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Middle Passage
It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a daring voyage of horror and self-discovery.
Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative, and philosophical novel.
Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative, and philosophical novel.
209 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
218 people are currently reading
5,553 people want to read
About the author
Charles R. Johnson
86 books236 followersCharles R. Johnson is an American scholar and author of novels, short stories, and essays. Johnson, an African-American, has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Middle Passage and Dreamer. Johnson first came to prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist, at which time he was also involved in radical politics. In 1970, he published a collection of cartoons, and this led to a television series about cartooning on PBS.
1990 National Book Award Winner.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 488 reviews
February 6, 2020
An exquisite novel about the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to bondage in the United States and the Caribbean. It won the National Book Award three years before Barry Unsworth’s fine and similarly themed Booker Award-winning Sacred Hunger was published. Belongs in the same league with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Light in August. A vital American document. I must reread it soon.
August 27, 2018
Charles Johnson is a highly prolific author, scholar, cartoonist and screenwriter. Middle Passage is perhaps his most celebrated work, having won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990. In my exploration through the canon of great Black American writers, Mr. Johnson is perhaps the best I've encountered. That is no small praise when he's compared to giants like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and Junot Diaz. They all have enriched and enlightened me, but none have offered up quite the cocktail of beautiful prose, compelling narrative, political and historical enlightenment and complex characterization that Johnson does.
Ralph Ellison told an epic tale of the life of the Black man in 1950s America. But his nameless Invisible Man seemed more a vessel for his story than a rounded, complex character. Rutherford Calhoun, Middle Passage's protagonist, not only shows us the horrors of the slave trade, the struggles of a free Black man pre-Civil War, but also is a character with complex desires and problems that transcend his skin color. His biggest problem, that which spurs him to action has nothing to do with the color of his skin, but instead with the choices he's made in life.
Richard Wright's Native Son offers up a compelling tale, one where its protagonist Bigger Thomas undergoes profound change, change that comes from an act of accidental violence. In that fire of violence, Bigger is free for the first time, free to be his own man, perhaps not the man he'd always hoped he could be, but at least a man whose formation was of his own doing. But Wright's Native Son with all its powerful messages does not have the same artful prose found in Middle Passage. Almost every sentence Charles Johnson crafts is a work of art, while Rutherford Calhoun undergoes a journey of change equal to Bigger Thomas both in magnitude and violence.
I could go on in this vein through other great writers, and the comparisons between Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and his contemporaries would all be favorable. In truth, to relegate such a great author and the comparisons of his work to just his contemporaries of similar skin color is to do him and his race a disservice. He is, without qualification, a great writer, and Middle Passage a great American novel.
Note: Middle Passage contains violent depictations.
Ralph Ellison told an epic tale of the life of the Black man in 1950s America. But his nameless Invisible Man seemed more a vessel for his story than a rounded, complex character. Rutherford Calhoun, Middle Passage's protagonist, not only shows us the horrors of the slave trade, the struggles of a free Black man pre-Civil War, but also is a character with complex desires and problems that transcend his skin color. His biggest problem, that which spurs him to action has nothing to do with the color of his skin, but instead with the choices he's made in life.
Richard Wright's Native Son offers up a compelling tale, one where its protagonist Bigger Thomas undergoes profound change, change that comes from an act of accidental violence. In that fire of violence, Bigger is free for the first time, free to be his own man, perhaps not the man he'd always hoped he could be, but at least a man whose formation was of his own doing. But Wright's Native Son with all its powerful messages does not have the same artful prose found in Middle Passage. Almost every sentence Charles Johnson crafts is a work of art, while Rutherford Calhoun undergoes a journey of change equal to Bigger Thomas both in magnitude and violence.
I could go on in this vein through other great writers, and the comparisons between Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and his contemporaries would all be favorable. In truth, to relegate such a great author and the comparisons of his work to just his contemporaries of similar skin color is to do him and his race a disservice. He is, without qualification, a great writer, and Middle Passage a great American novel.
Note: Middle Passage contains violent depictations.
February 22, 2025
Homo Est Quo Dammodo Omnia
The quotation "Homo est quo dammodo omnia", attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas, may be translated "In a way, man is everything". It serves as one of three epigraphs to Charles Johnson's 1990 National Book Award winning novel, "Middle Passage". Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" about the terrors of slavers and a statement from the Upanishads: "Who sees variety and not the Unity wanders on from death to death" serve as the other two epigraphs for Johnson's beautifully complex and erudite philosophical novel, set largely on an illegal slave ship from New Orleans in 1830.
Charles Johnson (b. 1948) became the first African American novelist to win the National Book Award following Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" which received the honor in 1953. A professor of philosophy and English for many years, Johnson is also an essayist, screenwriter, and novelist. He has long been a practicing Buddhist. "Middle Passage" reflects his interest in understanding America, its history, and capacity for change. The book is also a sea yarn of sorts written to entertain. The book is heavily allusive to the literature of the sea, particularly to novels of Herman Melville and to Homer's "Odyssey".
The main character and the book's narrator, Rutherford Calhoun, 22, is a manumitted former slave from southern Illinois who has moved to New Orleans where he becomes a gambler, womanizer and petty thief. He has a relationship with Isadora, an African American schoolteacher from Boston. When he becomes pressed by his debts and by Isadora's desire to marry, he stows away on the first ship out of New Orleans, a rickety and illegal slaver, with the suggestive name, the "Republic". (Congress had outlawed the international slave trade in 1808,) In a memorable opening sentence, Calhoun observes that "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women." The "Republic" sails to Africa in search of taking captives from a tribe called the Allmuseri. This is a fictitious entity. Johnson elaborately develops the belief system of the Allmuseri, and their god, who becomes a captive on the ship together with his people.
The book combines realism, philosophy and myth. Calhoun is tough and street-smart and has a remarkable way with words. He changes from a thief to a writer and reflective thinker in the course of the book. He also is possessed of remarkable erudition, attributed to the kindness of his former master, a learned clergyman who hated slavery, in Illinois. Scenes on the outgoing voyage, in Africa, and on the return are described in detail in passages which range from the humorous to the shocking. The leaky and unreliable "Republic" is buffeted by storms and Calhoun becomes involved in a mutiny by some of the crew against the captain, in the captain's efforts to defend himself, and in a rebellion by the Allmuseri en route.
The history in the book is combined with a great deal of anachronism and with philosophical/religious discussion which owes a great deal to Buddhism. Thus the novel is not a straightforward history of a slave ship. Rather, Johnson probes beneath the surface to develop a metaphysics about non-duality -- the unitary character of experience -- and an understanding of the United States, tied into non-duality and based upon the need of Americans of every background to see and understand themselves as a people and to avoid polarizing fights about identities. A crucial goal of the book, I think, is to help Americans to understand themselves. Late in the novel, as his character is transformed by his experiences Calhoun reflects upon what America, with its faults, has come to mean to him as a black man:
"The States were hardly the sort of place a Negro would pine for, but pine for them I did. Even for that I was ready now after months at sea, for the strangeness and mystery of black life, even for the endless round of social obstacles and challenges and trials colored men faced every blessed day of their lives, for there were indeed triumphs, I remembered, that balanced the suffering on shore, small yet enduring things, very deep, that Isadora often pointed out to me during our evening walks. If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives-- this cauldron of mongrels from all points on the compass -- was all I could rightly call home, then aye: I was of it. There, as I lay weakened from bleeding, was where I wanted to be."
I thought of the approaching Independence Day holiday in reading this book. I also thought of the polarization in our country and of the need for people of varying identities and beliefs to come together as, in the simplest metaphor in this book, seamen on a ship. I have seen interviews Johnson gave in the years following "Middle Passage" in which he discusses the role of American literature in encouraging individuals to think of themselves as sharing in an America rather than being entrapped in their own smaller ideas of identities. His book has great breadth and development as it moves from the individual story of Rutherford Calhoun and his development from his days as a former slave and petty crook. The book encourages reflection on the nature of the United States as well as on philosophical questions on the nature of reality. I think this 1990 National Book Award-winning novel deserves more attention that it currently receives. It is a modern American classic.
Robin Friedman
The quotation "Homo est quo dammodo omnia", attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas, may be translated "In a way, man is everything". It serves as one of three epigraphs to Charles Johnson's 1990 National Book Award winning novel, "Middle Passage". Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" about the terrors of slavers and a statement from the Upanishads: "Who sees variety and not the Unity wanders on from death to death" serve as the other two epigraphs for Johnson's beautifully complex and erudite philosophical novel, set largely on an illegal slave ship from New Orleans in 1830.
Charles Johnson (b. 1948) became the first African American novelist to win the National Book Award following Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" which received the honor in 1953. A professor of philosophy and English for many years, Johnson is also an essayist, screenwriter, and novelist. He has long been a practicing Buddhist. "Middle Passage" reflects his interest in understanding America, its history, and capacity for change. The book is also a sea yarn of sorts written to entertain. The book is heavily allusive to the literature of the sea, particularly to novels of Herman Melville and to Homer's "Odyssey".
