73 pages • 2 hours read
Charles R. JohnsonMiddle Passage
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Black Atlantic, the Middle Passage, and Slavery
Johnson’s choice of setting, his decision to focus the narrative on a protagonist who is a black sailor aboard a slave ship in the Atlantic, and his source material are elements that make the novel a narrative that is rooted in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.
Johnson chooses to set his story on the Atlantic Ocean and in Atlantic ports in New Orleans, the Caribbean, and the western coast of Africa. The Atlantic that Johnson uses as his setting is one that acknowledges the role of the slave trade in Western history and the engagement of both slave and free people of African descent with the Atlantic. In fact, the novel represents the “Black Atlantic,” a term coined by academic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy’s central argument is that the Atlantic slave trade—the ships, the money, the people, its impact on the identities of Westerners and the African people they enslaved—is what pushed the West into modern ways of thinking about identity and the nation.
An important intervention Johnson makes in one of the myths of Western identity is his transformation of a tale about a sailor lost but on a journey home—a tale at least as old as The Odyssey, which Johnson explicitly references several times in the novel. In much of Western culture and literature, the ship and narratives about the sea are concepts and images that are associated with freedom and the achievement of identity and the ability to claim a homeland.
While the novel can most certainly be read as a quest for identity and Rutherford’s ability to claim the United States as home, the central focus of the novel is the degree to which movement aboard the ship and across the Atlantic is severely constrained by large historical forces, including the philosophical and economic underpinnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Johnson’s choices as a writer are designed to rewrite the way we think about the Atlantic by focusing on this underexplored perspective. His novel moves the middle passage—the second leg of the slave trade routes, a journey on which enslaved African people were transported under terrible conditions to the Americas—to the center of the story of a sailor gone to sea.
Rutherford, an ex-slave who takes to the high seas in search of freedom, is Johnson’s most significant engagement with the Black Atlantic and the middle passage. Johnson uses the perspective of Rutherford, a black thief turned sailor, to show that the process of enslaving Africans irrevocably changed the lands and people it touched. The experience of sailing on the Black Atlantic transforms Rutherford and the Allmuseri into Americans, exposes the degree to which the white crew are subject to the same economic forces as the slaves, and reveals the fatal corruption at the heart of empires and nations built on such a merciless regime of exploitation.
Johnson’s engagement with the history of the slave trade is also apparent in his source material. The narrative is one that owes less to the sea adventures, such as Treasure Island and Moby Dick, and more to the narratives of ex-slaves and black sailors such as Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo kidnapped from the western coast of Africa and thrust into the middle passage. Rutherford’s description of the hold of the ship, the terrible conditions for the slaves in the barracoons before setting sail, and the fears of Africans who are kidnapped and placed on ships with people they think are cannibals bear remarkable similarities to the middle passage story of Olaudah Equiano in his Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano.
Starting with his use of Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage” as an epigraph, Johnson also explicitly references the 1839 slave mutiny aboard the Spanish-owned ship Amistad. The tale of how the Mende captives overcame their captors to attempt a return to Africa, only to be steered to the coast of Long Island through the subterfuge of the remaining whites on board, was a scandal that galvanized early American opposition to slavery. The ensuing Supreme Court case, United States v. Amistad (1841), to determine to whom the captives belonged (to themselves, it was ultimately concluded) was one of the early indicators that the issue of slavery had the potential to tear the United States apart.
While the Amistad story ends with the freedom of the captives, Johnson’s tale is a grimly realistic one in which the captives are three-dimensional people with flaws, some of the whites are sympathetic figures, and the material conditions of life on a ship—disease, poor rations, bad weather—are front and center. By telling a more realistic story of the middle passage, Johnson imaginatively fills in the gaps of the psychological dimensions of life in the middle passage.
Western Philosophy and Identity
The cultural and historical setting of the novel is 1830, a moment when the Enlightenment, a philosophical and cultural movement that emphasized the importance of rationality, observation, and experience to understanding culture and individuals, began giving way to Romanticism, a movement that arose in part from the philosophical traditions of German idealism, represented by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Romanticism, especially as an artistic movement, tended to focus on the impact of nature on humans, the importance of subjective experience, and some of the darker, less rational corners of the human mind. In Middle Passage, Johnson explores the philosophical debates of the age by representing how several characters grapple with the meaning of experience and identity, with particular attention to how these questions unfold in the midst of the slave trade.
