Biography

Charles Richard Johnson was born on April 23, 1948, in Evanston, Illinois, to Benjamin Lee and Ruby Elizabeth Johnson. While quite young, Johnson demonstrated a talent for drawing and wished to pursue an artistic career, but his father strongly disapproved of the notion. It was only after the younger Johnson sought and won the support of Lawrence Lariar, an established writer and cartoonist, that his father relented. At the age of seventeen, Johnson began working as a cartoonist, and throughout the years he has contributed his work to publications such as Ebony, Jet, Black World, and Players International. His cartoons and drawings were also published in book formin Black Humor (1970) and Illustrated Anatomy of Campus Humor (1971).

As a student at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Johnson was an editorial and comicstrip artist for several college publications. In 1969 and 1970, he worked as a cartoonist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and he was a member of the art staff of the St. Louis Proud from 1971 through 1972.

While working successfully as a cartoonist and journalist, Johnson also attended to his academic studies. By 1971, he had completed work for his bachelor’s degree in journalism at Southern Illinois.

In 1970, Johnson had branched into a new endeavor by creating, coproducing, and hosting a television show on cartooning called Charlie’s Pad. Fifty-two shows were completed and distributed nationally by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). He later wrote scripts for other public television series such as Up and Coming and Y.E.S. Inc.

Johnson’s varied interests led him to the study of philosophy, and in 1973, he received a master’s degree in that discipline from Southern Illinois. Throughout his writing career, philosophical concerns have remained a dominant theme in his work, and Johnson often combines these with oral narrative formulas and techniques drawn from black culture, including traditional slave narratives and folktales. In such experimental fusions, Johnson shows the influence of the novelist, poet, shortstory writer, and essayist John Gardner, who had a considerable effect on Johnson’s formative years as a writer.

When Gardner was teaching creative writing at Southern Illinois, Johnson sought him out for advice and instruction. It was a wise move; Gardner, who was one of the most talented of American writers, was also one of the most generous with his time and encouragement. He read and critiqued the six manuscript novels that Johnson had written and helped him to fashion his first published novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974). As might be expected, the novel combines philosophical concerns with subject matter drawn from the black experience in America.

Johnson has credited Gardner with helping him to forge this literary link between the African American experience and philosophical interests. The clear influence of the older writer is evident throughout Johnson’s writings, especially in his outstanding novel Middle Passage (1990), which is close to Gardner’s work in theme, style, and imagery.

Johnson undertook postgraduate work in philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook from 1973 through 1976. His particular areas of interest, appropriately enough, were in literary aesthetics and phenomenology, the study of how external appearances influence internal images of reality. Clearly, this issue is crucial to any writer, but few have studied it as vigorously or as thoroughly as Johnson.

Johnson’s academic career continued in 1976, when he became an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1979, he was promoted to associate professor and in 1982 became a full professor in English at the institution. From 1979 to 1981, he was director of the Associated Writing Programs Awards Series in short fiction. In June, 1970, Johnson married Joan New, an elementary-school teacher. The couple has two children, Malik and Elizabeth.

Analysis

Four major points distinguish Johnson from other modern American authors. First, as an African American writer, he approaches the traditional themes and concerns of that culture with a new insight while retaining a profound understanding and appreciation of them. Second, he is an intensely philosophical writer, acutely aware of developments in modern thought and able to give those thoughts concrete expression in his fiction. Third, he links this love and understanding of philosophy with a deep respect for moral fiction, a connection also found in the writings of John Gardner, the writer who influenced Johnson greatly and who was, in many ways, his mentor. Fourth, and most important, Johnson has published some of the most innovative and best-written American fiction of his time.

Johnson repeatedly turns to the themes of black history in the United States and the response of black people to slavery, discrimination, and poverty. One of the triumphs of African Americans has been the preservation of a distinct culture and identity even when these were seriously threatened, over long periods of time, by external forces. In novels such as Faith and the Good Thing and Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson uses the black experience and draws upon the oral forms of African American folk narrative. Faith and the Good Thing, for example, strongly relies upon these traditions, with the author pausing frequently to address the reader with the phrase “Listen, Children,” exactly as a speaker would summon a listener’s attention. Oxherding Tale employs these same devices to an even greater and more successful extent. The novel is structured along the lines of a slave narrative, a form of modern parable most successfully developed during the nineteenth century by Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave.

