Background on Middle Passage BY: CHARLES JOHNSON Dear Jude Morris: I'm sending you a talk I've given at many schools (first at Stanford in 1999) where all the students on campus were assigned MIDDLE PASSAGE. This version (below) was given at Wofford College in Spantanburg, S.C. a couple of years ago. All best, Charles JohnsonThank you all for reading Middle Passage. It's been some time since I looked at this novel, so I imagine all of you know it far better than I do right now. And I know you probably have questions about Middle Passage. This morning I will like to try to answer some of those questions by giving you a description of the novel's genesis, what I call the story behind the story you read last summer. I would also like to do my best to respond to the one-page papers written by eight wonderful, young critics here at Wofford College: Laura Vaugh, Anna-Maria Clark, Keely Mohon, Byron Fields, Gaby Dido, Rachel Moore, Patrick Holland Brennan, and Rhea DeJesus. All of them gave thoughtful and provocative answers to the difficult question, "Are you Rutherford?" But I have to ask you to please be patient with me as I excavate the history of this novel because every work of art is, first and foremost, a process of discovery for the reader and the writer both. And when I say discovery I mean just that. The writer discovers his characters and what they will do during the process of creation---and not before. He discovers a great deal about himself, and he is always changed by the story for which he has simply served as a midwife. I suppose I should start by saying that until I wrote Middle Passage there was nowhere in our literature a novel that dramatized the specifics of the North Atlantic slave trade. There was no work of imaginative fiction that placed a reader on those ships and as a slave. As a writer, I tend to be drawn to subjects that have not been explored before---and most of black American history (which is American history) remains "invisible," as the late Ralph Ellison might say, marginalized and until recently removed from our history books. But in the case of Middle Passage, I did find a couple of interesting precedents to work with. One was the much-anthologized poem called "Middle Passage" by Robert Hayden, which appears in my novel as an epigraph. Another precedent was a play called "Slave Ship," written in the 1970s by Amiri Baraka, one of the principal theoreticians of the Black Arts Movement. And, finally, I knew of a third work from African-American culture that concerns black people on ships. It's a "toast." In other words, a drinking-song. The title is "And Shine Swam On." I doubt that many of you are old enough to know this toast, so I'll tell you about it. The character Shine is a black cook on the Titanic (And, no, you did not see him in James Cameron's movie). Shine is an exceptionally good swimmer, so when the Titanic hits that iceberg and begins to sink, Shine jumps into the water and starts stroking for land. In the toast, the ship's captain comes to the rail as the Titanic sinks. He sees Shine swimming away, and he calls out, Shine, shine, save poor me, and I'll give you more money that a Negro can see. Shine thought about this as he kept swimming, and he replied, There's money on land, and there's money at sea, but the money on land is the money for me. The toast continues, with everyone on board ship pleading with Shine to save them, including the captain's beautiful daughter---you can imagine what she offered him---but always each stanza ends with the words, And Shine swam on.... Except for these three examples, I knew when I started Middle Passage of no other black mariners, although there is a rich, almost unknown history of black Americans and the sea. (If this subject interests you, I suggest you read a splendid book by W. Jeffrey Bolster, called Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail.) I wrote the first draft of Middle Passage in 1971 when I was still an undergraduate. It was my second novel, and it was not successfully executed at all. The idea for the story first came to me when I was sitting in a survey course on black American history. Back in the late 1960s, Black Studies courses were just beginning, and there were very few black teachers at American universities. At the school I attended, the black graduate students from different fields served as teachers for the first Black Studies courses, and undergraduates like me served as leaders of discussion groups. So one day I was sitting in an auditorium filled with about 300 people, and one of the black graduate students put a slide on the overhead projector. It was the famous image of a cross-section of a slave ship in which Africans were pressed together "spoon-fashion." I was mesmerized. This haunting and horrible image burned itself into the emulsion of my memory, and it would not leave me alone. So when I started seriously writing fiction in 1970, I felt I had to imagine myself on those ships from the moment captured black men and women were taken from the slave factories on the west coast of Africa into the bowels of boats like The Republic. I felt I needed to feel from the inside what those Africans---my ancestors---experienced on a daily basis during a voyage comparable only to the Holocaust. My first step in preparing to write the novel was to ask one of my professors in a Black Studies course----he was a visiting professor in 1971---if I could do my research paper for his history class