One of the big debates shaped by the Enlightenment was whether people who were not white men—Native Americans, women, non-Westerners, and enslaved people of African descent—could ever lay claim to being full, rational subjects capable of using reason and thus participating in important aspects of society such as property ownership and self-governance. As the protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun is the character whose engagement with these issues is most visible. Rutherford’s initial sense of identity is in relation to his brother Jackson and his experience of slavery.
Jackson, a methodical, steady African-American man with progressive ideas about education, is the ideal black Enlightenment figure against whom Rutherford defines himself. Jackson has excelled at the classical education Chandler, his master, gave him; is responsible both for his brother and his ailing master; and is respected by all, regardless of race. Rutherford and Chandler see Jackson as evidence that African Americans are fully capable of embracing Christian morality and rationality.
At the start of the novel, Rutherford, despite the apparent benevolence of his master and example of his brother, has not come to understand what his place in the order of things is. Rutherford’s earliest inkling of his own identity is that he is unable to live up to the expectations of his master and Jackson. His whole life, from his thievery to his impulsive, emotional decision-making, is a repudiation of the traditional morality and method embraced by Jackson. Having been a slave, Rutherford sees abiding by traditional morality as a luxury an African-American man cannot afford, which explains his estrangement from his brother after Jackson gives up their inheritance from their master, Chandler, in the name of Christian charity.
One of Rutherford’s central motivations prior to his journey on the Republic is to have experiences, “as if life was a commodity, a thing we could cram into ourselves” (38). Indeed, as a slave, his identity was to serve as a commodity. Rutherford’s breathless “shock of recognition” (2) when he first sees New Orleans is because he at last becomes a person who can consume and collect experiences rather than being consumed as a piece of movable property. Johnson writes Rutherford as a picaro, a roguish figure whose life can be narrated only episodically, and his movement from disaster to disaster is part of what makes the narrative interesting. Once aboard the Republic, Rutherford enters a space that causes him to question his ideas about morality and identity.
Among the crew and the officers, there are two sometimes-conflicting moral codes, one advanced by Falcon and one that supposedly governs the crew. Falcon believes that “[f]or a self to act, it must have something to act on. A nonself” (97). “Dualism” he argues, “is a bloody structure of the mind,” which is thus “made for murder” (98), slavery, and other acts of violence that assert the self through the oppression and destruction of an Other. This master-slave dialectic—a theory advanced by Hegel—is one that explains Falcon’s willingness to go so far as to enslave a god as the ultimate act of claiming an identity.
Alongside this idea about relations with others as a struggle for dominance, there is also a code of values that exemplifies the Enlightenment notion that societies such as the ship are governed by contracts agreed to by rational, self-interested men for the sake of their mutual benefits. Under this contract, the ship is a rigidly hierarchical space, making it a rational society in which each person knows his or her place and will derive benefit from it by staying in place.
A complication for the latter system of values, however, is the presence of black people. Rutherford, who stows away by stealing Squibb’s papers, is the first problem. Where does he fit on the ship? Cringle and Falcon assign Rutherford to the kitchen, but Rutherford floats along all levels of the ship, disrupting the hierarchy and slipping in and out of distinct groups. Rutherford is also a sneak and a thief, an outsider who is frequently selected by the crew and officers to engage in actions that violate the stated moral codes because he is under no obligation to the members of the crew or their contract with one another.
Then there are the Allmuseri, a tribe of black magicians, and their god, whose presence completely breaks the structure of society aboard the Republic. Their philosophy, discussed at length by Rutherford, is one that rejects Western ideas about identity and morality. From the Allmuseri perspective, the “failure to experience the Unity of Being everywhere was the Allmuseri vision of Hell” (65), and there is no greater rupture with that unity than murder or the oppression of another through violence.
