Dreamer by Charles Johnson

At the SCLC part of my job description was recording the Revolution, preserving its secrets for posterity--particularly what took place in the interstices. Naturally, this is where the stories of all doubles occur. In a spiral notebook, one I kept from my college days, I made entries on Chaym Smith's progress, having no idea at the time that just possibly I was composing a gospel. I--even I--was startled to discover ho much he'd already absorbed about King since 1954, as a man might meticulously study his rival, or an object of love, or--in his case--someone he loved and envied simultaneously. He was determined to possess the mystery of the minister's power and popularity, make it his own.

Dreamer begins with the narrator, Matthew Bishop, knocking on the hotel room door of his boss, Martin Luther King, Jr. "You'll want to see this for yourself," Bishop says, and brings King to see a visitor named Chaym Smith, who turns out to be King's exact double. Smith is a bit prickly and unpredictable, but he appears to want to make himself useful to the King project, which has just begun to confront radical opposition in the city of Chicago, as well as among his own allies who resent the broadening of King's message into an anti-poverty and anti-Vietnam platform. But how can the campaign make use of such a man? One answer, of course, is to use him as a decoy--an attempt has already been made on the minister's life--but this is a possibility with which King is deeply uncomfortable. He assigns Bishop to take Smith away to a safe house in rural Indiana and babysit him, perhaps mold him into something useful.

Chaym Smith is the novel's most interesting creation. He resembles King in many important ways, including a deep engagement with world religion, including Eastern religion, in this case emerging from his time as a soldier in Korea. But he describes himself as a non-believer, and his attitude toward most of King's work is one of cynical disbelief. He certainly doesn't share the minister's commitment to non-violence, perhaps being responsible for the death of his wife and her children; we also see him set fire to an apartment block where he's been summarily evicted. Is he King's doppelganger, or his opposite? Perhaps he is a secret third thing: the shadow self that follows King around, the self-doubt and cynical voice that eats away at his self and his mission, wondering if true change really is possible.

For all that, it felt to me that Johnson wasn't really sure what to do with this interesting character, no more than King himself seems to be. The one time he's actually used as a decoy to save King from violence--Smith is shot by a minister-hating Black man who climbs into Bishop's car--seems to happen by happenstance. Mostly, Smith is kept out of the way in Indiana, troubling Bishop's conscience and tending a church garden. When he's whisked away by government agents toward the novel's end, it's not clear what they want from him, or how it might bear on the assassination that, as you might expect, is the novel's culmination. Perhaps we are meant to think that King's shadow lives on after him somewhere, in the wind. But it read to me as if Johnson dispatched Smith because he wasn't sure how to make him matter.

In fact, what I liked best about the novel were the interstitial, italicized sections that follow King himself in the close third person. Here, Johnson relies on his scrupulous research--which often seemed to crowd out narrative and meaning in the sections narrated by Bishop--to form an image of King who is determined and principled, but haunted by exhaustion as well as his own doubts and demons. I came away with even more respect, I think, for King, reflecting on this version of a man who does great things despite his own deep troubles and misgivings: a real human being. Among other things, these sections emphasize how deep King's commitment was to a vision of true equality which is confounded by the fundamental differences we see in the faces on the street. Deep down, this vision says, we're all the same--and what better proof of this than confronting your own double?

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.