Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Faith stopped, still as a mummy, her ears straining at a slushing sound from the swamps. Snorting, she yanked back the tarpaulin to a window and saw two timorous barefoot children crossing the bridge. She giggled, rushed to the machine in the corner, and shouted, “Faugh!” The Gila monster awoke running in place on its treadmill (what good things lie in a serpent’s way of being-in-the-world? Someday she would have to try that one, too). The shanty filled with mournful music. Quickly she reshaped her nose into a sharp cone and seated herself cross-legged on the floor. She decided to tell them first about Aristotle’s Illusion (cross your first and second fingers on one hand, then rub a pencil between them; it’ll feel like two pencils, not one, scraping your skin), and then the tale about Stackalee’s great battle with Lucifer in West Hell. It made her laugh:

“Hee hee!”

But she was ready, children, because there always was and always will be an old Swamp Woman cackling and conjuring in the bogs (someday it might just be you), just like there’ll always be the Good Thing for folks willing to hear and hunt for it. But you’ve got to believe in it. Don’t be interrupting to ask if the tale is true.

Was it Good?

Was it Beautiful?

All right.

CHARLES JOHNSON was the first black American male since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award for fiction, which he received for Middle Passage. His fiction has been much anthologized, and he was named in a survey conducted by the University of Southern California as one of the ten best short-story writers in America. A widely published literary critic, philosopher, cartoonist, essayist, screenwriter, and lecturer, he is one of twelve African American authors honored in an international stamp series celebrating great writers of the twentieth century. Johnson’s alma mater, Southern Illinois University, administers the Charles Johnson Award for Fiction and Poetry, a nationwide competition inaugurated in 1994 for college students. He is currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle.