It sometimes happens during the course of an artist’s life, particularly when he is young and fighting to define his own voice and vision, that the idea for an original literary work comes to him, a project so exciting (to him) in its promise, and so unlike the literature he has read, that his only choice becomes the execution and completion of said work. Nothing else will be able to powerfully engage his imagination. No other project can make sense to him until this troublesome book ceases to exist only in his head and enters public space. He knows, as he knows nothing else, that this is a story he was born to write, though he is far from ready for its endless demands of imagination and invention. Incarnating the idea—making it flesh—will stretch him, technically and emotionally and intellectually, and that, of course, is precisely part of the project’s appeal—how the doing of it will change him. It is at first a thrilling promise, then a curse and at last a cross he must carry until the last syllable of the last word on the last page is done.
Once they hear of the dream he’s nurturing, former teachers, editors, and friends might question this new direction he is taking. Some may feel personally offended and discourage him from going ahead because, for heaven’s sake, they thought they knew him, or had some idea of what he was like from his earlier work, and this thing, they say, is so “different.” If he is a creator of color, they will wonder why he is doggedly pursuing a project so unusual it bears no resemblance whatsoever to other Negro books—“protest novels” in particular—presently being ballyhooed and blessed with awards and attention. And their confusion will be all the greater if his dream-novel, this project that (for him) is more about breaking new ground than fitting into ephemeral literary fashions, also challenges most of the racial and sociological presuppositions in the air during the time of the book’s composition.
The time? 1975 through 1982.
The book? Oxherding Tale.
Its seeds were sown when I was fourteen, pulled down a volume on yoga from my mother’s shelf of books in our living room in Evanston, Illinois, and, after reading the chapter devoted to “Meditation,” I spent the next half hour in my bedroom following its instructions for dhyana. It was the most peaceful thirty minutes I’d ever known, an experience that radically slowed down my sense of time, cleared away the background noise always on the edge of consciousness, and divested me of desires. My vision was clearer; I felt capable of infinite patience with my parents, teachers, and friends. Within me, I detected not the slightest trace of fear or anger or anxiety about anything, Nor was I conscious of myself, only of what was immediately in front of me, and that, I assure you, was indeed an unusual experience for a fourteen-year-old boy in 1962. But in addition to being rewarding that first dhyana was scary too (I wondered what the hell I’d just done to myself), as if I’d been playing with a loaded pistol. It came to me that if I kept this up, I might well become too detached and dispassionate and lack the fire—the internal agitation—to venture out into the world and explore all the things, high and low, that I, as a teenager, was burning to see, know, taste, and experience.
Yet that very hunger for worldly experience brought me face to face again with the haunting practices I’d found in eastern philosophy when I was nineteen and enrolled, in 1967, at one of Chicago’s most rough-and-tumble martial-arts schools, Chi Tao Chuan of the Monastery. There, I practiced kung-fu (often referred to as “meditation in motion”) with the intensity of a monk because nothing less than total effort was sufficient to get me through those nights of brutal sparring. Our teacher had a saying that stuck to me like a burr. “You don’t have to be a Buddhist to get good at this system,” he said. “But it helps.” Believe me, I was ready to investigate anything that would keep me alive in that school.
