Middle Passage Book

Charles Johnson is a highly prolific author, scholar, cartoonist and screenwriter. Middle Passage is perhaps his most celebrated work, having won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990. In my exploration through the canon of great Black American writers, Mr. Johnson is perhaps the best I've encountered. That is no small praise when he's compared to giants like Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and Junot Diaz. They all have enriched and enlightened me, but none have offered up quite the cocktail of beautiful prose, compelling narrative, political and historical enlightenment and complex characterization that Johnson does.

Ralph Ellison told an epic tale of the life of the Black man in 1950s America. But his nameless Invisible Man seemed more a vessel for his story than a rounded, complex character. Rutherford Calhoun, Middle Passage's protagonist, not only shows us the horrors of the slave trade, the struggles of a free Black man pre-Civil War, but also is a character with complex desires and problems that transcend his skin color. His biggest problem, that which spurs him to action has nothing to do with the color of his skin, but instead with the choices he's made in life.

Richard Wright's Native Son offers up a compelling tale, one where its protagonist Bigger Thomas undergoes profound change, change that comes from an act of accidental violence. In that fire of violence, Bigger is free for the first time, free to be his own man, perhaps not the man he'd always hoped he could be, but at least a man whose formation was of his own doing. But Wright's Native Son with all its powerful messages does not have the same artful prose found in Middle Passage. Almost every sentence Charles Johnson crafts is a work of art, while Rutherford Calhoun undergoes a journey of change equal to Bigger Thomas both in magnitude and violence.

I could go on in this vein through other great writers, and the comparisons between Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and his contemporaries would all be favorable. In truth, to relegate such a great author and the comparisons of his work to just his contemporaries of similar skin color is to do him and his race a disservice. He is, without qualification, a great writer, and Middle Passage a great American novel.

Note: Middle Passage contains violent depictations.