Patriotism in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage

ABSTRACT

This essay places the issue of patriotism at the heart of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). The first part looks at the three political systems against which the young protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, is going to forge his own political beliefs while aboard the slaver the Republic. And the second part argues that Calhoun’s unexpected claim toward the end of the story that he is a patriot can be best understood when compared to the decision of the nameless protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) to come out of his hiding place and be a responsible, active citizen. Calhoun and the Invisible Man’s belief in the values of equality and tolerance on which the nation was built, as well as their eagerness to play their part to make it work, exemplify, the essay concludes, what political theorists call constitutional patriotism.

KEYWORDS:

• Transatlantic slave trade
• constitutional patriotism
• Invisible Man

Funding

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Ministry of Education of Japan. Host Institution: Kansai University.

Notes

1. Barely a decade before Calhoun starts as a free man in New Orleans, the nation has been caught up in the Missouri controversy opposing antislavery and pro-slavery advocates on the very practical question of whether new slave states should be added to the Union, and on the more fundamental question of whether or not the Founding Fathers had been opposed to slavery in principle when they claimed, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had the effect of reinforcing slavery in the South and accelerating disenfranchisement of blacks elsewhere. In addition, Denmark Vesey’s failed conspiracy a couple years later threw North Carolina and the South into a panic resulting in stricter control and oppression of both slaves and free citizens of color by the slaveholding class and their supporters. Things were not much better in the northern states: in 1824 Hard Scrabble and Snow Town, two African American neighborhoods in Providence, Rhode Island, were attacked by working-class whites. And in 1829 (the year Calhoun arrives in New Orleans), riots erupted in Cincinnati, Ohio, between African Americans and Irish immigrants over employment opportunities.

2. According to New York Times book critic Eleanor Blau, Falcon “is based loosely on Sir Richard Francis Burton, whose contradictions fascinated the author. ‘He was an explorer, an imperialist, a translator, a quasi-genius,’ [Johnson] said, ‘and also the biggest bigot in the world’” (C: 9+).

3. While Squibb’s use of the word “buccaneer” may be understood in its historical sense (a pirate of the Caribbean), it may also be understood in its more modern sense of a reckless, deceitful adventurer, especially in business or politics—which is a good description of Falcon. Thomas Blood remained a Cromwellian for a while, but later in life, after his failed attempt at stealing the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London, he not only was pardoned but also found favor with Charles II.

4. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Karl Marx describes what he calls the “sum-proletariat of Paris” manipulated by Bonapartist agents thus: “Along with the ruined roués of questionable means of support and questionable antecedents, along with the foul and adventures-seeking dregs of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, dismissed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway gallery slaves, sharpers, jugglers, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand performers, gamblers, procurers, keepers of disorderly houses, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissors grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, that whole undefined, dissolute, kicked-about mass that the Frenchmen style ‘la Bohème’” (41).

5. Jonathan Little, in Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (1997), takes the analysis of the Diamelo character further as he interprets Diamelo as Johnson’s vehicle to satirize the essentialist views of the Black Nationalist leaders of the 1960s. Little also establishes a parallel between Diamelo and Falcon, but he steers his analysis toward what could be described as “martyromania,” that is, the desire to be considered as a martyr. According to Little, Johnson “exposes Diamelo as paradoxically dependent on his oppressor’s victimization of him. Diamelo suffers a loss when Falcon commits suicide since he depends on Falcon’s existence for his identity. Diamelo […] fixates on his victimization and is destroyed by it. Diamelo’s position of victimology is dramatized as unstable in the depiction of his death—since his actions destroy all those in his path, including himself” (148). Thus racial isolationism is self-defeating and detrimental to the nation at large.

