The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage

ASHRAF H. A. RUSHDY The Properties of Desire: Forms of Slave Identity in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage UTHERFORD calhoun, the narrator of Charles Johnson's third»novel Middle Passage, has three careers, each of which is part of a determined effort on his part to create the person he "could rightly call Rutherford Calhoun," or to discover, as he puts it, the "T that I was" (162). After he is manumitted by his master in Southern Illinois, he first becomes a thief—a career, he informs us, that he had learned as a slave, and a career which is part ofhis striving to generate a philosophy of experience. In one way, Middle Passage is a story about the conversion ofRutherford from a self-proclaimed "petty thief" and "social parasite " into the chief accuser of the illegal slavetraders of New Orleans (2,200-03). He is transformed from someone who lives outside one set of laws into someone who comes to live within another set of laws. We cannot say that Rutherford undergoes a radical transformation from thief to law-abiding citizen for two reasons. First, he was never as "petty" a thief as he professes to be because his career as a thiefcoincides with, and is supported by, an interesting philosophy of revolution and class warfare. Second, he does not simply begin obeying the law after his middle passage. Having discovered the economic and social conditions underwriting large-scale crime—namely, slavery and the slave trade— Rutherford partially reforms his philosophy about stealing property, but he also discovers that blackmail is an effective strategy towards ending the slave trade. In his second career, Rutherford becomes a lover. In many ways, none of them conventional, Middle Passage is a love story. Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 2, Summer 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 74AshrafH. A. Rushdy The novel begins with Rutherford Calhoun running off"to sea" in order to avoid a shotgun wedding with Isadora Bailey and concludes with Rutherford and Isadora in an "embrace that would outlast the Atlantic's bone-chilling cold" (1,209). Part of Rutherford's "middle passage," then, is learning to commit himself to his beloved—once he realizes that Isadora is just that. Finally, Middle Passage is a story about Rutherford as writer, and about writing as a means of subscribing oneself in the act ofundermining the economic trade in slavery. What is interesting about Rutherford's three careers is that he seems to wish to work at each in order both to create an identity for himself and to criticize a capitalist economic system. In other words, stealing, loving, and writing are ways for Rutherford to determine how, as he says, "the (black) selfwas the greatest ofall fictions" as well as to maintain a revolutionary attitude towards what he comes to see as the "invisible economic realm . . . behind the sensuous one" directing the actions and limiting the kinds of relationships possible between human beings (17t, t4o). In this novel, then, like much of his earlier work, Johnson is studying the ways any person may undermine the socio-economic order of capitalism before it threatens to determine and define all his or her social relationships. While I am not going so far as to say that Johnson is a novelist with some sort of vaguely Marxist agenda, I am saying that one crucial aspect ofJohnson's work to date, particularly that work in which he deals with American chattel slavery, is his representation of individuals who recognize the manner in which the economic order of slavery determines their social relationships and act both to subvert the economic order and to organize the possibility for conceiving of a collective sense of selfhood. Let us recall that one of the characters in Oxherding Tale was Karl Marx, whose visit to the Cripplegate plantation in South Carolina was part of the turning point of the novel. Let us also note that one of Johnson's short stories, aptly entitled "Exchange Value," is a haunting study of the process by which two brothers who come into a large sum of money become alienated from their previous social life and from each other...