer is the modern civil rights movement and the life of the man who was at the center of this recent stage in what the historian Vincent Harding terms the black freedom struggle.1 144

Dreamer Of course, the man in question is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Baptist minister, architect of the modern civil rights movement, Nobel Laureate for Peace, great advocate for peace in Vietnam, and, according to Johnson, this nation’s “preeminent moral philosopher.”2 While the modern civil rights movement has been the subject of ﬁction for many contemporary African American writers, such as Ernest J. Gaines of In My Father’s House and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker of Meridian, and Toni Morrison of Song of Solomon, Johnson is the ﬁrst writer to create a novel in which King emerges as a character. Johnson captures King in the last two years of his life when he had sought to apply Gandhian satyagraha (soul force) or the strategy of nonviolent direct action to the Chicago Movement and the Poor People’s Campaign of Memphis, Tennessee. The arc of the novel essentially spans the years between January 23, 1966, when King took up residence with his family in the Lawndale tenement at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue, and April 4, 1968, following his assassination in Memphis and the period of national mourning that culminated in his funeral in Atlanta, Georgia. The several questions related to sacriﬁce, leadership, kinship, morality, ideology, revolution, and transformation that ﬁgure prominently in the novel are subsumed, I would like to suggest, within one question. This question is bodied forth in the lives of many of the novel’s characters, but chieﬂy through the protagonist: Chaym Smith, King’s twin or double and an exKorean veteran who, after a sojourn in southeast Asia, has taken up residence in Chicago in search of work. The central question of the novel is, I maintain, How can we end evil without engendering error or evil?3 This question is ﬁrst introduced in the form of a meditation by Matthew Bishop, a twenty-four-year-old civil rights aid with the Chicago branch of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), philosophy major at Columbia College, and the novel’s narrator. Idealistic, bookish, reserved, and conventional in appearance, he is, in other words, the type of person easily overlooked and easily forgotten. Through the character of Bishop, Johnson pays tribute to that great crowd of anonymous salaried workers and volunteers who were foot soldiers in the Dreamer’s great army of social reform. As he reﬂects upon the growing violence that threatens to unravel King’s campaign to challenge segregation in Chicago, Bishop introduces the question that is the expanding ﬂoor for all other questions in the novel in the following manner: “Gun sales soared in Slavic districts, and I wondered, as the minister must have wondered, if it was possible to end social evil through actions that did not themselves engender a greater, more devastating evil ” (113– 114, emphasis added). Because Bishop is keenly aware of the potential for 145

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS violence in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, “the impregnable suburban enclave of Slavic exclusivism,”4 the question at the novel’s core has penetrated his consciousness completely. This meditation is introduced a second and ﬁnal time in the novel as a moral dilemma in the very fatigued consciousness of King in the days before his assassination in Memphis. The second iteration of the novel’s central question contains some slight variations, but the core elements remain unchanged: “In the darkness, on stiff cushions on the sofa, he tossed and turned, trying to ﬁnd a comfortable position that might beckon sleep, grappling with the perennial dilemma of his public ministry, how to end evil without creating evil” (224). Signiﬁcantly, an earlier version of this meditation appears in Middle Passage, when Ngonyama reﬂects upon the consequences of the slave revolt for his tribesmen, the Allmuseri. In Middle Passage, this meditation is also presented as an intellectual problem and a moral dilemma: “The problem was how to win without defeating the other person.”5 The fact that an iteration of the deﬁning question of Dreamer ﬁrst emerges in Middle Passage is not unimportant. At this juncture, I wish only to stress that this is one of several striking instances of double-voiced, internally dialogized discourse that shapes the manner in which we read the life of Chaym Smith, King’s double and twin. As I will show, it is through the violent and contradictory life of Smith that Johnson gives voice to something approaching an answer to the novel’s central question. It is through the life of Smith that Johnson provides us with an example and a means of understanding the challenges and possibilities associated with responding to the call of this requiring question as it is embodied in the life of the Dreamer. In examining the question of how we can end evil without engendering evil, or “how to win without defeating the other person,” the theoretical frameworks I will employ in examining Dreamer emerge chieﬂy from the Book of Genesis, most notably in the story of Cain and Abel, and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. As I will show, the complex relationship between Smith and King possesses elements of the relationship between Cain and Abel, and the evolving relationship between Smith and King is one which suggests that the radical commitment to progressive social change and personal transformation is a process that speaks to the many possibilities of human development. Dreamer opens with a prologue that serves to establish the social and political context for the novel’s central question as well as the manner in which Johnson chooses to tell and to structure his tale of social upheaval and personal transformation in the United States of the 1960s. The novel

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Dreamer opens with an eschatological description of Chicago by an unidentiﬁed narrator: In the Upsouth cities he visited, violence followed him like a biblical curse, but one step ahead of his assassins. Despite his clerical vows, or perhaps because of them . . . he walked through a world aﬂame. Chicago in the hundred-degree summer heat of 1966 was the site for the special form of crisis his wing of the Movement produced: families divided, fathers at the throats of their sons, brothers spilling each other’s blood. Unhappily, I have the eloquence of neither Guido the Angelic nor Teresa of Avila, and so with each halting sentence I pray for the words to demonstrate how this was the beginning of his northern crusade to undo the work of the Devil. (13)

In these opening sentences of the novel, Johnson establishes the forbidding setting and Stygian atmosphere of the Dreamer’s harrowing, but potentially transforming, work in Chicago. He conjures an image of King walking through a landscape ablaze with strife and with assassins just one step behind him. It is a vision of Chicago stained with bloodletting between families, between fathers and sons, and between, signiﬁcantly, brothers. As David Levering Lewis tells us in his biography of King, the Coordinated Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a federation of organizations consisting of the West Side Federation, the Woodlawn Organization, the local chapters of the Urban League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had extended, through its co-founder and president the Rev. Albert A. Raby, an invitation to King to join them in this coalition effort to transform the racial and political landscape of the “City of the Big Shoulders.”6 This coalition of the brave and the willing was deeply divided along ideological and tactical lines, for some “favored a frontal assault on [Mayor Richard] Daley’s machine,” while others “advised the route of diplomacy and entreaty.”7 It was within these seething complexities that the minister had come to provide moral leadership. The goals of the Chicago Movement were threefold: “(1) to educate people about slum conditions, (2) to organize slum-dwellers into a union to force landlords to meet their obligations, and (3) to mobilize slum tenants into an army of nonviolent demonstrators.”8 On July 21, 1966, these three demands would be enlarged to include eight others with a similar trajectory when King participated in a demonstration that included Dick Gregory, Mahalia Jackson, and thirty-ﬁve thousand others at Chicago’s Soldier Field. After walking the three miles from Soldier Field to City Hall at

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS the head of this impressive gathering of nonviolent demonstrators, King, in a dramatic gesture recalling “his sixteenth-century spiritual mentor, posted several sheafs of demands upon the door of the city government’s center.”9 In his assessment of the Chicago Movement, Lewis argues that the minister and his aides were unprepared for the violence and racism of Chicago; nothing in their southern campaigns had prepared them for the duplicity, machinations, and the virulent species of Jim Crow they would encounter in this upsouth city ﬁrmly under the command of the Machiavellian Mayor Daley, who, in this “northern crusade,” was often the one form the “Devil” assumed. The Summit Agreement, the Chicago Movement’s culminating document— drafted in collaboration by King, Daley, and the leadership of the business and religious communities at Chicago’s Palmer House—did not possess a timetable nor guarantees for the reformation of fair-housing practices and the abolition of the practice of red-lining that excluded African Americans from bank loans. As Johnson tells us in his own reconstruction of these events, for “some members of SNCC and Core the agreement was a sell out.”10 Later in the novel, Johnson writes of King’s perceptions of the complexities of life in this upsouth city in the following manner: “There were factors he had not foreseen. . . . Yes, he knew the South. The North, of course, was another matter. Northern cities, he was ready to believe, were, as the Book of Genesis claimed, the products of Cain” (83–84). Johnson’s dramatic, elegiac beginning is intended to provide us with a vivid sense of the deeply moral struggle of King’s work or “crusade” not only in Chicago, but also in other parts of the nation. The elevated prose of the prologue is intended to recall for us the scale and scope of the powers arrayed against King in Chicago, and also the courageous manner in which he would do battle with them in coalition with the Coordinated Council of Community Organizations. In the prologue, Johnson not only evokes the grim, Byzantine social and political realities of the Chicago Movement, but he also introduces several distinctive narrative features. In this fourth novel, he experiments with a form of ﬁrst-person narration that allows him the freedom to imagine and to see King from both the inside and outside, to capture and portray his personal habits and also his private, unspoken yearnings, fears, and misgivings. It is a narrative strategy that recalls Johnson’s very successful experiments in narration in Oxherding Tale, where we encounter what he terms “the transcendental nature of the narrator.”11 In this ﬁctionalized antebellum slave narrative, Johnson creates a narrator who, as he writes, “is that world,” the embodiment of the slave communities of antebellum America. And he

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Dreamer goes on to assert that such a narrator is “less a reporter than an opening through which the world is delivered: ﬁrst-person (if you wish) universal.”12 There is an elaboration of “ﬁrst-person universal” in the prologue of Dreamer, for the I we encounter here and in the other italicized chapters possesses certain transcendental properties. This I is, among other things, the voice of history as it would be embodied in the voice of a narrator keenly aware of the limitations of his eloquence, yet because of the requirements of history he struggles to capture and describe a life that eludes, in one sense, historical documentation. Beneath the beautiful language of the narrator’s apologia that recalls those found in the prefaces of slave narratives, we also hear the voice of Johnson himself who, as an artist, asks for the reader’s understanding, forbearance, and the complete suspension of disbelief as he confronts perhaps the greatest artistic challenge of his career: the treatment in ﬁction of a national and international icon, of which the very attempt to do so would generate controversy, skepticism, and, from some quarters, hostility. Johnson, however, is successful in meeting this artistic challenge, for the King who emerges in the pages of the novel is a product of not only exhaustive historical research, but also of Johnson’s commitment as an artist to breathe life into an icon and myth: to make the man behind the national holiday, to make the man enshrouded in the “piety (and emotional distance) reserved for this republic’s Founders,” walk and breathe as King the man.13 The transcendental properties of the narrator are manifest not only in the effort to evoke the voice and context of history, but also in the effort to evoke particular moments in history, that is, particular moments in the life of King. For example, in the prologue, the narrator recalls King’s wish for anonymity in a sermon delivered before his resignation from Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: “What I have been doing is giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat and meditate like I should—to come back. If the situation is not changed, I will be a physical and emotional wreck. I have to reorganize my personality and reorient my life. I have been too long in the crowd, too long in the forest” (19). Fast forwarding in time, the narrator also describes the mounting pressures and crises that were a feature of the minister’s daily existence during the Chicago Movement: “Having come through these crises, and with more to face, the man from whom the world expected everything, who sometimes went for days on four hours of sleep and rested fully only when he checked into a hospital, tried for a moment to nap, to step back from the severe discipline that black manhood called for in the twentieth century for just one precious moment in the sweltering heat of his Lawndale ﬂat” (20). What these

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS passages reveal is the manner in which the narrator moves effortlessly across time, and also the manner in which he is both inside and outside of time: the vital point of intersection of the past, present, and the future. More, these passages also reveal the manner in which historical research, when joined with the vision of a gifted artist, produces creative historical ﬁction. Or put another way, it is the impressive and convincing demonstration of the manner in which intuition and a disciplined artistic imagination serve as the living bridge to a ﬁgure in history and to the broad operations of history. The successful execution of “ﬁrst-person universal,” which delivers to us the external and internal world of King is, in subsequent chapters, balanced against the ﬁrst-person narration of Bishop, whose perspective of the minister is that of a worshipful, idealistic aid. The mechanism of “ﬁrst-person universal” is a means of overcoming the limitations of Bishop as a narrator, while also providing us with personal and historical information that relates directly to King and is essential to Johnson’s portrayal of him in ﬁction. This alternating, double-voiced, internally dialogized form of discourse and narration is the structural equivalent to the trope of the double or the doppelganger that Johnson employs with great effectiveness to advance his complex tale. In Dreamer, Johnson employs the trope of the double or the doppelganger for the ﬁrst time. While he has experimented with forms of the double in conceptual and thematic terms—self and other, I and Thou, black and white, slave and free, subject and object—in much of his ﬁction, in Dreamer he experiments with the classical form of the double or the doppelganger as it initially emerged and developed in the literature of German romanticism in the work of such authors as E. T. A. Hoffman and Heinrich Heine. In the tradition of the German romantics, the double or doppelganger is the ghost or spiritual double of a living human being, the appearance of which foreshadows an individual’s death.14 In terms of the chronology of King’s own life, the appearance of Smith is certainly a foreshadowing of the minister’s own death by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. While Johnson honors this particular aspect of the literature of the doppelganger, he also, as I will show, makes creative use of the trope of the double by assigning to it a range of meanings and functions. He carefully prepares the ground for Chaym Smith’s ﬁrst appearance in the novel through certain observations made by Bishop regarding the strangeness and violence of the night in the upsouth city of Chicago: “The night felt wrong. All of it, as if the riot, the looting and lunacy, breakdown and disorder, had torn space and time, de150

Dreamer stroying some delicate balance or barrier between dimensions—possible worlds—creating a portal for fantastic creatures to pour through” (32). Of course, the “fantastic” creature who issues from the tear in both “space and time,” who emerges from the rupture in the universe brought about by violence and division, is none other than Smith himself: King’s double. In his excellent study of the literature of Cain and Abel, Richard J. Quinones argues that the “fundamental proposition” of the biblical story of the enemy brother is “the reality of a fracture at the basis of existence, a breach in its heart, and the correlative need for ﬁnding and promoting a means of reconstitution.”15 In this archetypal scene, Johnson makes dramatic and effective use of what Quinones terms the “fundamental proposition” that deﬁnes the tale of Cain and Abel. Smith’s occult arrival is concrete evidence of “the fracture at the basis of existence,” and as this philosophical novel develops in its high dialogic style, Johnson reveals the ways in which he has imagined “a means of reconstitution.” The ﬁrst encounter between King and his double is facilitated by Bishop and Amy Grifﬁth, a volunteer from the CCCO, and a ﬁgure by whom the soft-spoken philosophy major is smitten. King ﬁrst learns of the existence and his resemblance to Smith by studying his expired Illinois driver’s license, at which point the minister discovers that the Korean veteran’s birth date, height, weight, and eye color are identical to his own. Intrigued by this set of correspondences King remarks: “This could be me!” (32). When King ﬁrst beholds his speculum, mirror, and twin, his voice drops to a whisper as he says: “Sweet Jesus.” In this carefully orchestrated scene, Johnson sets in motion the trope of the double; thus enabling him to introduce the novel’s protagonist, along with the several elements of this tale that ﬂow from this fateful encounter: Far beyond interested, he looked spellbound. Then shaken. He might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down, beginning not in his father’s commodious, two-story Queen Anne-style home in Atlanta but instead across the street in one of the wretched shotgun shacks crammed with the black poor. Certainly in every darkened, musty pool hall, on every street corner, in every cramped prison cell he’d passed through, the minister had seen men like Chaym Smith—but never quite like this. He tore his eyes away, then looked back. Smith was still there, his eyes squinted, the faint smile on his lips one part self-protective irony, two parts sarcasm, as if he carried unsayable secrets (or sins) that, if spoken, would send others running from the room. His work shirt was torn in at least two places, and yellowed by his life in it; his trousers were splotchy with undecipherable stains and threadbare at the knees—he was the kind of Negro the Movement had for years kept away from the world’s cameras: sullen, ill-kept, the very

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS embodiment of the blues. Then, as the minister knuckled his eyes, Smith, behind his heavy black eyeglasses, beneath his bushy, matted hair and scraggly beard—as rubicund in tint as Malcolm Little’s—began to look less threatening and more like a poor man down on his luck for a long, long time, one who’d probably not eaten in a week. Neglected like the very building we were in. Everything about him was in disrepair. Just as the city’s administration and the ﬂat’s landlord . . . had failed to invest in the crumbling eyesore and allowed it to degenerate into a dilapidated, dangerous public health hazard, so no one, it seemed, had invested in Chaym Smith. For a moment the minister looked faint. His right hand reached for the back of a kitchen chair to anchor the spinning room and steady himself. (32– 33)

In contrast to the classical form of the doppelganger in German romanticism, Smith is not a ghost but rather a living and working man “down on his luck” and who, as such, is “the very embodiment of the blues.” As King processes what appears to be an apparition, he has the startling sense that he “might have been peering into a mirror, one in which his history was turned upside down.” While the appearance of Smith is a harbinger of the various forms in which death will manifest itself in the novel, and I will offer more commentary on this particular function of the double in the pages to come, one of the important functions of the double in Johnson’s novel is to highlight and reveal the points of convergence and divergence between King and Smith. Before examining the many differences between these characters, between the bluesman and the minister, I will ﬁrst examine the single and striking similarity between these two men, which emerges in and frames their ﬁrst and only encounter. At the time of their meeting in the Lawndale ﬂat in the summer of 1966, the vital point of convergence between King and Smith is the condition of the outsider. In his description of Smith, Johnson, through the strategic use of simile, suggests several economic and social factors that have shaped the life of his protagonist. Like the tenement building in which King takes up residence in order to protest the squalid housing conditions of many urban blacks, Smith “was in disrepair,” for “no one, it seemed, had invested in [him].” Smith’s difﬁcult and discouraging circumstances reveal the degree to which this “poor man down on his luck for a long, long time” exists on the margins of the social order. This fact is a powerful index of Smith’s alienation; indeed, it is the fact that brings him, unannounced, to King’s ﬂat. Smith hopes that this meeting will result in an improvement of his circumstances, which have worsened since King’s arrival in Chicago. In the following passage, Smith describes the various ways in which his own life has been 152

Dreamer threatened and further devalued as a result of his striking resemblance to the minister: “I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago. Last week a couple of boys pushed me off the El platform.” Smith measured the ﬁve inches between his foreﬁnger and thumb. “I was ’bout that far from landin’ on the third rail. Lots of people know where you’re stayin’ in town, but some don’t. They see me and come to my place. Some of ’em tore up my room. Scared my landlady so much she’s askin’ me to leave. But where am I gonna go? Hell, I can’t walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin’ me. Some of ’em spit in my face. That’s colored as well as white. That’s why I’m here. I ﬁgure if I’m catching hell ’cause of you, I might’s well catch it for you instead.” (40–41)