6. In Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination (1997), Jonathan Little also bases his reading of Johnson’s Middle Passage on a comparison with Ellison’s Invisible Man. Both analyses overlap on a few specific points. For instance, both analyses discuss the “responsibilities of citizenship” (Little 157) and the challenge that living in America represents for both protagonists. However, while the present analysis endeavors to demonstrate that both protagonists, in their own way, have made the exact same choice about personal commitment and political action, Little warns, early in his analysis, that “Johnson’s novel is markedly different from Ellison’s in its conclusions about self and society” (136). Also, Little attributes Calhoun’s sense of indebtedness to his nation to some sort of Buddhist epiphany. This is a critical angle that this analysis has deliberately left aside, preferring to focus on individual free will rather than spiritually induced initiative. Finally, Little argues that both novels “construct the philosophical foundations that support the politics of integrationism: a system that recognizes King’s ‘network of mutuality’ and interracial cooperation” (158). While the conclusions of the present analysis are congruent with the above argument, the present analysis also suggests that both protagonists, in their eagerness to see the founding principles of the nation restored to their rightful place, have placed their hopes in a society that is beyond the process of integration and based on universal principles.

7. The evolution of the Invisible Man from the personal to the national, his to-ing and fro-ing between his American and African American identities, as well as his meditation on the frailty of the republic echo Calhoun’s own existential ruminations and the probing of national values in Middle Passage. Gary Storhoff’s analysis of the Calhoun character in Understanding Charles Johnson (2004) bears some resemblance to the present analysis of the Invisible Man character. According to Storhoff, Calhoun is “literally the American self-made man, who creates, then revises, himself as he goes along” (158). And, like his nation, Calhoun “is constantly engaged in self-making” (159). Storhoff also argues that in Middle Passage, “Johnson links his theme of personal identity to the question of America’s national identity: how is it imagined with the corporate cooperation of its citizens, then constantly revised communally through time” (148). And finally, Storhoff notes that Middle Passage is very much about democracy—its fickleness and fallibility: “At no point is America ever finished, and it is a citizen’s duty ‘at any cost’ to preserve this fragile thing—disorderly, ‘flying apart,’ but coming together again with its citizens’ concerted efforts. American history is not simply made but remade again and again” (152).

8. In Charles Johnson in Context (2009), Linda Selzer structures her analysis of Johnson’s Middle Passage around a new form of cosmopolitanism, which, she claims, “attempts to rearticulate older conceptions of world citizenship and human rights […] in ways that will make them effective tools for advancing human rights in late modernity” (167). Selzer invokes a “new interest in universals” that is nonetheless “tempered by a respect for cultural, local, and ethnic specificity” and makes Johnson’s position on race match these theories. Selzer then offers a range of cosmopolitanisms (e.g., predatory, nonproprietary, and consumerist) that is far wider than the one referred to in these pages. However, her expanding, in line with the theories of Kwame Anthony Appiah, “the conceptual borders of cosmopolitan thought by articulating a ‘situated,’ ‘patriotic,’ or ‘rooted’ cosmopolitanism” (6) leads her to conclusions very similar to those reached herein.

9. The civil rights movement did not start out unexpectedly with school desegregation (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), and a few major steps were taken before 1952 when Ellison’s Invisible Man came out. For instance, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909 with the help of W. E. B. Du Bois as a response to such setbacks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s helped nurture a black cultural identity while putting black arts and culture in the national spotlight. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pressured by National Negro Congress President A. Philip Randolph, signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the federal government and war industry. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman established, with limited success, the Committee on Civil Rights and, in 1948, desegregated the armed forces with Executive Order 9981. The previous year, Jackie Robinson had become the first black professional baseball player in the major leagues, and in 1950 United Nations diplomat Ralph Bunche was the first individual of African extraction to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

10. In “Kantian Patriotism” Pauline Kleingeld writes: “Civic patriotism is found in the tradition of republicanism. The republican state (res publica, commonwealth) is regarded as serving the common good of the citizens in the political sense. The citizens are regarded as free and equal (and, often, as male and propertied) individuals who are united in their pursuit of a common political good. Civic patriotism is the love of their shared political freedom and the institutions that sustain it” (317; emphasis added).

11. The quotation in its full form reads: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (579).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Ministry of Education of Japan. Host Institution: Kansai University.

Notes on contributors

Raphaël Lambert

Raphaël Lambert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) is professor of African American literature and culture in the department of American and British Cultural Studies at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan. His current research focuses on the transatlantic slave trade with an emphasis on the notion of community.