Freedom Through Contamination: Collapsed Boundaries in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage

Abstract

In recent scholarship, much attention has been paid to what seems to be a new direction for the African American literary tradition(s). Many contemporary authors (Octavia Butler, Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Toni Morri­son, Ishmael Reed, and Sherley Anne Williams, to name but a few)—amongst whom Charles Johnson is often included—re-create in their fiction the conditions of slavery and of the Middle Passage. They do so, according to Timothy L. Parish, “in order to connect the receding past to the living present,” a process through which African Americans “begin to understand [themselves] and American and African American culture in general” (Rampersad qtd. in Parish 81). The African American writers who participate in this rewriting of history are “resisting the ‘master’s’ versions of historical experience” (Robbins 531). Yet I am reluctant to agree with the contention that Charles Johnson is one of these contemporary authors. Johnson, I would argue, is not only revising the master’s version of his­tory; he is also resisting the (ex-)slave’s revision of the master’s historical con­struction. His appropriation of the form of the slave narrative for the novels Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage critiques white historiography of slavery, as well as black literary traditions.