Middle Passage
by Charles Johnson
Summary
Rutherford Calhoun is a freed slave, a practiced petty thief and an accomplished liar, at large in New Orleans in 1830 and enjoying it thoroughly until his debts and a marriage minded schoolteacher named Isadora close in together. Offered a choice between a forced wedding and his creditors, he takes a third option and stows away on the first ship out. The Republic, he discovers at sea, is a slaver, bound for the Guinea coast.
Its captain is Ebenezer Falcon, a dwarfish, brilliant monster, patriot, polymath and torturer, one of the great grotesques in American fiction, and its cargo, taken aboard off the coast, is forty members of the Allmuseri, a tribe Johnson invents as a kind of philosophical opposite to the West: a people without a concept of property or of the singular self. Also crated below decks is something Falcon says is their god.
Calhoun, the ship's least principled man, becomes its recording conscience: the log the reader holds is his. Storm, mutiny and the Allmuseri uprising strip the ship of its hierarchy and then of its seaworthiness, and the middle passage becomes a floating philosophy seminar conducted at the edge of starvation, Calhoun caught between the crew he shipped with and the captives whose way of being starts remaking him. The rescue, and who conducts it, closes the circle on New Orleans, Isadora, and a changed man's accounting.
Around two hundred pages, fast, funny and horrifying by turns.
Best for readers who want the slave trade confronted in the form of a sea yarn, Melville's genre steered by a Buddhist philosopher.
Historical Context & Significance
Middle Passage won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990, making Charles Johnson the first African American man to win it since Ralph Ellison won in 1953; his acceptance speech that night was a tribute to Ellison.
Johnson is that program in person: a philosophy PhD, a practising Buddhist, a cartoonist in his first career and a student of John Gardner, and the novel wears its learning openly, the Allmuseri serving as a thought experiment about selfhood smuggled inside a nautical adventure. Reviewers reached for Melville, as the book intends; the ship's very name, the Republic, does the political arithmetic aloud.
It remains his central book, flanked by Oxherding Tale and Dreamer, and a fixture of the canon debates it helped provoke: proof, arriving at the exact moment the multicultural canon wars began, that the historical novel of slavery could be comic, metaphysical and unconsoling at once.