The main character and the book's narrator, Rutherford Calhoun, 22, is a manumitted former slave from southern Illinois who has moved to New Orleans where he becomes a gambler, womanizer and petty thief. He has a relationship with Isadora, an African American schoolteacher from Boston. When he becomes pressed by his debts and by Isadora's desire to marry, he stows away on the first ship out of New Orleans, a rickety and illegal slaver, with the suggestive name, the "Republic". (Congress had outlawed the international slave trade in 1808,) In a memorable opening sentence, Calhoun observes that "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women." The "Republic" sails to Africa in search of taking captives from a tribe called the Allmuseri. This is a fictitious entity. Johnson elaborately develops the belief system of the Allmuseri, and their god, who becomes a captive on the ship together with his people.
The book combines realism, philosophy and myth. Calhoun is tough and street-smart and has a remarkable way with words. He changes from a thief to a writer and reflective thinker in the course of the book. He also is possessed of remarkable erudition, attributed to the kindness of his former master, a learned clergyman who hated slavery, in Illinois. Scenes on the outgoing voyage, in Africa, and on the return are described in detail in passages which range from the humorous to the shocking. The leaky and unreliable "Republic" is buffeted by storms and Calhoun becomes involved in a mutiny by some of the crew against the captain, in the captain's efforts to defend himself, and in a rebellion by the Allmuseri en route.
The history in the book is combined with a great deal of anachronism and with philosophical/religious discussion which owes a great deal to Buddhism. Thus the novel is not a straightforward history of a slave ship. Rather, Johnson probes beneath the surface to develop a metaphysics about non-duality -- the unitary character of experience -- and an understanding of the United States, tied into non-duality and based upon the need of Americans of every background to see and understand themselves as a people and to avoid polarizing fights about identities. A crucial goal of the book, I think, is to help Americans to understand themselves. Late in the novel, as his character is transformed by his experiences Calhoun reflects upon what America, with its faults, has come to mean to him as a black man:
"The States were hardly the sort of place a Negro would pine for, but pine for them I did. Even for that I was ready now after months at sea, for the strangeness and mystery of black life, even for the endless round of social obstacles and challenges and trials colored men faced every blessed day of their lives, for there were indeed triumphs, I remembered, that balanced the suffering on shore, small yet enduring things, very deep, that Isadora often pointed out to me during our evening walks. If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives-- this cauldron of mongrels from all points on the compass -- was all I could rightly call home, then aye: I was of it. There, as I lay weakened from bleeding, was where I wanted to be."
I thought of the approaching Independence Day holiday in reading this book. I also thought of the polarization in our country and of the need for people of varying identities and beliefs to come together as, in the simplest metaphor in this book, seamen on a ship. I have seen interviews Johnson gave in the years following "Middle Passage" in which he discusses the role of American literature in encouraging individuals to think of themselves as sharing in an America rather than being entrapped in their own smaller ideas of identities. His book has great breadth and development as it moves from the individual story of Rutherford Calhoun and his development from his days as a former slave and petty crook. The book encourages reflection on the nature of the United States as well as on philosophical questions on the nature of reality. I think this 1990 National Book Award-winning novel deserves more attention that it currently receives. It is a modern American classic.
Robin Friedman
July 22, 2022
A former slave, now a petty thief, stows away on a ship that turns out to be a slaver. The captain is hated and feared by both the crew and the slaves. This book was not the expected tale of the tragic Middle Passage. It was a jumble of history, fable, philosophy, humor and picaresque adventure. It was very cleverly written by an author who knew when to mix modern and historical idioms. The audiobook is narrated by Dion Graham, who is always excellent.
July 5, 2015
Middle Passage is a bizarre book. I wanted to like it much more than I did. It's strengths are pretty strong but it's weaknesses, for me, had much more of an impact. It's short, barely two hundred pages, and it's one of the few books I would say that I wanted to be much longer. At one point towards the end, Rutherford Calhoun, our narrator, can't tell his fiance all that had happened to him because it "would take a thousand more nights than Scheherazade needed to beguile King Shahryar." Well, where is all of that? It's not in this book. There is no doubt that Johnson is a talented writer and it is a doozy of a premise and much of it is very exciting but I still felt like much of it is missing. We're told a lot has happened but only shown snippets. We meet a god, no less, for a brief horrifying moment, that is gripping and very powerful and then we never see it again. I'm not even entirely sure how the story would have been different if the god had not been introduced. A confrontation with the black kingpin of crime in New Orleans is tied up so neatly and improbably and by such flimsy means that it barely registered as a conflict at all. Rutherford Calhoun, the alternately charming, engaging/infuriating, maddening protagonist claims to be profoundly changed by what has happened to him on the ship but immediately gets involved in worldly matters the first chance he gets. People learn a substantial amount of each others language within days it seems, though their languages do not, say, stem from a common linguistic tree. We hear a LOT about what a rapscallion/ne'er do well/rascal/thief/hustler/whatever Calhoun is without him actually doing any of that.
And it's too bad. A freed black man that stows away on what turns out to be an illegal slave ship, and that ship capturing not only slaves but a god, and then there's a slave rebellion on the ship, I mean, that is a fantastic idea for a story!
I just didn't feel like the book that came out of it was all that it should have been.
And it's too bad. A freed black man that stows away on what turns out to be an illegal slave ship, and that ship capturing not only slaves but a god, and then there's a slave rebellion on the ship, I mean, that is a fantastic idea for a story!
I just didn't feel like the book that came out of it was all that it should have been.
January 12, 2025
What a wonderful, powerful, thought provoking, surprising read. The first two attributes are on account of Charles Johnson's mastery of the written word. His prose grips the reader from first sentence and doesn't let go for a second. It goes by so quickly that I found myself wishing it had been padded to last another 50 pages or more. Why was it surpising? Well, I expected it to focus primarily on the horrific middle passage in which people were enslaved and transported in barbaric fashion from Africa to America. And the bulk of this book does in fact describe such a voyage. But before we get to it we are introduced to the protagonist, a fascinating character who is a freed slave that ends up on the ship basically by accident as he flees to avoid a forced marriage to his impatient girlfriend, a seemingly mild mannered lady who has taken matrimonial matters into her own hands in rather brutish fashion. Once Rutherford Calhoun is aboard ship and particularly once it has monstrously taken on cargo, which includes not only members of an ancient African tribe but also their god, the narrative is so intense and perilous and chock full of life and death double dealing on the unpredictable high seas, that the early part of the novel is mostly forgotten. But without giving too much away, as Middle Passage reaches its conclusion suddenly we are back in the world of the original cast of characters. The physically battered protagonist is much changed mentally and emotionally due to his adventurous ordeal. But he has one last dangerous set of circumstances to navigate before he can be fully saved. Ironically, being saved means opting for a degree of monogamy and commitment that his avoidance of got him into so much trouble in the first place. Freedom has an entirely different definition to him from beginning of the story to the end. So yes, this book as expected was about the atrocities of the slave trade. But slavery is more of a backdrop than focus of the action packed tale. What it ultimately ends up being about is the lengths a man goes to live a carefree existence, and what he must go through to learn that caring for people other than himself is a far superior way to live.
December 19, 2011
I liked it quite a bit. I'm not sure what to do with the narrative voice, though. It's, at times, wildly anachronistic and, frankly, unrealistic. This is all the more strange because Johnson is writing into a literary legacy that has a very particular set of tropes--all of which, he easily elides in order to utilize a narrator who's likeable and street-wise sophisticated. Yet this is also a man who is an uneducated, recently freed slave in 1830--a character who has an acute knowledge of continental philosophy, classical literature, and Shakespeare---much like Melville's omniscient narrator in Moby-Dick. I almost think the novel would've been more successful had Johnson used both the first-person narration of Calhoun for plotting purposes as well as a third-person omniscient narrator that could bare more of the philosophical and metaphysical burden. But then again, maybe the merging of past/present is the point: to create a historically minded narrative that is just as much about the present "Republic" as it is about the troubled vessel sailing along the Middle Passage. But as a fan of early Black Atlantic texts and the sea tales of Melville, I couldn't help but want a more historically appropriate narrator. These things aside, I really enjoyed its gritty plot and Johnson’s steady theorizing of the Middle Passage as both a geo-historical route and a timeless, imbued metaphysical legacy.
March 23, 2020
In a 2nd reading of Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, I found myself even more impressed by the author's imaginative story line, certainly not a typical rendering of a slave ship narrative but rather a kind of fable that seems to embrace every character within the novel, while being primarily about a man named Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave living in New Orleans in 1829. Alas, the author's research into the period seems exhaustive, with a full accounting of nautical detail, the method of capturing slaves near coastal Senegal by Arabs, speech colloquialisms of the period & the long pattern of ambivalence about slavery in the American south, even extending to an occasional African-American taking advantage of this laxity by dealing in slaves. (At this point slavery was still legal in the south but the further importation of slaves was not, having been banned in 1808.)
What drives this wonderful novel is the character of Rutherford Calhoun, a bit of a rascal to say the least, much in debt & living a rather loose life in a somewhat multi-racial New Orleans, after having grown up in Illinois & been given freedom on his owner's deathbed. Offered marriage to a woman named Isadora, someone Rutherford finds enchanting but does not wish to be enchained to, this in exchange for the absolution of his debts by a black power-broker called "Papa" Zaringue, he stows away on a barely seaworthy ship bound for West Africa to broker a new cargo of slaves. When discovered at sea, Rutherford is enlisted as a cook's apprentice and in time becomes the confidant of the ship's captain, a strange but captivating, dwarf-like, multi-lingual, semi-paranoid fellow named Ebenezer Falcon, one of many complex characters on board the Republic en route to "Senegambia".