In this passage, we encounter one of many instances of both economy and control in Johnson’s ﬁction. While evoking the bleak realities that shape Smith’s life in Chicago, Johnson also evokes the revulsion and hostility that King’s program of social reform within the framework of the CCCO inspired in both blacks and whites in Chicago. To summon again Smith’s use of the black vernacular, both the bluesman and the minister have been “catching hell,” but for different reasons. For Smith, it is a case of mistaken identity in combination with the operations of white supremacy, both of which reify his condition of the outsider, in his state of alienation. For the minister, the condition of the outsider is, like that of Smith’s, multivalent. First, the minister is an outsider in relation to the people and the political world of Chicago, which, as Johnson suggests in his prologue to the novel, is a city ablaze with strife and bloodshed. Although King, a son of the South, was invited to this upsouth city by Rev. Albert Raby of CCCO, the minister nevertheless remains an alien ﬁgure during his sojourn in Mayor Daly’s deeply polarized city. As Johnson writes, King “knew the South. The North, of course, was another matter” (84). Johnson’s characterization of King’s faltering knowledge of and relation to the distinctive set of dynamics that shape the political realities of Chicago at this time have been documented by David Levering Lewis, Clayborne Carson, Taylor Branch, and most recently Michael Eric Dyson.16 It is important to stress, however, that King’s status of outsider or what Johnson terms the minister’s “feeling of displacement” (45) is not only a function of the setbacks of the Chicago campaign. In the summer of 1966, the period of Johnson’s ﬁctionalized encounter between Smith and King, the minister experienced a national decline in his popularity among both blacks and whites, as attested by Smith’s violent and humiliating encounters involving blacks and whites in Chicago. The several events that serve as an index to the diminishment of King’s moral 153

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS authority and thus contribute to his condition of the outsider are the Watts riot of 1966, the growing divisions in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) over the contested issue of black power, and King’s condemnation of the Vietnam War. When King toured the ruins of Watts, he was “astonished to ﬁnd that most people there had never heard of him. Almost all were hostile to his attempts at mediation.”17 For King, the bitter message of Watts was that in concentrating upon the desegregation of the South, he had failed to devise a national strategy that would reach and inspire the young in the urban areas beyond the South. The conﬂagration of Watts was dispiriting evidence of the divide between King and the angry, embittered youth who, cognizant of the dehumanizing facts of ghetto existence, expressed their contempt of the paradoxes of the American political and social order through rioting. As Gwendolyn Brooks reveals to us in “The Third Sermon on the Warpland,” one of what she terms three sermonettes that treats the pain, chaos, and contradictions of this era, for those men, women, and children living in poverty in Watts or Chicago, a riot “is their way of lighting candles in the darkness.”18 Or, as King asserted during this period when so many cities across the nation were ablaze, a “riot is the language of the unheard.”19 Unfortunately, Watts was not the only point on King’s national map of leadership that showed signs of unraveling. Shuttling between Chicago and Greenwood, Mississippi, King found himself more and more at odds with the leadership of SNCC. The differences between King and Carmichael would achieve their most pronounced and ultimately divisive form within the context of the Greenwood campaign. Addressing a group of six hundred SNCC volunteers in Greenwood, Carmichael used for the ﬁrst time the slogan of “Black Power.” Immediately afterwards, Carmichael “issued instructions that, from Greenwood on . . . the shibboleths of nonviolence were to be exorcised.”20 While King worked diligently to arrive at a compromise with Carmichael and other proponents of black power, these efforts failed. The genie, as it were, was out of the bottle. Reﬂecting upon the meaning of black power, King came to the following dispiriting conclusion: “Beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can’t win. It was born from the wounds of despair and disappointment.”21 While the Watts riot and the Greenwood Campaign were a measure of King’s alienation from certain sectors of black America, the principled position he would assume on the U.S. involvement in Vietnam would place a 154

Dreamer considerable strain upon his relationships with the black leadership of the civil rights movement and also with progressive whites who allied themselves with President Lyndon B. Johnson around the project of the “Great Society.” Senator Edward Brooks stated, “As early as October 1965, Ralph Bunche, another Nobel Laureate, stated that Martin ‘should positively and publicly give up one role or the other,’ that of civil rights leader or that of international conciliator.”22 Along with the very formidable Bunche, King was also criticized by Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, Jackie Robinson, and Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts; they felt that King had an unproductive ﬁxation on the Vietnam War, which, in their view, threatened to jeopardize President Johnson’s support of civil rights legislation.23 Collectively, the Watts riot, the debate over black power, and King’s critique of the Vietnam War placed the minister, now more than ever the “Socratic gadﬂy of the state,” on both the inside and outside of the operations of power in both black and white circles in the United States.24 These national and international events form part of the fabric of Dreamer; they are part of the rich and dynamic ﬁeld of history that inform Johnson’s orchestration of the ﬁrst and only meeting between King and Smith. These events reveal how the lives of the minister and the bluesman converge, for both are, for different reasons, contending with the effects of alienation upon their lives. While the lives of Smith and King converge in their shared condition of the outsider, their lives remain largely, as Johnson writes, “negatives of each other” (47). To be sure, the uncanny somatic similarities only serve to underscore the many differences in background, experience, and outlook between these two men. Quinones argues that one of the distinctive features of the Cain–Abel story is the “tragedy of differentiation. Such differentiation is painfully realized at the moment of the offering, when one of the brothers has his essential nature endorsed over that of the other brother. The arbitrariness of preference thus compounds the tragedy of differentiation and brings home the fact of division in a way that is particular to the Cain-Abel theme.”25 Here again, Johnson’s story conforms to this deﬁning pattern in the story of the enemy brother. The many differences between Smith and King unfold within the matrix of what Quinones suggestively terms the “tragedy of differentiation,” a matrix in which the many differences between Smith and King are both reiﬁed and revealed. As I will demonstrate, Johnson’s intentions are not to enunciate the many differences that exist between Smith and King for their own sake, but rather always to move his doublevoiced, dialogic narrative to the point where the “fracture at the base of existence,” which their appearance signiﬁes, becomes an opening and an 155

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS opportunity for the achievement of something approaching reconstitution. I say approaching reconstitution because Johnson’s novel, like the story in Genesis, opens and occurs within what Quinones terms an “atmosphere of momentousness and mystery.”26 The reconﬁguration and regeneration of the self and community that the novel chronicles is also subject to the mystery and ambiguity that are a feature of what Quinones asserts is “one of the deﬁning myths of our culture.” Ever at home in both mystery and ambiguity, Johnson does not construct a denouement that produces a resolution, the happy and sweet joining of untidy, conﬂicting parts. The deﬁning patterns of this deﬁning myth complement his own practices and outlook as an artist. We are, therefore, given an ending that is more like a pause than a conclusion, an ending that yields more questions than answers. Needless to say, the differences between the minister and the bluesman are legion and striking. To begin with the differences in background, King was born at home into a prosperous middle-class family on historic Auburn Avenue, or “Sweet Auburn,” as this center of black life in Atlanta was christened by John Wesley Dobbs in the 1920s.27 The last of three siblings, young M. L., as he was called by family and friends, was being groomed to take his place in a dynasty of preachers that extended back to his grandfather, the Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams, founder of Ebenezer Baptist Church that was located only a stroll away from the family’s two-story Queen Anne residence. This dynasty of the pulpit also included M. L.’s father, the Reverend Martin King, Sr., whom the young scion would eventually succeed as the pastor of “the largest and most prestigious Baptist church in Atlanta.”28 After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, the ﬁrst public high school for African Americans in Atlanta, “Tweed,” as he was now called by his high school classmates “because of his penchant for stylish and exquisitely woven suits,” entered college.29 Predictably, King enrolled, at the improbable age of ﬁfteen, in the institution at which his father was both an alumnus and trustee: Morehouse College, the citadel of black manhood in American higher education. “It was, despite its size, a consciously arrogant place.”30 As one among four hundred students who were exhorted daily to rise to the high standard of leadership and scholarship of the Morehouse Man, a rather rigid, and doubtless for some oppressive, heterosexist construction of black masculinity, King majored in sociology and maintained a grade point average of 2.48. While at Morehouse, he was mentored by many faculty and administrators, including none other than Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the college’s legendary president who, commenting upon King’s academic performance and that of another student in a letter of recommendation, 156

Dreamer stated that “they are not brilliant students but they have good minds.”31 After graduating from Morehouse College, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary, where he earned a master’s degree. After Crozer, King completed his doctoral studies at Boston University, where he wrote a dissertation in which he examined the concept of God in the work of the philosophers Henry Nelson Wieman and Paul Tillich. By contrast, Smith was born on Chicago’s South Side. Orphaned and without siblings, he is an autodidact and an army veteran of the Korean War. Very plainly, he is not, like his double, the adored son of a privileged black family and a member of the black elite. Smith’s current address on the South Side, 3721 Indiana Avenue, reveals volumes about his life and circumstances. It also reveals something of the manner in which Johnson, through the calculating and artful exploitation of literary antecedents, seeks to position his protagonist in relation to King. Signiﬁcantly, Smith’s current address is also the same address of his ﬁctional counterpart, Bigger Thomas of Richard Wright’s Native Son.32 This very subtle introduction of Bigger Thomas further underscores the differences between Smith and King; it reveals how far apart they are in terms of background, and is a means by which Johnson pays tribute, in this double-voiced, internally dialogized narrative, to another important literary ancestor. “What Wright achieved in Native Son,” writes Johnson, “and what no American writer has done quite so well since (including Wright), was the construction of a ﬁctive universe where everything is charged by the broken mind and broken heart of a black boy reduced to a state of thinghood.”33 Like Bigger Thomas, Smith’s life is marked by fear, violence, alienation, addictions, invisibility, and, at the point of his entry into the novel, above all a “broken mind and a broken heart.” Certainly, Johnson’s subtle linking of Bigger Thomas to Smith sheds new light upon the manner in which we interpret the mysterious and brutal deaths of Juanita Lomax, a woman with whom Smith becomes romantically involved and subsequently enters into a doomed and violent marriage, and her three sons. In their brutality and violence, the unsolved murders of Juanita Lomax and her sons recall the murders of Mary Dalton and Bessie at the hands of Bigger Thomas. As readers, we are never free of the speculation that Smith is responsible for these deaths, even though he “swore he knew nothing about” them, even though there is no evidence linking him to these murders, and even though he is not convicted of this quadruple murder. Moreover, Johnson’s linking of Bigger Thomas to Smith also raises questions about Smith’s innocence with regard to the torching of his apartment once he discovers that he has 157

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS been evicted by his landlady. While the Chicago police does not ﬁnd, as it were, blood on Smith’s hands in their investigation of the murder of Lomax and her sons, in the case of the destruction by ﬁre of his former apartment building Bishop notes that Smith had “the scent of gasoline on his clothes” (59) when he rushed back to the car in which he would travel with Bishop and Amy to Makanda, Illinois, for a period of training, ironically, in the nonviolent methods of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The brilliant and subtle overlay of the life of Bigger Thomas upon the life of Smith endows Johnson’s protagonist with sinister and violent possibilities; there is the troubling specter that the double is leading a double life and that others may ﬁnd themselves double-crossed by him. Doubtless, in the conceptualization of this deeply philosophical novel that bears the imprint of many inﬂuences, including German romanticism, Johnson was intrigued by many questions, including the following one: What would be the challenge of creating a novel in which a protagonist who possesses the background of Bigger Thomas would meet and serve as a proxy for King? In one sense, the novel is an answer to this question. The arrival of the minister in Chicago has complicated in very particular ways—insults, assaults, death threats—the life of this bluesman cast in the mold of Bigger Thomas. At a crucial point in their ﬁrst and last encounter, in which, strikingly, they “drew breath at the same instant,” the less fortunate double makes a novel proposal to his privileged counterpart: “I said I been catching hell since you come to Chicago. Hell, I can’t walk down the street or go to the store without somebody stoppin’ me. Some of ’em spit in my face. That’s colored as well as white. That’s why I come here. I ﬁgure if I’m catching hell ’cause of you, I might’s well catch it for you instead” (40–41). The action of the novel turns upon King’s later acceptance of this proposal. Although Smith dutifully applies himself to the task of preparing to function as King’s proxy once the minister has agreed to ﬁnd some useful role for him in the Movement, nevertheless for much of the novel we are both suspicious of and fascinated by Smith. Our sense of being ill at ease with Smith is based in part upon an observation he makes to Bishop after he has learned of King’s willingness to assist him. Apparently offended by the idea of a job in the Movement, Smith, his face an “unﬁnished puzzle, or a mask” hidden in the shadows of the stairwell, observes to a disbelieving Bishop: “A job? . . . I don’t want just a job, Bishop. Uh-uh. I want a li’l of what the good doctor in there has got in such great abundance” (43). Unable to hear clearly and distinctly, Bishop thinks he hears a retreating Smith utter the word Immortality (43). In tracing 158

Dreamer the evolution of the double, Otto Rank writes that the double has been imagined as an “energetic denial of the power of death”; indeed, Rank observes that the immortal soul was the ﬁrst double of the body.34 It is fascinating that Smith, King’s double, seeks, if Bishop has not misheard him, immortality through his association with the minister. In other words, Smith seeks what the double in classical literature has bestowed upon its human likeness. Again, we witness here the manner in which Johnson experiments with the trope of the doppelganger. Of course, it is not clear to us what Smith means by immortality. Does he mean visibility in the social world as an antidote to his own invisibility and alienation, a kind of permanent and unalterable fame and celebrity? Or is he expressing a wish for an eternal existence beyond death? At this point in the novel, Smith’s motivations and intentions are, like his face in the stairwell, obscured by shadows. This mystery and calculation on Johnson’s part are the basis for the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that pervade the novel from the period of Smith’s arrival at the threshold of King’s Lawndale ﬂat, to Smith’s departure with Bishop and Amy for Makanda for training in the methods and philosophy of the Movement. The differences in experience and outlook between King and Smith emerge during the course of his sojourn in Makanda, a familiar site in Johnson’s expanding ﬁctional universe. Makanda is the birthplace of Rutherford Calhoun, Johnson’s brash, bawdy, and transformed hero of Middle Passage. On the outskirts of Makanda, Bishop, Smith, and Amy make their temporary home in a “hundred-year-old farmhouse” belonging to Mama Pearl, Amy’s grandmother and also a volunteer for the CCCO. Soon after their arrival at the farmhouse, Amy tells Bishop and Smith the history of her family in Makanda. Smith’s response to Amy’s ancestral narrative is all derision, petulance, and exasperation: “Is this gonna be a long story?” (87). At the very point when he ﬁnds Amy’s narrative of family unendurable, Smith growls: “Excuse me, I need to shit” (91). As he proceeds to the outhouse, Bishop questions him about his bruising, uncivil remark. The response is one that reveals Smith’s skepticism about Amy’s particular narrative as well as of narratives in general: “That story she told,” said Smith, “it’s a fucking lie. Front to back, it was kitsch. All narratives are lies, man, an illusion. Don’t you know that? As soon as you squeeze experience into a sentence—or a story—it’s suspect. A lot sweeter, or uglier, than things actually were. Words are just webs. Memory is mostly imagination. If you want to be free, you best go beyond all that.” “To what? ”

159

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS “That’s what I’m trying to ﬁgure out. By the way”—he held up the Commitment Blank and grinned—“tell her thanks for this. I need something to wipe with.” (92–93)

In his diatribe, Smith registers his deep skepticism about narratives, surely a function of his own marked alienation. Moreover, he reveals the orphan’s contempt for narratives of family, as well as his own feelings of betrayal at the hands of his own remote and anonymous family. This is a position that further sets him apart from King, who, born into a loving and protective family, did not in the early years of his life question his place in the world from the position of the abandoned, but rather assumed his place in the world from the position of the anointed. Smith’s contemptuous dismissal of Amy’s ancestral narrative is also a veiled dismissal of the faith in the ﬁxed meanings of language, and the rhetorical eloquence upon which King would build his career in the pulpit and in the Movement that he would shape to a remarkable degree. It also is a veiled dismissal of the powerful arguments that King would construct in the form of narratives (sermons, letters, speeches, books) that were both a critique of American racial and economic injustice as well as an evocation of the beloved community, that is to say, of the realization of the practice of radical democratic politics. Smith believes that the cultivation of skepticism toward narratives will lead to freedom, but of what kind and for what purpose he does not explain. Regard all things with suspicion; hold nothing as sacred. This is Smith’s position, but what are his politics? He appears to adopt the position of the nonconformist, which explains his almost gleeful use of the SCLC’s Commitment Form as a substitute for toilet paper. Smith’s critical and skeptical posture vis-a`-vis Amy’s narrative is the ﬁrst of many instances in which he, by adopting the position of the skeptic and nonconformist, challenges Bishop to think critically about his position in the social world. It is the ﬁrst of many instances in which Smith seems to be functioning as both guide and teacher, in effect pointing the way to something larger and more comprehensive for the young, somewhat innocent and vulnerable Bishop, whose life he saved when Bishop was mortally threatened by a knife-wielding rioter. Of course, somewhere beneath Smith’s diatribe is a warning and selfcriticism from Johnson himself regarding narratives of ﬁction and nonﬁction. Smith’s vulgar and abrasive language is a means by which Johnson challenges the reader to cultivate a necessary objectivity and distance from the novel itself, through the reading of which we are both participants and witnesses in the historical process. While Smith is in the outhouse “railing against conformity and conven160

Dreamer tion, all the while emptying his bowels loudly, with trumpeting ﬂatulence and gurgling sounds and a stink so mephitic it made me [Bishop] choke” (93), Bishop returns to the farmhouse or “Nest,” as they also call it, to ﬁnd Amy inspecting Smith’s sketchbooks. “She turned each page slowly,” Johnson writes, “puzzling over verses he’d scrawled beneath a series of eight charcoal illustrations of a herdsman searching for his lost ox. Finding it. And leading it home where—in the ﬁnal panel—both hunter and hunted vanished in an empty circle” (93). Studying the drawings, Amy remarks to Bishop, who is engrossed by the beauty of her hands rather than the beauty and import of the drawings, “Chaym is talented . . . but I can’t see him helping the Movement” (93). This is a moment in the novel in which Johnson introduces us to the other aspects of Smith’s experiences and background that further distinguish him from King. As I have been attempting to demonstrate, one function of the doppelganger in Dreamer is to signify difference, although that is not its only function in the novel. Nevertheless, Smith’s sketchbooks constitute an opening through which Johnson subtly introduces a set of important elements that not only reveal Smith’s complexity as an individual, but also are a means by which Johnson returns to an inﬂuential text in the creation of his ﬁctional corpus. The text in question is The Ten Oxherding Pictures, a classical text in Zen Buddhism and, as I argued in chapter 2, the framework and foundation for Oxherding Tale: Johnson’s antebellum metaphysical slave narrative and “platform book.” How is this Zen Buddhist text used in Dreamer? Its function and purpose in the novel is closely allied with Johnson’s use of the doppelganger, that is to say, the text functions as yet another sign of difference between Smith and King. More speciﬁcally, it is a marker for the worldviews that each character embodies, for Smith is the embodiment of the religious and philosophical traditions of the East, and by contrast King is the embodiment of the religious and philosophical traditions of the West. Together they embody the liberating potentialities of these two distinct and complementary traditions as articulated within the framework of the Movement. In this regard, I refer to King’s application, as a result of the timely intervention by the paciﬁst and activist Bayard Rustin, of Gandhi’s philosophy and strategy of nonviolent direct action.35 We learn of Smith’s experiences in the East during the course of his ﬁrst conversation with King. Here he informs his double that after recuperating from an injury caused by accidentally stepping on a landmine in Pyongyang, he remained in the East, “sorta like being in exile” (35). During this period of exile, he was on a ﬁrst-name basis with every bartender, or so he claims, in Kyoto, Jakarta, and Rangoon. Signiﬁcantly, Smith’s knowledge of the 161

