A Conversation with Charles Johnson
Interview by:
Julianna Duennes Russ
Q: Middle Passage is set in 1830. You wrote it in the 80s, and it was published in 1990. How did you capture the texture of that time so well? What was your approach?
A: The more I think about it, I realize how much writing I've done set in the 19th century. I never expected that to be the case. I did study the 19th century as much as I could for the novel before Middle Passage, called Oxherding Tale, because I needed to know that world and the props and the costuming. And then after that, I had an opportunity to write about the oldest living American. His name was Charlie Smith—137 supposedly—in 1977 for a PBS drama. That's set in the past.
So I found myself writing a lot of stories, not in my own time, but also, you know, in the past. The whole purpose was to make it convincing enough to the reader that you were in 1830. It's not, you know, 1990. However, I do not see myself as a historical fiction writer. There are people who do that for a living, and they're much better than me.
I see myself as basically writing for a contemporary audience. The book, the story, should not feel like a transcript from the 19th century, like a Frederick Douglass slave narrative. It's for modern readers, and it should have the texture, as best I could do it, of the period. But I'm not a historical fiction writer.
Q: To follow up on that, obviously, you explored a lot of Buddhist themes through the Allmuseri in the novel. I’m interested in how you stayed true to the historical elements of the novel, while also incorporating those more philosophical themes that were personal to you. How did you go about blending those?
A: The Allmuseri… I could tell you how I got that name. It was really by accident. When I thought, “How am I going to construct this tribe?” I wanted to show the tribe in all of its dimensions. Religious dimensions, you know, their rituals, just everything—I was creating a people.
I drew upon African and Indian and Buddhist sources. I went to Paris, and there was a poet there who took me around named Ted Jones. He took me to a museum and he showed me an African exhibit that he really liked. He told me a story about the exhibit and the people. As an example, if you were not of a tribe and you came to it, they would spit at your feet. And if you were a Westerner, you might think, Oh, I'm being insulted. But that's not true. They felt they were saying, “Your feet must be hot, hot and tired. We want to give you moisture, right?” I said, okay, that's cool. I like that tribe. I use that, I think, in Middle Passage. And then there's stuff from India, what people are doing in Kerala, India, and then a lot of Buddhism. So they're an amalgamation of different spiritual sources, because I wanted them to seem like the most spiritual tribe on earth, and the original tribe of humankind.
The name itself… I'll tell you how it happened. You got a pen or pencil? I'll show you what I'm talking about.
One of my really short stories, my first novel Faith and the Good Thing, was a folk tale that has lots of magic. So I read 80 books on magic. I came across this word, and what it meant was, I thought, like a hut, you know, in a village where magic was taking place. So, you know, Al-museri. So I wrote a short story called The Education of Mingo. He had to be from somewhere. So I just said, okay, he was from the Al-museri tribe. But what I did was, I took out the hyphen and put an L, so it's like Allmuseri. So that's how that happened. But then I did another novel, Oxherding Tale, and again, I said, okay, I gotta have an African character. Where's he from? I could have made him Ethiopian, but I wanted my own creation, so I made him an Allmuseri.
By the time I got to Middle Passage, the whole point was, now I gotta really open this up. What's their religion? What's their language like? So you get all that. But I was on the road talking to people about the novel, and you know what this means? Al-museri. It's Egyptian. It means “the Egyptian,” and the airline in Egypt is called Almasria, and people joke about it because it's not a good airline. They say it's really “all misery.” That's what they call it. Just by accident, I took that word, added an L, dropped the hyphen to get Allmuseri, but it really means “the Egyptian.” It’s how the creative mind works, sometimes by accident, by association, and it just falls together.
Q: I know you've spoken in other interviews about your understanding of dependent origination, and I'm interested in how that understanding might have influenced your writing when you were conceptualizing the Allmuseri and the way that the past, present and future intersect in their perspective, as compared to the Western-oriented linear progression of time.
A: I don't really think I made a distinction on the basis of time with the Allmuseri. I do know they believe in interconnectedness between people, which is a very Buddhist idea. And theirs is a very different vision than Captain Falcon. But they tragically have to break from their own vision of life to be free, because they have to kill their captors. I think it's a line that says, “Falcon won, because they had to be as bloodthirsty as he has been.” Ngonyama, their leader, grieves over that after the mutiny in which they've had to kill most of the crew. So it's karma, you know, and he knows that's going to come back and they'll suffer for it.
Q: It seems in the novel that history isn't something that just happens. The narrative structure of having Rutherford write these passages makes it so much more of an intimate experience for the reader, because you're there as these things are happening, you're hearing it from his perspective. How do you think fiction lets us experience history in a different way than textbooks do? And how did you use that to help the legacy of the Middle Passage resonate now?
A: For some reason, I got inducted into the Society of American Historians. I don't know why that happened, because I've written all these stories set in history. So why did they induct me in this? You know, I'm just a writer who reads a lot of history and tries to incorporate it, right? But I do know there's an important difference. Stephen Oates, I believe is his name, is a historian at Amherst.
I wrote a novel after Middle Passage called Dreamer, about Martin Luther King, Jr. I was on a book tour, and [Oates] came to the bookstore where I was signing copies of Dreamer, and he said it was the best book he'd seen on King. And he wrote a wonderful book on King called Let the Trumpet Sound. Here's the trick. He tells Martin Luther King's story as a story—beginning, middle and end, building so it's suspenseful. He uses novelistic techniques. And then after I talked to him, I saw the next move he made as a historian in his writing. He uses more creative writing techniques in terms of viewpoint and things like that. There's an intimate connection between what somebody does, who's a historical novelist, and the historian. You want to dramatize, as a novelist, the historical record. You want to hear people talking to each other. Dialogue. You want to see a scene. You may have to imagine what that is on the basis of historical research, and it's not going to be exactly the way it was, probably, but maybe close enough so that the reader emotionally feels the history and the characters. And in a strict history, they may not feel that. They may not have dramatic scenes, they may not have vivid dialogue. Stephen Oates is very sensitive to that, because history is stories.