The Prickly Problem of the
African God in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage
by Jude Morris
The mysterious cargo that Captain Falcon brings
on board with the Allmuseri slaves in Charles Johnson’s Middle
Passage and which the crew later discovers is an Allmuseri god presents
a number of interesting problems in the text. First of all, its very
presence in a crate seems problematic. As Rutherford Calhoun says
to Captain Falcon when he is told they’ve put the god in irons
– “’You can do that?’”(101). Calhoun’s
assumption is a natural one. Can a god be captured? By its very nature
– Falcon describes it as being physical for only seconds at a
time, but mostly “immaterial” – it would seem that
a deity would be beyond the bonds of slavery. But according to Falcon,
the god seems only slightly amused to have been put in irons. Does
this imply that the god is simply humoring its captors? If so, who,
then, is the true captor – Falcon who commands the ship or the
being in the hold who commands its unique “feeding?”
Falcon, who thinks he is in command, speaks dismissively
of the deity because it can’t do geometry and hasn’t man’s
empirical knowledge. Falcon’s point of view represents a scientifically
objective, empirically based, atheistic stance toward religion. God,
from his vantage point, has limitations, but is “a tricky rascal”
possessed of “a hundred ways to relieve men of their reason”
(102). According to Falcon, God “tricks” men into Heaven.
Thinking himself beyond such trickery, he trusts no one else to go
down into the hold.
The second problem arises with the nature of the deity which begins
to emerge when Tommy O’Toole, the cabin boy, is lowered into
the hold for a glimpse and crawls back on deck speaking a mixture
of “Bantu pantois, Bushman, Cushitic, and Sudanic tongues”
(68), eyes blazing fanatically in a pantomime of a Christian fundamentalist
speaking in tongues. In the tale he tells of what he has seen below,
it is apparent that the god has clear conscious-probing abilities.
Tommy first describes dark coils of defecation, which may be metaphoric
of his own guilt and shame for the buggery to which he has been subjected
to by the captain. But then the creature sings to him and through
him, a song of great love and lament and sorrow, a song in which all
boundaries of time and space are erased. Having described his experience,
Tommy’s eyes shimmer as if he has peered “into the heart
of things hidden” (69). In many ways the god mirrors the god
of the Christian deck hands, engendering guilt but also conveying
great love.
A deck hand, however, assesses the situation:
“’It eats people, that’s what it eats’”(69).
He is referring, of course, not to flesh, but to souls. The crew considers
the cabin boy lost to them because the god is African and not the
god of the crosses that hang around some of their necks. Clearly the
god, although it might provide answers to the mysteries of the unknown,
is not to be trusted by those who do not follow its particular religious
structure. A god is not necessarily “the” god.
Rutherford Calhoun is not concerned with the particulars
of religious prejudice. He is concerned that once a god is held under
lock and key, “history would change. History, as we knew it would
end, for there would be no barriers between the secular and the sacred”
(103). He raises, here, a very modern question, one being explored
in the twenty-first century when physics has come closer than ever
to erasing the boundaries between science and religion. For America,
of course, this blurring of the boundaries between sacred and secular
would raise some tricky political questions. To be in possession of
a god but not the god in which the people of that country believed
and worshipped would be more than problematic.
Furthermore, what exactly will be done with the
god once the ship reaches shore? And what will be its powers on American
shores among primarily Christian peoples? What effect might it have
on Africans brought to these shores as slaves? Might there be unexpected
changes in the institution of slavery as Africans are empowered by
the presence of an African god?
For Calhoun, the immediate problem is more personal.
He has been taught by Reverend Chandler that gods only appear on Judgment
Day, and he, being young and healthy, has no wish for the Apocalypse
to start any time soon. He says: “I needed the world as I knew
it, as evil and flawed as it was, to be there for a while” (103).
In Calhoun’s own encounter with the deity,
it takes on the shape of his father, the unconscious presence he has
not dealt with in his own mind. As it answers the unknown questions
about his father’s disappearance and “folded my father back
into the broader, shifting field . . . I had to listen harder to isolate
him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if
the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions” (171). This
experience recalls the Buddhist idea of the great energy from which
all life flows. What does it mean that Calhoun’s black self is
“the greatest of all fictions?” Does it speak of his larger
humanity, of his presence as an everyman as this god is a sort of
every god? Johnson leaves us wondering.
Most problematic of all, of course, is what happens to the god when
the ship breaks apart during the hurricane? Does it return to Africa?
Meld into the souls of the lost Allmuseri? Become part of the vast
energy of the ocean? Nothing more is mentioned of this most intriguing
of presences after Calhoun’s encounter.
What would have happened to the god had it been
left behind in the cave when the Allmuseri were removed? Since it
depended on the people for feeding, would it have wasted away? Are
gods immortal or do they depend upon their worshippers for their very
existence? Do ancient gods last forever, or are they lost like their
long-dead peoples to the sands of time? Johnson’s text raises
some interesting and problematic questions -- ones that have no easy
answers.