Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson uses a common enough vehicle to introduce us to his novel and to his protagonist. It is called, “Have you ever had one of those days... ?” Rutherford Calhoun has. He is setting sail from the port of New Orleans on April 14, 1830. Mr. Calhoun is a freed slave from southern Illinois who found in New Orleans a city that matched his own preference for the “excessive, exotic fringes of life.” The downside of Calhoun's sensual existence, however, has gotten him into a jam and a need for a ticket out of town. In short, Rutherford Calhoun has gambling debts and women trouble. The former threatens him with extinction, the latter with marriage (no, she is not pregnant; it is even worse — she is religious). Finding neither of these alternatives acceptable, he stows away in the dead of night aboard a ship due to leave port at dawn. Midmorning finds Calhoun in his lifeboat bed with the rudest of all possible wake-up calls — a pistol pointed at his belly by an angry human being claiming to be the first mate. As it turns out, this is the high point of Calhoun’s day. For, as he is being led to see the captain (who was busy raping the cabin boy), past the crew of lecherous, toothless, peg-legged, hook-handed, eyepatched, pock-marked men who pass for sailors, he is informed by First Mate Cringle, that he, black freedman Rutherford Calhoun, late of southern Illinois, has managed to get himself out of New Orleans by coming aboard a slave ship bound for the coast of West Africa. And the name of this rabid, leaking slaver, sailed by this perverse crew and their racist and insane captain, is The Republic.
Middle Passage earned Charles Johnson the National Book Award two years ago. It deserves the further honor of being widely read and passed from friend to friend and from teacher to student. As literature alone, it is the best first-person narrative I have read since John Gardner’s Grindel, in which Gardner allowed the Beowulf legend to be told from the MONSTER’S point of view. Though it could rightly be called a black novel, in reference to its author and its hero (whether it is a GOOD black novel is a question I need to leave to its black readers and critics), it could also be quite justly termed a first-rate sea story, worthy of Melville and Hemingway.