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Indonesian language emerges seconds after he intervenes in a potentially deadly assault. After Bishop thanks him for this timely intervention, Smith replies, “Sama-sama,” which, as he informs a dazed and grateful Bishop, is Indonesian for “you’re welcome.” Later, when Amy and Bishop retrieve Smith’s belongings that his landlady has left for garbage on the street, we discover that while Smith’s South Side address is the same as that of Bigger Thomas, there are marked differences between Bigger and Smith in terms of their intellectual interests: Judging by the cardboard boxes at my feet, whatever Smith lacked in clothing he more than made up for in books. There were volumes from Moody Bible Institute, translations from the Coptic Gnostic Library . . . , the Rhineland sermons of Meister Eckhart, the Dhammapada, texts on Suﬁ and Tantrism. . . . In other boxes I found Japanese pornography—magazines with page upon glossy page of photos showing teenagers . . . doing things I dare not describe, but which I guessed he used for masturbation, and then—I saw playing cards depicting a different, more terrifying kind of pornography: Thai pictures taken in morgues, showing bodies in different stages of decomposition, used by Theravada monks for meditation on the transitory nature of all things. (58–59)

While Bishop is uncertain about what value to attach to this occult and complex mix of texts from the East and West, and also, by extension, what to think of Smith, the relationship of these strange texts to this stranger do, over time, become clearer. After observing Smith in the practice of zazen, a deep form of meditation, Bishop unexpectedly discovers the contemplative aspects of Smith’s personality: “He was utterly unaware of me, and his practicing the Presence, reviewing these passages [gatha or prayers] like a Muslim haﬁz, was so private and intimate an exercise that I felt like a voyeur and was about to pull myself away, back toward the farmhouse, when I saw tears sliding down his cheekbones to his chin” (96). Moments afterwards, Smith informs Bishop that while in Kyoto he spent a year as an initiate in a zendo or Zen Buddhist temple. While in the zendo, Smith learned samu or monastic labor, and before being asked to leave by the Roshi, or head monk, he also learned “to read Sanskrit in three days of study and chanting sutras” (105). Smith informs Bishop that he was asked to leave the zendo because the Roshi, although impressed by the purity of the veteran’s discipline, believed that only “a Japanese could experience true enlightenment” (99). While Smith is disillusioned by the racism of the Roshi, he takes from this experience an important lesson regarding self-development and shares it with a rapt and sympathetic Bishop: “If anything, my year in the temple taught me what 162

Dreamer Gautama ﬁgured out when he broke away from the holy men: if you want liberation, to be free, you got to get there on your own. All the texts and teachers are just tools. If you want to be free, you’re supposed to outgrow them” (99). In referring to Gautama, or the historical ﬁgure Sakyamani Gautama who achieves enlightenment and becomes the Buddha, Johnson casts Smith as a kind of bluesman who, paradoxically, takes as his model and inspiration the Buddha himself. As I will show, Smith’s own path or spiritual trajectory recalls that of Gautama, for during the course of the novel he undergoes a series of trials that culminate if not in enlightenment, then certainly in a marked and profound expansion of consciousness. Beyond a doubt, the period of instruction in the methods of the Movement at the Nest represents a vital stage in Smith’s evolution. Just as Smith embodies the religious and philosophical traditions of the East, so does King embody the religious and philosophical traditions of the West. As a Christian and ordained Baptist minister, the holder of two postgraduate degrees in Western theology, the Dreamer is in many ways the very antithesis of Smith. Johnson provides us with an overview of the minister’s intellectual development through Bishop in his role as tutor to Smith: As we walked I tried to convey capsule descriptions of the existentialist theologians germane to the minister’s intellectual genesis, and what little I’d gleaned from a hasty perusal of Edgar Brightman. Of Personalism there was precious little to say. Had King not written about its value to him in reinforcing his belief in a loving, divine Father on high when he was in college (in contrast to Paul Tillich’s monistic, impersonal God as the “Ground of Being”), Personalism as a philosophy would be as dead as Neoplatonism. None of the abstract portraits of the Lord offered by Tillich, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Eastern mystics could satisfy a Baptist preacher’s boy. Thus the Boston Personalists, and Crozer professor L. Harold DeWolf ’s conception of a self-limited temporal Father who bore man’s face and ﬂaws, hopes and values, impacted King’s vision more than any other. . . . For DeWolf, God was immersed in creation, His power willingly curtailed by human freedom. . . . King, I explained, accepted some restrictions on God’s power, but could not—would not—believe for a second that He lacked absolute control of events predestined to lead to social liberation and the beloved community. (110–111)

Bishop’s “capsule descriptions” of the minister’s intellectual development further highlight the differences in background between King and Smith. He provides an overview of the training King received in Western theology at Crozer Theological Seminary under the guidance of Professors George W. Davis and Kenneth Lee Smith, who introduced King not only to the work of Gandhi, but also to the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, 163

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS and Walter Rauschenbusch, the great exponent of the philosophy of the social gospel. About the work of Rauschenbusch, King remarked: “It has been my conviction ever since reading Rauschenbusch . . . that any religion which professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul is a spiritually moribund religion.”36 In his tutorials, Bishop also mentions L. Harold DeWolf, King’s dissertation supervisor at Boston University, under whom he completed a dissertation entitled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” In completing his doctoral dissertation, King sought the advice of Niebuhr and corresponded with none other than Tillich.37 Although King admired, as Johnson mentions in the prologue, the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, “the poet, Zen master, and chairman of the Vietnam peace delegation” (18), the minister embodies, in contrast to his double, the religious and philosophical traditions of the West. Certainly, then, it is for this reason and other more obvious ones that King, during his sole encounter with Smith, feels, according to Bishop, that “his history was turned upside down” (32). Another important difference between King and Smith is shown in their vision of human experience, a vision undoubtedly shaped by their divergent personal histories. Of the several moments in the novel where King articulates his deeply Christian and moral vision, the crucial moment is in an acceptance speech he delivers at Evanston’s Calvary A. M. E. Church on the occasion of receiving an award from its members. In this section of the novel, ﬁction and autobiography merge in a seamless fashion. In recalling the history of the black citizens of Evanston, a history he learned from Amy who in turn had learned it from Mama Pearl, Bishop is also recasting the history of prominent African Americans in Evanston, some of whom include members of Johnson’s own family, and its role in the growth and development of the black side of Evanston from approximately the late 1930s to the 1960s. Dr. Jennifer Hale, the force behind the establishment of Center Hospital that served the black residents of Evanston, is the ﬁctional counterpart to Dr. Elizabeth Hill, who, wishing to serve the medical needs of African Americans in a segregated city, founded the Community Hospital, a blackowned, black-operated medical facility. It was in Community Hospital in 1948 that Dr. Hill delivered Charles Johnson, the ﬁrst and only child of Benny Lee Johnson and Ruby Elizabeth Jackson, Johnson’s parents.38 The “congenial black contractor named Robert Jackson [the founder of Jackson Construction Company and] whose company won the contract for building

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Dreamer Calvary AME” (127) is the ﬁctional counterpart to William Johnson, Johnson’s great-uncle who migrated to Evanston from South Carolina in the 1920s. Like the character Robert Jackson, whose surname is the maiden name of Johnson’s mother Elizabeth Jackson, William Johnson established his own milk company and subsequently set up the Johnson Construction Company that built homes, hospitals, and churches for Evanston’s black community.39 Of the churches built by the Johnson Construction Company, one was Evanston’s Springﬁeld Baptist Church, the black Baptist Church upon which the ﬁctional Calvary A. M. E. is based. It is into this prosperous, self-conscious community and its vibrant center, Calvary A. M. E., that the minister has come to accept an award for service and leadership. Hosted by the pastor of Calvary A. M. E., Rev. Coleman, King delivers an acceptance speech that contains the core elements of his deeply moral vision: After liberating lunch counters, winning court battles and homes in nice neighborhoods, we must in our next campaign free consciousness itself from fear, from what William Blake called “mind-forg’d manacles.” But to do this we must unlearn many things. We must be quiet and not deluded or deceived by the creation of our own minds. The soil of the soul must be plowed. Reverend Coleman . . . the answer to your question is that no man can bring me so low as to make me hate him . . . because hate is based on fear, and I don’t fear losing anything since I willingly gave up everything to the one I love. . . . I’ve got nothing to lose. Nothing to fear because after being in the storm so long I’ve learned to accept only one problem: What is God? Every night when I get down on my knees to pray or close my eyes in quiet meditation I’m holding a funeral for the self. . . . I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make myself a willing servant of the will of God. As Whitehead might put it, “I am” is an example of Misplaced Concreteness. And what’s left when you get the I out of the way? Only the others, living and dead, who are already so thoroughly integrated into our lives you can never get rid of them. No, the segregationists lost before they even began. Nothing stands alone. . . . After a time, I tell you, a man comes to see only a We, this precious moment as a tissue in time holding past, future, and present, with all of us in the red, everlasting debtors—ontological thieves—in a universe of interrelatedness. . . . Every man and woman is a speculum, our mirror. Our twin. . . . Think about it. . . . If you believe in Jesus, then you believe in the man who sleeps outside your door on the street. . . . You believe in the brokenhearted, the poor, the unemployed, the captive, the blind, the bruised. . . . But I know that at the numinous heart of being, there is a Heart, a Father who, if we approach the poor by one span, will come to us by one cubit; if we move toward the needy one cubit, He draws nearer by a fathom; if we love all men as our brothers, He embraces us with a redemption greater than any fortune in the world. Brothers and sisters, . . . no man can make me hate. I have no choice but

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS to love others because I am the others. Reason (to say nothing of self-interest) demands that I care for them as much as I do for myself. (138–141)

The inspirational speech the minister delivers at Calvary A. M. E. is one based upon Johnson’s careful probing and analysis of King’s published sermons, addresses, and writings. The outcome of this research is a speech in which Johnson captures successfully the cadence, diction, voice, and vision of the historical King. In this speech, the minister imagines a deeply moral and integrated universe in which the lives of all human beings are governed not by fear, division, and hate, but instead by love. From the pulpit of Calvary A. M. E., the minister enunciates a vision of human community that is enlivened by the concept of “We” rather than “I,” in other words by King’s concept of the beloved community. According to the theologian Walter E. Fluker, King’s “conception of the beloved community draws upon several signiﬁcant theological and philosophical sources. Most notable among these sources are the personal idealism of Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf, Protestant liberalism as represented by Walter Rauschenbusch, and the ‘black Christian tradition.’ ”40 The minister’s concept of the beloved community is tantamount to the actualization of the Kingdom of God on earth. As Fluker asserts, King’s concept of the beloved community “is the Christian eschatological ideal which serves as the goal of human existence and the norm of ethical judgment. Concretely expressed, it is ‘the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture’ of persons in which they realize the solidarity of the human family by assuming responsibility for one another as children of God.”41 In articulating his powerful, palimpsestic vision of the beloved community, Johnson’s King also emphasizes the myriad ways in which the lives of human beings are interrelated. He asserts: “Nothing stands alone.” Moreover, each man and woman is, he declares, “everlasting debtors” existing in a “universe of interrelatedness.” And in another carefully orchestrated use of language, Johnson summons the novel’s dominant trope through the voice of King himself, when King asserts that every “man and woman is a speculum, our mirror. Our twin.” The cadence, diction, and vision of Johnson’s ﬁctional sermon recalls one of King’s most famous speeches entitled “The Ethical Demands of Integration,” which was delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 27, 1962. In this speech, the historical King expressed his now very well-known metaphor of interrelatedness: “The universe is so structured that things do not quite work out rightly if men are not diligent in their concern for others. The self cannot be self without other selves. I 166

Dreamer cannot reach fulﬁllment without thou. . . . All life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”42 In the ﬁctionalized sermon that the minister delivers at Calvary A. M. E., Johnson also conveys successfully the historical King’s fundamentally optimistic view of human nature and the universe. This view is reﬂected in the minister’s assertion: “But I know that at the numinous heart of being, there is a Heart, a Father who, if we approach the poor by one span, will come to us by one cubit; if we move toward the needy one cubit, He draws nearer by a fathom; if we love all men as our brothers, He embraces us with a redemption greater than any fortune in the world” (141). The poignant language of this section of the minister’s speech recalls the language found in the historical King’s speech “How a Christian Should View Communism” and the unpublished speech “Is the Universe Friendly?” in which he writes: “at the heart of the universe, there is a Heart.”43 Moreover, Johnson’s convincing evocation of King’s afﬁrmative vision also recalls “An Autobiography of Religious Experience,” in which a very young King, then a student at Crozer Theological Seminary, reﬂects upon the relationship of his childhood and adolescent experiences to the development of his religious outlook and eventual choice of vocation: “It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where lovely relationships were ever present. It is quite easy for me to think of the universe as basically friendly mainly because of my uplifting hereditary and environmental circumstances. It is quite easy for me to lean more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature mainly because of my childhood experiences.”44 These excerpts from the published and unpublished writings of King reveal not only the faithful manner in which Johnson evokes, in this double-voiced narrative, important aspects of the historical King, but it also reveals the ways in which the ﬁctional King differs in background and outlook, as already discussed, from his double, Smith. In treating the complementary themes of indebtedness, interrelatedness, love, and an afﬁrmative vision, Johnson returns again to themes in Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, and Middle Passage. We are reminded of Faith’s ﬁnal revelatory encounter with the Swamp Woman and the exchange of roles that reveals the manner in which one life mirrors another. We are reminded of Andrew Hawkins’s sympathetic recounting of Ezekiel SykesWithers’s fateful encounter with love, as well as Hawkins’s later vision of the “one and the Many” in the “ﬁeld of energy” imprinted upon the chest of a transﬁgured Horace Bannon. And we are reminded of the pick-pocket Ruth167

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS erford Calhoun’s mounting sense of awe and indebtedness in the presence of the Allmuseri shortly after their arrival aboard the Republic, and of Calhoun’s comic and tender embrace of Isadora in the ﬁnal paragraphs of the novel. Not only does the minister’s transcendent language at Evanston’s Calvary A. M. E. recall pivotal moments in earlier works of ﬁction by Johnson, but it is also a means by which he reveals yet another function of the doppelganger in this novel. Johnson’s calculated use of the double suggests the complex ways in which the lives of King and Smith, and by extension the lives of others, are profoundly different and yet, paradoxically, connected, for as the minister asserts, “I am the others.” King’s concept of the beloved community and Johnson’s careful evocation of it in Dreamer also recall the vision of community and politics espoused by Ellison throughout Invisible Man, but most dramatically in the epilogue. Here the narrator, after questioning the meaning of his grandfather’s deathbed advice, is able to say “yes” to what Ellison terms the “principle,” by which he means the potentiality of the founding documents of state: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. After a series of assertions and rhetorical questions that in their eloquence and power rival the language of some of King’s most well-known addresses, Ellison’s narrator concludes his meditation on politics and community, which was set in motion by his grandfather’s cryptic advice, with these ruminations: “Was it that we of all, we, most of all, had to afﬁrm the principle, the plan in whose name we had been brutalized and sacriﬁced—not because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunistic, but because we were older than they, in the sense of what it took to live in the world with others and because they had exhausted in us, some—not much, but some—of the human greed and smallness, yes, and the fear and superstition that had kept them running.”45 And in another place: “Or was it, did he mean that we should afﬁrm the principle because we, through no fault of our own, were linked to the others in the loud, clamoring semi-visible world . . . ?”46 And elsewhere: “Weren’t we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died?”47 Both Ellison and King espouse a vision of community and politics that is based upon a profound sense of interrelatedness and the unwavering belief that politics, called by some a system of organized hatreds, could be an expression of love. This is a vision of citizenship and civic-mindedness that stands in marked contrast to the positions of such a ﬁgure as Johnson’s Yahya Zubena, a cultural nationalist whose positions on race, politics, and citizenship recall the problematic positions advanced by such ﬁgures as Eldridge Cleaver and more recently Leonard Jeffries. Zubena’s 168

Dreamer paranoid vision of the concentration of blacks in the nation’s urban centers, a pattern he maintains is by design, recalls the genocidal “King Alfred Plan” set forth with great seriousness of purpose in John A. Williams’s The Man Who Cried I Am. Plainly, the views on politics and community espoused by King function as a counter-narrative to the separatist vision and politics of Zubena, and also to the species of politics advanced by Smith in that period preceding the assassination attempt. In contrast to King’s vision of a world community bound by the values of faith, harmony, love, and progressive social change, Smith espouses a radically different vision of human experience in his various exchanges with Bishop. It is important to stress that Smith’s vision of human experience is in process and is essentially divided into two periods: the period before the assassination attempt by an embittered old man who accuses King of adultery, and the period after this encounter with heartbreak and death, in which we witness during a protracted and painful convalescence the emergence of a greatly changed Smith. During the period before the assassination attempt, the Korean War veteran and heroin addict imagines a world diametrically opposed to the vision of the beloved community evoked in King’s speech at Calvary’s A. M. E. Church. Shortly before departing for Makanda, Smith, in conversation with Bishop, makes the following stark observation about human relationships, based upon his experience of war in Korea: “I saw that [the barbarity of war], and it showed me there’s two kinds of people in this world. Predators and prey. Lions and lunch. You see it any other way, buddy, and people will chump you off. . . . If you’d been through half of what I have, you’d put that Bible away and learn what time it is—or learn how to read it right” (54–55). Smith’s dark Social-Darwinist vision is made even darker in a later conversation with Bishop when they are en route to Makanda. In a conversation that quickly becomes a dramatic monologue, Smith delivers a lonely, cynical, nihilistic, and pessimistic reading of both personal and collective experience that is punctuated by derision, scorn, and, paradoxically, an offer of assistance: “You like most of the rest of us. Brothers, I mean. You’re illegitimate. No father prepared the way for you. You want to be among the anointed, the blessed—to belong. I saw that in you the moment we met. Nothing’s worked for you, I can see that. . . . That’s why I said I think I can help you.” “With what?” “Your salvation,” he said. “You work real hard at being good, Bishop. Anybody can see you’re a Boy Scout. Square as a Necker’s cube. But you don’t ﬁt. You got to remember that nobody on earth likes Negroes. Not even Negroes. We’re outcasts. And outcasts can never create community. I been to a

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CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS lot of places and it’s the same everywhere. We’re despised worldwide. You ever thought we might be second-class citizens because generally we are secondrate? . . . “You got to face up to the fact of black—or human—mediocrity damned near across the board. Outside of entertainment and athletics . . . , we don’t count for shit, boy. . . . And don’t blame it on bigotry. Nobody believes that tired old excuse anymore. What you got to face, Bishop . . . is the possibility that we are, as a tribe, descended from the ﬁrst of two brothers whose best just couldn’t hack it. And, it wasn’t his fault. See, you check that Bible of yours, you’ll ﬁnd the world didn’t begin with love. It kicked off with killing and righteous hatred and ressentiment. Envy, I’m saying, is the Negro disease. We got the stain, the mark. Nothing else really explains our situation, far as I can see.” (65–66)

