Middle Passage

Johnson introduces important elements of the novel—themes, character, and setting—in these first sections. He also establishes the overall mood of the work.

The epigraphs introduce three important elements of the novel. The one from St. Thomas Aquinas references the idea of the unity of all beings, an idea that comes to the fore in later chapters when Rutherford learns that Allmuseri philosophy focuses on unity rather than the duality that shapes Western perspectives on being. Rutherford’s identity at this point in the novel is focused on dualism and his penchant for defining himself in opposition to others—his brother Jackson, whites, people with property. The quote from Aquinas is also a more general signal that Johnson’s novel is one that delves into philosophy.

The second quote introduces the idea of the middle passage and the novel’s preoccupation with slavery. The middle passage is the second of three legs of the triangular transatlantic slave trade. In the first leg, Europeans loaded goods aboard ships bound for Africa. Once in Africa, the traders exchanged these goods for African slaves. In the middle passage of the trip, the traders packed African slaves into the holds of ships and made the perilous journey to the Americas. The mortality rates for both common sailors and the captives were high, with poor weather, poor nutrition, disease, and mistreatment all playing their roles. While captives would at times be in single-tribe groups, more often than not, they were mixed lots, a situation that forced the captives to learn new languages and begin the creation of a culture forced on them by their situation. The final leg of the trip began when the slaves were exchanged for raw materials, which merchants shipped to Europe, thus beginning the cycle all over again.

The poem from which the second epigraph comes is Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” a poem that recounts the 1811 mutiny of Mende captives against the owners of the slave ship Amistad. Hayden’s aim in the poem is to tell a story obscured by time and lack of interest in history from the perspectives of slaves. Hayden accomplishes this task by assembling pieces—actual entries from the logbooks of the ship, Negro spirituals, mini-biographies of enslaved African-American heroes, and passages that fill in the blanks of the historical record with monologues of the participants in the mutiny. Johnson’s subject matter, source material, and narrative structure reflect the same approach to the middle passage as that taken by Hayden in his poem.

The third epigraph comes from the Upanishads, sacred Hindu texts. This particular quote—“Who sees variety and not the Unity wanders from death to death” (i)—anticipates several important philosophical ideas in the novel. The first is dualism, the very Western idea that identity emerges from a distinction between self and the other. The second idea is something akin to karma, the idea that our actions create possibilities that immediately bear fruit in our lives and in the lives we experience as reincarnated beings in some Eastern philosophical and religious systems. The last element of the novel anticipated by this quote is the ubiquity of death, which comes to be an overwhelming presence in the novel. This quote is the first moment of foreshadowing.

Johnson focuses on introducing characters and establishing the setting in the first two chapters, which encompass the first leg of the triangular slave trade in the narrative. Protagonist Rutherford Calhoun is an ex-slave, thief, and sensualist who boards the ship to escape a loss of freedom but ends up nearly dying as a result. Johnson also introduces Ebenezer Falcon, a figure whose greed and big plans show how overwhelming a force America’s imperial and colonial ambitions were in the first part of the 19th century. Other characters—the low-life common sailors and seemingly decent Peter Cringle and Josiah Squibb—also enter the stage at this point.

The primary setting—the Republic in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean—is important in establishing Middle Passage as an allegory about the threat that slavery posed to the idea of America as a land of freedom during the early 19th century. Johnson pushes the novel beyond the flat archetypes one typically finds in allegories by drawing rich characters like Rutherford, emphasizing the material conditions of life on board a ship, and including detailed descriptions of the sea and the sailors.