Middle Passage

“New Orleans wasn’t home. It was heaven.” 

New Orleans, an Atlantic seaport built by multiple colonial powers and home to many people of African descent, is initially a symbol of freedom for Rutherford because it feeds his hunger for experiences and sensuality. The city becomes a trap for him when he is forced to flee his debts and Isadora’s plot, however.

“I have never been able to do things halfway, and I hungered—literally hungered—for life and all it shades and hues: I was hooked on sensation, you might say, a lecher for perception and the nerve-knocking thrill, like a shot of opium, of new ‘experiences.’” 

This quote articulates one of the main reasons Rutherford is such a contrast with Jackson: He is driven by a desire for sensation and experience rather than rationality. This aspect of his character means he has more in common with the Romantic notion that such human experiences are more important than rationality, the focus of Enlightenment philosophy.

“It was what you heard all your blessed life from black elders and church women in flowered gowns: Don’t be common. Comb your hair. Be a credit to the Race. Strive, like the Creoles, for respectability.” 

Rutherford’s choices represent a repudiation of black respectability, described in its essence in this quote. He is a thief, unconcerned for anyone but himself. By contrast, Jackson embodies these values fully. Jackson is an educated man who encourages his master to divide his estate among all his slaves and donate the rest, instead of giving it all to Jackson and Rutherford.

“‘That’s how worldly things work, Calhoun. The Social Wheel, as I understand it after forty years in business for myself, is oiled by debts, each man owing the other somethin’ in a kinda web of endless obligations.’” 

Papa Zeringue’s understanding of the social wheel is one that places him at the top of the social hierarchy. His focus on debt indicates the degree to which his values are driven by material things and explains his willingness as a black man to engage in the slave trade. He is essentially corrupt. 

“Standing aft, looking back at the glittering lights ashore, I had an odd sensation, difficult to explain, that I’d boarded not a ship but a kind of fantastic, floating Black Maria, a wooden sepulcher whose timbers moaned with the memory of too many runs of black gold between the New World and the Old.” 

A Black Maria is a funeral hearse, so this moment is just one of the many instances of foreshadowing in the novel. The ship will eventually carry many of the dead after revolts and disease take out many on board.“Black gold” is a term that references the wealth to be made through the slave trade. The reference to human beings as “gold” shows how dehumanizing the trade was and Rutherford’s early awareness that the ship is destined for destruction.

“That special breed of empire builder, explorer, and imperialist that sculptors love to elongate, El Greco-like, in city park statues until they achieved Brobdingnagian proportions. He carried, I read, portraits of Pizarro and Magellan on every expedition he made.” 

Rutherford describes Falcon and the hypocritical whitewashing of figures like Falcon in American culture. Falcon has defined himself by his domination of peoples from other cultures—by enslaving them and stealing from them. He, and many like him, are still known as heroic figures, though.

“Captain Falcon’s crew spent most of their time literally rebuilding the Republic as we crawled along the waves. In a word, she was, from stem to stern, a process. She would not be, Cringle warned me, the same vessel that left in New Orleans, it not being in the nature of any ship to remain the same on that thrashing Void called the Atlantic (also called the Ethiopic Ocean by some, owing to the trade.)” 

This quote underscores the ship as a symbol for the United States—also a “ship” that is constantly under construction and subject to destruction if it is not continually maintained. The fact that the ship is engaged in the slave trade also indicates the ironic significance of slavery to a nation founded on the idea of freedom.

“The Reverend’s prophecy that I would grow up to be a picklock was wiser than he knew, for was I not, as a Negro in the New World, born to be a thief? Or, put less harshly, inheritor to millennia of things I had not myself made?” 

Rutherford articulates his sense of estrangement from Western and American culture as a result of his experience of slavery, highlighting the impact of slavery on African American notions of identity.

“[H]e, like the fledgling republic itself, felt expansive, eager to push back frontiers, even to slide betimes into bullying others and taking, if need be, what was not offered.” 

Rutherford articulates his sense of estrangement from Western and American culture as a result of his experience of slavery, highlighting the impact of slavery on African-American notions of identity.

“Once the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the pressure against his heart—after seeing this, the Africans panicked. Believe it or not, a barker told us they thought we were barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten. They saw us as savages.” 

