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Book Reviews

Inner and outer voyages

By EUGENE B. REDMOND

Charles Johnson. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Pp. 209. $17.95 (cloth). New York: Plume, 1991. $8.95 (paper).

Last winter Charles Johnson, graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, became the first African-American male to win the National Book Award for fiction since Ralph Ellison in 1953. Middle Passage is a funny-gloomy novel that will dazzle and distress readers with its syntactical gymnastics, philosophical sparring matches, word wizardry, sudden flights of imagination, cultural cross-fertilizations and intimate incursions into the nether regions of human psyches — both contemporary and ancestral.

But these deep currents are masked by a high sea and lowland adventure tale of hero (a term used guardedly here) Rutherford Calhoun and the misfitted cast that he encounters: Creoles, American blacks, European Americans, Africans, gods and half-men (or "halved" men).

"Middle passage," a loaded (loded) phrase, refers to the stretch of sea in the Atlantic Ocean (called the Ethiopian Ocean before 1650) between the west coast of Africa and the New World. (Fifty years ago, Robert Hayden's great poem, "Middle Passage," surveyed the human horror of this sea stretch, trafficked by slave ships legally between 1619 and 1804 and illegally for decades afterwards.) Middle Passage, the novel, is set in 1830 on three very different stages: the city of New Orleans; the labyrinthine slave ship Republic; and Senegambia, West Africa (with flashbacks to life under slavery in southern Illinois).

Calhoun, a 22-year-old manumitted slave, hustler and petty thief, makes a pilgrimage from Makanda, Ill., to New Orleans, where he unsuccessfully attempts to navigate the marginal social stream between the underworld of Creole gangster Phillippe Zeringue and the upper world of Boston-bred (and husband-hunting) school teacher Isadora Bailey.

Caught between an array of creditors, unscrupulous Papa Zeringue (who doesn't "mind gettin' rid of people who have the bad manners to cut me off in mid-sentence") and too scrupulous Isadora, our man stows away aboard the Republic — itself a multistory within a story. Told serially, by way of daily entries in a captain's log, this first-person narrative unfolds as a tale of grit, greed, cannibalism, sodomy, murder, suicide, love, hate, pride, mutiny and cultural dismemberment.

To earn his keep, sticky-fingered/split-tongued Calhoun becomes cook's mate to Josiah Squibb, an alcoholic polygamist who is crippled of body but not of spirit. Multitudinous problems begin with the ship's doomed voyage from New Orleans to Senegambia to pick up, among other cargo, 40 slaves (called "black gold/black ivory/black seed" by Hayden) of Allmuseri stock — "the most sought after blacks in the world."

The Republic's Captain Ebenezer Falcon ("small enough to miss in a crowd, but with the bantam spirit for fighting and over-compensating that many men of slight stature possess") is hated and despised. A human timebomb and paranoia personified, Falcon "lived the principle of 'Never Explain and Never Apologize.' "

By contrast, First Mate Peter Cringle, the only member of the crew "not pitted by smallpox, split by Saturday night knife scars, disfigured by Polynesian tattoos, or distorted by dropsy," was one whose "whole air spoke of New England gentility."

Helping to further flesh out the stages of this "chaosmos" is the elusive, foreboding mosaic of Allmuseri, as well as one of their "captured" (and shape-shifting) gods, all epically incarnated in Ngonyama, their leader and spokesman.

Minor figures, believable as are the supporting casts of Dickens or Ellison, parade, flawed and flailed, before our eyes: the adolescent Allmuseri girl Baleka, thief of hearts and survivor; the cabin boy Tom, sodomized by Falcon and driven crazy by the Allmuseri "godhead in the hold"; the fellow tribesman Diamelo, an Iago-like figure, plotting to turn mutinied Allmuseri against Ngonyama (whose "stare was so fierce," it was like "sparks from a blacksmith's forge"); and ship barber-surgeon Nathaniel Meadows, who, "for all the talk of his being an ax murderer," looked "Biblically meek."

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women," Calhoun announces in the very first sentence. Yet, after Calhoun experiences his "middle passage" ("one long hangover," with its storms, intermittent violence and sinking of the Republic), a bizarre twist of fate reunites him with Isadora, who presumably will help him raise the orphaned Baleka.

Among the other women characters, Madame Toulouse of New Orleans makes the most exciting cameo appearance. Married four times to a banker, actor, preacher and mortician, respectively, the wealthy widow "used the principle of 'one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.' "

Like other major works of art in any genre or era, Middle Passage has its centers of density, perplexing ambiguities, technical complexities and often inaccessible codes. Falcon's fetish for philosophical meander, for example, may dismay some readers, though his ramblings help set the stage for this novel of ideas. At the same time, Johnson's seeming stiff-arm indifference to the holocaustal implications of slavery may enrage and estrange the race-burdened reader.

However, Johnson is more clinician-philosopher than racial excoriator. The most heinous hurts are often handled with humor. One example illustrates the latter point:

Falcon: " 'Then we underestimated the blacks. They're smarter than I thought.' "

Calhoun: " 'They'd have to be.' "

So, brave reader, there you have it. Middle Passage. A horror story. A philosophical standoff. A treatise on the creolization of ethnicities and ideas. A meditation on Eurocentrism v Afrocentrism. A Romance. A text of defiance and rebel criminality. A joltingly brilliant ritual of revelation, cultural self-discovery and personal hunger/thirst.

To quote the protagonist: "As I live, they so shamed me I wanted their [Allmuseri] ageless culture to be my own." Much of this painfully comic novel is about how too many people become anchorless when they are willingly or unwillingly uprooted from their own "ageless" selves.

Eugene B. Redmond is a poet and educator from East St. Louis. Now writer-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, he won the Teacher of the Year Award of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English in 1989. He is writing a poetic biography on Katherine Dunham.

January 1992/lllinois Issues/29


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