In fact, it soon seems that the ramshackle ship & the entire process of the Middle Passage represents "one long hangover with a crew of 40 dregs & degenerates", perhaps chief among them being Josiah Squibb, the ship's cook & a "pitiful rumpot". Another character is First Mate Peter Cringe, an almost patrician fellow & a teetotaler, mistrusted by the rest of the crew who see him as "soft" but who also takes a personal interest in Rutherford, often called "Illinois" by Squibb.
The Africans to be enslaved are most extraordinary specimens, members of the Allmuseri tribe & seen as "spell-casting, devil-worshiping sorcerers" by the crew. Also lifted on board the Republic in a large wooden box is the tribal god of the Allmuseri, not a wooden fetish but some force enshrouded in mystery, needing to be fed daily & seemingly larger than life, revered by the Allmuseri, who are said to be "an Ur-tribe of humanity, distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier, a biological repository of Egyptian & Sub-Saharan eccentricities."
What follows on the return journey to New Orleans requires one to suspend disbelief somewhat, which is why I label Johnson's Middle Passage a fable but I find great magic in the story, the colorful characters & even, though perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, the eventual resolution at novel's end. Some of what occurs in the midst of a slave rebellion on board is definitely visceral & not for the faint of heart but always there is Rutherford Calhoun, blending every experience, examining his own identity, not just enduring but seeming to embrace & to assimilate all the adversities & doubts that have confronted him:
I do have some complaints with Middle Passage, in particular a considerable doubt about just how the enslaved Africans, though oddly enough at times allowed freedom of movement on the deck, were quickly able to become so very fluent in the English language. Beyond that, there is a troubling, almost overwhelming use of arcane vocabulary, with some of the words not to be found in my dictionary, words such as: pitchkettled, ontic, parmenidean, ensorcelled, pungled, barracoon, homunculus, dislimning, soger, gaposis & capoeira, to cite just a few. Detailed nautical terminology is one thing but it was distracting to have to slog through & attempt to decipher so very many cryptic words.
However, the author's prose is exceedingly well-framed, an example being when with those left alive after the takeover of the ship extremely desperate for food & wracked by all manner of disease, Rutherford falls into a stupor, with mottled dreams of home:
And, as an additional postscript to my review, in February 2020 Charles Johnson appeared in Chicago at one of the expertly dramatized performances of his novel at the Lifeline Theater, afterwards explaining the gestation process for his novel, signing copies of the book & further enhancing my connection to his novel.
What drives this wonderful novel is the character of Rutherford Calhoun, a bit of a rascal to say the least, much in debt & living a rather loose life in a somewhat multi-racial New Orleans, after having grown up in Illinois & been given freedom on his owner's deathbed. Offered marriage to a woman named Isadora, someone Rutherford finds enchanting but does not wish to be enchained to, this in exchange for the absolution of his debts by a black power-broker called "Papa" Zaringue, he stows away on a barely seaworthy ship bound for West Africa to broker a new cargo of slaves. When discovered at sea, Rutherford is enlisted as a cook's apprentice and in time becomes the confidant of the ship's captain, a strange but captivating, dwarf-like, multi-lingual, semi-paranoid fellow named Ebenezer Falcon, one of many complex characters on board the Republic en route to "Senegambia".
In fact, it soon seems that the ramshackle ship & the entire process of the Middle Passage represents "one long hangover with a crew of 40 dregs & degenerates", perhaps chief among them being Josiah Squibb, the ship's cook & a "pitiful rumpot". Another character is First Mate Peter Cringe, an almost patrician fellow & a teetotaler, mistrusted by the rest of the crew who see him as "soft" but who also takes a personal interest in Rutherford, often called "Illinois" by Squibb.
The Africans to be enslaved are most extraordinary specimens, members of the Allmuseri tribe & seen as "spell-casting, devil-worshiping sorcerers" by the crew. Also lifted on board the Republic in a large wooden box is the tribal god of the Allmuseri, not a wooden fetish but some force enshrouded in mystery, needing to be fed daily & seemingly larger than life, revered by the Allmuseri, who are said to be "an Ur-tribe of humanity, distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier, a biological repository of Egyptian & Sub-Saharan eccentricities."
What follows on the return journey to New Orleans requires one to suspend disbelief somewhat, which is why I label Johnson's Middle Passage a fable but I find great magic in the story, the colorful characters & even, though perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, the eventual resolution at novel's end. Some of what occurs in the midst of a slave rebellion on board is definitely visceral & not for the faint of heart but always there is Rutherford Calhoun, blending every experience, examining his own identity, not just enduring but seeming to embrace & to assimilate all the adversities & doubts that have confronted him:
Only an inexplicable calm, as if I were the sea now, the dam of my tears--the poisons built up since I left southern Illinois--burst & I cried for the sewage I carried in my spirit, my failures, my crimes, foolish hopes & vanities, the very faults & structural flaws in the blueprint of my brain. I could no longer find my loyalties.There are images in Middle Passage that reminded me of other novels, Moby Dick among them, with an almost imperial Allmuseri figure named Ngonyama tending the ship's wheel during a final crippling storm and a wealth of philosophical references one hardly envisions on such a ship. At one point, Rutherford sizes up the fate of the ship & intones, "deep down no man's democratic-we're just closet anarchists" and also "this was not a ship but a coffin." In spite of this, the author suggests that Rutherford Calhoun and all of the other characters, including the Allmuseri have been changed by the voyage, with the would-be slaves no longer Africans but not yet Americans and with "no one able to stop the terrible forces & transformations our voyage had set free."
All bonds, landside or on ships, between masters & mates, women & men, it struck me, were a lie forged briefly in the name of convenience & just as quickly broken. I'd brought a world of grief on myself but, hang it, I wished like hell I had someone to blame--my parents, the Jackson administration or white people in general for this tangle of predicaments.
I do have some complaints with Middle Passage, in particular a considerable doubt about just how the enslaved Africans, though oddly enough at times allowed freedom of movement on the deck, were quickly able to become so very fluent in the English language. Beyond that, there is a troubling, almost overwhelming use of arcane vocabulary, with some of the words not to be found in my dictionary, words such as: pitchkettled, ontic, parmenidean, ensorcelled, pungled, barracoon, homunculus, dislimning, soger, gaposis & capoeira, to cite just a few. Detailed nautical terminology is one thing but it was distracting to have to slog through & attempt to decipher so very many cryptic words.
However, the author's prose is exceedingly well-framed, an example being when with those left alive after the takeover of the ship extremely desperate for food & wracked by all manner of disease, Rutherford falls into a stupor, with mottled dreams of home:
As I remembered home, it was a battlefield, a boiling cauldron. It created white rascals like Ebenezer Falcon, black ones like Zeringue, uppity Creoles, hundreds of slave lords, bondmen crippled & caricatured by the disfiguring hand of servitude. Nay, the States were hardly the sort of place a Negro would pine for, but pine for them I did. I was ready now after months at sea for the strangeness & mystery of black life, even for the endless rounds of social obstacles, trials & challenges colored men faced every blessed day of their lives, for there were indeed triumphs that balanced the suffering the suffering on shore, small yet enduring things.In 2006, when I hosted a longtime book discussion group with a pairing of Middle Passage & Melville's Billy Budd, I noticed that Charles Johnson had grown up within walking distance of my home & sent off an invitation to join our gathering, if by some extreme chance he happened to be in the area visiting relatives at that time. Prof. Johnson, then teaching at the University of Washington, emailed his regrets but included some very interesting photo images of slave ships that might have resembled the one on which his own novel was set, a very nice gesture, with the images of great benefit during our discussion of Middle Passage.
If this weird upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees & former indentured servants, religious heretics & half-breeds, whoresons & fugitives--this cauldron of mongrels from all points of the compass--was all I could rightly call home, then aye: I was of it.
And, as an additional postscript to my review, in February 2020 Charles Johnson appeared in Chicago at one of the expertly dramatized performances of his novel at the Lifeline Theater, afterwards explaining the gestation process for his novel, signing copies of the book & further enhancing my connection to his novel.
December 28, 2019
Middle Passage is a masterpiece of fiction. Written by Charles R. Johnson, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990.
Carefully constructed and beautifully written, Middle Passage has been criticized for its light-hearted approach to the heavy and dark subject matter of the slave trade. This is probably because it is an adventure book first and foremost. I think of it as one part Moby Dick, one part Treasure Island, one part fantastical horror novel, and one part memoir that is deeply grounded in the historical Middle Passage slave trade. Admittedly these are seemingly incongruous themes but the recipe works well in this case.
The novel follows a freed slave, Rutherford Calhoun, as he flees an arranged marriage in New Orleans. He instead chooses to stowaway on an illegal slave ship called the Republic that the very next day is leaving New Orleans to pick up slaves from the Ivory Coast. Calhoun is quickly found and the captain - Ebenezer Falcon - relegates Calhoun to work as the cook’s assistant, thereby sparing his life. The journey to the African coast is largely uneventful save the battering storms that indicate that the ship is not as seaworthy as it should be. The relationship between our protagonists is developed during this time and insights into the ship’s crew reveals the growing uneasiness that this voyage is like no other. It becomes increasingly clear that Falcon has a death wish and that the crew has picked up on it.