The visual elements of the middle passage—the ship, the hold, the infamous system of tight-packing captives—are elements that mark the novel as a middle passage narrative. This passage echoes actual slave narratives that invert the typical representation of Europeans as civilized and Africans as barbarians, thereby highlighting the slave narratives as one of the genres that shape the novel.

“[H]ow in God’s name I could go on after this? How could I feel whole after seeing it? How could I tell my children of it without placing a curse on them forever? How can you even dare to have children in the world so senseless?” 

In this quote, Rutherford responds to the brutal nature of the material conditions of the middle passage. The quote highlights how difficult it is to find language that honors the survivors when representing such dehumanizing experiences. Simply witnessing the middle passage is such a shock to Rutherford’s world that it threatens his ability to even imagine a future (represented in this case by the possibility of having children).

“I suppose he selected me because I was the only Negro on board, though the distance between his people and the black America was vast—his people saw whites as Raw Barbarians and me (being a colored mate) as a Cooked one.” 

Ngonyama selects Rutherford as his intermediary with the crew because of his race, but as the quote points out, Rutherford is indeed a Westerner who is as divorced from the experience of the Allmuseri as his white crewmates are. Rutherford’s identity as a Westerner who is not quite Western reflects the larger situation of people of African descent as interlopers in Western culture.

“Her expectation, and that of Mama, for sharing my every pan of food became an unspoken contract no less binding between us than a handshake. Bye and bye, we were inseparable. This was how Mama wanted it, having decided her child’s survival might depend on staying close to the one crew member who looked most African, asking me to decipher the strange behavior of the whites and intercede on their behalf.”

Mama’s stratagem to ensure the survival of her child, Baleka, is just one of the many ways enslaved people address their predicaments and mitigate their sense of powerlessness when it comes to fulfilling parental roles such as the protection of children. This quote also represents one of the few instances in which Johnson focuses on the experience of women (who at times and on some trade routes outnumbered men) and children in the middle passage. 

“[E]yes I had seen before, I realize, under the sun-blackened brows of slaves: men and women who had no more at stake in the fields they worked than these men in the profits of a ship owned by financiers as far away from the dangers at sea as masters from the rows of cotton their bondman picked. No less than the blacks in the hold these sea-toughened kill bucks were chattel.” 

This quote is just one of many instances in which Johnson draws parallels between the experience of enslaved people and whites caught up in exploitative economic relationships. The white-on-white exploitation on the ship shows how the social contract aboard the ship is not as rational and fair-minded as Enlightenment thinkers believed.

“‘Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other—these ancient twins are built into the mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what pray, can such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: they are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is a social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound.’” 

This quote encapsulates Ebenezer Falcon’s vision of relations with others as a master-slave dialectic in which identity emerges only through dominance and violence. His morality is one that counters enlightened notions of identity and culture, and these beliefs eventually doom the ship when the Allmuseri enact those beliefs by killing their captors.

“A godhead in the hold? Closing my eyes, I made myself consider the consequences of the being that sustained the world falling into the hands of an American soldier of fortune. […] [H]istory would change. History, as we knew it, would end, for there would be no barriers between the secular and the sacred.” 

Here, Rutherford considers the implications of Falcon’s enslavement and possible sale of the Allmuseri god and concludes that this act has the potential to destroy the entire non-Western world and usher in an era of American dominance. Johnson is also alluding to the Western philosophical idea that history works toward some end—usually positive—as a result of the guidance of some force or social forces such as class. The end of history in this case is a nightmare vision, one that ensures the dominance of people like Falcon. Johnson’s decision to have Rutherford articulate his fears in this way is just one more example of Johnson’s engagement with Western philosophy in the novel. 

“As you might guess, I was his shadow-self, the social parasite, the black picklock and the worldling—in whom he saw, or said he saw, our runaway father.” 

Rutherford explicitly sees his brother, Jackson, as a foil against whom he defines himself. His sense of himself as a shadow of Jackson and an echo of Riley Calhoun, his father, shows how unstable his sense of identity is prior to his sojourn in the novel.

“Stupidly I had seen their lives and culture as timeless product, as a finished thing, pure essence […] when the truth was that they were process and Heraclitan change, like any man, not fixed but evolving and as vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we had thrown overboard. Ngonyama and maybe all the Africans, I realized, were not Allmuseri anymore. We had changed them […] No longer Africans, yet not Americans either.” 

