Charles Johnson Middle Passage

About Middle Passage

Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) won the National Book Award — a sea-adventure novel set aboard the slave ship Republic in 1830, narrated by the freed slave Rutherford Calhoun. The novel borrows its structure from Melville's Moby-Dick and uses it to explore the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African philosophy, and the question of what freedom means within systems that do not recognize Black humanity. One of the most ambitious American novels of the late twentieth century.