The African slaves to be bought are from the fictional Allmuseri tribe. After entering the slave port on the African coast the enchained slaves are inhumanely and cruelly sandwiched beneath the deck in a manner that Falcon is especially proud of. But the Allmuseri are said to possess magical powers and the ship’s crew become more uneasy and they begin to talk of mutiny. It is at this point when the ship leaves Africa to return to New Orleans that the novel’s high drama begins to unfold.
Calhoun plays the role of narrator. In addition to being a free man he is a charming and petty thief. Both of these attributes serve him well in the dramatic days to come. He manages to gain the confidence of the captain, the mutinous crew and slaves in the hold. There are strong literary similarities between Calhoun and Jim Hawkins — the young narrator in Treasure Island. Calhoun seems blessed with good luck, some level of objective distance from the other characters and an immunity to the many horrors around him.
Falcon meanwhile is not unlike Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. In Falcon’s case his white whale is the God-like leader of the Allmuseri. The author makes heavy use of symbolism and ominous portents through the enslavement of the God, who is captured, brought aboard and placed deep in the hull in a covered cage. He is represented as some sort of mythical creature not quite human. What could possibly go wrong for Falcon and the slave traders with such a powerful force on board? I don’t wish to spoil the plot here.
Overall the plot development in Middle Passage is excellent. While there are many portents sprinkled throughout the novel there is also plenty of mystery to allow the dramatic effect to slowly build. Since it is a short novel the importance of each sentence is magnified and it is here that Johnson delivers. The care, detail and scholarship around the fictional slave ship and crew are notable and there are no words wasted in this story.
5 stars. Easily one of my favorite books that I read in 2019.
Carefully constructed and beautifully written, Middle Passage has been criticized for its light-hearted approach to the heavy and dark subject matter of the slave trade. This is probably because it is an adventure book first and foremost. I think of it as one part Moby Dick, one part Treasure Island, one part fantastical horror novel, and one part memoir that is deeply grounded in the historical Middle Passage slave trade. Admittedly these are seemingly incongruous themes but the recipe works well in this case.
The novel follows a freed slave, Rutherford Calhoun, as he flees an arranged marriage in New Orleans. He instead chooses to stowaway on an illegal slave ship called the Republic that the very next day is leaving New Orleans to pick up slaves from the Ivory Coast. Calhoun is quickly found and the captain - Ebenezer Falcon - relegates Calhoun to work as the cook’s assistant, thereby sparing his life. The journey to the African coast is largely uneventful save the battering storms that indicate that the ship is not as seaworthy as it should be. The relationship between our protagonists is developed during this time and insights into the ship’s crew reveals the growing uneasiness that this voyage is like no other. It becomes increasingly clear that Falcon has a death wish and that the crew has picked up on it.
The African slaves to be bought are from the fictional Allmuseri tribe. After entering the slave port on the African coast the enchained slaves are inhumanely and cruelly sandwiched beneath the deck in a manner that Falcon is especially proud of. But the Allmuseri are said to possess magical powers and the ship’s crew become more uneasy and they begin to talk of mutiny. It is at this point when the ship leaves Africa to return to New Orleans that the novel’s high drama begins to unfold.
Calhoun plays the role of narrator. In addition to being a free man he is a charming and petty thief. Both of these attributes serve him well in the dramatic days to come. He manages to gain the confidence of the captain, the mutinous crew and slaves in the hold. There are strong literary similarities between Calhoun and Jim Hawkins — the young narrator in Treasure Island. Calhoun seems blessed with good luck, some level of objective distance from the other characters and an immunity to the many horrors around him.
Falcon meanwhile is not unlike Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. In Falcon’s case his white whale is the God-like leader of the Allmuseri. The author makes heavy use of symbolism and ominous portents through the enslavement of the God, who is captured, brought aboard and placed deep in the hull in a covered cage. He is represented as some sort of mythical creature not quite human. What could possibly go wrong for Falcon and the slave traders with such a powerful force on board? I don’t wish to spoil the plot here.
Overall the plot development in Middle Passage is excellent. While there are many portents sprinkled throughout the novel there is also plenty of mystery to allow the dramatic effect to slowly build. Since it is a short novel the importance of each sentence is magnified and it is here that Johnson delivers. The care, detail and scholarship around the fictional slave ship and crew are notable and there are no words wasted in this story.
5 stars. Easily one of my favorite books that I read in 2019.
May 18, 2023
Protagonist Rutherford Calhoun had grown up in Illinois as a slave. His owner provided education and eventually freed him. He traveled to New Orleans where he became a thief. In 1830, when threatened with a forced marriage to settle his debts, he stows away on a ship. After it is too late, he finds out they are headed to Africa to pick up slaves from Senegal and Gambia. He becomes the cook’s assistant.
As the only black man on the ship, Rutherford acts as a liaison between the Africans and the crew. One of the Africans has learned some English and serves as a translator. The captain is a tyrant, and during the return trip, the crew plans a mutiny and the slaves plan to revolt. The trip back contains some gruesome scenes. There is an unusual presence in the hold of the ship, taken onboard in Africa, which wreaks havoc on the minds of the captain, sailors, and Africans. (I am unclear on the author’s intent with including this “presence.”)
The Middle Passage of the title is the second leg of the slave trade, where African slaves were taken from their home continent to the Caribbean. In this book it also refers to the passage of Rutherford from his wayward youth to a more knowledgeable adult. It is a combination of picaresque, historical fiction, and social commentary.
Those looking for realistic content should look elsewhere, as there are many anachronisms, coincidences, and improbable events (not to mention the strange “presence.”) For example, the Africans and Rutherford communicate extremely well considering they have only one partially fluent translator. The end of the ship’s journey requires a huge suspension of disbelief. I think the author is telling an adventurous story while also making other philosophical comments about racial issues in America.
3.5
As the only black man on the ship, Rutherford acts as a liaison between the Africans and the crew. One of the Africans has learned some English and serves as a translator. The captain is a tyrant, and during the return trip, the crew plans a mutiny and the slaves plan to revolt. The trip back contains some gruesome scenes. There is an unusual presence in the hold of the ship, taken onboard in Africa, which wreaks havoc on the minds of the captain, sailors, and Africans. (I am unclear on the author’s intent with including this “presence.”)
The Middle Passage of the title is the second leg of the slave trade, where African slaves were taken from their home continent to the Caribbean. In this book it also refers to the passage of Rutherford from his wayward youth to a more knowledgeable adult. It is a combination of picaresque, historical fiction, and social commentary.
Those looking for realistic content should look elsewhere, as there are many anachronisms, coincidences, and improbable events (not to mention the strange “presence.”) For example, the Africans and Rutherford communicate extremely well considering they have only one partially fluent translator. The end of the ship’s journey requires a huge suspension of disbelief. I think the author is telling an adventurous story while also making other philosophical comments about racial issues in America.
3.5
August 4, 2022
First line: Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."
Really good story, loved the bits of humor, and an excellent audio version. I would read this author again.
Really good story, loved the bits of humor, and an excellent audio version. I would read this author again.
May 24, 2016
Middle Passage begins with an audacious sentence, "Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women," which announces its audacious conceit: published just four years after Beloved's solemn Freudian-Faulknerian modernism arrogated slavery to the poetics of trauma and the incommunicable, Johnson's novel recasts the slave narrative in the style of the fictional forms that Europeans were writing at the time of slavery. Middle Passage is a picaresque, a maritime romance, an allegory, a mock-epic, and a conte philosophique; high-spirited and satirical, it calls not upon Freud and Faulkner but upon Voltaire and Swift (and Melville and Twain). This should not be as surprising as those of us reared on Morrison and her somber exegetes might find it: don't Equiano and Douglass represent themselves in their narratives less as mutely traumatized analysands than as heroes of reason and democracy, boldly seeking freedom?
Johnson, like his forebears in Enlightenment skepticism and Romantic irony, is what we, with our limited grasp of literary history, would call a postmodern metafictionist: he both tells a historical tale and consistently alerts the reader to the tale's fictionality and historicity. He seduces the reader with all manner of adventure, from shipwreck to marriage plot, even as he comments on his literary precursors.