At the time I was a philosophy and journalism major—and professional cartoonist—located three hundred miles away at Southern Illinois University. Back at school, in between summer training at Chi Tao Chuan, I studied classical western philosophy for my classes. On my own I avidly consumed the major and minor texts of first Buddhism, then Hinduism and Taoism. During the racially turbulent late 1960s, when anger and violence, the polarization of blacks and whites, the young and old, seemed everywhere around me, these works became my secret pleasure, the place I turned for clarity and consolation—a refuge—though I still could not muster up the courage to commit myself to practicing meditation. Instead, I studied over and over the “Ten Oxherding Pictures” of twelfth-century Zen artist Kakuan Shien, the stunningly spiritual art of Nicholas Roerich, western writers who’d imaginatively “journeyed to the east”—Somerset Maugham in The Razor’s Edge, Herman Hesse in Siddhartha, James Hilton in Lost Horizon, Jean Toomer in “Blue Meridian,” Thomas Mann in The Transposed Heads—and devoured everything in print on zen by D. T. Suzuki, Eugen Herrigel, Christmas Humphreys, Alan Watts, and a library of esoteric books by authors from India, China, and Japan. I took college classes on Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and the Vedas. Yet study alone became insufficient for satisfying my increasing absorption with the principles of eastern philosophy. The martial arts complemented but could not complete that spiritual trajectory. My physical odyssey carried me from the Chicago school to a karate club on campus, which was much easier to get to, then to a dojo on Long Island (1974) when I was working on a doctorate in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, after that to the Choy Li Fut school of Doc Fai Wong in San Francisco (1981), and finally to co-directing one of grandmaster Wong’s schools in Seattle (1987 to now). But I could never shake the nagging sense that Buddhism was something I had to deal with creatively. Specifically, I felt personally compelled to come to terms with Gautama’s phenomenological insight that desire was the origin of suffering, his beautiful description of impermanence, the rightness of a life devoted to ahimsa (“harmlessness toward all sentient beings”), and the very zen truth that ontological dualism was one of the profoundest tricks of the mind. I wondered: Was race an illusion, a manifestation of Maya? And what might these eastern traditions, which inspired Gandhi, poet Gary Snyder, and even led Richard Wright to compose hundreds of hiaku, have to say to black Americans?
Added to this was the central place investigations into the nature of the self, the I, and personal identity held in eastern thought. This most primordial of meditations—What am I—has always seemed to me the question we must raise and provisionally answer before any other problems could be resolved with satisfaction. (This is certainly the reason why, as a philosopher, my orientation was phenomenology.) In the 1960s, when black cultural nationalism (the new name for this is “Afrocentrism”) was all the rage, the importance of the black self was on the lips of every militant writer and speaker. But not a one ventured to define the self they spoke about. Or, like David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (or Mark Twain in his 1906 novel What Is Man?), inquire into whether the self might be a chimera impossible to empirically locate when we (like Gautama) take a hard look at our experience. (It must also be said that sixties writers and speakers devoted lots of time and ink to what they called the “black experience,” but without any systematic clarification—such as we find in Immanuel Kant, Hume, Edmund Husserl, and the American pragmatists—of what we mean by “experience” as such.)
In 1970 these questions would not let me be. I had no intention of becoming a novelist; I was a journalist, a cartoonist. But at night when I tried to sleep, I found vivid scenarios and an intriguing, black character traipsing through my dreams—a young man deeply involved in a martial arts kwoon, like the one where I’d studied in 1967, who by virtue of his training and personal tragedies is delivered at the story’s end to what the Japanese call satori, the Hindus moksha, and we in the West simply refer to as “enlightenment.” I had no recourse but to write the novel, then called The Last Liberation, so it would leave me alone. The writing took three months over the summer of 1970. The results were dreadful. I put it aside. I began another, this one about the African slave trade (which in 1983 I would resurrect and rewrite as Middle Passage) because writing that first book turned out to be such an intoxicating experience. In the second characterization improved a little, but plotting, description, dialogue, and structure needed work. I knuckled down to a third book to improve these matters. Then three more after that, all written within ten weeks’ time (three drafts per book at a rate of ten pages per day). This was how great my enthusiasm for fiction became after five years of drawing and writing for newspapers. Yet these were strictly naturalistic novels inspired by writers I then admired: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and John A. Williams. They were not, I realized, anywhere close to my emerging vision of how the world worked. For that reason I threw them all into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and in the fall of 1972 began a seventh book, Faith and the Good Thing, with a superb novelist and outstanding writing teacher, John Gardner, peering over my shoulder.
Faith and the Good Thing, written in nine months, was a great deal of fun, though I had to discard 1,121 pages to arrive at its final version. Three months after its completion in 1973, my agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt, sold it to Viking Press, where it was shepherded into print a year later. But while this first (seventh, really) novel brought me stylistically closer to artistic strategies I would employ later—genre crossing, folklore, comedy, western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Sartre, the strongest possible narrative voice, poetically layered prose lines—despite these satisfactions, I still had not dealt head-on with the matters closest to my heart and mind.