After brieﬂy addressing what he perceives as the advantages of membership in the tribe of Cain or the outsiders, Smith goes on to describe the weakness of the tribe of Abel or the anointed: “I have been on the outside long enough to know that hatred is healthy—even holy—and that until you step away, or they cast you out, you can’t see nothing clearly. Truth is, being on the outside is a blessing. Naw, it’s a necessity, if you got any creative spark at all. . . . the way I see it, the problem with all the fuckin’ anointed and somebody like Abel . . . is that they’re sheep. That’s right, part of the obedient, tamed, psalm-singing herd. They make me sick, every one of ’em. See, I ain’t never been good at group-think. You ever notice how safe and dull and correct they all are? How timid! And unoriginal? How vulgar and materialistic? . . . There’s not a real individual in the bunch. No risk-takers, Bishop. No iconoclasts. Nobody who thinks the unthinkable, or is cursed (or blessed) with bearing the cross of a unique, singular identity . . . except him. . . . Individuality . . . That scares ’em. In Japan, they got a saying: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. You see what I’m saying? . . . But that’s how you get to belong, boy—by ﬁtting in and mumbling the party line and keeping your head down and losing your soul, but I think I can save you from that if you let me.” (65–67)

As mentioned earlier, Smith’s vision of human experience is divided into two sections, the periods before and after the assassination attempt. This rambling, emotionally charged monologue falls into the ﬁrst period. The world according to Smith is, at this juncture, a world dominated by strife, envy, alienation, and hatred. In marked contrast to the minister’s vision, which is actuated by faith and love, the distinctive elements of Smith’s have their foundation in atheism, nihilism, and hatred; indeed, he asserts that hatred is not only “healthy,” but also “holy.” At this point, Smith’s vision of human experience is one whose outcome is not progress but, inevitably, chaos and division. The division in the world is easily explained, according to 170

Dreamer Smith, for its origins can be traced to the conﬂicts between two brothers: Cain and Abel. In introducing the Old Testament parable of Cain and Abel, Johnson invests his tale, as I have been arguing, with even greater dramatic and symbolic possibilities. He also introduces the religious and philosophical text undergirding all thought and action in the novel. Unlike his three previous novels, in Dreamer Johnson draws upon the philosophy and parables of Christianity, and uses for the ﬁrst time the parable at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition: the story of Cain and Abel in the Book of Genesis. We are invited to see Smith’s envy of and obsession with King against the ancient backdrop of the Book of Genesis and the archetypal tale of sibling rivalry that ends in murder. The prophets tell us that Cain, the farmer, slew his brother Abel, the shepherd, out of envy, for Yahweh looked with more favor upon Abel’s sacriﬁce of the ﬁrstlings of his ﬂock than upon Cain’s sacriﬁce of the fruit of the ground. The prophets also tell us that for slaying his brother Abel, Yahweh placed upon Cain’s forehead a mark signifying His displeasure with the ﬁrst child of Adam and Eve, while also protecting him from the vengeance and likelihood of murder by others. Yahweh’s curse upon Cain included not only this sign or mark upon his forehead, but He also condemned Cain to live out his life as a “fugitive and vagabond” upon the earth. Cain lived as an outcast for many years until, as the Old Testament tells us, he married and established the city of Enoch, named after his ﬁrstborn son who was the ﬁrst of many descendants to govern this city.48 The parable of Cain and Abel is one of three stories in the Old Testament that treats humankind’s rebellion and fall. Of course, the ﬁrst is the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from paradise for eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The third is the story of the Flood and Noah’s mythic efforts to provide protection for his family and all other forms of life on board the ark during the forty days of rain that concluded with the end of the world. Of these three parables that treat the fall of humankind, none dominates the Western imagination more than the story of Cain and Abel: the enigmatic story of blessings withheld by a loving God; the pain and anguish of sibling rivalry; envy directed at both God and one’s brother; the transformation of the brother into the enemy through murder; the cycle of deception, punishment, and forgiveness by a God Who inexplicably withholds His blessing from one of His own creation; and the introduction of violence, alienation, exile, and chaos into the world. These are the components and themes of a story that consists of only twenty-six verses of chapter 4 of the Book of Genesis, and which has given rise to a vast body of literature 171

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS that includes St. Augustine’s The City of God (413 a.d.), Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery (1821), Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (1919), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama Topdog/Underdog (1999). As Elie Wiesel tells us in his insightful meditation on Cain and Abel, the Old Testament story “is the curious and frightening tale of two brothers who, jealous of each other’s belongings, memories and solitude, are unable to coexist in a world they are still alone to possess. And so they call on death to be their arbiter, thus forever justifying darkness and doom—their own and ours.”49 According to Wiesel, no “other Biblical situation contains so many questions or arouses so many uncertainties.”50 In a similar fashion, Regina M. Schwartz also calls attention to the troubling questions at the heart of the Old Testament tale of sibling rivalry. Schwartz argues that these questions have engendered a disastrous cycle of violence throughout human history, based upon a belief that there can only be one blessing, that has translated, tragically, into notions of what she terms scarcity: “In the Bible, these brothers are the eponymous ancestors of peoples: peoples whose enmity grows and is nurtured for centuries, peoples who deﬁne themselves and their prosperity in that close atmosphere of scarcity, peoples who conceive of the Other as cursed and murderous outcasts.”51 Adopting a line of argument somewhat different from that of Schwartz, Ellen van Wolde maintains that the “story of Cain and Abel shows that YHWH holds out a plea for brotherhood between human beings in spite of their differences. But above all this text makes it clear that YHWH’s preference is for the weak.”52 In his excellent summary of the scholarly debates concerning God’s preference for Abel’s sacriﬁce and His indifference to the sacriﬁce of Cain, Philippe Sellier advances an argument that validates aspects of van Wolde’s reading of this Old Testament parable: “If we look at the Bible as a whole, it is easy to notice the recurring theme of God’s preference for the youngest son (Jacob, Joseph) and for the weak (David). There is also the leitmotif of the prophets: God looks into the hearts of those making an offering, not just at the material value of the sacriﬁce itself. It is this prophetic view that surfaces in the New Testament: ‘By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacriﬁce than Cain, through which he received approval as righteous’ (Hebrews 11.4). The ‘way of Cain’ (1 John 3. 12; Jude 11) is denounced as being counter to the Gospel (Matthew 23. 35; John 8: 44).”53 Signiﬁcantly, in Dreamer Johnson joins this scholarly debate about the meanings of the story of Cain and Abel through a sermon delivered by a Reverend Littlewood, pastor of Makanda’s Bethel A. M. E. Church where, 172

Dreamer as I will show, a greatly changed Smith works out the terms of his own salvation. “The younger brother’s murder, which brought death and guilt into our world,” preaches Littlewood, “is often said to be a preﬁguring in the Old Testament of the greater, far grander sacriﬁce of an innocent who died for our sins at Cavalry” (156–157). Through Littlewood, Johnson introduces a perspective on the story of Cain and Abel, the sacriﬁce of an innocent foreshadowing the greater sacriﬁce of the Lamb of God, not suggested in the readings advanced by Wiesel, Schwartz, and van Wolde. Littlewood maintains that Cain’s sacriﬁce “was intended not to honor the Creator, but to glorify himself, to win the Lord’s favor like a trophy, or an ornament he might wear” (157). Here, Johnson’s Littlewood echoes the reading of Sellier, who emphasizes Cain’s vanity and self-interest in making his sacriﬁce. Believing that God is both forgiving and just, Littlewood concludes his homily by returning to the Creator’s cryptic statement made after He rejects Cain’s sacriﬁce: “if thou does well, shalt thou not be accepted?” Littlewood believes that Cain’s “deliverance—and surely ours—is wrapped in the perennial mystery of what that divine counsel, doing well, possibly means. Is there a single answer? I think not. As a question, it is open-ended, admitting of only provisional answers, a riddle that yields an inexhaustible reply, which is cast best not as a clever sentence but rather in the quality of sacriﬁce and sentience itself” (157). Again through Littlewood, Johnson suggests that there is the possibility of redemption and forgiveness for Cain, a possibility linked to the sincerity and motivation of future sacriﬁces, whether at the altar or in the course of daily living. As I will show, it is this hopeful and redemptive vision of Cain’s potentiality that informs Johnson’s treatment of the life of Chaym Smith. It is against this backdrop of changing representations of the story of the “enemy brother”54 and scholarly debate about its importance and meaning that Johnson stages the drama between King and Smith, while also amending elements of this Old Testament tale to meet the speciﬁc requirements of his philosophical novel. Johnson’s treatment of the Old Testament parable of sibling rivalry depends upon two distinct traditions in Western literature that draw their power from the tragic story of the “enemy brother.” According to Sellier and Quinones, the ﬁrst tradition spans the writing of the biblical account of Cain and Abel; this form of interpretation ends essentially in 1831 with the publication of Byron’s Cain: A Mystery.55 This ﬁrst tradition is best embodied by St. Augustine’s The City of God, a work that Thomas Merton describes as “the autobiography of the Catholic Church.”56 In Book Fifteen of The City of God, the Bishop of Hippo writes that the human race 173

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS is divided into two parts, “the one consisting of those who live according to man, and those who live according to God. And these we also mystically call the two cities, or two communities of men, of which the one is predestined to reign eternally with God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil.”57 The ﬁrst black philosopher in the Western tradition maintains that the “ﬁrst two parents of the human race” are Cain and Abel. Warming to his argument about the source of division among humankind, he asserts that “Cain was the ﬁrst-born, and he belonged to the city of men; after him was born Abel, who belonged to the City of God.”58 In recounting the origins of the human race, St. Augustine constructs a “binary aspect” or system that Edmund Leach has observed is “characteristic of mythical stories.”59 The Bishop of Hippo presents Cain as an outcast, a cruel and unrepentant reprobate, the source of all wickedness and evil in the world, a man whose allegiances are to the cities of man rather than to the “city of the saints,” that is to say, the heavenly city of Abel whose descendants “shall reign with their Prince, the King of the ages, time without end.”60 The second tradition in the literature of Cain and Abel begins with the publication of Byron’s mystery in 1831 and includes such works as Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Hesse’s Demian (1919), and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952). According to Quinones, Byron was the ﬁrst writer to introduce the concept of the double to the theme.61 In this second tradition, Cain is represented not as the archetypal reprobate and outcast, but instead as a hero, rebel, and nonconformist. Of the revisions of the master narrative of Cain and Abel, the text that perhaps best embodies this second tradition is Hesse’s Demian, a novel, as I will show, very important to Johnson’s treatment of the story in Dreamer. The recasting of Cain as a dynamic and romantic ﬁgure emerges ﬁrst in Hesse’s description of Max Demian, an individual who proudly declares his allegiance to the community of Cain. In recalling his ﬁrst impressions of Demian, Emil Sinclair, the novel’s narrator and subsequent disciple of Demian, describes the only child of Frau Eva in the following manner: “When I think back on it today, and what he looked like as a student at the time, I can only say that he was in every respect different from all the others, was entirely himself, with a personality all of his own which made him noticeable even though he did his best not to be noticed; his manner and bearing was that of a prince disguised among farm boys, taking great pains to appear one of them.”62 Hesse’s novel also contains a striking revision of the canonical reading of the story of the “enemy brother.” In conversation with Sinclair, Demian offers the following interpretation of the story of Cain: 174

Dreamer It’s quite simple! The ﬁrst element of the story, its actual beginning, was the mark. Here was a man with something in his face that frightened the others. They didn’t dare lay hands on him; he impressed them, he and his children. We can guess—no, we can be quite certain—that it was not a mark on his forehead like a postmark—life is hardly ever as clear and straightforward as that. It is much more likely that he struck people as faintly sinister, perhaps a little more intellect and boldness in his look than people were used to. This man was powerful: you would approach him only with awe. He had a “sign.” You could explain this any way you wished. And people always want what is agreeable to them and puts them in the right. They were afraid of Cain’s children: they bore a “sign.” So they did not interpret the sign for what it was— a mark of distinction—but its opposite.63

And when Sinclair asks Demian to address the vital matter of fratricide, he offers this most striking reading of the event at the core of the parable of the “enemy brother”: Oh, that’s certainly true. The strong man slew a weaker one. It’s doubtful whether it was really his brother. But it isn’t important. Ultimately all men are brothers. So, a strong man slew a weaker one: perhaps it was a truly valiant act, perhaps it wasn’t. At any rate, all the other weaker ones were afraid of him from then on, they complained bitterly and if you asked them: “Why don’t you turn around and slay him, too?” they did not reply “Because we’re cowards,” but rather “You can’t, he has a sign. God has marked him.” The fraud must have originated some way like that.64

Demian offers a radical revision of the master narrative of the parable of Cain and Abel found in The City of God. In Hesse’s novel, Cain is constructed as an individual possessing exceptional qualities and abilities that set him apart from others. These special attributes inspire not admiration, but fear and envy. Moreover, what we know of as the mark of Cain or the outward sign of both Cain’s crime and God’s protection of him is interpreted by Hesse’s protagonist as a “mark of distinction.” Sinclair recalls that Demian’s “mark of distinction” manifested itself as a “peculiar brightness on his broad forehead,”65 rather than as a “kind of permanent grimace, a perpetual tremor, a tattoo, . . . a horn,” or some “physical defect” (blindness or lameness), that is to say, the traditional manifestations of the sign of Cain theorized by the theologians of the early Christian church.66 Above all, in his interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel, Demian gives greater emphasis not to the crime of murder, but instead to what he terms the “fraud” whose origins are in the deep feelings of envy and distrust that Cain engendered in others, that is to say, in what he perceives as the rather tame and cowardly tribe of Abel. 175

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Through Bishop, who consults a history of the literature of Cain and Abel as a result of Smith’s obsession with “the story of Adam’s two sons” (160), Johnson provides us with a synopsis of this dual tradition in Western literature that includes references to both St. Augustine’s The City of God and Hesse’s Demian. As Hesse is one of Johnson’s literary ancestors, we are not surprised by the fact that Smith is a ﬁgure who embodies more of the elements of the second tradition of the literature of Cain and Abel as they are represented in Demian. Like Demian, Smith is a man who possesses a knowledge of esoteric matters. In the case of the Korean War veteran, this special knowledge manifests itself in his practice of the teachings of Buddhism, whereas in the case of Demian it is reﬂected in his practice of “an art known as thought reading,” which is a form of mind control, and also in his worship of Abraxis, a dark god who embodies both good and evil.67 Crucially, Smith also share’s Demian’s contempt for “the reign of the herd instinct.”68 Like Hesse’s protagonist, Smith functions as a guide to a younger man in a chaotic social world, a guide who, like Demian, brings, as I will demonstrate, his younger charge to a form of salvation. And does Smith, like Demian, possess an outward sign of his inward difference, a “mark of distinction” that separates him from the majority of men and women? While Smith does not possess the “peculiar brightness” of Demian’s forehead, he does possess a physical defect. I am thinking of the injuries to his left leg that Smith sustains after mistakenly stepping on an active landmine shortly before his discharge from the army. And while Smith’s occult resemblance to King has, as Bishop remarks to the minister, “marked him” (42), the socalled “mark” of Cain manifests itself more in Smith, as it does in Demian, in what Sinclair characterizes as another “mode of vision.”69 While Smith is far from being a “prince . . . among farm boys,” he is, like Demian, an outcast and rebel, a troubling ﬁgure who suggests the dark features of the human personality, and the nonconformist and servant who embodies the potentialities of humankind. As Quinones argues, while Cain is “subversive of the ideals of community,” he is also a “ﬁgure of regeneration.”70 He argues further that the story of Cain and Abel invokes “the trauma of violence to bring to birth a new moment of being, even a new dimension of the self that leads to a reviviﬁcation of the community.”71 In other words, Quinones argues that violence is the stage for regeneration within the context of the story of Cain and Abel. Quinones’s argument is crucial to the argument that I am advancing about Smith’s own rich potentiality. As I will demonstrate, Smith’s emergence as a symbol of both transformation and regeneration in the mode 176

Dreamer of Max Demian is catalyzed by what Quinones terms the “trauma of violence.” Ironically, Smith’s metamorphosis through violence afﬁrms, in the ﬁnal sense, the ideal of community espoused by King as it is articulated in his vision of the beloved community. In his dramatic monologue on the Abelites and the Cainites, Smith informs an engrossed and disbelieving Bishop that the various forms of mediocrity, black or otherwise, can be explained not by bigotry, but instead by patrilineal descent, thus absolving himself and his other fellow Cainites of their own failures and inadequacies. Driving home his point to Bishop, whom he also claims is a Cainite, Smith asserts: “Nothing else really explains our situation, far as I can see” (66). By suggesting that the world is divided into the descendants of the tribes of Cain and Abel, Smith (and Johnson) privileges the story of the “enemy brother” over that of the Old Testament story of Ham, one of three sons of Noah, and the ancestor of the Hamitic races that populated Africa. According to legend, the black skin and the enslaved condition of the Hamitic peoples are a result of Ham’s iniquity in viewing his father intoxicated and naked, while his brothers Shem and Japheth walked backward, with averted eyes, to cover Noah’s indiscretion. Likewise, Smith (and Johnson) subordinates the Old Testament story of Jacob and Esau, in which once again a father, in this instance Isaac, has only one blessing for two brothers.72 For Johnson, the story of Cain and Abel fulﬁlls the narrative and thematic objectives of the novel in ways that the stories of Ham, Jacob, and Esau do not. The overlay of the biblical tale of the “enemy brother,” of sibling rivalry and murder, infuses the trope of the doppelganger with additional force and signiﬁcance. The doubles, King and Smith, are in a symbolic and archetypal sense kin, or put in another way, brothers of both the ﬂesh and the spirit. This complex layering of one narrative upon another endows Smith’s talk of “salvation” with new and special meanings. While he offers to assist Bishop in coming to terms with his own demons, the talk of “salvation” is actually more revealing, at this juncture, of Smith’s own complex and mysterious needs to be at peace with himself in the divisive world he imagines. Further, this talk of “salvation,” that is, this veiled and unexpressed need for reconciliation with the tribe of Abel and deliverance from the curse of his vagabond existence, serves to frame a yearning disguised as an ambition that he expresses sometime later to Bishop during Smith’s apprenticeship in Makanda: “My spirit don’t ever have to be still. It don’t need to sleep. Fuck that. The only thing is, I don’t want to be forgotten. Not by the goddam sheep. Or God. I want to do something to make Him remember this nigger—me— 177