Here is the tale: the year is 1830 and Rutherford Calhoun is a young manumitted slave from Illinois whose conscience-stricken master educated him mightily, teaching him about "Neoplatonism, the evils of nominalism, the genius of Aquinas, and the work of such seers as Jakob Böhme," so as to make him "a Negro preacher, perhaps even a black saint." But Calhoun—shaped by a rivalry with his pious brother—wants no part of sainthood and flees upon being freed to the humid pleasures of New Orleans ("a great whore of a city in her glory") to support himself as a petty thief. He eventually becomes caught up in a relationship with a respectable woman who threatens to "sivilize" him (I quote Huckleberry Finn—the boyish opposition to female society is the same in both novels, though not ultimately valorized in Johnson's) and goes to extraordinary lengths to get him the altar—to wit, she has him threatened by the Creole gangster Papa Zeringue. So Calhoun takes to to the sea, stowing away on the semi-ironically named Republic, an illegal slaver under the command of Captain Falcon—a man who represents the best and worst of America, its endless willful individualist determination that respects no traditions and its consequent neglect of or violence toward other persons who would get in the way of the expansive self. (Falcon is both Ahab and Emerson—Calhoun observes that he has titled a set of written exercises "Self-Reliance.") Falcon's mission is to enslave for his investors the fictional Allmuseri people, "a whole tribe…of devil-worshipping, spell-casting wizards," in one character's description—they are an pre-modern/post-modern anti-civilization of exemplary non-essentialists, half-Buddhist, half-pre-Socratic, an "Ur-people" who have traveled the world bringing their wisdom to Mexico and India, but now subject to the merely material power of the dualistic white man and his brute mechanical anti-magic. But Falcon is not only after the people; he is also after their god, a frightening all-deity unlike monotheism's benign father, a divinity that encompasses or perhaps is the whole universe. Eventually, the Allmuseri are captured and then they rebel in turn, commandeering the Republic and inverting its moral universe as they attempt to return to Africa. The second half of the novel narrates how Calhoun survives these calamities at sea and what he learns from the moral quandaries they raise.
As noted above, Middle Passage wears any number of influences on its sleeve, but its presiding author-deities are Melville and Ellison. Like them, Johnson gives his narrator a distinctively American style that delights in the mix of registers, "blending the languages of house and field, street and seminary." Moby-Dick is present in Johnson's speech-making mad captain with his metaphysical quarry (the whale for Ahab, the Allmuseri god for Falcon). But, if I were given to writing in glib blurb-speak, I might say that Middle Passage crosses Benito Cereno with Invisible Man. Johnson takes Ellison's polytropic narrator and puts him on a nineteenth-century slaver, there to reflect on his Americanism, his relation to Africa, his inheritance of European thought, and his responsibilities (if any) to his fellow men and women, whether white or black. The animating dilemma, as in Melville's novella, comes from a slave revolt at sea—Johnson introduces rebellious slaves named Atufal and Babo and has another character allude to "how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their tales" to make sure we are thinking of Benito Cereno. Whereas Melville critically scrutinized the white man's ideology of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, Johnson turns a similarly critical eye on what he sees as limitations in black American thought at the end of the twentieth century. Like Ellison, he concludes, against various radical traditions, that the African-American's home is America:
In the novel's complicated ethical and political argument, the individual must be affirmed precisely because he is created and constituted by others. Because the ego is an illusion (Johnson, by the bye, is a Buddhist) and the self a composite, it is all the more valuable in its variety, through which the elemental unity streams (Johnson, by the bye, wrote an introduction to a collection of Emerson, wherein he praises the Transcendentalist almost unstintingly). Any ideology that would try to freeze that variety, whether in the name of domination or resistance, is a sin against the world-spirit.
Johnson does allows that western philosophy's dualism has made certain achievements and discoveries possible that rigorously monistic societies could probably not have attained: as Captain Falcon says,
Middle Passage is, overall, a fantastic fictional invention, a blessedly bizarre book that, I concede, does not always work—the mixed style is sometimes a little too precious, and the dialogue often verges on pirate-speak; Johnson lets Calhoun's narrative voice essay and assert about matters that really ought to be dramatized; the Allmuseri never come alive but exist mostly as a concept; and the preponderantly happy ending feels ever-so-slightly inadequate to its antecedent events. Middle Passage's ideas are more vivid than its emotions, its concepts than its characters; it is the best novel written by a philosopher that I can imagine, but it is a novel written by a philosopher. Nevertheless, its dense brevity, its rich style, its unpredictable plot, its wild shifts of tone, its complex intellectual excursions, and its dissident politics all make it well worth reading—not least because of its potential to unsettle some of the aesthetic and political orthodoxies of today.
________________________________
*Shades of Judge Holden—I suspect that Johnson read Blood Meridian sometime during the composition of Middle Passage, though the debt of both novels to Melville is perhaps large enough to explain the similarities.
**Hence Calhoun's thoroughly and amusingly anachronistic vocabulary, which has annoyed so many Goodreads and Amazon reviewers; from his use of words like "cute" and "cultural" in their contemporary—not nineteenth-century—senses to his rather post-Heideggerean philosophical commentaries, Calhoun tells a tale of 1830 in prose that could only have been written in 1990. And why the hell not?—it was written in 1990, which I take to be Johnson's point: text cannot be separated from context, and the past only comes to us through our conceptual filters, language above all.
Johnson, like his forebears in Enlightenment skepticism and Romantic irony, is what we, with our limited grasp of literary history, would call a postmodern metafictionist: he both tells a historical tale and consistently alerts the reader to the tale's fictionality and historicity. He seduces the reader with all manner of adventure, from shipwreck to marriage plot, even as he comments on his literary precursors.
Here is the tale: the year is 1830 and Rutherford Calhoun is a young manumitted slave from Illinois whose conscience-stricken master educated him mightily, teaching him about "Neoplatonism, the evils of nominalism, the genius of Aquinas, and the work of such seers as Jakob Böhme," so as to make him "a Negro preacher, perhaps even a black saint." But Calhoun—shaped by a rivalry with his pious brother—wants no part of sainthood and flees upon being freed to the humid pleasures of New Orleans ("a great whore of a city in her glory") to support himself as a petty thief. He eventually becomes caught up in a relationship with a respectable woman who threatens to "sivilize" him (I quote Huckleberry Finn—the boyish opposition to female society is the same in both novels, though not ultimately valorized in Johnson's) and goes to extraordinary lengths to get him the altar—to wit, she has him threatened by the Creole gangster Papa Zeringue. So Calhoun takes to to the sea, stowing away on the semi-ironically named Republic, an illegal slaver under the command of Captain Falcon—a man who represents the best and worst of America, its endless willful individualist determination that respects no traditions and its consequent neglect of or violence toward other persons who would get in the way of the expansive self. (Falcon is both Ahab and Emerson—Calhoun observes that he has titled a set of written exercises "Self-Reliance.") Falcon's mission is to enslave for his investors the fictional Allmuseri people, "a whole tribe…of devil-worshipping, spell-casting wizards," in one character's description—they are an pre-modern/post-modern anti-civilization of exemplary non-essentialists, half-Buddhist, half-pre-Socratic, an "Ur-people" who have traveled the world bringing their wisdom to Mexico and India, but now subject to the merely material power of the dualistic white man and his brute mechanical anti-magic. But Falcon is not only after the people; he is also after their god, a frightening all-deity unlike monotheism's benign father, a divinity that encompasses or perhaps is the whole universe. Eventually, the Allmuseri are captured and then they rebel in turn, commandeering the Republic and inverting its moral universe as they attempt to return to Africa. The second half of the novel narrates how Calhoun survives these calamities at sea and what he learns from the moral quandaries they raise.
As noted above, Middle Passage wears any number of influences on its sleeve, but its presiding author-deities are Melville and Ellison. Like them, Johnson gives his narrator a distinctively American style that delights in the mix of registers, "blending the languages of house and field, street and seminary." Moby-Dick is present in Johnson's speech-making mad captain with his metaphysical quarry (the whale for Ahab, the Allmuseri god for Falcon). But, if I were given to writing in glib blurb-speak, I might say that Middle Passage crosses Benito Cereno with Invisible Man. Johnson takes Ellison's polytropic narrator and puts him on a nineteenth-century slaver, there to reflect on his Americanism, his relation to Africa, his inheritance of European thought, and his responsibilities (if any) to his fellow men and women, whether white or black. The animating dilemma, as in Melville's novella, comes from a slave revolt at sea—Johnson introduces rebellious slaves named Atufal and Babo and has another character allude to "how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their tales" to make sure we are thinking of Benito Cereno. Whereas Melville critically scrutinized the white man's ideology of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, Johnson turns a similarly critical eye on what he sees as limitations in black American thought at the end of the twentieth century. Like Ellison, he concludes, against various radical traditions, that the African-American's home is America:
If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives—this cauldron of mongrels from all points on the compass—was all I could rightly call home, then aye: I was of it. […] Do I sound like a patriot? Brother, I put it to you: What Negro, in his heart (if he's not a hypocrite), is not?Through his characters, Johnson gently mocks Afrocentrism and related reductive forms of identitarian rebellion, while being quite clear about the horrifying circumstances that made and make them seem reasonable or necessary. The Allmuseri, Calhoun observes, have been changed by their experiences—thus, there is no possibility of their recovering a pure, unspoiled essence—and they have moreover made themselves over in the image of their oppressors in the course of their revolution, seeking power and purity and so denying the world's Heraclitean flux. They thus betray the best of their own worldview, which is incarnated in their language: "Nouns or static substances hardly existed in their vocabulary at all." Their revolt has turned them into nouns.
In the novel's complicated ethical and political argument, the individual must be affirmed precisely because he is created and constituted by others. Because the ego is an illusion (Johnson, by the bye, is a Buddhist) and the self a composite, it is all the more valuable in its variety, through which the elemental unity streams (Johnson, by the bye, wrote an introduction to a collection of Emerson, wherein he praises the Transcendentalist almost unstintingly). Any ideology that would try to freeze that variety, whether in the name of domination or resistance, is a sin against the world-spirit.
