Middle Passage

Zusatztext "Middle Passage resonates...a spirited adventure tale daringly spun off the realm of myth." Informationen zum Autor Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks ,  Dr. King’s Refrigerator ,  Dreamer ,  Faith and the Good Thing , and  Middle Passage , for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle. Klappentext From a critically acclaimed, award-winning and bestselling author comes a compelling adventure that "The Seattle Times" hailed as "a work of art that is a rattling good sea yarn as well as a profound meditation on the nature of self-knowledge". Entry, the first June 14, 1830 Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I´ve come to learn, is women. In my case, it was a spirited Boston schoolteacher named Isadora Bailey who led me to become a cook aboard the Republic. Both Isadora and my creditors, I should add, who entered into a conspiracy, a trap, a scheme so cunning that my only choices were prison, a brief stay in the stony oubliette of the Spanish Calabozo (or a long one at the bottom of the Mississippi), or marriage, which was, for a man of my temperament, worse than imprisonment -- especially if you knew Isadora. So I went to sea, sailing from Louisiana on April 14, 1830, hoping a quarter year aboard a slave clipper would give this relentless woman time to reconsider, and my bill collectors time to forget they´d ever heard the name Rutherford Calhoun. But what lay ahead in Africa, then later on the open, endless sea, was, as I shall tell you, far worse than the fortune I´d fled in New Orleans. New Orleans, you should know, was a city tailored to my taste for the excessive, exotic fringes of life, a world port of such extravagance in 1829 when I arrived from southern Illinois -- a newly freed bondman, my papers in an old portmanteau, a gift from my master in Makanda -- that I dropped my bags and a shock of recognition shot up my spine to my throat, rolling off my tongue in a whispered, "Here, Rutherford is home." So it seemed those first few months to the country boy with cotton in his hair, a great whore of a city in her glory, a kind of glandular Golden Age. She was if not a town devoted to an almost religious pursuit of Sin, then at least to a steamy sexuality. To the newcomer she was an assault of smells: molasses commingled with mangoes in the sensually damp air, the stench of slop in a muddy street, and, from the labyrinthine warehouses on the docks, the odor of Brazilian coffee and Mexican oils. And also this: the most exquisitely beautiful women in the world, thoroughbreds of pleasure created two centuries before by the French for their enjoyment. Mulattos colored like magnolia petals, quadroons with breasts big as melons -- women who smelled like roses all year round. Home? Brother, for a randy Illinois boy of two and twenty accustomed to cornfields, cow plops, and handjobs in his master´s hayloft, New Orleans wasn´t home. It was Heaven. But even paradise must have its back side too, and it is here (alas) that the newcomer comes to rest. Upstream there were waterfront saloons and dives, a black underworld of thieves, gamblers, and ne´er-do-wells who, unlike the Creoles downstream (they sniffed down their long, Continental noses at poor, purebred Negroes like myself), didn´t give a tinker´s damn about my family tree and welcomed me as the world downstream would not. In plain English, I was a petty thief. How I fell into this life of living off others, of being a social parasite, is a long, sordid story best shortened for those who, like the Greeks, prefer to k...

Product details

• Authors: Charles Johnson, Charles R. Johnson
• Publisher: Scribner USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.07.1998
• EAN: 9780684855882
• ISBN: 978-0-684-85588-2
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 14 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature