A Study Guide for Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820653

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Middle Passage

Charles Johnson

1990

Introduction

Middle Passage, published in 1990 and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction that year, is a historical novel by Charles Johnson. Its title refers to the middle leg of the triangular route sailed by slave ships in the Atlantic from the 1500s to the early 1800s. On the first leg, ships left Europe for Africa, carrying goods that were traded for captured and kidnapped Africans. During the Middle Passage, these Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the New World, where they were either sold or traded for raw materials. The ships then transported the materials back to Europe, completing the triangular voyage. The term Middle Passage has become synonymous not only with the journey across the Atlantic but also with the evils of the slave trade and the unimaginable hardships Africans faced on their forced journey to the New World, a journey that took weeks, sometimes months, under appalling and even horrific conditions that typically resulted in numerous deaths.

Johnson's novel is set in 1830. Although slavery was still legal in the United States, the slave trade no longer was; that is, slaves could be owned, bought, and sold, but they could no longer be imported. The novel tells the story of the final voyage of an illegal slave ship, the Republic. The novel's protagonist is Rutherford Calhoun, a free black who lives by his wits in New Orleans as a thief, con man, and womanizer. To escape debts and marriage to Isadora, a prim schoolteacher from Boston, and to embark on a new adventure, he poses as a cook aboard a ship bound for Africa to pick up a cargo of slaves. Through his adventures, Calhoun acquires a new understanding of the evils of slavery. Some of the material in Middle Passage may not be suitable for younger readers. Calhoun comments briefly on some of his sexual experiences and describes a sexual encounter, and a cabin boy aboard the ship is molested by the ship's captain.

Author Biography

Charles Richard Johnson was born on April 23, 1948, in Evanston, Illinois. He achieved some prominence in the 1960s as a political cartoonist. He studied at Southern Illinois University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1971 and a master's degree in 1973. In 1988, he earned a PhD in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Meanwhile, Johnson established himself as a leading African American scholar and writer. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he held an endowed chair in writing, the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professorship for Excellence in English. He also became director of the university's creative writing program, in which he taught fiction writing.

At the university, Johnson enjoyed a long and prolific career. He is the author of four novels,