Johnson does allows that western philosophy's dualism has made certain achievements and discoveries possible that rigorously monistic societies could probably not have attained: as Captain Falcon says,
"The Allmuseri god is everything, so the very knowing situation we mortals rely on—a separation between knower and known—never rises in its experience. You might say empirical knowledge is on man's side, not God's."But Falcon elsewhere in the novel explains to Calhoun the logical terminus of the separation between knower and known (Johnson, by the bye, has a Ph.D. in philosophy):
“Conflict,” says he, “is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other—these ancient twins are built into the mind like the steam-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound.”*Calhoun's narrative challenges Falcon's view: the novel itself (not only this one, but the very form) is therapy for philosophy, having more in common with the Allmuseri's all-embracing worldview. The novel undoes the distinctions dualistic philosophy makes—between high and low style, between Africa and America, between past and present**—and allows Rutherford Calhoun to stop merely reacting and instead become a free man in free relations with others, wide as "countless seas of suffering."
Middle Passage is, overall, a fantastic fictional invention, a blessedly bizarre book that, I concede, does not always work—the mixed style is sometimes a little too precious, and the dialogue often verges on pirate-speak; Johnson lets Calhoun's narrative voice essay and assert about matters that really ought to be dramatized; the Allmuseri never come alive but exist mostly as a concept; and the preponderantly happy ending feels ever-so-slightly inadequate to its antecedent events. Middle Passage's ideas are more vivid than its emotions, its concepts than its characters; it is the best novel written by a philosopher that I can imagine, but it is a novel written by a philosopher. Nevertheless, its dense brevity, its rich style, its unpredictable plot, its wild shifts of tone, its complex intellectual excursions, and its dissident politics all make it well worth reading—not least because of its potential to unsettle some of the aesthetic and political orthodoxies of today.
________________________________
*Shades of Judge Holden—I suspect that Johnson read Blood Meridian sometime during the composition of Middle Passage, though the debt of both novels to Melville is perhaps large enough to explain the similarities.
**Hence Calhoun's thoroughly and amusingly anachronistic vocabulary, which has annoyed so many Goodreads and Amazon reviewers; from his use of words like "cute" and "cultural" in their contemporary—not nineteenth-century—senses to his rather post-Heideggerean philosophical commentaries, Calhoun tells a tale of 1830 in prose that could only have been written in 1990. And why the hell not?—it was written in 1990, which I take to be Johnson's point: text cannot be separated from context, and the past only comes to us through our conceptual filters, language above all.
July 28, 2013
Maybe I missed whatever the National Book Award people saw in this, but I thought this book was terrible.
Jamrach's Menagerie is a much better book based on similar themes and setting. What kills the book is the narrator. The book is first person,written by a freed slave, as journal entries in a ship's log. I realize that this is a stylistic choice the author has made, but in this case it is a spectacularly stupid one. What freed slave from Illinois, who describes himself as "used to cornfields and cowplops"writing in 1830 would use words and phrases like these?
Ur type
Neoplatonism
Disquisitions
Oubliette
Portmanteau
Glandular
Labyrinthine
Social parasite
Nominalism
Liquescent
Opalescent
Omnific
Metaphysically
In these only in the first FIVE pages of the book. Hey don't get me wrong I love spelling bee words as much as the next serious reader, but it seems well past absurd to put them in the mouth of this particular narrator. It's almost as if Johnson is still pissed about Harriet Beecher Stowe making all her black characters speak like slow children, and has selected this book and its narrator as his revenge on old Harriet. It does not work. The rest of the book isn't much better, but truly the narrator's voice was so awful I doubt even a great plot or descriptive talents could have saved this for me.
Jamrach's Menagerie is a much better book based on similar themes and setting. What kills the book is the narrator. The book is first person,written by a freed slave, as journal entries in a ship's log. I realize that this is a stylistic choice the author has made, but in this case it is a spectacularly stupid one. What freed slave from Illinois, who describes himself as "used to cornfields and cowplops"writing in 1830 would use words and phrases like these?
Ur type
Neoplatonism
Disquisitions
Oubliette
Portmanteau
Glandular
Labyrinthine
Social parasite
Nominalism
Liquescent
Opalescent
Omnific
Metaphysically
In these only in the first FIVE pages of the book. Hey don't get me wrong I love spelling bee words as much as the next serious reader, but it seems well past absurd to put them in the mouth of this particular narrator. It's almost as if Johnson is still pissed about Harriet Beecher Stowe making all her black characters speak like slow children, and has selected this book and its narrator as his revenge on old Harriet. It does not work. The rest of the book isn't much better, but truly the narrator's voice was so awful I doubt even a great plot or descriptive talents could have saved this for me.
February 10, 2010
I had to read this for school, and I honestly wouldn't have read it all the way if it wasn't that I had to for class. Initially, I was put off by the narrator's time-inappropriate voice. Supposedly, we are reading the journal of a freed slave in 1830. However, he sounds like a scholarly modern man.
The more I read, though, the more I understood that this was exactly the writer's intention, and that much of the message of the book lies in this paradoxical narrator. For one thing, I believe the author is trying to imagine what it would be like to be in the 1830's, while also trying to make the readers understand what it meant to be black back then, and how so much has changed, yet so much has staid the same.
The plot is also very funny, though sometimes stretching believability. Again, I don't think the author tried to give us a believable plot, but rather point out some important questions about life and literature in writing like this.
The book was entertaining, easy to read, yet challenging on so many levels. Highly recommended.
The more I read, though, the more I understood that this was exactly the writer's intention, and that much of the message of the book lies in this paradoxical narrator. For one thing, I believe the author is trying to imagine what it would be like to be in the 1830's, while also trying to make the readers understand what it meant to be black back then, and how so much has changed, yet so much has staid the same.
The plot is also very funny, though sometimes stretching believability. Again, I don't think the author tried to give us a believable plot, but rather point out some important questions about life and literature in writing like this.
The book was entertaining, easy to read, yet challenging on so many levels. Highly recommended.
October 16, 2016
A northern, manumissioned, educated, black scoundrel who found his way to the French-becoming-overrun-by-Kaintucks mash up of worlds that was 1830 New Orleans, escapes his debts and worse, matrimony, by playing stupid (a skill mastered, and apparently necessary for survival, among educated free blacks when confronted by white idiots who needed to feel that their accidents of womb made them superior - often used in Benjamin January novels) and landing himself (unbeknownst to him) on a slaver. So, he is off to Senegambia on a ship planning to take a “special” load back, illegally by then. The journey is life altering, needless to say, and this book is a really well written adventure wherein even the really creepy guys are interesting, (like Falcon and some of his sad, disconnected philosophies).
There is something so overwhelmingly, unconscionably evil about what went on for four hundred years, rationalized by allegedly religious? civilized? potentially deliberative? humans? That vicious cruelty - beyond belief - which still poisons the USA - literally (Flint’s poisoned water, the epidemic of police murders of unarmed black men & women, etc) and in so many other ways (mass incarceration allowing “legal” slavery, discrimination in hiring, job advancement, crappy schools in black hoods, red lining etc etc) that still continue to rob the descendants of this historical evil, daily.
But the beginning - the capture, capture of humans, separation of families, the complete theft of all dignity and humanity. Chaining them naked in vomit and shit filled bilges, front to back, given the absolute minimum to survive (and the many who did not, cursorily tossed overboard, then to people the City of Bones) to travel the 6,000 miles of the Middle Passage. The reward for survival? Work as a slave, beaten, raped, sold. That amount of evil has to have created a powerful antidote, opposing force, and the “secret cargo” in this novel suggests one possibility, although i like to think we haven’t seen it yet, and that it is much more powerful. But what do i know? ‘Bout that time my ancestors were farming Norway and fishing off Bournemouth. They did nothing to stop it.
If it weren’t for the gillion words i had to look up, (on one page there were SIX*) this was a pretty perfect book.
*this vocabopenia is particularly humbling as this is officially a YA book, (?) and i’ve had, they tell me, 12 years of post-collegiate education. Hrrumph. Did others have this experience, too?
There is something so overwhelmingly, unconscionably evil about what went on for four hundred years, rationalized by allegedly religious? civilized? potentially deliberative? humans? That vicious cruelty - beyond belief - which still poisons the USA - literally (Flint’s poisoned water, the epidemic of police murders of unarmed black men & women, etc) and in so many other ways (mass incarceration allowing “legal” slavery, discrimination in hiring, job advancement, crappy schools in black hoods, red lining etc etc) that still continue to rob the descendants of this historical evil, daily.
But the beginning - the capture, capture of humans, separation of families, the complete theft of all dignity and humanity. Chaining them naked in vomit and shit filled bilges, front to back, given the absolute minimum to survive (and the many who did not, cursorily tossed overboard, then to people the City of Bones) to travel the 6,000 miles of the Middle Passage. The reward for survival? Work as a slave, beaten, raped, sold. That amount of evil has to have created a powerful antidote, opposing force, and the “secret cargo” in this novel suggests one possibility, although i like to think we haven’t seen it yet, and that it is much more powerful. But what do i know? ‘Bout that time my ancestors were farming Norway and fishing off Bournemouth. They did nothing to stop it.