African American culture and literature have traditionally emphasized verbal skill and wordplay, and these are found abundantly in Johnson’s work. A master of metaphorical language, Johnson creates scenes that are highly visual and descriptive and that place the reader in the center of the work’s action while at the same time commenting upon it. In so doing, Johnson draws from a culture that prizes the apt use of language to control and order a potentially dangerous world.

Another way to establish control and order is through philosophical investigation, and Johnson is one of American literature’s most philosophical writers. Yet he links his philosophical investigations to the practical business of writing. In his study of black writing, Being and Race (1988), Johnson establishes a careful theoretical foundation that includes a sophisticated reading of the doctrines of philosopher Edmund Husserl. Johnson, however, connects these abstract thoughts to written reality:

Johnson understands that the enduring questions of philosophy, and the answers that have been advanced, may be difficult but are never idle. He also maintains that all human beings, irrespective of their race or gender, share a profound stake in these questions and answers. This is one reason why Johnson creates characters such as the Swamp Woman in Faith and the Good Thing, who may appear to be uneducated, even illiterate, but who can approach the confusion of being and existence with the subtlety of Aristotle or Immanuel Kant—and often quote them as well.

Combining such philosophical concerns with artistic integrity was also a major goal of Gardner, whose novels such as The Resurrection (1966) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) often interweave fiction and philosophy. The positive impact of Gardner on Johnson is seen clearly in Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, where the philosophical discussions arise naturally from the action and become a part of it.

Finally, Johnson is a talented and original writer who draws upon the African American experience, the legacy of philosophy, and the teachings of Gardner but who forges his own fiction and finds his own voice. Even when he handles difficult subjects and complex ideas, he presents them in a clear, almost conversational tone, making such topics come alive with startling comparisons and appropriate examples.

Johnson has a knack for creating vivid, memorable characters who engage the reader’s interest and sympathy. Faith Cross in Faith and the Good Thing; Andrew Hawkins in Oxherding Tale, and Rutherford Calhoun in Middle Passage have their own voices and their own presences. The reader cares about them because of their overwhelming individuality.

Above all, Johnson is a master of language, a writer whose novels and stories are effective because they draw upon all the resources fiction offers. At once thought-provoking and memorable, often intensely humorous and profoundly tragic, Johnson’s writings examine all facets of the human condition.

Faith and the Good Thing works on several levels simultaneously. At times a realistic account of the experiences endured by African Americans moving from the rural South to the urban North, it is also a folk fable concerning mythic figures such as the Swamp Woman, a combination of philosopher and voodoo priestess. The novel is also, in part, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of physical and spiritual reality and human personality. Finally, it is an adventurous narrative that follows the travels and trials of its title character.

The novel begins when Faith Cross is commanded by her dying mother: “Girl, you get yourself a good thing.” Puzzled, Faith consults the Swamp Woman, incredibly ancient and eerie, who orders Faith to go to Chicago but refuses to reveal just what the good thing will be.

In fact, there seems to be little good in Chicago, where Faith quickly sinks into a life of prostitution and drugs, an episode that the novel describes in a surreal combination of reality and illusion. Here, Johnson displays his ability to combine black folk idioms with rich, evocative language.

Faith is rescued, after a fashion, through her marriage to Isaac Maxwell, a young black reporter for a Chicago newspaper. Maxwell, who speaks constantly of the will to power and who fancies himself a dominant personality, is a portrait of the ineffectual black intellectual cut off fromhis own heritage and not fully accepted by the white culture. Although Faith’s material wants are satisfied, Maxwell cannot meet her spiritual needs, and her life remains barren and unfulfilled. When she reveals her past to Maxwell, the marriage disintegrates, and Faith is eventually murdered by a former lover. In the novel’s ending, Faith’s spirit returns to Georgia, where it exchanges places with the Swamp Woman.

Faith and the Good Thing was Johnson’s first published novel, although he had written six others previously. He credits Gardner with providing him with much of the discipline and insight required to construct the work, but the themes, characters, and approach are clearly those of its author.

An accomplished short-story writer as well as a novelist, Johnson uses the briefer form to explore many of the same themes and concerns touched on in his novels. He is especially interested in the relationship between the individual, particularly the African American male, and the larger world. In the short stories of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, this relationship is often expressed in philosophical terms, even though the situations may, at first, seem to have little connection with philosophy.

