Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

We drew lots to see who would be the first to sneak below while the captain slept and wrench open a plank to peer inside.  Tommy O'Toole, the cabin boy, pulled the shortest length of string.  He shinnied down a rope reef-knotted round his waist so we could pull him up.  After ten minutes Squibb tugged and found the rope broken.  We were about to lower him when the boy crawled back on deck with only half his mind--or could be it was twice the mind he had before.  His skin was cold, all one bluish color as if he had been baptized in the Deep.  His face was blank as a pan.  And his words, as his mouth spread and closed like a fish's, were strange: a slabber of Bantu patois, Bushman, Cushitic, and Sudanic tongues, and your guess where he learned them is as good as mine.  His eyes glowed like deck lights, less solid orbs of color, if you saw them up close, than splinters of luciferin indigo that, like an emulsion, had caught the camphor of a blaze once before them.

Charles Johnson's novel Middle Passage follows Rutherford Calhoun, a freedman living in New Orleans who hops aboard a ship in order to evade his creditors, and a girlfriend who has offered them restitution of his debts in exchange for a forced marriage.  The ship is called The Republic--whoop whoop, there goes the symbol siren--and it's bound for West Africa to pick up a group of slaves taken from the mysterious and ancient Allmuseri people.  Rutherford is understandably conflicted about the ship's goal, but all his life he's been self-serving, a drifter, a petty thief who looks out for himself.  But he can't stop himself from getting entangled in the drama of the crew: the prim, aloof mate Cringle, the mad genius captain Ebenezer Falcon, and especially the Allmuseri, who are themselves of several minds about how to deal with their newfound captivity.  Rutherford has a kind of mobility between the captives and the crew, but as a result, he's isolated: the crew doesn't trust him (he is a stowaway after all) and the Allmuseri consider him a "cooked barbarian" as opposed to the white slavers, who are "raw barbarians."

But that's not all that's on board: a secret crate Falcon hides deep in the galley is rumored to contain the Allmuseri's god.  A young cabin boy, sent to investigate, returns mad, and speaking in several African languages.  Later, when Rutherford is tasked to feed the god--by the Allmuseri who have taken over the ship--it transforms, like that Harry Potter creature that presents as your greatest fear, into an image of the father who abandoned him.  The mysterious nature of the Allmuseri god drives the intrigue of the novel, but in the end, it turns out to be mostly irrelevant; it's the violent conflict between the ship's crew and the Allmuseri, the reality of starvation, the pistol, and the guinea worm, that lead the plot to its conclusion.

I wasn't totally satisfied by the way the novel concluded.  Once the Allmuseri dispatch most of the crew, Johnson sets up a number of conflicts that don't get fully explored: the compassionate Ngonyama versus the bloodthirsty Diamelo, both of whom must grapple with the way that the Middle Passage has already altered their character without ever stepping foot on American soil.  When the divisions between the Allmuseri reach a head, Rutherford is catatonic, having been stunned by his interaction with the Allmuseri god, and as a result the novel feels distant when it might have tackled disaster head on.  Nor did I think the following sea rescue, with its neat resolutions, match the weirdness and mystery of the preceding novel.

But ultimately, Middle Passage manages to juggle a lot of balls at once, and mostly successfully: it's an adventure novel, a comedy, a fantasy novel, and a political novel, interested in the ways the slave trade shapes and deforms our national character.  It's worth reading just for Rutherford's voice, associative and erudite, which rejects any expectation that a former slave must be undereducated, or have a heart of gold.  Like the Allmuseri, who explain that they have traded and intermarried with Dravidians in India and Olmecs in the new world, Rutherford is far more than the narrative his former owner, or his creditors, or the captain of The Republic, would tell.