Representations of non-Western cultures commonly show them to be unchanging and static; this contrasts with depictions of Western cultures, which are often seen as dynamic and adaptive. Johnson in this quote represents how the middle passage changes Rutherford’s understanding of an African culture and thus undercuts that binary. The evolution of Rutherford’s view of Allmuseri culture is one of the many ways the voyage changes him. The quote also highlights the violent role that the middle passage plays in transforming the Allmuseri into Americans/Westerners. The reference to Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher who believed that that nature of existence is that all things are in flux, is another Western philosophical reference among many in the novel. 

“Seeds, they were, that would flower into other deeds—good and evil—in no time at all. For people with their values, murder violated (even mutilated) the murderer so badly that it might well take them a billion billion rebirths to again climb the chain and achieve human form[…]From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made Ngonyama and his tribesmen as bloodthirsty as himself, thereby placing upon these people a shackle, a breach of virtue, far tighter than any chain of steel. The problem was how to win without defeating the other person. And they had failed. Such things mattered to Ngonyama. Whether he liked it or not, he had fallen; he was now part of the world of multiplicity, of me versus thee.” 

This quote describes the Allmuseri philosophy concerning the impact of violence on the Unity of Being. Unlike Westerners in Falcon’s mold, they see violence and dominance as acts that destroy one’s identity. After the Allmuseri take the ship by force and kill the crew, they must perform rituals to cleanse the ship of what they have done, and the fear that something negative will happen to balance out the violence of the act is present.

“The ‘I’ that I was, was a mosaic of many countries, a patchwork of others and objects stretching backwards to perhaps the beginning of time. What I felt, seeing this, was indebtedness. What I felt, plainly, was a transmission to those on deck of all I had pilfered, as though I was but a conduit or a window through which my pillage and booty of ‘experience’ passed.” 

Rutherford transforms his sense of being an African-American interloper in Western culture into an ethic focused on mediating experiences for others in such a way as to give hope to suffering people aboard the ship. His use of memories and stories to create a reality for others makes him more akin to the Allmuseri than the Westerners aboard the ship, so this moment also marks how much the journey and the process of coming to see himself as responsible for others has transformed Rutherford.

“More specifically: What came out of us, not what went in, made us clean or unclean. Their notion of ‘experience,’ I learned, held each man utterly responsible for his own happiness or sorrow, for the emptiness of his world or its abundance, even for his dreams and his entire way of seeing, so that an Allmuseri pauper might be rich if his heart was clean, and their kings impoverished if they harbored within themselves hunger, grievances, or hatred.”

This aspect of Allmuseri identity further underscores how important collectivity and caring for others are to the Allmuseri. While Rutherford admires them at this point, it is clear that he is too much of a Westerner to fully embrace their notions.

“If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives—this cauldron of mongrels from all points on the compass—was all I could rightly call home, then aye, I was of it. There, as I lay weakened and bleeding, was where I wanted to be. Do I sound like a patriot? Brother, I put it to you: what Negro, in his heart (if he’s not a hypocrite), is not?”

Rutherford articulates a counternarrative to Falcon’s notion of America as an imperializing and colonizing power. Here, he imagines America as a nation of immigrants and disenfranchised people. This more inclusive vision is one that sees the United States as a melting pot.

“Looking back at the asceticism of the middle passage, I saw how the frame of mind I had adopted left me unattached, like the slaves who, not knowing what awaited them in the New World, put a high premium on living from moment to moment, and this, I realized, was why they did not commit suicide. The voyage had irreversibly changed my seeing, made of me a cultural mongrel, and transformed the world into a fleeting shadow play I felt no need to possess or dominate, only appreciate in the ever extended present. Colors had been more vivid at sea, water wetter, ice colder.” 

This quote articulates how thoroughly Rutherford has been transformed by his journey and thus underscores one of the important themes of the novel. Rutherford’s rejection of materialism and his acceptance of other cultures and points of view is, in some sense, the most modern identity in the book and highlights how much the novel reflects Paul Gilroy’s thesis that the Black Atlantic was crucial to the formation of modernity.