Middle Passage (Masterplots II: African American Literature Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Charles Johnson
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Bildungsroman
- Time of Work: 1830
- Setting: A slave ship
- Principal Characters: Rutherford Calhoun
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: African Americans
- Locales: Africa
The Novel
Middle Passage is Rutherford Calhoun’s account of the last voyage of an illegal American slave ship, the Republic, and of his personal quest for knowledge of the meaning of his life. When the novel begins, Calhoun is a twenty-one-year-old freed slave from Illinois who supports his life of pleasure in New Orleans by theft and lying. To escape a forced marriage to Boston schoolteacher Isadora Bailey and debts owed black underground leader Papa Zeringue, Calhoun stows away on the slave ship Republic, where he meets even greater dangers than he...
[The entire page is 3700 words long]
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