on the slave trade. He agreed. So the work I did for his class plunged me into a rudimentary investigation of the slave trade. But there was a problem. In that first draft, I told the story from the viewpoint of a white ship's captain. And what I discovered was that he was not able to easily enter into the non-Western culture of the Africans he brought on board his ship. In 1971, I didn't know how to solve this problem, so I put the novel away. I went on to write other books, like my first published novel Faith and the Good Thing, which I wrote in nine months under the guidance of the late John Gardner. More importantly, though, I began work on a second novel that I would devote five years to, a book called Oxherding Tale, which is a philosophical slave narrative. By that time I was in graduate school, in a Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. After teaching my class as a TA, and after taking my courses, I went to the graduate library and spent hours each night speed-reading every book on slavery they had in 1975. I was still working on Oxherding Tale in 1976 when I was hired as a professor at the University of Washington, and I continued my research on slavery there. Added to which in 1977 I wrote the first of many PBS docu-dramas that I would be called upon to do for WGBH in Boston. The first show was about the oldest living American, whose name was Charlie Smith----he was captured in Liberia in 1848, sold to a Texas rancher, and he lived to be 138-years-old. For this show, which was broadcast in 1978, WGBH provided me with lots of research. That research was very useful for Oxherding Tale, which I published in 1982 after throwing away 2,400 pages. And Oxherding Tale was very useful for Middle Passage. If you ever have a chance to read that second novel, you'll discover that it is a first-person slave narrative, an odyssey of a young slave who makes a desperate attempt to win his freedom and is assisted by an African from the Allmuseri tribe. Oxherding Tale was the third time in my writing career that I found myself confronted by an Allmuseri. The first time was in a 1977 short story I wrote called "The Education of Mingo," where an Illinois slave-owner is outwitted by his Allmuseri servant. The second time was in a story called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," where a young, black magician in South Carolina---yes, here in South Carolina---studies under a conjure man from the Allmuseri tribe. But even though I wrote those two stories, and had an Allmuseri in Oxherding Tale, I still didn't know who these mysterious and very spiritual Africans were or why they kept popping up in my work.. I didn't know their culture from top to bottom. I didn't know their history. I didn't know their language, their religion, of their social world. So when I started writing Middle Passage over again in 1983---which is probably close to the year most of you were born---I felt one thing I wanted to do was fully explore the world of the Allmuseri. What I wanted was to create a whole tribe of Mother Teresas and Gandhis and Dalai Lamas. However, I made up very little about them. The details that you read about the Allmuseri are drawn specifically from different African and Asian cultures. For example, you read that the Allmuseri spit at the feet of a visitor to their tribe, which usually angers Europeans who think they've just been insulted; but for the Allmuseri all they intended by this action was to say, "We know you've come a long way to reach us and we just want to cool your feet off a little." There is a tribe in Africa that does exactly that. Also, you read that the Allmuseri have a holiday celebration every year where they give up a selfish desire. That was a practice in India among people who live in Kerala. In 1998, when I was on a 6-week book tour for my last novel Dreamer, I gave a reading in a bookstore and a gentleman asked me, "Are the Allmuseri still living in Africa?" I hated to do this, but I said, "Well, sir, I don't know---I did make them up, you know." He was very embarrassed to learn the Allmuseri were fictitious. Just as a footnote, let me add this: when Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels in 1726 quite a few people thought his creations---the Lilliputians, the Houyhnhnms, the Brobdingnagians---were also real. With Middle Passage, I wanted that Swiftian feel for the novel, and right up until the time it was finished, the book's working title was "Rutherford's Travels." In her paper, Rachel Moore said she felt the Allmuseri lacked "individuality," and she felt that way about Rutherford at the end of the novel. She said, "I think that all men are interconnected through faith and creation, but it is a creation of individuals. For direction and purpose to be formed, there has to be a balance between the discovery of self and the discovery of unity." I'd like to say to Rachel that, yes, I agree, and I think the Allmuseri would also agree. What they reject is an isolated, atomistic, and selfish individuality. In other words, they respect the individual but, as an old African goes, "I am because we are." Anna-Maria Clark expressed her insight into this question when she wrote that the novel's "refreshing destruction of an egotistical self (makes) way for a new, fulfilling life." When I started re-writing and re-envisioning this novel in 1983, I knew I had accumulated in 12 years all the slave trade research I needed. But what I didn't know was the