The Allmuseri revolt and subsequent execution of most of the members of the crew destroy their ability to be Allmuseri and transform them into Westerners who will forever be defined dualistically by their relationship with Falcon, whom Rutherford imagines will become “a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did” (144). Their revolt simultaneously reveals the way that a master-slave dialectic, rather than Enlightenment rationality, underwrites the West. What becomes of a society that can go through the moral and philosophical contortions necessary to enslave others? Can such a society truly be said to be rational? The story of the Republic seems to indicate that destruction is the eventual end of such a society unless someone chooses to break the dialectic.
The presence of the Allmuseri god also disrupts the moral and rational order. Rutherford’s encounter with the Allmuseri god is the ultimate transcendent experience that cannot be comprehended rationally, in fact, and many of the other unsettling experiences he has aboard ship further undercut the Enlightenment foundations of how Rutherford understands himself. Like the American Romantics—transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular—Rutherford understands himself as something more than what can be observed and understood rationally as a result of his communion with the god and the ocean.
When Rutherford finally returns home, he is a different man from the one who left New Orleans. He is a man who values his connections and mutual obligations with others above all else. He is tender and more comfortable with living with two feet in multiple worlds and is guided by morality that is not conventional. These changes make him a more powerful figure. He ceases to be a poor copy of his brother and instead comes to embody important values associated with Romanticism. The Allmuseri are also transformed by their journey. Like Rutherford, they exist between worlds. Surviving the middle passage transforms them into African Americans.
Imperialism, Colonialism, and American Identity
Captain Ebenezer Falcon is the face of colonialism and imperialism in Middle Passage, and the Republic is symbolic of the impact of these two forces on Western history and American history in particular.
Johnson writes Falcon into early American history during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 by providing a backstory in which Falcon initially makes his fortune as a privateer. Privateers were essentially American smugglers and pirates who fell on the right side of the law because the early US government was too fearful of professional armed forces and too cheap to create a navy capable of facing down Great Britain, which owned the greatest navy in the world. The British navy wreaked havoc on American sea lanes during wartime as a result. Figures like John Paul Jones, a naval commander from the Revolutionary War, captured the imagination of Americans looking for heroes during a fearful time in American history, and the fact that privateers such as Falcon managed to make money and move goods as a result would not have bothered a country in the midst of creating its own merchant class.
Furthermore, freebooters and explorers were key players in expanding the territory of the United States as it attempted to carve out sufficient space to protect itself from then-dominant colonial and imperial powers such as Spain, France, and Great Britain. The seizure of land, loot, and people from North American, Caribbean, Asian, and African peoples was thus a key means by which the United States became a nation during the age of colonialism.
Ebenezer Falcon, whose cabin is littered with all that he has stolen from various cultures, is also a figure who represents the role imperialism had as the United States finally resolved its conflict with Great Britain in the early 19th century. Falcon’s theft of the Allmuseri and their god is just his most audacious act as an American imperialist. Rutherford’s perusal of Falcon’s journal reveals the economic motives behind this patriotic desire to spread the American system across the world.
As Rutherford reads through Falcon’s journals, he comes to understand that Falcon:
had a standing order from his financiers, powerful families in New Orleans who underwrote the Republic, to stock Yankee museums and their homes with whatever of value was not nailed down in the nations he visited. To bring back slaves, yes, but to salvage the best of their war-shocked cultures too (49).
As a thief, Rutherford recognizes that the American empire is both economic and cultural theft on a grand scale. Falcon’s journals can be read as stories about a hero only through the lens of irony. The outcome of Falcon’s plans—the civil war between the crew members, the wreck of the ship, and the death of almost everyone aboard—is a heavy allegory that makes the point that founding a nation through acts of theft, violence, and appropriation guarantees negative karma that will virtually destroy that nation.
Rutherford is among the few survivors of the wreck, and it is left to him to articulate some other basis for American identity. By the end of the novel, Rutherford sees America as a “weird, upside-down caricature of a country […,] land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half breeds, whoresons and fugitives—this cauldron of mongrels from all points of the compass” (179). Johnson’s decision to have slaves and ex-slaves be the sole survivors of the Republic implies that the eventual fate of an America that can survive is one that is comprised of the disenfranchised and immigrants—a melting pot.