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS for eternity” (100). What Smith yearns for is not only acceptance, notwithstanding his vitriolic dismissal of the “psalm-sing herd,” but also the immortality he associates with King. Unlike his ancestor in the Old Testament who marries and establishes a city that is governed by his descendants, Smith is a widower who lives a deracinated, lonely existence that promises only the extinction of what he now imagines as a discredited line. Above all, Smith’s bitter and raging quarrel appears to be not only with King and the other descendants of Abel, but also rather with God Himself, Jehovah, Who has cursed him and Whose favor and acknowledgment he still seeks. Here again, the overlay of the biblical narrative of brotherhood and betrayal endows the condition of Smith with a marked poignancy and desperation. Like his biblical counterpart who is spurned by Jehovah, and who cries out, “My punishment is greater than I can bear,” Smith is also a man who believes he has been spurned by God. It is this belief that drives Smith to seek recognition from God through his apprenticeship with SCLC. Just as Johnson provides us with insight into the interior world of the historic ﬁgure of King, so he also provides us with a perspective on the suffering of Cain through the character of Chaym whose name, as Bishop tells us later in the novel, is a variation on Cain: “Caym, Kaym, even Chaym, were etymological variations on it” (162). While presuming to effect Bishop’s salvation, Smith discovers, as I will show, through an apprenticeship marked by violence and redemption, the means of achieving his own salvation, a means of achieving something approaching a reconstitution of the “breach in existence” that his very presence signiﬁes.73 Just as Smith is the “fantastic creature” who emerges mysteriously from a rupture in the universe brought about by violence, so is he propelled “toward the last stage of his evolution” (143) through what Quinones terms the “trauma of violence.” The traumatic and violent event that serves as a catalyst for Smith’s metamorphosis occurs moments after his unraveling at Evanston’s Calvary A. M. E. Church, where, as a consequence of envy, fear, and anxiety, he is unable to deliver an acceptance speech on King’s behalf. Unexpectedly, King is able to keep this commitment, thereby making it unnecessary for Smith to stand in for him. Leaving Calvary A. M. E., Smith, in the company of Matthew and Amy, is accosted by an elderly and nameless man who strangely resembles Smith. As Bishop observes: “I was all but certain he was Smith’s father” (145). There are somatic as well as psychological similarities, for like Smith, this stranger is motivated by anger and heartbreak. He accuses Smith, whom he mistakes for King, of being responsible for destroying his marriage and absconding with his wife. Before pulling the trigger on a Colt 178

Dreamer semiautomatic, the old man gives full vent to his despair: “I don’t want nothin’ anymore. Y’all took it all. Ministers like you are responsible for all my troubles” (146). In a scene that plays upon the trope of the double, difference, and illusion, and one that revises and revisits Izola Curry’s attempted assassination of King, Bishop describes Smith’s attempted assassination by a similarly disturbed ﬁgure: From inside his coat the old man withdrew a nickelplated, Colt semiautomatic, pointing the ancient pistol straight-armed at Smith, who instinctively threw up his left hand and tried to turn away. The old man pulled the trigger over and over, pumping ﬁve rounds into the backseat. The muzzle ﬂash blinded me; then I saw Smith dancing like a marionette on the cushion as the old man emptied his gun, ﬁring, spiderwebbing the windows, frosting them with bullets that ricocheted crazily around the car like bees. Amy dived under the dashboard. Brass casings rained on the roof of the Chevelle, the curb, and one, burning hot, seared my forehead. Pedestrians were ducking into doorways. After the ﬁrst shot, my ears were cottoned. Deaf. Sounds were muted like voices submerged in the sea, and all I remember after I froze was the old man bolting into the hotel, leaping over a derelict sprawled dead drunk in the lobby, and Amy, her hair sopping with blood, cranking the starter and Smith yelling at me to get the hell into the car and at her to drive to the Nest. (146)

This violent and bloody scene is the expanding ﬂoor for Smith’s metamorphosis. In a radical revision of the master narrative of the Cain and Abel story, Smith is not the assassin, but rather the victim of an assassin; he does not raise his gun to kill King, but rather positions himself to stand in the minister’s place at the appointed hour of the assassin’s arrival. In contrast to Milkman and Guitar of Song of Solomon, who propel themselves forward into the “killing arms of his brother,”74 and unlike the brothers Booth and Lincoln of Topdog/Underdog, who fulﬁll, tragically, the historical and symbolic signiﬁcance attached to their ironical Christian names,75 Smith does not, as Booth does, raise a gun to kill his brother. While Bishop, in the ﬁnal pages of the novel, speculates that the Cainites, as a tribe, are responsible for King’s death, as an individual Smith is not culpable for the slaying of the Dreamer. In this departure from the master narrative of Cain and Abel, Johnson signals his interest in pursuing a different set of questions, questions that emerge from the novel’s central question: How can we end evil without engendering error or evil? As a synecdoche, this violent scene positions us to explore the rich, complex implications of the novel’s deﬁning question. As a synecdoche, this scene captures what Robert Hayden terms in his master poem “Words in the Mourning Time” the “agonies of our deathbed childbed age.”76 In this poem, Hayden mourns the passing of King, Robert 179

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS Kennedy, and many others; he also mourns for America, a nation he describes as “self-destructive, self-betrayed.” In this scene, in which Smith is “dancing like a marionette” in a haze of bullets, Johnson recalls for us the escalating violence of the decade of the 1960s in which King and so many others were killed by assassins. And there is a vital point of convergence between Hayden and Johnson that reaches beyond their shared horror of an age that Hayden links with the reign of the Sphinx. Hayden maintains that the “agonies of our deathbed childbed age / are process, major means whereby, / oh dreadfully, our humanness must be achieved.”77 Johnson holds a similar view, for it is from this location stained with blood, confusion, and hatred that Smith “moves toward the last stage of his evolution” (143). Both Hayden and Johnson imagine human transformation as a process. For Hayden, this idea of process is grounded in his faith as a Baha’i; for Johnson, this idea of process is derived from his study of Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of organism set forth in Process and Reality. Very fortunately for Smith, the old man, as Bishop tells us later, “was a bad shot. Only one round had struck Smith, the bullet slamming into his left side with the force of a sledgehammer, then punching out his back” (148). During his period of convalescence at the Nest, we witness the emergence of a new Smith, who is brought into being by the violence of the assassination attempt, or to summon the language of Quinones, the “trauma of violence.” Bishop states that Smith’s healing “resembled more a being’s slow emergence from a chrysalis than convalescence. And it took months . . . for the nearness of death had altered him” (153). Employing language and imagery that recalls Rutherford Calhoun’s own metamorphosis in Middle Passage, Johnson continues to prepare the ground for his protagonist’s transformation. Along with Bishop, we witness the death of an old self and the emergence of another. Bishop states that the “nearness of death had altered” Smith, but in precisely what ways has this violent encounter with death changed him? The ﬁrst of many signs of change, of growth, of transformation, of the move toward a state approaching reconstitution, occurs early on in Smith’s convalescence. Bishop notes with surprise that Smith “did not want to talk about the attempted assassination he’d foiled, or to claim bragging rights from it. Which bafﬂed me. Wasn’t this what he’d wanted? His bid for a place in the history books? In point of fact, Smith spoke very little to Amy and me as he healed” (153). During this period, Bishop also witnesses in Smith a curious withdrawal from the social world, an indifference to the political events deﬁning the age, which is replaced by an attention in the 180

Dreamer army veteran to “little things—everyday things that had no scribe—with complete absorption and care” (154). Our very reliable narrator also notes another striking alteration in Smith. He observes that after the shooting, Smith “seemed more indifferent to himself,” and that very signiﬁcantly he was “emptied of envy,” which is what Smith had once wryly termed “the singular Negro emotion” (163). While it is debatable that envy is the “singular Negro emotion,” envy is, as Quinones argues, the “motivating emotion” of the story of Cain and Abel.78 Along with envy, Quinones maintains that violence and mystery are also “residual forces in the theme that are equally determining.”79 All three of these elements are at play in Johnson’s novel. As one of the seven deadly sins, envy exists, as Quinones argues further, in “protest against God’s grace, against God’s favor. At its heart then envy is repellent because it lives in opposition to the conditions of existence. The quarrel of envy is ultimately a quarrel with God. . . . When this animosity is directed toward a sibling or a cohort we are in the midst of a Cain-Abel story.”80 Throughout Dreamer, Johnson masterfully exploits the deﬁning and “motivating emotion” of the parable of the “enemy brother.” Perhaps Johnson’s most dramatic and poignant treatment of the impact of envy upon Smith occurs moments after he has heard King deliver his remarks at Evanston’s Calvary A. M. E. Keenly aware of his inadequacy as a result of King’s eloquence, Johnson writes that Smith “dropped his eyes, staring at his feet, almost as if he was ashamed of—and despised—his own being. ‘How does he do that? . . . Some of the things he said . . . That was my stuff. . . . It feels when he’s preaching like his words come from inside me, not outside—like he gives my soul a voice. It doesn’t make sense’ ” (142). Filled with envy before the attempted assassination, in the weeks following it Smith is “emptied of envy.” In the treatment of the emotional life of Smith, Johnson honors and also continues to revise the master narrative of Cain and Abel. In creating a situation where Smith is purged of envy, Johnson also creates a situation in which his protagonist can take the ﬁrst step in a process that will culminate in his transformation. There is other evidence of change and transformation. Once his gunshot wound has healed, Smith volunteers to do repair work at Makanda’s Bethel A. M. E. Church. As a result of its small size and meager resources, Bethel A. M. E. is perpetually under construction, and so its pastor, appropriately named Reverend Littlewood, gladly accepts Smith’s offer to perform various tasks from gardening to carpentry without charge. Although small and impoverished, Bethel A. M. E. is a church with a compelling and complex history. Established by free blacks and ex-slaves after the Civil War, Bethel 181

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS A. M. E. is not only a place of worship but also, as Bishop describes it, a “palimpsest” and a metaphor that speak to the powerful processes of personal transformation in relation to a particular vision of culture: The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, the African, the Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experiences of the spirit. On either side of the entrance were two cracked stained-glass windows of intersecting tracery, the mullions of each branching out into curved bars, below them smooth masonry with chamfered edges. Under the direction of the church’s ﬁrst pastor, the congregation ﬁnished the church’s foyer and stairs leading up to the sanctuary, but it fell to the next generation to complete the choir stand and the storeroom where wooden crates containing the church’s archives . . . were stacked almost to the ceiling; then it fell to a third generation to raise additional rooms in the rear for special meetings. In the original braces strengthening the frame of the roof, in the quoins at the church’s four corners, in the small choir section to the left of the pulpit, added during the 1920s by parishioners whose names were now lost, I saw a creation that on every level— from purlins to wallplates—transcended the passing of its founders, one that no single generation could live to see completed and thus handed down and on to the those yet unborn for its continual restoration and completion. (179–180)

As a palimpsest of lives, histories, and architectural styles, Bethel A. M. E. mirrors and externalizes the process of change and transformation occurring within Smith himself. As Smith repairs this church, which constitutes the center of the spiritual life of Makanda’s black community, so this outsider in this open and welcoming community also repairs the damage he has done to himself and others through the espousal of a doctrine grounded in envy and hatred. In the process, Smith functions not only as a ﬁgure or “metaphor of transformation,” but also as what Quinones terms a “ﬁgure of regeneration.” In undertaking the repairs of Bethel A. M. E., he nurtures the growth and regeneration of a community. As Smith is a kind of unsalaried sexton, the labor he performs during his period of convalescence at Makanda’s Bethel A. M. E. recalls the labor he performed during his sojourn in Japan while a novice at a Buddhist monastery. In both instances, Smith is performing samu, or monastic labor, in which, as he once explained to Bishop, “each task was zazen,” or holy; all labor within the context of samu is “spiritual practice” that leads to the transformation of the individual and the regeneration of community. Signiﬁcantly, Smith’s disciplined practice of samu occurs within an architectural space that recalls a similarly suggestive and powerful space in 182

Dreamer Johnson’s ﬁction. I am thinking now of the Republic, the slave clipper of Middle Passage. As we may recall, Johnson describes the slave clipper in the following manner: “she was, from stem to stern, a process.”81 In similar fashion, from the foyer to the sanctuary, Bethel A. M. E. is also a “process,” for, as Johnson writes, the parish was a “creation that on every level . . . transcended the passing of its founders, one that no single generation could live to see completed and thus was handed down and on to those yet unborn for its continual restoration and completion” (emphasis added). The process of Bethel A. M. E.’s renovation is continuous, for a project, once completed, gives rise to another. In the description of Bethel A. M. E., we again see the imprint of Whitehead’s theory of organism, which, as I argued in the previous chapter, is a theory of which Johnson makes creative and provocative use in his construction of the Republic and in framing Rutherford Calhoun’s metamorphosis. “The community of actual things,” writes Whitehead, “is an organism; but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion in process of production.”82 Like the Republic, Bethel A. M. E. is an “incompletion in process of production,” or, in other words, it stands as a symbol of the dynamic process of change and transformation. And just as the Republic mirrors and suggests the process of Calhoun’s own metamorphosis, so also Bethel A. M. E. mirrors and suggests this same powerful process in Smith. In treating again the impact of change and process upon personality within the framework of political and social formations, Johnson posits a hopeful and afﬁrmative vision grounded in the work of Whitehead, who argued that “to be something is to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.”83 Like Rutherford Calhoun, Smith functions as an example of our capacity for transformation in relation to “other entities,” that is to say, within the context of our relationships with others and in our communities that themselves are always in process. Smith’s metamorphosis takes place within a speciﬁc social and political context, under the pressure of a range of cultural and historical forces. Again, it is important to recall that during his period of convalescence, Smith is an African American who bodies forth philosophical positions speciﬁc to Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism within the context of a speciﬁc manifestation of African American Protestantism (Bethel A. M. E. or Bethel African Methodist Episcopal) that, within the context of the novel, also reﬂects in the very construction of the place of worship a range of architectural styles and inﬂuences: “The structure was a tissue, a layering of lives and architectural styles based not on the principle of either/or but of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too, the Jewish, the Christian, the Greek, 183

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS the African, the Roman, the English, the Yankee, for these could only enrich the experience of the spirit” (179–180; emphasis added). Like so many moments in Johnson’s expanding corpus—including Faith Cross’s revelatory encounter with the Swamp Woman, Andrew Hawkins’s discussions of ontology with Hiram Groll (a.k.a. the Vet), Rutherford Calhoun’s functioning ultimately as the scribe for Ebenezer Falcon—the entrance of Smith into the community and sanctuary of Bethel A. M. E. is what I term an Ellisonian moment. By that, I mean a moment in the novel when we are provided with an example of the rich interplay between myth and history, unexpected juxtapositions, irony, contradictions, humor, jeopardy, and the complexity of the American experience that is characteristic of the worldview of Ellison. As a literary ancestor, Ellison, as I have stated, is an important frame of reference for Johnson. How does Ellison emerge in this particular stage of Smith’s evolution? Smith’s repairs of Bethel A. M. E. also include painting the church’s storeroom. Crucially, the type of paint that Smith uses to paint the storeroom is, as Bishop informs us, “Optic White” (181). The type of paint used is a direct reference to the allegory of Liberty Paints in Ellison’s Invisible Man.84 Liberty Paints is one of several allegories in Ellison’s ﬁrst novel, and in this particular allegory he is concerned deeply with the question of culture and with debunking the notion that American culture is somehow free of the inﬂuence of African American culture. Ellison argues that African American culture is an essential element in the making of American culture. The strategic reference to Ellison’s position on culture in the guise of a paint called “Optic White” signals Johnson’s decision to revisit, advance, and expand Ellison’s pluralistic vision of culture that rejects the proposition of “either/ or” and afﬁrms instead the proposition of “both/and,” or, to summon again Johnson’s own language, “of adding this to that, and yes of course throw that in too.” During Smith’s practice of samu at Bethel A. M. E., Johnson continues to advances a theory of culture that is dynamic and hybrid. As I have argued in the previous chapter, it is a vision of culture central to his creation of the Allmuseri: a hybrid people joined together by an ecumenical vision. In this particular moment in Dreamer, Johnson returns to themes and questions central to his ﬁction, and also positions himself in the national debate on culture that reveals his afﬁnities to such ﬁgures as Ellison, Albert Murray, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Stanley Crouch, and Anthony Appiah. But for Johnson, a pluralistic vision of culture is not only the site for the cultivation of identity, but is also an enrichment “of the experience of the spirit” (180). Johnson suggests that Smith’s psychological and spiritual trans184

Dreamer formation is linked, if not dependent upon, his openness to a range of cultural traditions and inﬂuences. Once again, the strategic reference to Ellison’s Invisible Man signals not only a shared vision of culture, but also is additional evidence of Smith’s transformation, for he is the embodiment at this stage in his evolution of a new optic or a new vision of human experience and human community. No longer is he at odds with others, as he was in the period before the assassination attempt, but rather he is living in harmony with others. Simultaneous with this meditation on culture, Johnson also reveals the ways in which Smith, like Calhoun, is becoming an ethical subject. Signiﬁcantly, the transformation of Smith’s system of values occurs in relation to a vision of culture that is pluralistic and ecumenical. Further evidence of Smith’s transformation is found in the sketches he produces after the assassination attempt. According to Bishop, who stumbles upon these drawings after Smith ﬁnds himself in the custody of the FBI men who had been observing them during their sojourn at the Nest, they were unlike his “earlier pieces . . . [which] seemed anguished and grotesque” (208). By contrast, the sketches produced in the period “after taking the bullet intended for King . . . were simplicity itself: delicate, lovingly detailed studies of the landscape around the farmhouse in different gradations of light” (208). The dramatic change in the mood and content of the new sketches suggests the degree to which Smith has undergone a marked alteration in his consciousness and outlook. As Bishop continues to examine the new sketches, he discovers several portraits of himself. Scarcely recognizing himself in these portraits, Bishop concludes that Smith captured him “as I might be in a decade, no longer the insecure, callow prop in the background of someone else’s story . . . but instead an individual inexhaustible and ineffable in his haecceitas and openended promise” (209). At this juncture, Johnson establishes a striking parallel between Dreamer and his “platform novel,” Oxherding Tale. The power of the parallel is derived from the relationship between Matthew Bishop and Chaym Smith, and the corresponding relationship between Andrew Hawkins and Reb, the Cofﬁnmaker. While Smith produces portraits of Bishop that provide him with some clues about his future and potentiality, so Reb produces carvings that provide Hawkins with similar insights. In establishing this parallel, Johnson is suggesting that Smith and Reb, both older men, function as guides in relation to Bishop and Hawkins, both younger men in need of guidance and direction. This parallel between these two groups of men is strengthened when Bishop, speaking of Smith, observes that “had he not proven himself to be, despite his crabbiness and infuriating eccentricities, 185