And apparently no one wanted me to.
After the publication of Faith, I delivered to my editor at Viking a ten-page, single-spaced outline for a new novel, Oxherding Tale, which in 1975 I envisioned as being a slave narrative that in its progress paralleled the “Ten Oxherding Pictures” depicting a young man who believes he has lost his ox (a Chinese symbol for the self), searches for and finds it, then—in the final, startling panels—the ox (self) disappears, leaving only the young man who returns to his village “with bliss-bestowing hands.” My editor looked at me as if to say, huh? He was far more interested, he said, in a different idea I presented to him that afternoon (just to see what he’d say)—a black family drama covering several generations. Yes, that he liked. But I wondered to myself, sitting there in his office, “Don’t we have that story already?” Naturally, he could give me no advance for Oxherding Tale, though I desperately could have used one, what with my wife and I having our first baby and my income consisting of what I made—$4,000 a year—as a philosophy teaching assistant.
With absolutely no encouragement, I wrote the first draft anyway, being the stubborn person I am, hammering it out in a (now) blurry year that saw me teaching undergraduate courses in the Philosophy and Comparative Literature departments, taking my own graduate classes, giving readings around New York from Faith, and, after my school work was done, speed-reading every book on slavery in the stacks of Stony Brook’s library. As the novel took shape, certain features came into focus: its form could only be that of the slave narrative, one of the oldest literary forms indigenous to the American experience. The form, in fact, that provided the basis for the black novel and tradition of autobiography that stretches from Reconstruction to The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Manchild in the Promised Land. Its movement was, of course, from slavery to freedom. Yet it was indebted, I discovered, to an older form, the Puritan narrative, characterized by its narrator detailing his (or her) progress from sin to salvation; and that form, I realized, had ancestral roots stretching back as far as Augustine’s Confessions. Yes, and yes again: the form was flexible, capable—or so I thought—of resonating in this novel with all these historical, literary, religious, and philosophical layers of meaning. Furthermore, it could be updated, I saw, from eighteenth-and nineteenth-century examples (Frederick Douglass, Equiano, Booker T. Washington) to become an entertainment for late twentieth-century readers and at the same time transformed into a vehicle for the exploration of the most deep-plowing contemporary questions. Its narrator, I knew, would have to start his journey to freedom already knowing everything western intellectual history could offer (which required him to have a kind of John Stuart Mill education: all the classics by the age of five, delivered to him by an Abolitionist tutor), so that as he quests for a deeper knowledge of the self, he is poised for whatever eastern philosophy might offer.
The first draft was finished in the summer of 1975. And promptly rejected by every editor my agent sent it to. This was the year the English department at the University of Washington called after its search committee read Faith and asked if I’d be interested in applying for an opening they had in creative writing. Short story writer James Alan McPherson had already turned them down. At the time I was planning on job hunting at philosophy departments on the East Coast (I’d never been west of the Mississippi and knew nothing of Seattle), so I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of teaching in an English department, especially creative writing, unless I could find a way to do so in a philosophically interesting fashion. But with my son, Malik, less than a year old, I agreed to be interviewed by critic Roger Sale at a restaurant in New York City. A short time later, after being informed that UW planned to hire both me and Clarence Major, I spent the remainder of the 1975-76 academic year finishing my Ph.D. exams and submitting my dissertation proposal (this later became a work of phenomenological aesthetics, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, published in 1988 by Indiana University Press, which, as it turned out, had the only editor in America—John Gallman—able to understand and willing to publish Oxherding Tale). Then my family and I headed west. What I told only my wife, Joan, at the time was that I planned to use this job for one purpose only—buying me the time I needed to complete this metaphysical slave narrative. After that I didn’t care what happened.