If it weren’t for the gillion words i had to look up, (on one page there were SIX*) this was a pretty perfect book.
*this vocabopenia is particularly humbling as this is officially a YA book, (?) and i’ve had, they tell me, 12 years of post-collegiate education. Hrrumph. Did others have this experience, too?
May 30, 2008
This was the perfect foil for Alexie's
The Toughest Indian in the World
. Johnson's novel is every bit as full of political and cultural commentary, is in fact a devastating indictment of slave-trading, but those points of view rise naturally out of the narrative, appear simply as facts littered about the story, rather than the other way around. There's a reason Johnson's book won the National Book Award and Alexie's didn't: literary art. Comparing these two books in a lit class would be quite useful I think. Enough of that. This book seduced me from the first paragraph. An engaging and complex narrative voice that I wanted to keep listening to. I think Johnson captured that 1800s narrative style perfectly. A key feature of that style is the desire of the narrator to tell a story, to make it interesting and exciting to hear. It's like sitting around a campfire listening to a ghost story. In this style you put in many of the embellishments that any well-respecting writing workshop would tell you to take out. A close read of the sentences, though, shows that it is not just an adjectival frenzy. The prose bursts with concrete details, a sensory world built on nouns and verbs.
January 30, 2016
It begins deceptively with cheeky humor from the mind of an ex-slave and street urchin making his way, dishonestly but not maliciously, in the world. But when the setting turns early on from New Orleans—deliciously realized as that “town devoted to an almost religious pursuit of Sin”—to the open sea, the mood shifts noticeably. I suppose any book about the Middle Passage has no business being light, and this one delivers on the horror. Our protagonist confronts slavery, mutiny, starvation, disease, shipwreck, not to mention the supernatural echoes of his past. All of this culminates unexpectedly in a Hollywood ending that leaves you a little shell shocked. How did we get here? You don’t really know, nor are you really convinced that it all worked; for all that this book touches on profound themes, you don’t quite buy it or the characters. Still, a good enough read with a distinctive narrative voice many will doubtless love.
December 9, 2013
This was not at all what I was expecting. I expected a realist novel. This is much more a picaresque. It's full of the gruesomeness you'd expect from a novel about a slave ship undergoing a mutiny, but it's also very over-the-top in terms of the richness of the language (the first person narrator is a freed slave, with a great deal of self-education and knowledge for a slave, but no freed slave regardless of how educated would narrate his experiences like Harold Bloom after a few drinks) and the hallucinatory wackiness of certain plot points, which almost verge on magical realism. It slants more toward comedy than tragedy.
Still, it bored me. It's a short book and I read it in one sitting.
September 4, 2009
Freshman book of some kind at Stanford. I remember it being dreadful. I went to see Charles Johnson speak afterwards; one of the things he talked about was learning words by reading the dictionary. While this is something I myself do/might aspire to do, the book kind of illustrated the worst of that--the vocabulary was graduate school English student, but the depth of the story was young adult novel.
July 1, 2015
I read this book about halfway, not getting it, before I realized that Charles Johnson is writing not exactly fable - more like myth - in Middle Passage, as opposed to fictive truth. The speaker is a manumitted eighteen-year old New Orleans slave, writing an 1830 ship log account of a voyage - Greek in proportion, Melvillian in symbolic import - that is somehow empty in central characterization. This speaker, despite his youth and former social status, has the wit and prescience to mouth French philosophy, more than a century ahead of its having been written - he knows Levi-Strauss, Sartre, Barthes and Derrida well in advance of their having been born. Of course I found it annoying, even though I wanted to know where Johnson was headed with all this, and I was worried about the National Book Award. There had to be a reason for it. Certainly Johnson could not hoodwink an entire culture of literary criticism. There is a scene late in the novel where a side character, who has a gift for mimicry, satirizes the various persons on board, including the narrator. I read this section with great focus, trying to stivvy out something - anything. This late in the book I still did not know my character. The impersonation yielded nothing concrete, and it was about then I realized - all this anachronistic emptiness is neither egregious error or posturing - it's deliberate. The speaker is Everyman, an empty shell, wherein fit the multitude of supporting characters as well as readers, contemporary readers familiar with postmodern criticism and culture. Johnson is under no obligation to adhere to broad principles, even, of historical fact because neither the characters or the journey are real - in a fictive sense. We are not asked to believe in them, but to interrogate them as we do mythic figures - turn them around, bang on them, query them for meaning. I would have to read the book again, from start to finish, to determine whether or not I believe Johnson is successful, but it's a laudable attempt, at any rate. 4 stars.
January 2, 2016
What a book. I'd never heard of it until I picked it up--the consequences of growing up in Canada, I guess. I'm so sorry it took me so long to find it--Johnson's style is wonderful, a delight to read, and his hero Rutherford Calhoun is a model of the picaresque. Strange to say that a story about a slave ship could be in any way humorous, but Johnson is a supreme talent and he makes it so. This is a slim book but the plot changes happen so fast that every page is packed. Nothing happens that isn't the most *interesting* thing that could happen, under the circumstances. Without sentimentality or apology for the horrors of slavery, Johnson makes all of his characters real and dazzles with language and style.
February 15, 2008
This is a fictional Middle Passage travelogue/slave narrative complete with surreal comedy, an African culture-monster in the hold, an Ahabian ship captain, and much metaphorical food to chew on. Loved every page of it. The narrator is an incorrigible thief and coward who undergoes a transformation of character...or maybe doesn't.
February 1, 2016
It seems to me that one of the best things about being a member of Goodreads is the process of writing about the book you just finished: expunging and cleansing yourself of all that built up terror and awe of the sheer craftsmanship when it comes to the written word. I finished Middle Passage around five minutes ago, and found it within myself to write something about it here, and by God, it's making me feel really good.
So, what's Middle Passage about? It's about a freed slave who finds himself on board a slaver ship, and finds his entire perspective towards the world change over a period of some three months at sea. He is exposed to a culture he has only assumed things about; he is exposed to indecencies and filth and extreme squalor and is made to do the unimaginable and the grotesque in order to survive. He also meets a God, and has some brilliant discussions with the Captain of this ship, who reminded me of the character called Judge from Blood Meridian: at once erudite and cruel, sophisticated and depraved, he is a fascinating yet repulsive character who might have filled in more pages if this novel had had the trappings of an epic. But I think it's good thing this isn't a novel of so called epic proportions: if three months has the capacity to change a man as it does Rutherford Calhoun, then why put the reader through hundreds of pages more, where the temptation to be vague and philosophical might take over the otherwise strong narrative urge?
The book is exceedingly well written. Clubbed together with Toni Morrison's Beloved for our college course on Neo-Slave Narratives and Contemporary Fictions, I came away pleasantly surprised and extremely moved. It also struck me how, like Beloved, the use of the fantastic in this novel is extremely subtle, but substantially changes the reception of the words on the reader's mind. The narrator frequently betrays his less than modest upbringing as a poor slave hand, and liberally alludes to everyone from Newton to Hegel every step of the way. Also, like I mentioned, there's a God on the ship, and his encounter with this creature is a surprising and slightly strange one, in the overarching context of the book. But apart from the wonder that such elements afford, they also puts the entire novel in perspective: all too often, historical narratives are dry retellings of fact, possessing nothing in them to call new, especially since they have taken place ages ago, in a time we presumably know too much about for it to appear new. But the true artist will always find the means of manipulating fact and presenting us in ways that always feel new and moving, and Johnson is clearly one such artist.
However, if there is one fault I had to find with the book, it would be how it ends. For someone who has endured everything that he does on board, Calhoun's return to a happy family life might feel a little disingenuous to some readers. Granted, you'll most likely be still cheering for him somewhere inside of you, but the book, in its best moments, might remind you of something H.G.Wells might have penned, or something Swift might have attempted, so as to make you certain that the protagonist, after surviving his perilous journey at sea, would become something of a misanthrope, a hermetic and relinquish all worldly desires and see them for what they are: distractions, at best.
Having said all of that, I am glad for having read this book. It will go down as one of the strongest books I will have read this year, and perhaps for the last several years.
So, what's Middle Passage about? It's about a freed slave who finds himself on board a slaver ship, and finds his entire perspective towards the world change over a period of some three months at sea. He is exposed to a culture he has only assumed things about; he is exposed to indecencies and filth and extreme squalor and is made to do the unimaginable and the grotesque in order to survive. He also meets a God, and has some brilliant discussions with the Captain of this ship, who reminded me of the character called Judge from Blood Meridian: at once erudite and cruel, sophisticated and depraved, he is a fascinating yet repulsive character who might have filled in more pages if this novel had had the trappings of an epic. But I think it's good thing this isn't a novel of so called epic proportions: if three months has the capacity to change a man as it does Rutherford Calhoun, then why put the reader through hundreds of pages more, where the temptation to be vague and philosophical might take over the otherwise strong narrative urge?
