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
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193
Notes
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199
Index
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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
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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)
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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
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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,
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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
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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:
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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
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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
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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
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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