In “The Education of Mingo,” for example, a young slave in the antebellum United States is purchased by an elderly farmer, significantly named Moses, who sets out to educate Mingo in the ways of white culture. The result is that Mingo finds his “coherent, consistent, complete” universe replaced with one that is “alien, contradictory, strange.” As a result of this reeducation, Mingo kills two white people, thinking his actions are expected by his master. Moses recognizes what he has done, and yet he is unable to turn his student over to the authorities, who will surely execute him.

The ability of individuals to be remade, sometimes by others, sometimes by themselves, is explored further in “China,” which brought Johnson a citation as a Pushcart Prize Outstanding Writer in 1984. Rudolph and Evelyn, a black couple in late middle age, have settled into a routine of vaguely dissatisfied married life when Rudolph discovers the lure of martial arts. Soon he is taking lessons in kung fu and other Eastern disciplines and exercising seriously to exchange his neglected, flabby body for a disciplined and stronger one. By the story’s end, Rudolph has largely re-created himself, to his wife’s bewilderment and dismay.

A second theme that runs through this collection concerns recognition and acceptance of one’s essential character. In “Alethia,” a middle-aged black professor suddenly learns how deeply he has betrayed his native roots. In the science-fiction story “Popper’s Disease,” a physician ministers to a sick alien in a crashed flying saucer, only to learn that the creature suffers from an incurable and all-too-human malady, the agonizing split between the individual and the outside world.

The title story fuses these themes as it traces the brief, abortive career of Allan Jackson, an apprentice to a black sorcerer, or conjure doctor, in rural South Carolina. Allan has some talent but not a true gift, and when his failure to cure a sick child makes him realize this, he renounces his career choice. Johnson demonstrates that while such insights can be painful, they are necessary for true maturity and wisdom.

Middle Passage, Johnson’s third published novel, is a complex blend of allegory, adventure story, tall tale, and philosophical meditation. The novel won the National Book Award. It follows the misadventures of Rutherford Calhoun, the narrator, who is an entertaining liar and consummate rogue. Calhoun, a slave, flees first to New Orleans and then, to escape marriage, to sea. Ironically, he stows away on a slave ship, the Republic, and so his adventures begin.

The novel’s characters are a motley collection of freaks, misfits, and oddities. Ebenezer Falcon, captain of the Republic, is a stunted, twisted dwarf whose brilliant mind and strong will are devoted to his own evil ends. Cringle, the first mate, is a wellmeaning but ineffectual liberal, able to perceive evils and injustices but incapable of acting to resolve them. Josiah Squibb, the alcoholic, oftenmarried but never-divorced cook, serves as a representative both of humankind’s baser instincts and of rough but necessary common sense.

In Africa, the Republic takes on a cargo of slaves from the Allmuseri tribe (a group frequently mentioned in Johnson’s fiction as a symbol of original African nature and unity). The crew also brings on board an enormous box that contains the Allmuseri’s “god,” a monstrous shape-shifting creature that drives mad those who listen to it.

On the return voyage, a mutiny and slave revolt, perhaps inspired by the caged god, lead to the destruction of the Republic and the death of everyone aboard except Calhoun, Squibb, and three Allmuseri children. Rescued by a passing ship, Calhoun and the others return to New Orleans. Now a changed man, Calhoun finally marries and settles down, having learned that to be fully human requires commitment to others and community.

Johnson clearly modeled his novel on Gardner’s novella The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales (1974), and there are references to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851) and other classics of American literature. Like these earlier works, Middle Passage is focused on the topic of community, specifically the individual’s place within and obligations to that community. Calhoun, who begins the story as a self-conscious loner, his hand set against every other man’s hand, ends by accepting the necessity of fitting into society. In a similar fashion, the novel implies, the larger, national community (the American republic, perhaps) exists only as the aggregate of individuals linked together. Lacking that unity, the community will sink as surely as a ship in the grip of mutiny and revolt.

Summary

Although Johnson clearly draws upon the African American tradition and its lessons, his work is significantly different from that of many other black American authors, especially as it relates to the role of the individual, of whatever race, in the larger community. In a similar fashion, Johnson’s use of philosophy to frame and express his concerns sets him apart from the majority of contemporary American writers of all races and genders.

Johnson’s major accomplishments are possible because of his re-creation of traditional oral narrative forms through powerful, metaphorically rich language. This use of language permits Johnson to create characters who can express philosophical dilemmas while remaining intensely and believably human.

Bibliography

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