The time needed turned out to be five years. As a former student of John Gardner, I had to take teaching writing seriously—indeed, as a moral work—and I did, often dividing my classes in half and teaching the second one for free rather than turn students away. Then seven months later in the winter of 1977, the first of many screenplay assignments for PBS came to me from WGBH’s Fred Barzyk and Olivia Tappan, resulting in a ninety-minute docu-drama about the oldest living American, Charlie Smith and the Fritter Tree (Visions, 1978). More PBS filmwork came, one project dovetailing with another, and all of them seemed to have nineteenth-century subjects (slavery was a favorite subject for PBS in the late 1970s after Alex Haley’s Roots), which meant that the scholarly consultants a PBS writer inevitably works with were putting in front of me research that became useful for Oxherding Tale. I worked on and off on the novel and, when stumped by its unique problems, turned to writing short fiction as a way of grappling with the novel’s epistemological, moral, and aesthetic issues on a smaller canvas. Out of that period came the story “China,” which satisfied my need to dramatize a black man’s progress through the martial arts into a Buddhist way of life, which I had been too unskillful to accomplish in my first experiment as a novelist. (And yet another short story, “Kwoon,” published in the December 1991 Playboy and reprinted in 1993’s O’Henry Prize Stories, takes up the drama of life in the dojo.)
By Christmas of 1979 I was growing tired of working on the novel. After nearly five years sections of it seemed stale to me. I needed a way to invigorate it again—or quit. Actually, I was hoping to quit. I didn’t want to carry old work into yet another new year. At my desk I decided to list all the reasons why this novel was impossible to do—this, as a way of freeing myself from it once and for all. First, I told myself, the protagonist, who was black, was boring to me. Just like every other central character in a slave story. Second, one of his masters is just another version of Simon Legree: the evil male slave owner we’d by 1979 seen a hundred times in fiction and film. I fully intended on talking myself out of returning to the novel. The problem was this: If a student gives to a creative writing teacher an artistic problem, his first impulse is to generate alternatives, imaginative variations. Against my will, I began to wonder, What if the protagonist was mulatto—half black, half white—and thereby lived right on the dividing line between the races? (For aren’t we all, as Americans, cultural mongrels?) I imagined Andrew Hawkins to be over one hundred years old, like the raconteur Charlie Smith, and telling us his tale at some time in the twentieth century. And what if the slave owner I found so boring wasn’t male but a woman of bottomless desires? What if, here and there, the novel had the flavor of eighteenth-century narratives—Fielding came to mind, and every so often the comic flair of Dickens? These possibilities, I decided with some resignation, did seem workable. In order to give the novel one last chance, in order to put the East at last behind me, I realized I would have to rewrite and revise it from scratch.
That effort took six months until the summer of 1980. The book was 250-something pages. I had thrown away 2,400 to arrive at the finished manuscript, one capable of surprising me and sustaining during its composition a sense of discovery. I knew it was what I’d wanted since 1970. Andrew Hawkins was the first protagonist in black American fiction to achieve classically defined moksha (enlightenment). The novel bodied forth a fictive “world,” from the drama—the adventure—of a black man’s desperate bid for liberation from numerous kinds of “bondage” (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical) right down to the aesthetic preferences of one-celled chlamydosauria. Karl Marx made a cameo appearance, not as the bristling socialist of so many caricatures but as the man who impressed me most when, as a teacher at Stony Brook lecturing on everything from his “1844 Manuscripts” to Mao, I was drawn to his philosophic genius and humanism. (That scene alone took a month and a half of rewriting.) There is the tragedy of Andrew’s black nationalist father, George Hawkins, forever suffering from the pains caused by racial dualism; Flo Hatfield’s sassy send-up of the character Kamala in Hesse’s Siddhartha; the Taoist/Buddhist presence of Reb, the Coffinmaker, an African from the fictitious Allmuseri tribe (which moves center stage in the novel, Middle Passage, that followed this one); the deep, Schopenhauerean pessimism of Andrew’s father-in-law, Dr. Undercliff; and the monstrous padderoll, Horace Bannon, who plays upon black fears—and a rigid, essentialist notion of the self—to trap his prey. (Reb, of course, escapes, knowing the self is not product but process; not a noun but a verb.) On the title page we find the Taoist symbol for a man traveling on the Way, the drawing I’ve told my wife and children I want (and nothing else) on my headstone when I die. Two full-blown essayist chapters harken back to the use of similar devices by Melville and Fielding, a tip of the hat is given at the end of Chapter 4 to Sterne’s Tristram Shanty, and in places obvious and not so obvious Buddhist and Hindu parables, Chinese imagery, and non-western philosophical themes arise from the text. For, I asked myself during the book’s unfoldment, isn’t all of human history—the effort of all men and women, East and West, to make sense of the world—our inheritance?
