Charles Johnson - Middle Passage

• How does Rutherford Calhoun’s sea tale follow the pattern of such mythic American quests?

• Is the sea, like the frontier, a place to test his masculinity? (See p. 41.) Does he successfully leave the past behind and stage his own rebirth? Rutherford Calhoun also observes at one point that there was an exaggerated sense of “manhood” on shipboard, one developed in the absence of women, who are said to be a civilizing influence. This conception of ship life seems to suggest that the sea is an antidote to the weakness of “civilization and urban life,” which is viewed as feminine.

• Do you agree that men are truly wild and women truly civilized? Why or why not?

• How is this dynamic played out in the relationship between Rutherford Calhoun and Isadora Bailey?

6. Historical Issues

Johnson’s Middle Passage is a work of fiction rather than historical scholarship. As such, creative license is taken with the historical setting in which the book’s narrative is situated. One example of such license is the author’s inclusion of anachronisms in the story he tells. An anachronism is something (or someone) that is historically out of place, such as a microwave in a movie set during the American Revolution. There are many anachronisms, most far less obvious than the microwave, in Johnson’s Middle Passage. There is, for instance, a mention of the Piltdown Man, an archeological hoax perpetuated in the early twentieth century, long after the time in which Johnson’s narrative is set.

• When you notice an anachronism, mark it, and as you read the book, try to come up with some possible reasons as to why an author would intentionally insert them into his story. In addition to inserting anachronisms into his tale, Johnson also invents people, places, and things that never existed in any historical context. The Almuseri, for example, are a fictional tribe. They are described as an ancient people of achievements when Europe was still embryonic, the repository of the achievements of all on the continent who had gone on before. There is also mention of “headhunting natives” residing near Bangalang (p. 44). The inclusion of such nonhistorical inventions may be used to serve a larger literary purpose.

• What aspects of the authors portrait of the African background are least accurate?

• What aspects are more accurate?

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