Abstract
Self-reliance and self-determination loom large in Charles Johnson’s writing, both critical and creative. His position on self-determination has its roots in the way he was raised by conscientious and hardworking parents. They encouraged Johnson to become educated and to work hard at honest work (his father found a summer job for Johnson as a garbage man when he was in college), and this goes a long way in explaining Johnson’s views about the possibility and necessity for self-reliance and creating one’s own opportunities regardless of social context and obstacles.3
The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others. Freedom and slavery are mental states.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin
Liberty means responsibility. That’s why most men dread it.
—George Bernard Shaw1
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Notes
Rudolph D. Byrd, ed., I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999) xiii.
Johnson, Middle Passage 179. All subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War, see chapter 142, vol. 1 (1942; New York: Schocken Books, 1951).
James Baldwin, “Notes from a Hypothetical Novel,” Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961; New York: Dell, 1967). George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists: Liberty and Equality,” Man and Superman (1903).
Charles Johnson, “The Second Front: A Reflection on Milk Bottles, Male Elders, the Enemy Within, Bar Mitzvahs, and Martin Luther King Jr.,” Black Men Speaking, eds. Charles Johnson and John McCluskey (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997) 178.
In fact, Johnson asserts that anything is possible with the right attitude and effort. He states: “If I wanted to be a cartoonist, a philosopher, a fiction writer, a college professor, an essayist, a screenwriter, a martial artist, all I needed to achieve any or all of these things was my own talent, disciplined labor, and the blessing of God. In other words, the self was a verb, not a noun—a process, not a product. You defined your life through action, deeds.” Michael Boccia, “Interview with Charles Johnson,” African American Review 30:3 (1996 Winter): 617.
The Allmuseri are a fictional tribe, an imaginative composite of many cultures, African and otherwise. See Charles Rowell, “An Interview with Charles Johnson,” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 20.3 (Summer 1997): 545;
William Nash, “A Conversation with Charles Johnson,” New England Review 19.2 (Spring 1998): 6;
Rob Trucks, “A Conversation with Charles Johnson,” TriQuarterly 107/108 (Winter/Spring/Summer 2000): 10.
Richard Hardack, “Black Skin, White Tissues: Local Color and Universal Solvents in the Novels of Charles Johnson,” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 22.4 (Fall 1999): 1030, 1038. Hardack also writes that “[w]hat is disturbing is not that Johnson writes purely ontological fictions—the prerogative of all artists and the ideal of many postmodern science fiction writers—but that he systematically denies a post-racial history in pursuing a pre-racial aesthetics” (1032), and that for Johnson slavery is a “metaphysical condition, and ‘Negroness’ a performative one” (1037).
Daniel M. Scott, “Interrogating Identity: Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage,” African American Review 29.4 (Winter 1995): 653.
Johnson, Little “Interview” 166. Johnson acknowledges the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty for the view “that philosophy, and fiction—both disciplines of language—are about, at bottom, the same business.” Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988) 32. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Herbert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Drefus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1964) 26.
Jonathan Little, Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1977) 3.
For a firsthand account of the Middle Passage experience, see Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself ed. Werner Sollors (1789; New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), particularly chapters 1–4, vol. 1, 19–70. See also Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
Fritz Gysin, “The Enigma of Return,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, eds. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pederson (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) 186. For a discussion about Rutherford’s precarious status between the Allmuseri and the white crew, and his “confinement to the middleness of […] [a] colonial moment, and the transcendence of coloniality via enunciation from the point of confinement” (625), see Brian Fagel’s “Passages from the Middle: Coloniality and Postcoloniality in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage,” African American Review 30.4 (Winter 1996). Fagel argues that Rutherford “is incapable of experiencing togetherness with the Allmuseri […] [he] finds himself too far removed from any sense of African roots” (627).
Charles Johnson, “Accepting the Invitation,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 10.1 (Fall 2000): 64. Johnson is a practicing Buddhist.
See V. P. Franklin’s Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance, for. Mary Frances Berry (1984; New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992), for a historical perspective of African American ideologies, objectives and strategies for self-reliance and self-determination.
Ebenezer Falcon is not alone in his concern for the alleged deleterious consequences of affirmative action, clearly subtext in this dialogue. For discussions by African Americans who question or oppose affirmative action policies see Carter’s Reflections; Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2002), especially his thoughts on compensatory policy;
Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990);
and, Ward Connerly’s Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000).
See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “The Phenomenology of the Allmuseri: Charles Johnson and the Subject of the Narrative of Slavery,” African American Review 26.3 (Fall 1992): 373–394.
See Ivan Van Sertima, They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976), particularly chapter 2, “The Visible Witnesses,” and center text photographic evidence.
Timothy Parrish, “Imagining Slavery: Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson,” Studies in American Fiction 25.1 (Spring 1997): 82.
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© 2004 Margaret I. Jordan
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Jordan, M.I. (2004). “Evolve or Die”. In: African American Servitude and Historical Imaginings. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978325_4
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