No novel has exhausted me more than this one. No creative venture in my thirty years of publishing stories and drawings had more at stake for me. To put this simply, my life as I wished to live it—and black fiction as I envisioned its intellectual possibilities—hung in the balance. During its composition, I often referred to it as my “platform” book (a playful reference to the zen “Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch”), meaning that everything else I attempted to do would in one way or another be based upon and refer to it. And so it has been: the decisions it took so long to arrive at in Oxherding Tale are givens in Middle Passage, a work that contains only a fraction of its predecessor’s complexity.
For all that, its progress in this incarnation through the book world was hardly better than in 1975. After reading it in his Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, home, my old friend and teacher John Gardner looked at me with something like bewilderment. He said, “This is a new Charles Johnson.” And I wasn’t entirely sure he liked the new me he saw, given the various “meta-fictional” devices the novel used. It was well known—and I certainly knew—how Gardner often railed against the wing of writing called meta-fiction and sometimes “sur-fiction.” Moreover, when I was writing the novel we’d argued hotly about Buddhism. “It’s evil,” he, a Christian, said. “If what you’re saying is right, then I’ve lived my life wrong, and I won’t accept that.” (However, I must add that Gardner later called publisher Gallman, asked if he could write an endorsement of the book, and during the last days of his life was showing the finished novel to friends—he died two weeks prior to its publication, and since then I’ve sorely regretted not having the opportunity to debate the merits of different religious traditions with him further.)
My agent, Anne Borchardt, tells me finding a home for this novel was one of the triumphs of her career. And little wonder: the 1980s began as a decade when the work of black male writers was systematically downplayed and ignored in commercial, New York publishing. For example, Oxherding Tale appeared the same year as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. I leave it to readers to decide which book pushes harder at the boundaries of invention, and inhabits most confidently the space where fiction and philosophy meet.
If I had thought completing Oxherding Tale would free me from my involvement with eastern thought, I was dead wrong. It only served to cement that commitment. No sooner than the book was finished I took a six-month job at KQED in San Francisco as one of two writer-producers for Up and Coming, a pre-Cosby PBS series about the trials and tribulations of a black family. There, I commenced martial arts training at the main studio of grandmaster Wong when not at the TV station, and after sixteen years of immersing myself in Buddhist scholarship as a way of avoiding the sustained practice of meditation, I finally surrendered to it gladly, happily, and with the sense that something in my life since my teens—a whisper in my ear of what might be—had come full circle.
Nevertheless, it took Oxherding Tale a few years to find its audience. Much credit is due to the daring critic Stanley Crouch, whose 1983 two-page review in The Village Voice led to its paperback purchase by Grove Press, where in one of life’s little ironies, my erstwhile Viking editor found himself working and thus in charge of marketing the novel. Established white literary critics such as Vera Kutzinsky and Werner Sollors found it early and addressed its probings into personal identity and its fusion of forms in their classes and articles; Herman Beavers, Jonathan Little, and Rudolph Byrd, younger black and white critics, were eager to move beyond protest fiction and the literature of gender and racial victimization, which was beginning to ossify by the mid-1980s, and turned to the novel as a springboard for broadening their discussions of blackness and Being. To them I am eternally grateful. But the greatest reason, I believe, for the book’s slowly building readership was a sea change in the literary climate itself, a growing curiosity about the work of black male writers, a dissatisfaction with political ideology in black fiction, and a simple desire for something fresh.
Looking back across thirteen years at this novel’s genesis, which in so many ways is at the center of my own evolution, two things strike me most clearly: first, how good it feels that I will never again have to take on such a spirit-stretching creative chore, and what a deeply satisfying pleasure it is to see this labor of love in a new, handsome edition.
—Charles Johnson
Seattle, 1995