The book is exceedingly well written. Clubbed together with Toni Morrison's Beloved for our college course on Neo-Slave Narratives and Contemporary Fictions, I came away pleasantly surprised and extremely moved. It also struck me how, like Beloved, the use of the fantastic in this novel is extremely subtle, but substantially changes the reception of the words on the reader's mind. The narrator frequently betrays his less than modest upbringing as a poor slave hand, and liberally alludes to everyone from Newton to Hegel every step of the way. Also, like I mentioned, there's a God on the ship, and his encounter with this creature is a surprising and slightly strange one, in the overarching context of the book. But apart from the wonder that such elements afford, they also puts the entire novel in perspective: all too often, historical narratives are dry retellings of fact, possessing nothing in them to call new, especially since they have taken place ages ago, in a time we presumably know too much about for it to appear new. But the true artist will always find the means of manipulating fact and presenting us in ways that always feel new and moving, and Johnson is clearly one such artist.
However, if there is one fault I had to find with the book, it would be how it ends. For someone who has endured everything that he does on board, Calhoun's return to a happy family life might feel a little disingenuous to some readers. Granted, you'll most likely be still cheering for him somewhere inside of you, but the book, in its best moments, might remind you of something H.G.Wells might have penned, or something Swift might have attempted, so as to make you certain that the protagonist, after surviving his perilous journey at sea, would become something of a misanthrope, a hermetic and relinquish all worldly desires and see them for what they are: distractions, at best.
Having said all of that, I am glad for having read this book. It will go down as one of the strongest books I will have read this year, and perhaps for the last several years.
May 11, 2016
Not a perfect or a 'grand' novel by any stretch but I will say that, in many instances, there are seeds of greatness here that I can completely see bearing fruit in later works by this author. Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage" is a bold literary experiment in many ways; firstly, it attempts to wrest the slave narrative from the grip of austerity and arch seriousness and into something far more, well, I won't say 'fun' but I will borrow one of the words used frequently to describe the text: picaresque (and the fact that the intro mentions Saul Bellow, Mr Augie I'm so god damn picaresque it hurts to smile when I smile March). Secondly, this is a very positive minded work. Now, it's not positive in the sense that it attempts to make slavery a pleasant part of history (it's not quite Life is Beautiful about it) and the details depicted in the text inhering in the slave trade are suitably horrific. But over the course of the novel I couldn't help but feel that Johnson was trying to tell a distinctly 'happy' story. This happiness finds fertile soil in the various gestures towards a more Eastern understanding of the world (specifically rooted, authorial fallacy spare me, in Charles Johnson's noted Buddhism) and in the various bits of humor (some of it lame and failed but most of it actually fairly funny) laced throughout the text.
But, overall, this is a good novel, rock solid even. It answers the gloom and misery and perpetual sense of alienation of postmodernism with a kind of joie de vive in writing and verbiage that would make the likes of Bellow, Updike and Nabokov proud. However, this is not without its problems as more than a few times (especially towards the beginning) Johnson's style choices came off as increasingly twee and even saccharine at times. Hell, there were more than a few moments where I have expected Rutherford Calhoun to burst into an Oklahoma style musical number. Luckily, Johnson learns to rein himself in while maintaining his sense of authorial exuberance, a tricky divide to negotiate and one he does, for the most part (especially closer to the novel's conclusion) with aplomb.
So, this is worth a read, most definitely. Just grin and bear the author's quite frankly dorky predilections for the first fifty or so pages and you will find an incredibly meritorious work just waiting for your appreciation and study.
But, overall, this is a good novel, rock solid even. It answers the gloom and misery and perpetual sense of alienation of postmodernism with a kind of joie de vive in writing and verbiage that would make the likes of Bellow, Updike and Nabokov proud. However, this is not without its problems as more than a few times (especially towards the beginning) Johnson's style choices came off as increasingly twee and even saccharine at times. Hell, there were more than a few moments where I have expected Rutherford Calhoun to burst into an Oklahoma style musical number. Luckily, Johnson learns to rein himself in while maintaining his sense of authorial exuberance, a tricky divide to negotiate and one he does, for the most part (especially closer to the novel's conclusion) with aplomb.
So, this is worth a read, most definitely. Just grin and bear the author's quite frankly dorky predilections for the first fifty or so pages and you will find an incredibly meritorious work just waiting for your appreciation and study.
February 29, 2016
This is a great adventure novel, but far more than that. A black freedman, Rutherford Calhoun is a ne'er do well who had educational opportunities, but preferred a life of petty theft, drinking, gambling and womanizing. He plans an escape from a possibly forced marriage (to a plain, prim New England school teacher he meets in New Orleans, where he has drifted.) and debts which he cannot pay. Unfortunately, his plan involves smuggling himself aboard a ship due to depart the following day.
The ship, it turns out , is a slaver headed for the west coast of Africa to pick up human cargo, among other items.
The captain is brilliant, but also probably mad, most of the crew are men of the lowest character, and the slaves are from an ancient tribe of sorcerers.
Needless to say, this heady brew will bring forth crises of the worst kind--plans for mutiny, slave rebellion and eventual destruction of the ship. A few souls are saved by a casino ship off of Guadaloupe and Rutherford finds himself quite back where he started from.
Only he is not the same man who left. The author, whose prose is wonderful, seems to create an analogy between the Middle Passage of a slave ship and the passage of Rutherford from his former self into someone more reflective, more aware, more mature. The crises and near death he experienced on the ship have created a new outlook. He has had to re-evaluate what it means to be loyal, and to decide where his loyalties lie, and to learn about relationships in a new way. All this serves him well when he again encounters his old nemesis, Zeringue, and his old pursuer, the school teacher.
This is a brief book, but it is packed with philosophy, history and, in a fast-moving story, encapsulates important ideas about self-knowledge .
Highly recommended!
The ship, it turns out , is a slaver headed for the west coast of Africa to pick up human cargo, among other items.
The captain is brilliant, but also probably mad, most of the crew are men of the lowest character, and the slaves are from an ancient tribe of sorcerers.
Needless to say, this heady brew will bring forth crises of the worst kind--plans for mutiny, slave rebellion and eventual destruction of the ship. A few souls are saved by a casino ship off of Guadaloupe and Rutherford finds himself quite back where he started from.
Only he is not the same man who left. The author, whose prose is wonderful, seems to create an analogy between the Middle Passage of a slave ship and the passage of Rutherford from his former self into someone more reflective, more aware, more mature. The crises and near death he experienced on the ship have created a new outlook. He has had to re-evaluate what it means to be loyal, and to decide where his loyalties lie, and to learn about relationships in a new way. All this serves him well when he again encounters his old nemesis, Zeringue, and his old pursuer, the school teacher.
This is a brief book, but it is packed with philosophy, history and, in a fast-moving story, encapsulates important ideas about self-knowledge .
Highly recommended!
August 25, 2010
OK, so admittedly I thought that this was going to be a hyper-serious, quasi-historical, Important book about the slave trade. Man, I was wrong. Instead, the book was a comic romp. Rutherford Calhoun is a recently freedman from Illinois who arrives in New Orleans with a serious penchant for wild parties and wild women. When a series of missteps, or, to be more exact, his lifestyle lands him in hot water he must decide to marry the naive schoolteacher that has taken pity on him or, well, pay off his debts and live a respectable life. Neither is an option. Instead, he opts to stowaway on a ship--the Rebublic-- bound for Africa...to pick up a cargo load of mystic African tribesman to be sold as slaves. The crew of the Republic is comprised of every type of lowlife you can imagine, a real motley crew if ever there was one. Upon return, Rutherford finds himself in the middle of a slave rebellion and must choose between his past and his present. The choice, such as it is, paves the way for a new, unimagined future. As much as Gatsby or Huck Finn this IS the story of America.
April 8, 2018
This history book has a history with me. I picked it at the Creston, CA library in the 1995, which I find interesting since Creston only has a population of 200, and so I would not expect them to have this book. I mean, the library is a hole in the wall. I began reading it and finished the first chapter, but then we were getting ready to move, so I took it back. I remembered how well I enjoyed the writing in it, so I remembered the title. A few years ago I bought the book, and after a few years I finally picked it up again. Now I have forgotten the story, but others on here have done made great reviews.
August 30, 2011
This book had been sitting in a box in my basement for years. Someone gave it to me, and because I never quite felt in the mood to sit down and read a book about the Middle Passage, I put it in a box and proceeded to move six times. Two weeks ago, I was down in the basement looking for an extension cord to whip my stepkid with, and I came across that box, and because I was feeling gloomy, I picked up this book. And what a damn treat! It was engaging as hell. I sat down, read the whole thing, and instead of whipping my stepkid, I ended up taking him out to KFC.
October 22, 2012
This is the funny and harrowing tale of a scoundrel-fool who boards a ship as a stowaway in an attempt to ditch a woman. The problem? He is a free black aboard a slave ship. I don't know how Charles Johnson managed to compress so many ideas and historical references, time periods, and personalities into this riveting and cheeky tale, but I loved every page even when my face was contorted with disgust! Even though it is a page-turner, it is also a rich read, so I look forward to re-reading it and experiencing more revelations.
July 14, 2019
Vivid, funny, horrifying, learned, thought-provoking, and even rather sweet in the end, this is what every book should be. It may sound disrespectful, or even crazy, to describe a book about the horrors of the Middle Passage as "entertaining," but this novel engages the reader on every level, not least of which through its display of Charles Johnson's mastery--and obvious love--of the language. I don't know how many times I stopped and re-read a passage just for the sheer joy of what he does with words. A deeply serious book that is also a page-turner, brilliant from beginning to end.
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