tradition of the sea story. I've never been to sea. In fact, the only boats I've ever been on are ferryboats on Puget Sound back in Washington State. Yet, I wanted Middle Passage to be not only an exploration of the slave trade but also a rousing sea adventure tale. There was no way to learn this tradition except by immersing myself for the next six years in every sea story I could find. I re-read The Voyage of Argo by Appolonius of Rhodes; I read all of Herman Melville, Jack London's The Sea Wolf, the Sinbad stories, and slave narratives about Africans who came over on those ships. I read nautical dictionaries. I read one book on Cockney slang in order to get right the speech of the Republic's crew. All that research helped shape Middle Passage. On its pages you hear echoes of Melville's "Benito Cereno" in the names of slaves on the Republic---names like Babo and Atufal. And there is also quite a bit of Jack London's character "Wolf Larsen" in Captain Ebenezer Falcon. But Falcon is also heavily indebted to the life of Sir Richard Francis Burton, the 19th century explorer who went searching for the source of the Nile, who could learn any language in two week's time, and who first translated into English The Arabian Nights. I read a biography of Burton when I was in high school. I read it twice because I couldn't understand how a man could be such a genius, as Burton was, and at the same time such a repulsive bigot. In fact, Burton was one of the architects of British colonialism. He has puzzled me since high school, so it was to Burton that I sometimes turned when thinking of ways to characterize the delicious contradictions in Ebenezer Falcon. After the historical and literary research for Middle Passage was done, all that remained was the question of the narrator---this funny, philosophical free man you had to write about. I knew he could not be the ship's captain, which I unsuccessfully tried to make him in my earlier draft from 1971. And unlike the narrator in Oxherding Tale, I felt he should not be a slave, but instead a newly freed man who has yet to understand the challenges and dangers of liberty. Keely Mohon felt that "Rutherford is a young man who thought very little of others. He cares only about where he can steal the money to buy more whiskey and women." She's right---at least for the Rutherford we first see when the novel opens. He is a rogue and becomes a thief in New Orleans after his desperate search for honest work leads nowhere; he is a man living only for himself until he meets Isadora Bailey, and then he encounters the profound spirituality of the Allmuseri who believe---as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed---in the "interconnectedness" of all life. Furthermore, Rutherford comes to see that all life is process, change and unending transformation---like the Republic itself, a ship constantly being torn apart and re-built as it crawls along the sea. Rutherford comes to realize, after the crew starts to mutiny, and after the Africans take over the ship, that those who will survive this odyssey are the people who are capable of change and growth. You probably noticed that those who die on the Republic---like Captain Falcon---are incapable of change, and the survivors like Rutherford and Josiah Squibb make it safely home across "the sea of suffering" because they open their hearts completely to the cultures of others. Patrick Brennan described Rutherford as "peppered and seasoned" by everyone he has known, and that is exactly right.. Or, as Rhea DeJesus put it, "At the end of the novel (Rutherford) chose to learn from his past and cherish all that he had. There is not one person on this earth who has not gone through difficult times," she said. "I will admit, some have it worse than others, but the difference is how you react to it. Accept what has happened and learn from it or repeat the same mistake in your life." And that is something Rutherford doesn't do when he has a second chance with Isadora in the final chapter. I think Byron Fields understood Rutherford very well, too, when he wrote, "Like Rutherford, we...end up right with the person we left in the first place," which is another way of saying that we can't escape from our problems by running off to sea, we can only confront them and, by doing so, we facilitate our own evolution, and that enables us to serve others. But that's a trick involved, one that Laura Vaugh pointed out when she said, "I have to heal myself before I can love others. Somewhere along the way I have to care more for the lives of my shipmates and the schoolteacher who corrects my 'southern Illinois accent' than for my own weathered forehead." As you start this new year at Wofford College, I hope you will care for your shipmates and the brave, hard-working teachers who are at the helm of your classes. You are the crew. And for the next four years I hope you have only fair weather and the wind always at your backs. Once again, thank you

Home: Background on Middle Passage In the words of Charles Johnson... Biography A few notes on the author's life In the author's words... Quotations from various published interviews with Johnson Travis Ferrell on Middle Passage A position paper submitted to Dr. Frazier.. Heidi Bradley on Middle Passage A position paper submitted to Dr. Frazier.. Rebecca Pitts on Middle Passage A position paper submitted to Dr. Frazier.. Jude Morris on Middle Passage A position paper submitted to Dr. Frazier.. Previous Issues