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS an experienced guide for those of us, broken-winged, condemned to mediocrity and the margins of the world?” (183). Without question, compassion, “crabbiness and infuriating eccentricities” are certainly traits that Smith shares with Reb. Beyond these facts, both men also embody a vision and way of life that links them to the East, as both men articulate a vision of human experience that is grounded in Buddhism and Taoism. We need only recall that at one point at the Nest, Smith provides Bishop with instruction in “doing Taoist-drenched Tai Chi in the Christian sanctuary [Bethel A. M. E.] where generations of right and proper Grifﬁths [the ancestors of Amy] had prayed to a god unknown to either Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu” (183). As two of the pillars of Taoism, the writings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu provide us with a framework, as I argue in chapter 2, for examining resistance as manifested in the life of Reb, a slave to Flo Hatﬁeld, within the context of antebellum America. Of course, the parallel between Smith and Reb is based not only upon a shared temperament and vision, but also on shared ancestry. Bishop is informed by Groat, one of the “Wise Guys” or FBI agents, that Smith is a descendant of “Baleka Calhoun [who] came over in a slave ship [the Republic] before Surrender. Belonged to an African tribe called the Allmuseri” (205). Through an agent loyal to J. Edgar Hoover, we discover that Smith, like Reb, is an Allmuseri. We also discover that he is a descendant of Baleka, the orphaned slave girl who, with Rutherford Calhoun and Josiah Squibb, is one of three survivors of a shipwrecked Republic. Baleka is subsequently adopted, as I note in chapter 3, by a greatly changed Rutherford Calhoun and his bride Isadora Bailey. Why does Johnson decide to make a descendant of Cain also a descendant of the Allmuseri? How does such an unlikely convergence of bloodlines and histories in the ﬁgure of Smith advance his tale? In considering these questions, I can offer two explanations. The ﬁrst is grounded in the facts of Smith’s own transformation. In linking Smith to the deeply spiritual tribe of Reb, Johnson seeks to provide additional assurances of Smith’s capacity for change and transformation. Further, Johnson’s calculated decision to link a man of Smith’s background and sensibility to the Allmuseri is not only a means of revealing the thematic coherence within his corpus, but it is also a means of revealing Smith’s great promise and potentiality. By establishing ancestral ties between the tribe of Baleka and Smith, Johnson endows a ﬁgure of mystery with a lineage that not only grounds him in a speciﬁc family history that has been documented, but also in such a family history that redeems and elevates him. Smith’s claims to the tribe of Cain are balanced against the history and culture of another tribe, one of great power 186

Dreamer and spiritual resources. Should it matter to us that Smith, according to Groat, “is pretty much the last of his line” (205)? I would assert that it does not. Certainly, the sense of hope we feel for Smith at this juncture is expressed by Bishop in his examination of the Korean War veteran’s sketches and portraits, the very texts that are evidence of his transformation: “I came to see that in them Smith had decided that if the world our absent fathers made was hideous, unfair, and unacceptable, a realm where we were condemned, then all right: he would reinvent it from scratch, if need be, in his art and actions” (209–210). In this hopeful and afﬁrming statement, we are provided with evidence that Smith has overcome the obstacles of his orphaned, alienated status. As the biological descendant of Baleka, the spiritual descendant of Reb, and above all as a result of the spiritual labors that attend his convalescence at the Nest, Smith emerges in the ﬁnal pages of the novel as a powerful symbol of change and transformation through his “art and actions.” Turning now to the second explanation for Johnson’s decision to link Smith with Reb’s tribe of sorcerers, I suggest here that it is revealing of Johnson’s belief that Smith is not only a symbol of transformation, but also, like the protagonists in Byron’s Cain, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, and Hesse’s Demian, that the Korean War veteran is what Quinones terms a “ﬁgure of regeneration.” I have alluded already to this particular aspect of Smith’s personality in his performance of samu for Bethel A. M. E., where he emerges as a ﬁgure of regeneration within the context of a particular community. This powerful aspect of Smith’s personality also emerges at the individual level, that is to say, in his relationship with Bishop and in particular during their ﬁnal encounter. On this occasion Smith informs Bishop of his decision to accept employment as an agent for the FBI, a decision he has made only as a result of coercion: “They’ve got me over a barrel” (213). Apparently, the unsolved murders of Juanita Lomax and her children have returned to haunt Smith. During the course of this last conversation, Smith signiﬁcantly asks Bishop to deliver to Amy Grifﬁth a signed Commitment Blank, a text he had used earlier as tissue paper. This gesture on the part of Smith is an important one, for it shows further evidence of his transformation and, equally as important, it is evidence of his continuing commitment to the goals of King’s movement of social transformation even as he begins his assignment with the FBI. Also in their ﬁnal encounter, Bishop playfully reminds Smith of his earlier offer and claim that he could assist him in acquiring salvation. Smith realizes now the arrogance, presumption, and preposterous nature of such a claim, and reminds Bishop that regarding such 187

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS matters Bishop is, in effect, on his own. The pivotal moment in their last exchange occurs when Smith asks a surprised Bishop to pray for him. It is in the execution of this request on the part of Bishop that Smith emerges as a ﬁgure of regeneration and also one who potentially may facilitate the acquisition of salvation in others: He waited, ﬁxing me so ﬁercely with his eyes I turned in my seat, bringing my hands together, the wrinkled Movement decalogue between my ﬁngers. But as before, no words came to me. My faith was frail. Prayers had always failed me. Like millions of black men, I was a bastard who’d never known his father— the word used for people like me was “illegitimate.” Whoever my father was, he’d rejected me long ago. How could I pray to a Father? I squeezed my eyes tighter, thinking of Chaym’s troubles, and those of the minister. Slowly I petitioned whatever powers that be, regardless of what they thought of me, to keep them from harm, praying not for myself as I’d always done, but instead for those I loved, and as the sense of their fragility and my own ﬁlled me, our lives of a few hours in a world of two minutes, the evil that waited outside our door, I felt something slam inside my chest, then hot tears were hopping down my cheeks, and instead of offering words I wept for my counterfeit, fatherless status, gave myself over to it shamelessly, and by the end of my halting, stumbling appeal I felt emptied, no longer trying to bring a distant God’s grace to my ﬁnite desires as His cast-aside son, but only wishing Thy will be done. (213–214)

In this powerful, climatic scene, Smith, the man without faith, has restored to Bishop, a man whose faith is frail, his tie to a transcendent reality. Just as Reb’s example of sacriﬁce and asceticism results in Hawkins’s liberation from slavery and an expansion of consciousness, so this same example in Smith brings about in Bishop a liberation from his crippling narrative of illegitimacy and strengthens in him a faith weakened as a result of his mother’s passing. In the execution of Smith’s request, Bishop realizes the promise of the gospel of his biblical counterpart: St. Matthew. A recurring theme in the Gospel of St. Matthew is faith. This is a theme expressed in St. Matthew’s telling of the story of the diseased woman who believes that she will be healed of her afﬂiction if she is able to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment. Knowing the thoughts of this supplicant, Jesus turns to her and says: “Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.”85 We also ﬁnd in the Gospel of St. Matthew, on the heels of Jesus’ famous assertion to the apostles that by faith one may move mountains into the sea, this assurance: “And in all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”86 In the Gospel of St. Matthew, we are given not only examples of faith, but also of selﬂess service. St. Matthew tells us of the story of 188

Dreamer Simon of Cyrene, who, as Bishop explains, was a “black man from the most despised tribe on earth [who was] given the priceless gift of easing the suffering of a savior” (212). Johnson’s strategic insertion of the story of Simon moments before Smith’s appearance is an important element in his emergence as a ﬁgure of regeneration. Like Simon, who shouldered the rood for Jesus on his way to Mt. Calvary, Smith has eased the suffering of both King and Bishop through his example of compassion, service, and renunciation. Again, I recall Bishop’s poignant reﬂection upon his own indebtedness to Smith: “had he not proven himself to be . . . an experienced guide for those of us, broken-winged, condemned to mediocrity and the margins of the world?” (183). As a result of the impact of Smith’s example, Bishop has been made whole and will grow into the man of compassion, faith, leadership, and authority that his name implies and whose latent power is captured in Smith’s several portraits. In Christianity, the ﬁrst step in the achievement of salvation is faith. Ironically, Smith, a man without faith, is the vehicle for the achievement of Bishop’s salvation, through his capacity to rekindle and regenerate Bishop’s “frail” faith. In the ﬁnal moments of the novel, Bishop, as a descendant of Cain, appears to have reconciled himself with a God, with a Father, Whom he believes has spurned and rejected him. Emptied now of anger and pride, Bishop is now able to state in prayer: “Thy will be done.” In this pivotal scene Smith, no longer the ﬁgure of division, emerges as a ﬁgure of regeneration, one who restores others to themselves and who brings about in others what Quinones terms “a new moment of being, even a new dimension of the self that leads to a reviviﬁcation of the community.”87 Or to recast this climactic development in language that Sinclair uses to describe his own journey of self-discovery within the context of his friendship with Demian, Smith is the ﬁgure of salvation, regeneration, and transformation who places Bishop, in a narrative that is as much the story of King and Smith as it is the story of his own youth, “on the path that leads to himself.”88 In the ﬁnal paragraph of the novel, Bishop fully acknowledges the impact of Smith’s example upon his own life. The depth of his gratitude is revealed in the integration of the Indonesian phrase sama-sama, or you’re welcome, into his own patterns of speech. As he joins the funeral cortege that will slowly make its way to the Atlanta University Center where Dr. Mays, digniﬁed and brokenhearted, will deliver a eulogy—“If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive.”89—over a now slain King, a mourning Bishop, in a statement that is both a tribute and a prayer for both King and Smith, 189

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS reﬂects upon the example of these men: “if the prophet King had shown us the depths of living possible for those who loved unconditionally in a less that just universe engraved with inequality, and that only the servants should lead, then Chaym had in his covert passage through our lives let us know that, if one missed the Galilean mark, even the pariahs, the fatherless exiles, might sometimes—and occasionally—doeth well. Amen” (236). In Bishop’s meditation upon the examples of King and Smith, we are given something approaching an answer to the novel’s central question: How can we end evil without engendering error or evil? The answer is twofold. First, the answer lies, as Johnson has sought to reveal at critical moments in his novel, in what Reverend Littlewood terms “the quality of sacriﬁce and sentience itself” (157), that is to say, in Smith’s commitment to emulate King’s example of unconditional love, of leadership through sacriﬁce and service to others, even if that means potentially the loss of his own life. This is the commitment that Smith has made in his “covert passage through the lives” of Bishop and others. Smith’s commitment to this life of duty and service, a commitment that resulted in the near loss of his own life, constitutes the point where the lives of King and Smith converge once more. The answer also lies in Smith’s new understanding of the complex relationship between love and power. In addressing the delegates of the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, King makes the following observations about love and power that have implications for our understanding of Smith’s choices following the assassination attempt: There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identiﬁed with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. . . . Power at its best . . . is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.90

And this is a vision that Smith decides to “move on.” Having rejected the questionable notion that “hatred is healthy—even holy” (66) and thus a path 190

Dreamer to power, Smith understands, following his period of convalescence, the complex dialectic between love and power. Through his actions, he demonstrates that love and power are not “polar opposites,” and he also demonstrates that he has overcome the false divisions between these two concepts. Through his contemplation and emulation of the example of the Dreamer, a transformed Smith both appreciates and lives the symbiotic relationship between love and power. In choosing “to move on” on this particular vision, Smith in effect chooses to afﬁrm life, thereby honoring his capacity to function as a ﬁgure of regeneration and transformation. In taking this position, he honors not only his potentiality, but also the Hebrew meaning of his name: life.91 While the etymology of Smith’s name links him to the Old Testament, a fact which further dramatizes the differences between him and King, whose message of love is grounded in the New Testament, the Hebrew meaning of his name, life, serves as a vital point of intersection between the minister and his double, and also explains, in part, Smith’s earlier preoccupation with immortality. Johnson’s masterful use of the trope of the double has not only provided us with a means of seeing King from the outside, of gauging the operation of certain forces upon his own life, and of discerning the impact of his own life upon others, but also in the novel’s ﬁnal moments we come to appreciate that in spite of the many differences between King and Smith that both come to function as ﬁgures of transformation and regeneration, both choose to afﬁrm life even when confronted with death. Through the lives of both men, the values of the beloved community are strengthened, revived, and afﬁrmed. And what becomes of Smith? We do not know. As with his biblical counterpart, there is no authoritative record of his death.92 As a ﬁgure of mystery, he returns to the mystery that produced him. What is important, however, is not what becomes of Smith, but rather his example that, though falling short of “the Galilean mark,” is a life in which he attempted to “doeth well,” in other words, a life that points the way, like King’s, to modes of being that bring the ideal of the beloved community closer to the lived experience of men and women of our time. Ultimately, that is Smith’s legacy for a striving Bishop. And for us. Quinones argues that the “Cain-Abel story does more than show unpromising beginnings; it shows them as having been overcome. Although thought to be an unlovely theme, it is here that the story acquires beauty from an involvement with historical change itself and the ways that individuals and groups can eventually ﬁnd some redemption.”93 As I have attempted to show, redemption is an element of Smith’s metamorphosis, and it is an 191

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS element in the effort to reconstitute the rupture in the universe his “covert passage” summons up for consideration. Through offering his life for his brother, in taking one, in a metaphorical sense, of the bullets meant for King, Smith reverses the master narrative of Adam’s ﬁrst sons. In making this altruistic commitment, he overcomes, it seems, his “unpromising beginnings.” In the ﬁnal pages of the novel, Chaym Smith emerges, like Faith Cross, Andrew Hawkins, and Rutherford Calhoun, as a “metaphor of transformation” whose life speaks to the potentiality of the human spirit, and who challenges us to think critically and expansively about our relation to both the symbolic and the social. As mentioned before, in this ﬁnal positioning of Smith, Johnson does not offer a resolution, but rather, as I have suggested, a further engagement with the central question of his novel. The question of how to end evil without engendering evil is a question with which we must be continually engaged, a question for which there is no single answer, no single strategy. It is a question that keeps us, as it were, in the questing, critical, interrogative stance of Smith and now Bishop. While some might argue that Smith’s decision to accept employment with the FBI is a rejection of the commitment he made when signing the commitment form, I would argue that his choice at this juncture is a strategy, one marked by sacriﬁce, subversiveness, and improvisation, for advancing progressive social change, a strategy that signals Smith’s continued engagement following his metamorphosis at the Nest, with the question at the novel’s center.94 And where are we, precisely, at the end of the novel? Certainly Johnson leaves us with an example in Smith and King that points the way toward the achievement of the beloved community. He also leaves us with questions concerning the manner of the process by which this ideal that combines both love and power might be achieved. In a summary statement in which he addresses the deﬁning features of the literature of Cain and Abel, Quinones puts the matter in this way: “If a major purpose of the changes of Cain in the romantic and postromantic epochs has been the exploration of the means by which imbalance may ﬁnally be righted and even justiﬁed, of ways that persons who are out of step may actually be readying themselves to play the new tune, then we can say that here the theme of Cain and Abel, in its manifold capacities for alternative and antithetical adjustments, shows its ability to breed its own antimyths, one revealing no ﬁnal rectiﬁcation but instead only another page torn from the bright book of life.”95 Dreamer, Johnson’s own bright book, one enlivened by the operations of his dialogic imagination, is, ﬁnally, like Smith’s own face, an “unﬁnished puzzle, or a mask” (43); it is a book, like a palimpsest, that reveals and conceals its meanings. 192

EPILOGUE

Africa proper as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—shut up; it is the Goldland compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. —G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History Gobineau is a notorious name, but how many students of European thought today, even among us Africans, recall that several of the most revered names in European philosophy— Hegel, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire—an endless list— were unabashed theorists of racial superiority and denigrators of the African history and being. —Wole Soyinka, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1986

While Johnson’s artistic project called philosophical black ﬁction has expanded signiﬁcantly what he terms “the metaphysical wing” in African American literature, one subtext and unexpected outcome of this ambitious project is an implicit critique of the tradition of racial reasoning that has stained the discipline of philosophy. This tradition achieved its apex during the Enlightenment. Also called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was a high period in European thought, characterized by tolerance, a belief in social progress through the rational organization of the state, a marked optimism based upon the discoveries and applications of science, and a belief in the goodness of humankind based upon the rejection of the doctrine of original sin. Interestingly, the marked tolerance of the Enlightenment was a product of the revulsion of the religious intolerance of the Reformation. Paradoxically, the tolerance and faith in the human person celebrated in Europe by philosophers, or philosophes, as they were called then (think of them as the modern counterpart of what we now call the public intellectual 193

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS who is committed to a free, open, and national dialogue involving all parts of the polity) did not extend to the person of African descent. As Wole Soyinka reminds us in his address delivered on the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature—the ﬁrst African writer to be so honored— the list of European philosophers who devalued systematically the humanity of Africans is “endless.” One example from Soyinka’s list will serve as an illustration. Speculating about the relationship of the African to the European, the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume offered the following observations on the intellectual capacities of persons of African descent: I am apt to suspect [emphasis added] the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or ﬁve different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in either action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no artists, no sciences. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishment, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.1

I will not waste time refuting the absurdity and baseness of Hume’s racist and ethnocentristic claims, which, as Soyinka points out, were among many narratives “needed to mystify the plain self-serving rush to dismantle independent societies for easy plundering.”2 Hume’s unsubstantiated claim of black inferiority, the audacious manner in which he links intellectual capacity, the capacity to reason, with skin color, found its way into the writings of none other than Thomas Jefferson. Reﬂecting upon the differences between blacks and whites, Jefferson arrives at the following questionable conclusions: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion [emphasis added] only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. . . . This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”3 Even when confronted with the fact of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the ﬁrst volume of poems by a black in the new world, Jefferson remained ﬁxed, indeed, mired in his suspicions. The president’s quip regarding the literary value of Wheatley’s poetry is now well-known to us 194

Epilogue all: “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”4 As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has argued at different points and stages in his scholarship, writing for such men as Hume, Jefferson, and many others under the spell of the Enlightenment, “was a principle sign of reason.”5 According to Gates, so “insistent did these racist allegations prove to be, at least from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, that it is fair to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as this urge to refute the claim that because blacks had no written traditions they were bearers of an inferior culture. . . . Few literary traditions have begun or been sustained by such a complex and ironic relation to their criticism: allegations of an absence led directly to a presence, a literature often inextricably bound in dialogue with its potentially harshest critics.”6 As a trained philosopher and gifted writer of ﬁction, Johnson is certainly in dialogue with some of the “harshest critics” of black ability, capacity, and potentiality. I do not mean to imply that Johnson’s sole purpose for writing is to refute the claims of Hume and his sympathizers, for that is not true. As an artist, Johnson is not simply reacting to the manifestations of white supremacy, for he was drawn to what Ralph Ellison terms the “stern discipline” of ﬁction for vastly different reasons.7 Nevertheless, in creating black worlds in ﬁction based upon his inventive and strategic use of the philosophical traditions of Europe and Asia, and by espousing the universalist and humanistic claims that many philosophers of the Enlightenment contradicted in their contemplation of the African, Johnson turns the racial reasoning of this tradition in philosophy on its head. In creating such characters as Andrew Hawkins and Rutherford Calhoun, characters whose stories emerge from within an historical context shaped by the theories of racial inferiority advanced by Jefferson, Johnson reveals that both the historical and contemporary claims of racial superiority and racial purity are simply mystiﬁcations and evidence of superstitious thinking. Johnson’s expanding corpus is a kind of intervention against this tradition in humanism that did not regard all persons as human. And this is not all. In the characters of Hawkins and Calhoun, we see again what the historian Edmund S. Morgan terms the “central paradox of American history,” in other words, how “the rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery.”8 Johnson calls on us to reﬂect upon this and other paradoxes endemic to the American project in democracy, paradoxes bodied forth not only by such richly drawn characters as Hawkins and Calhoun, but also by Faith Cross and Chaym Smith. Above all, embedded within Johnson’s implicit but nev195

CHARLES JOHNSON’S NOVELS ertheless powerful critique of philosophy’s collusion in the construction of racial hierarchies, and his challenge to us to reﬂect upon the paradoxes of American life and history, is an important principle that shapes his outlook as an artist. It is a principle grounded in the belief that all “knowledge, all disclosure, all revelation from the past, from our predecessors, black, white, and otherwise”—I would add even those forms of knowledge, disclosure, and revelation that seek to divide us and discredit the humanity of those of African descent—“is our inheritance.”9 In regarding the literary, cultural, and philosophical traditions of the world as our “human inheritance,”10 Johnson gives voice to an outlook and perspective on culture that Ross Posnock terms “cosmopolitanism.” In large measure based upon the life and example of W. E. B. Du Bois, Posnock deﬁnes cosmopolitanism as a form of aesthetic universalism “that presents a democratic challenge to the obdurate belief that high culture is a private citadel of white privilege.”11 Johnson’s expansive view of culture and the processes of artistic creation are consistent with Posnock’s claims of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, Johnson’s cosmopolitanism is reﬂected in his pantheon of literary ancestors that includes both American and European writers. It is also reﬂected in the manner in which he draws upon the arguments, positions, and worldviews of both Continental and Eastern philosophy in order to frame and to catalyze all thought and action in his novels. And it is also reﬂected in his approach to and technique of writing, an approach and technique he describes as “synthetic,”12 or, as I have argued, doublevoiced, internally dialogized discourse. Grounded in the particularism of African American culture and history in the American South and in the upsouth city of Chicago, the goals of Johnson’s artistic project called philosophical black ﬁction are not only to advance the development and evolution of the American novel through the creation of characters and situations that are entirely new to ﬁction, but also, recalling Andrew Hawkins’s attainment of moksha, to move us beyond the veil of race, and to make plain to us that race is an illusion. In other words, one of the chief objectives of philosophical black ﬁction is what Johnson terms “whole sight,” that is, the liberation of perception and consciousness. Taken as a whole, one of Johnson’s most important achievements as a novelist is the realization of a cosmopolitan vision of culture and community captured in the concept of “whole sight,” and one analogous to the vision of culture and community set forth in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide 196

Epilogue in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the stronglimbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they all come graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.”13 It is this broadly humanistic vision that Johnson embraces and afﬁrms when he asserts that “all knowledge is . . . our inheritance.” It is this cosmopolitan vision, made more real to us through Johnson’s treatment of enduring and universal questions as they emerge from a largely southern landscape—What is the nature of the good? In what ways can we be enslaved? What is the nature of freedom? How can we end evil without engendering error or evil?—that guides the writing of each of his several novels. In contemplating the lives of Faith Cross, Andrew Hawkins, Rutherford Calhoun, and Chaym Smith, in creating what I have termed palimpsests or “metaphors of transformation,” Johnson challenges us to move beyond the world of distinctions to a transcendent vision of the whole. As readers we are able to make this imaginative leap because in Johnson’s luminous and compassionate ﬁction we see the world through the eyes of an artist, and not through those of an ideologue.

197

Notes

Prologue 1. Stuart Hall, “For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 287. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 152. 7. Charles Johnson, Dreamer (New York: Scribner, 1998), 179–180. 8. “An Interview with Charles Johnson Conducted by Jonathan Little,” in I Call Myself an Artist, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 227. 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 139. 10. Ibid., 241. 11. “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 88. 12. The metaphor of the “melting pot” was popularized if not created by the playwright Israel Zangwill and it appears in his four-act drama entitled The Melting Pot (1912). While this is a metaphor associated most often with the discipline of sociology, it is important to note that its apparent origins are in a four-act play by a Jewish immigrant. 13. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 577. 14. “A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction,” in Charles Johnson, Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (New York: Scribner, 2003), 150. 15. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 53. 16. Charles Johnson, “Philosophy and Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 80. 17. Ibid. 18. Charles Johnson, “Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 95. 19. Ibid., 92. 20. Charles Johnson, “Preface,” in Essentials, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd (Athens, Ga.: Hillside Press, 1999), xiv–xv. Johnson reprinted this preface to Essentials as an essay,

199

Notes to pages 6–13 which he entitled “A Poet of Being,” in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing. 21. I have examined the inﬂuence of Georges I. Gurdjieff upon Toomer’s development as a writer in Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artist, 1923–1936 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). Other scholarly works that have examined this aspect of Toomer’s literary career include Nellie Y. McKay’s Jean Toomer, Artist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge’s The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and Robert B. Jones’s Jean Toomer and the Prisonhouse of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 22. Ibid., xx–xxi. 23. Charles Johnson, “Where Philosophy and Fiction Meet,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 93. 24. Ibid., 93. 25. Charles Johnson, “The Singular Vision of Ralph Ellison,” in Turning the Wheel, 105. 26. Charles Johnson, “The Beginner’s Mind,” in Turning the Wheel, 139. 27. Charles Johnson, “I Call Myself an Artist,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 13. 28. Charles Johnson, “An American Milk Bottle,” in Turning the Wheel, 175. The essays in which Johnson reﬂects upon his indebtedness as an artist to John Gardner appear in I Call Myself an Artist and Turning the Wheel. 29. Charles Johnson, “Interview,” in The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 41. 30. Ibid., 41. 31. Charles Johnson, “I Call Myself an Artist,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 30. 32. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 324. 33. Ibid., 292–293. 34. I refer here to my essay on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice entitled “It Rests by Changing: Process in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in I Call Myself an Artist. 35. Being and Race, 4. 1. Faith and the Good Thing 1. These framing essays, which deﬁne and set forth the scope of Johnson’s project called philosophical black ﬁction, are published in a collection I edited with Johnson’s cooperation entitled I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 2. Charles Johnson, “Philosophy and Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 80. 3. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 5. 4. Charles Johnson, “Philosophy and Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 80– 81. 5. Ibid., 81. 6. Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 87.

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Notes to pages 13–21 7. In an essay entitled “Oxherding Tale and Siddhartha: Philosophy, Fiction and the Emergence of a Hidden Tradition,” ﬁrst published in a special edition of African American Review devoted to the work of Johnson, and ably edited by Herman Beavers and Michael Boccia and subsequently reprinted in I Call Myself an Artist, I argue that Johnson is indebted to such writers as Toomer, Wright, and Ellison, and also to Hermann Hesse, whose novel Siddhartha exercised a profound inﬂuence upon Johnson’s Oxherding Tale. 8. In the Plume edition of Oxherding Tale (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), Johnson has included an introduction in which he positions this second novel as the “platform novel,” one in which he integrates into his ﬁctional treatment of African American life and history the great themes, questions, and traditions of Asian philosophy. 9. See Robert Butler’s “The City as Psychological Frontier in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Charles Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing,” in The City in AfricanAmerican Literature, ed. Robert Butler and Hakutani Yoshinobu (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). 10. Jonathan Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 55. 11. William R. Nash, Charles Johnson’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 52. 12. The Republic of Plato, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968; 2nd ed., 1991), 193. 13. Faith and the Good Thing (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 3. All references to the novel are from this edition and will appear throughout this chapter and in subsequent chapters in parentheses. 14. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 16. 15. While I have been stressing the analogy that exists here between Ellison’s debut novel and Johnson’s, in her superb biography of Zora Neale Hurston Valerie Boyd writes that the death of Hurston’s mother had a profound effect upon the writer. “That hour began my wanderings,” writes Hurston. “Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.” There is, I believe, fascinating correspondences between Hurston’s early experience of death and Johnson’s questing protagonist. See Boyd’s Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner Press, 2003), 47. 16. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 278. 17. Ibid., 293–294. 18. Ibid., 295. 19. Ibid., 324. 20. Ibid., 324. 21. Ibid., 324–325. 22. Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 193. 23. Ibid., 196. 24. Ibid., 195. 25. Ibid., 188. 26. Ibid., 189. 27. Ibid., 196. 28. Ibid., 197. 29. Ibid., 189.

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Notes to pages 21–45 30. Ibid., 402. 31. Bloom, The Republic of Plato, 193. 32. Ibid., 402–403. 33. Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 125. 34. Richard Wright, “Blue Print for Negro Writing,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 317–318. 35. Ibid., 320–321. 36. Richard Wright’s debate on the centrality of African American folklore to the development of African American literature is elaborated and expanded upon in Toni Morrison’s “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Mari Evan’s Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (New York: Anchor Books, 1984) and Alice Walker’s “The Dummy in the Window,” in Living by the Word (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). Among her many points, Morrison stresses the importance of developing and honoring the relationship between the written and spoken word, of orality in the construction of the novel. Although it has been devalued by the invention of a ﬁgure like Uncle Remus, Walker argues that “folklore is at the heart of self-expression and therefore at the heart of self-acceptance.” 37. Ellison, Invisible Man, 243. 38. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 242. 39. Zora Neale Hurston, “Glossary,” in Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper and Row, 1935), 305. 40. For this insight of folklore as discredited knowledge, I am indebted to Toni Morrison, who argues this point in “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” 41. Some contend that William of Ockham did not use the formulation cited by Johnson, but rather such formulations as “Plurality is not to be assumed without necessity” or “What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more.” I am indebted to Thomas Flynn, Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, for his translation and for directing me to Ockham’s Razor. 42. Concerning the sexual exploitation of both black men and women in slavery, Johnson’s Oxherding Tale is an important innovation and intervention. In Beloved, Toni Morrison also explores the sexual exploitation of both black men and women within the context of slavery. Such testimony is also found in the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Douglass describes the sexual exploitation of his Aunt Hester by a white overseer, and Jacobs suggests the sexual exploitation of Luke by his white male slave owner. Concerning the national crime and shame of lynching, I recommend Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America, ed. James Allen (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000). Of special interest is the rare photograph of Laura Nelson, an African American woman lynched with her son in Okemah, Oklahoma, on May 25, 1911. 43. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Maximilian Aue, Professor of German Studies at Emory University, for his translation of these lines from Goethe’s Faust. 44. The Philosophy of Nietzsche, ed. Geoffrey Clive (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), xvii–xviii. 45. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGrawHill, 1964), 191.

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Notes to pages 46–67 46. Nash, Charles Johnson’s Fiction, 67. 47. William R. Nash also advances a similar critique of Johnson’s depiction of the processes of creation in the lives of both men and women. He writes that this feature “points to another potential inconsistency in Johnson’s position: his apparent difﬁculty in extending his transformative aesthetic vision to issues of gender.” Charles Johnson’s Fiction, 70. 48. The Swamp Woman’s ability to step out of her skin as if it were a garment and thereby making it possible for Faith to assume a new and different path is a variation on the tales of witches in the South and in West Africa recorded by Melville Herskovits: “The greatest variance among the Negroes is to be found in the great number of methods used in avoiding or driving off witches. The most common legend in this regard is that of an old witch who took off her skin, hung it on the wall and went off to ride someone. While she was gone a man slipped in and sprinkled red pepper in the skin. The witch came back and tried to slip it on. ‘What de mattah, skin? Skinny, doan’ you know me? Doan you know me, skinny! Doan’ you know me!’ she cried in agony, hopping up and down until she was ﬁnally discovered and killed. In various forms this same plot exists all through the South—in Georgia, Missouri, Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina and the Sea Islands, as well as in the Bahamas. The belief is too widespread to be an independent development; to the best of my knowledge it is not found in Europe; but in West Africa there is the widespread idea that the witch leaves her skin behind on going out, and among the Vais it is thought that salt and pepper will prevent her getting back into her hide.” The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941; 1990), 259. 49. “An Interview with Charles Johnson Conducted by Jonathan Little,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 227. The phrase “a sort of tissue of world experience” is one uttered by Johnson in his conversation with Little.

2. Oxherding Tale 1. For an overview of the publishing history of Oxherding Tale, I recommend Charles Johnson’s “Introduction” in the Plume edition of Oxherding Tale (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), x. 2. Angela McRobbie, “Hand Me Downs,” New Statesman, December 9, 1983, 25. 3. Ibid. 4. Savkar Altinel, “Charles Johnson Oxherding Tale,” Times Literary Supplement, January 6, 1984, 19. 5. Stanley Crouch, “Charles Johnson: Free At Last!” in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews 1979–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 143. 6. See the introduction to the 1995 Plume edition of Oxherding Tale. 7. D. T. Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (London: Rider and Company, 1950), 128. 8. Ueda Shizuteru, “Emptiness and Fullness: Sunyata in Mahayana Buddhism,” in Eranos Yearbook (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1976), 8. 9. Ibid., 131. 10. Ibid., 10. 11. Ibid., 10–11.

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Notes to pages 67–89 12. William Gleason, “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale,” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 4 (Winter 1991). See also Jonathan Little’s Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997) and William Nash’s Charles Johnson’s Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 13. Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale (New York: Grove Press, 1984). All further references to this text are from this edition and will appear in parentheses. 14. According to D. T. Suzuki, the “history of Buddhism is . . . also a history of freedom in one’s spiritual, intellectual, and moral life.” See Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961), 75. 15. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, ed. John Hope Franklin, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 37. 16. Ibid., 37. 17. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 18. Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination, 95. 19. From a letter to R. P. Byrd from Charles Johnson dated March 12, 2003. 20. “The Woodcarver,” in The Way of Chuang Tzu, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1965), 110–111. 21. Herrlee G. Creel, What Is Taoism? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 2–63. 22. The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), vol. 14, 289. 23. For these and other Taoist parables, see Thomas Merton’s edition of The Way of Chuang Tzu. 24. Ibid., 74. 25. Ibid. 26. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651; reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 5. 27. Ibid., 130. 28. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 8. 29. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 233–234. 30. Ibid., 51. 31. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 5 and 51. 34. Roger J. Corless, The Vision of Buddhism: The Space under the Tree (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 142. 35. Ibid., 143. 36. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1972), 154. My reading of this moment in Ellison’s novel has been inﬂuenced by statements made by Ellison in an interview with Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto, “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” which appears in their anthology, Chant of Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 37. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 337. 38. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 192.

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Notes to pages 89–98 39. For another example of the sexual exploitation of black men in slavery as it is treated in ﬁction, see Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The pertinent scene involves Paul D’s witnessing of forced oral sex by black male slaves upon white men. Also, in her collection of essays entitled Dark Continent of Our Bodies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), feminist scholar E. Frances White wonders why scholars of slavery have not explored the issue of the sexual exploitation of slave men by both the men and women of the master class. In Oxherding Tale, Johnson challenges scholars to take up such important and necessary questions. 40. William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), chapter 4. 41. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103. 42. Edward J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1933), 119. 43. The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (New York: Mentor Books, 1944), 110–111. 44. Ibid., 92. 45. Ibid., 38. 46. Harper and Stepto, “Interview with Ralph Ellison,” Chant of Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 460. 47. Charles Johnson, “Whole Sight: Notes on New Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 87. 48. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, 58. 49. Stuart Hall, “For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 287. 50. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identities: Community, Culture and Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222. 51. Ibid., 235. 52. A counter-narrative to constructions of a so-called authentic, monolithic construction of the black subject, I am indebted once more to Stuart Hall for the phrase deessentialized black subject, a version of which appears in his essay “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 444. 53. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 221. 54. Ibid., 221. 55. Johnson, “Philosophy and Black Fiction,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 80. 56. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 443. 57. Ibid., 443. 58. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (1940; reprint, New York: The Modern Library, 1986), 665. 59. Ibid., 651. 60. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5. 61. Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31. I recommend to the reader Johnson’s review of this text which appears in I Call Myself an Artist.

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Notes to pages 99–111 62. Ibid., 46. 63. Ibid., 155. 64. Ibid., 180. 65. Stuart Hall, “Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities,” in The House That Race Built, ed. W. Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Press, 1997), 290. See also Hall’s Race: The Floating Signiﬁer (Northampton, Mass.: Media Education Foundation, 1966). 66. Ibid., 290. Du Bois uses the term badge to explore the operations of race in the chapter in Dusk of Dawn entitled “The Concept of Race.” See p. 641 in the Modern Library edition of this text. 67. Of the many places in The Alchemy of Race where Williams advances this argument of race as a ﬂoating signiﬁer, she is perhaps at her most insightful in chapter 4, “Teleology on the Rocks,” in her analysis of the Howard Beach incident of 1986. See The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 56. 68. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 15. 69. Ibid., 15. 70. For an examination of the points of intersection between Siddhartha and Oxherding Tale, see my essay “Oxherding Tale and Siddhartha: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Emergence of a Hidden Tradition,” in I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson. 71. Charles Johnson, Being and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 120. 3. Middle Passage 1. On the occasion of being awarded the National Book Award for Fiction, Johnson invited a very digniﬁed and surprised Ralph Ellison to join him on the dais at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Johnson reconstructs this important moment with Ellison in an essay entitled “Novel Genius,” The Crisis Magazine, March/April 2002, 17–20. 2. For an analysis of father-and-son relationships in Johnson’s ﬁction, see William R. Nash’s “ ‘I Was My Father’s Father, and He My Child’: The Process of Black Fatherhood and Literary Evolution in Charles Johnson’s Fiction,” in Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama, ed. Keith Clark (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 3. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Plume, 1990), 8. All further references to this edition will appear in the text in parentheses. 4. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: The David Company, 1988). 5. For a thorough and insightful analysis of these American types, I recommend Constance Rourke’s classic American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; reprint, New York: New York Review Books, 2004). 6. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or, the Whale (New York: Dell Books, 1959), 27. 7. Jack London, The Sea-Wolf (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 113. 8. Melville, Moby Dick, 97. 9. Ibid., chap. 29, 153. 10. I quote from Henry James’s famous letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne as it is quoted by Ralph Ellison in his essay “Society, Morality and the Novel,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 251. 11. Ibid., 243. 12. Ibid., 261.

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Notes to pages 112–125 13. Harold Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, 307. 14. The Republic, “Book VI,” 168. 15. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1978), 214–215. 16. Ibid., 215. 17. Ibid., 212. 18. Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of organism is relevant not only to an examination of the various meanings of Middle Passage, but Johnson also makes splendid use of this philosophical concept in his ﬁrst collection of short stories, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I have argued for the relevance of Whitehead’s theory of organism in reading The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in “It Rests by Changing: Process in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” an essay published in a collection I edited entitled I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 19. Moby Dick, 150. 20. London, The Sea-Wolf, 16. 21. Ibid., 111. 22. Moby Dick, 197–198. 23. Ibid., 198. 24. The Sea-Wolf, 192–193. 25. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967), 229. 26. Ibid., 234. 27. Ibid., 236. 28. Ibid., 236–237. 29. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 19. 30. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 237. 31. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 98. 32. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 229. 33. I have examined the presence of the Allmuseri in “The Education of Mingo” in an essay entitled “It Rests by Changing: Process in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in I Call Myself an Artist. 34. For the full context of Johnson’s commentary on the hybrid culture of the Allmuseri, see his interview with Diane Osen in The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 39. 35. As a novelist, Johnson is always instructing the reader on a range of subjects, including aspects of Eastern thought and discipline. This ﬁrst reference to the Jain priests in Middle Passage also appears again in Dreamer, 47. 36. The Dhammapada (New York: Penguin Classics, 1973), 35. 37. This is a mentioning that appears in Johnson’s interview with Diane Osen from The Book That Changed My Life, 39. 38. For the full text of “Cutting Up an Ox,” see The Way of Chuang Tzu, ed. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Books, 1965), 45. 39. From a letter to R. P. Byrd from Charles Johnson dated March 12, 2003. 40. Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 155.

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Notes to pages 126–146 41. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 236–237. 42. Ibid., 237. 43. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 16. 44. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 237. 45. Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Liveright Publishers, 1985), 53. 46. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1965), 41. 47. Ibid., 66. 48. The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita (New York: Mentor Books, 1944), 92. I also refer the reader to my examination of Johnson’s earlier application of this revelation from this Hindu text in my chapter on Oxherding Tale. 49. Oxherding Tale, 176. 50. Jonathan Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 142. 51. “The True Man,” in Merton, ed., The Way of Chuang Tzu, 60. 52. I deﬁne emasculating masculinity as a mode of masculinity that achieves its power and legitimacy through the denigration of others. For more about this concept, see Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy Sheftall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 8. 53. Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination, 141. 54. “Metamorphosis,” in Merton, ed., The Way of Chuang Tzu, 62. 55. Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 162. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. The importance of freedom as a deﬁning theme in African American literature is treated in such studies of the African American literary tradition as Francis Smith Foster’s Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), William Andrews’s To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Robert B. Stepto’s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 59. Georg W. F. Hegel, “Introduction,” in The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 19. 60. Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 13. 4. Dreamer 1. Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981). 2. See “Introduction,” in King: The Photography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Charles Johnson and Bob Adelman (New York: Viking Studio, 2000), 6. 3. Charles Johnson, Dreamer (New York: Scribner, 1998), 114. All further references to this text will appear in parentheses. 4. David Levering Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1970), 340.

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Notes to pages 146–156 5. Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (New York: Plume Books, 1990), 140. 6. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” in American Literature: A Prentice Hall Anthology, vol. 2, ed. Emory Elliot, Linda K. Kerber, A. Walton Litz, and Terence Martin (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 954. 7. Lewis, King: A Biography, 314. 8. Ibid., 316. 9. Ibid., 332–333. According to Lewis, the Chicago Movement made eight demands of the city: “(1) refusal of real-estate agents to handle property not available to all races and a pledge of nondiscrimination from banks and loan associations, (2) the construction of public housing outside the ghetto, (3) restriction of city purchases to ﬁrms with ‘full-scale’ fair employment policies, (4) publication of business and local government of racial-employment statistics and the acceptance by organized labor of four hundred black and Latin American apprentices, (5) recognition by the county public-aid department of the unionized welfare recipients being promoted by the civil rights groups, (6) establishment of a citizens’ review board for the police department, (7) adoption of an immediate desegregation plan by the city, (8) the boycotting of discriminatory businesses.” 10. See “Chicago,” in Johnson and Adelman, eds., King: The Photography, 238. 11. Oxherding Tale (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 152. 12. Ibid., 152–153. 13. Johnson, “Introduction,” in King, 6. 14. A classic study of the doppelganger is Otto Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), translated and edited by Harry Tucker, Jr. Rank’s study of the doppelganger was admired by Sigmund Freud, who refers to it in his essay “The Uncanny.” 15. Richard J. Quinones, The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 239. 16. See The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner Books, 1998); Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000); Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Scribner, 1996); and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996) and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998). 17. Lewis, King: A Biography, 306. 18. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Third Sermon on the Warpland,” in Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), 475. 19. Interestingly, Brooks uses this statement by King as an epigraph to her poem entitled “Riot” that appears in Blacks. 20. Ibid., 324–325. 21. Ibid., 326. 22. Ibid., 357. 23. For an overview of the debate among black leadership concerning King’s position on the Vietnam War, see “Killers of the Dream,” chapter 12 of Lewis’s King: A Biography. 24. Johnson refers to King as a “Socratic gadﬂy of the state” in his chapter entitled “Atlanta” in King: The Photography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 271. 25. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 9. 26. Ibid., 243.

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Notes to pages 156–172 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

See chapters 1 and 2 of Pomerantz’s Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn. Lewis, King: A Biography, 4. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. See Johnson’s “Early Years” in King: The Photograph, 9. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993),

54. 33. Charles Johnson, “Richard Wright: Works,” in I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 176. 34. Otto Rank has documented the conﬂicting meanings attached to the double over time. He notes that in particular eras and cultures the double is both a harbinger of death as well as a denial of death. I recommend chapters 1–4 of Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). 35. Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen—A Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 185–186. 36. Lewis, King: A Biography, 29. 37. Ibid., 43–44. 38. Charles Johnson, “I Call Myself an Artist,” in I Call Myself an Artist, 5. 39. Ibid., 3. In his essay “An American Milk Bottle,” Johnson reconstructs his family history in Evanston, Illinois, and pays tribute to his great-uncle William Johnson, founder of the Johnson Dairy Company. See “An American Milk Bottle,” in Johnson, Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (New York: Scribner, 2003), 169– 176. 40. Walter E. Fluker, They Looked for a City: A Comparative Analysis of the Ideal of Community in the Thoughts of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: University Press of America, 1989), 110. 41. Ibid., 113. 42. Martin Luther King, “The Ethical Demands for Integration,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 122. 43. Fluker, They Looked for a City, 120. Also see endnote 81 located in chapter 5 of Fluker’s study. 44. Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 360. 45. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), 574. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 575. 48. Genesis, chapter 4. 49. Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends (New York: Random House, 1976), 37–38. 50. Ibid., 40. 51. Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4. 52. Ellen van Wolde, “The Story of Cain and Abel: A Narrative Study,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 52 (1991): 39.

210

Notes to pages 172–189 53. Philippe Sellier, “Cain,” in Companion to Literary Myths: Heroes and Archetypes, ed. Pierre Brunel (New York: Routledge, 1992), 176. 54. The provocative term enemy brothers is one that appears in Elie Wiesel’s chapter on Cain and Abel in Messengers of God, 52. 55. For an excellent overview of the representations of Cain and Abel in Western literature, I recommend Sellier’s “Cain” and Quinones’s The Changes of Cain. 56. Thomas Merton, “Introduction,” in Augustine, The City of God (New York: Modern Library, 1950), xi. 57. Ibid., 478. 58. Ibid., 478–479. 59. Edmund Leach, Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 8. 60. The City of God, 479. 61. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 241. 62. Hermann Hesse, Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (New York: Bantam, 1965), 23. 63. Ibid., 24–25. 64. Ibid., 25–26. 65. Ibid., 113. 66. Sellier, “Cain,” 176. 67. Hesse, Demian, 32 and 102. 68. Ibid., 114–115. 69. Ibid., 122. 70. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 5. 71. Ibid., 14. 72. See Genesis 27:30–37. 73. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 239. 74. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1977), 341. 75. Suzi-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999), 109. 76. Robert Hayden, “Words in the Mourning Time,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Liveright Publishing, 1985), 90. 77. Ibid., 90. 78. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 8. 79. Ibid., 9. 80. Ibid., 16. 81. Middle Passage, 35. 82. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 214–215. 83. Ibid., 212. 84. See chapter 10 of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the narrator’s hilarious adventure as a temporary laborer in a paint factory called Liberty Paints, whose logo is a screaming eagle and which produces a paint called Optic White. 85. The Gospel of St. Matthew 9:22. 86. Ibid., 21:22. 87. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 14. 88. Hesse, Demian, 38.

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Notes to pages 189–197 89. Benjamin E. Mays, “Eulogy at the Funeral Services of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia, April 9, 1968,” in Born to Rebel: An Autobiography of Benjamin E. Mays (1971; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 360. 90. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here?” in A Call to Conscience: the Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 186. 91. The Hebrew version of “Chaym” is “Hayyim,” which translates as “life.” See Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 50. 92. Quinones, The Changes of Cain, 6. 93. Ibid., 242–243. 94. William Nash advances a very different reading of this moment in the novel. He argues that Smith’s “transformation is not so complete as to allow this ﬁnal, total sacriﬁce of himself; it is as if the ideal he momentarily touches cannot survive the presence or power of the real.” See Nash, Charles Johnson’s Fiction, 175. 95. Ibid., 248. Epilogue 1. David Hume, “Of National Characteristics,” in The Philosophical Writings of David Hume: Volume III (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1854), 217–236. 2. Wole Soyinka, “Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1986,” The Georgia Review, vol. 49 (Spring 1995), 178. 3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: W.W. Norton, 1982), 143. 4. Ibid., 140. 5. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6. See also Gates’s The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003). 6. Gates, Figures in Black, 25–26. 7. Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” in Going to the Territory (New York: Random House, 1986), 275. 8. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), 4. 9. “An Interview with Charles Johnson Conducted by Jonathan Little,” in I Call Myself an Artist: Writings By and About Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 230. 10. Preface, in Johnson, Turning the Wheel, xviii. 11. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3. 12. I Call Myself an Artist, 231. 13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 90.

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Index

Abel: on Cain and Abel, 9, 146, 151, 155– 156, 169–171 Adventures of the Dialectic, 1 Afrocenstrism, 4, 125 The Alchemy of Race, 80, 99 Altinel, Savkar, 64 Andrews, William, 70 Appiah, Anthony, 3, 98–99, 124, 184 Asante, Moleﬁ, 4 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman Bailey’s Cafe´, 7, 13 Bakhtin, M. M., 7–8, 17–19, 62 Baldwin, James, 6, 13 Bambara, Toni Cade, 15 Baraka, Amiri, 63, 101 Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970, 1, 5, 12, 101 Beloved, 74 beloved community, 166 Benito Cereno, 125, 129 Bhagavad-Gita, 91, 93, 135 The Birth of African American Culture, 3 Black Arts Movement, 4, 63, 96, 101 Bloom, Alan, 21, 24 “The Blue Meridian,” 6 The Bluest Eye, 6, 13 “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 26–27 The Bondswoman Narrative, 142 Branch, Taylor, 153 Brightman, Edgar S., 166 Brooks, Edward, 155 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 106, 154 Brown, John, 78 Buddhism, 6, 57, 62, 64, 71, 82, 90, 92, 100, 136–137, 176, 186 Bunche, Ralph, 155 Butler, Robert, 14 Byron, Lord, 172–173, 187 Cain: on Cain and Abel, 9, 146, 151, 155– 156, 169–171 Cain: A Mystery, 172–173, 187

Calhoun, John C., 106 Cane, 6, 12–13, 15, 77 Carmichael, Stokely, 154 Carson, Clayborne, 153 Chesnutt, Charles, 26, 96 Chicago Movement, 145 City of God, 172–176 Cleaver, Eldridge, 168 The Color Purple, 63–64 Colter, Cyrus, 6, 13 The Conﬁdence-Man, 105 Conrad, Joseph, 174, 187 conversion narrative, 62, 69, 94 Coordinated Council of Community Organizations, 147–148, 153 Corless, Roger J., 82–83, 89 Crafts, Hannah, 96, 142 Creel, Herrlee G., 77–78 Crouch, Stanley, 65, 184 Daley, Richard, 147–148 Delany, Samuel, 7, 13 Demian, 7, 172, 174–176, 187 Descartes, Renee, 119 DeWolf, Harold L., 164, 166 The Dhammapada, 123 Dobbs, John Wesley, 156 Doomsday Book, 42–43 doppelganger, 9, 150, 152, 159, 161, 168, 177 Douglass, Frederick, 68, 70, 89, 142 Dreamer, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 46, 71, 98, 101, 114, 144–192 Du Bois, W. E. B., 2, 3, 94, 98–100, 196– 197 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 98–99 Dyson, Michael Eric, 153 East of Eden, 174 Ellison, Ralph, 3, 6, 12, 19, 26–28, 85–86, 94, 102, 111, 168, 184–185, 195 Essentials, 6 existentialism, 6

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Index Faith and the Good Thing, 4, 8, 12–60, 63, 71, 101, 112, 144, 167 Faulkner, William, 96 Faust, 39–40 Flight to Canada, 7 Fluker, Walter E., 166 Foucault, Michel, 89 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 77 Gaines, Ernest J., 145 Gallman, John, 63 Gardner, John, 7 Garrison, William Lloyd, 106 Gass, William, 7 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 28, 98, 100, 195 Gautama, Sakyamani, 163 Gayle, Addison, 4, 63 Ghandi, Mahatma, 161, 163 Gilroy, Paul, 3, 95–96, 99, 124, 184 Gleason, William, 67 Goethe, J. W. von, 39 Go Tell It on the Mountain, 6, 13 Gregory, Dick, 147 Gurdjieff, Georges I., 6, 77 Hall, Stuart, 1, 95, 97, 99, 184 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 164 Harding, Vincent, 144 Harper, Frances E. W., 96 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 111 Hayden, Robert, 127, 179 Hegel, George, 9, 117–119, 121, 126–129, 142–143 Hesse, Herman, 7, 101, 172, 174, 187 Hill, Elizabeth, 164 Hinduism, 9, 57, 62, 90–91, 124 Hippodrome, 6, 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 79–80, 82–83 Hume, David, 194–196 Hurston, Zora Neale, 14, 26, 28, 96 In My Father’s House (Gaines), 145 In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, 98–99 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 89, 142 Invisible Man, 4, 6, 12–13, 16–17, 27–28, 32, 39, 85–86, 126, 168, 184–185 Jackson, Mahalia, 147 Jackson, Ruby Elizabeth, 164 Jacobs, Harriet, 89, 142 James, Henry, 111 Jefferson, Thomas, 106, 194–195 Jeffries, Leonard, 168 Johnson, Benny Lee, 164–165 Johnson, Charles: concept of art in relation to politics, 63; concept of culture, 184–185; concept of slavery, 49, 89, 100; portrayal of black female subjectivity, 98;

214

treatment of the mulatto, 96; use of folklore, 26–29; vision of culture, 3–4 Johnson, James Weldon, 26, 96 Johnson, Lyndon B., 155 Johnson, William, 165 Jones, Gayle, 15 King, Martin, Sr., 156 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 9, 46, 97, 101 Klein, Jacob, 24 Kojeve, Alexandre, 118, 129 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 30–31 Larsen, Nella, 96 The Last Days of Louisiana Red, 7 Leach, Edmund, 174 Leviathan, 79 Lewis, David Levering, 147–148, 153 Lewis, Sinclair, 96 Little, Jonathan, 14, 67, 70, 136, 141 London, Jack, 103, 108, 110, 114 “Lordship and Bondage,” 9, 117–119 The Mad Man, 7, 13 The Man Who Lived Underground, 6 Marx, Karl, 45–46 Mays, Benjamin E., 156, 189 McRobbie, Angela, 64 Meditations, 119 “melting pot,” 3–4 Melville, Herman, 65, 69, 103, 105, 108, 110– 111, 114, 125, 129 Meridian, 145 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1, 3, 14 Merton, Thomas, 173 Middle Passage, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 20, 45–46, 62, 71, 97–98, 101–144, 159, 167, 180 Mill, John Stuart, 68 Milton, John, 116 Mintz, Sidney, 3 Moby Dick, 108, 110, 115–116 Morgan, Edmund S., 195 Morrant, John, 69–70 Morrison, Toni, 6, 13, 15, 27, 64, 74, 145, 172, 179 Mumbo Jumbo, 6 Murray, Albert, 124, 184 Nash, William, 14, 46, 67 Native Son, 12, 27, 157–158 Naylor, Gloria, 7, 13, 64 New Negro Movement, 6 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 163 Nietzsche, Frederick, 34–35, 46 Ockham, William of, 30 The Outsider, 6, 13

Index Oxherding Tale, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 30, 55, 66– 101, 103–104, 123, 144, 148, 167, 185 palimpsest, 2–3, 9–10 Paradise Lost, 116 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 172, 179 Patterson, Orlando, 81–82, 88–89, 118 The Phenomenology of Mind, 9 philosophical black ﬁction, 5, 12–13, 62, 65, 193, 196–197 Philosophy of Freedom, 142 Philosophy of Right, 142 Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, 61–62 Plato, 8, 14, 19–21, 38, 58–59, 112 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 194 Poor People’s Campaign, 145 Posnock, Ross, 196 Price, Richard, 3 Process and Reality, 113, 146, 180 Quinones, Richard J., 151, 173–174, 176, 181, 187, 191–192 Raby, Albert A., 147, 153 Rank, Otto, 159 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 164, 166 Reed, Ishmael, 6 The Republic, 8, 14–15, 19–20, 38 Ripley, George, 67–68 Robinson, Jackie, 155 Rustin, Bayard, 155, 161 St. Augustine, 172–174 St. Matthew, 188–189 Santayana, George, 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7 Schwartz, Regina M., 172 The Sea-Wolf, 108, 110, 115, 133, 140 The Secret Sharer, 174, 187 Sellier, Phillippe, 172–173 Shen, Kaku-an, 65–66 Shizuteru, Ueda, 66 Siddhartha, 7, 101 Singer, Peter, 143 slave narrative, 62, 68, 94, 149 Socrates, 14, 22–24, 41, 57, 60 Song of Solomon, 145, 172, 179 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 62, 71, 122 The Souls of Black Folk, 2, 26, 94, 196–197

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 145, 158, 190 Soyinka, Wole, 194 Spencer, Herbert, 30–31 Stackalee, 105 Steinbeck, John, 174 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 154 “The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith,” 106 Suzuki, David, 65–66 “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 98 Taoism, 9, 57, 62, 71, 76–77, 92, 124, 186 Tar Baby, 64 The Ten Oxherding Pictures, 65–67, 69, 71, 94, 161 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 28, 56 They Came Before Columbus, 123 “The Third Sermon of the Warpland,” 154 Tillich, Paul, 157, 163–164 Toomer, Jean, 6, 13, 15, 19, 26, 77, 96 Top Dog/Underdog, 172, 179 Trevor, M. H., 65 Twain, Mark, 96, 111 Unamuno, Miguel de, 7 Up From Slavery, 69 Van Sertima, Ivan, 123 Vietnam War, 154 Walker, Alice, 15, 27, 63–64, 145 Washington, Booker T., 68–69 The Way of Chuang Tzu, 76 Wheatley, Phillis, 194–195 Whiteﬁeld, George, 70 Whitehead, Alfred North, 3, 9, 113–114, 146, 180, 183 Wieman, Nelson, 157, 164 Wiesel, Elie, 172 Wilkins, Roy, 155 Williams, Alfred Daniel, 156 Williams, John A., 169 Williams, Patricia, 3, 80, 99 Wolde, Ellen van, 172 The Women of Brewster Place, 64 “Words in the Mourning Time,” 179 Wright, Richard, 6, 13, 19, 26–27 The Writings of Chuang Tzu, 71 Young, Whitney, 155 Zangwell, Israel, 3

215

Rudolph P. Byrd is Associate Professor in The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. Byrd has also published Traps and I Call Myself an Artist with Indiana University Press.

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