SOURCE: Hayward, Jennifer. “Something to Serve: Constructs of the Feminine in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature 25, no. 4 (winter 1991): 689-703.

In the seventh chapter of Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale, Andrew Hawkins, a fugitive slave, watches a family's morning routine from his hiding place in the loft of their barn. While carrying a bucket of fresh milk up to the house, the father spills some “in an accident so suggestive of casual abundance and unconscious prosperity, of surplus and generosity, that I cannot now, with pen or tongue, make you feel the wretchedness and envy that descended upon me, the fugitive, as I watched this white family dine. Beyond this, I thought, there was nothing of lasting value” (107).

This scene seems to me to condense the novel's most urgent themes: the slave overlooking white “freedom” (with the manifold ironies implied in Andrew's heightened position); the male awed by the “casual abundance and unconscious prosperity” of the feminine, as symbolized by the spilling milk; and the voyeurism of the fugitive, cut off from this “dumb domesticity” (107), doubly cut off from the abundant female life-source. Andrew, who has just escaped from a period of sexual slavery to a white woman, sees the farmer's life as a utopia, one which is ostensibly the right of all Americans but from which he is excluded because of his race.

Oxherding Tale acknowledges the marginalization not only of black men but of women, black and white. Johnson explores questions of race and gender by locating them within a complex, experimental network of slave narrative conventions, Afro-American tropes, eighteenth-century narrative strategies, literary constructs of the first-person narrator, and philosophical constructs of the self and of freedom—all of which are subsumed in Johnson's version of Zen Buddhism. Johnson has described his book as “a modern, comic, philosophical slave narrative—a kind of dramatization of the famous ‘Ten Oxherding Pictures’ of Zen artist Kakuan-Shien” (Stefani 235) that represent a young herdsman's search for his rebellious ox, which symbolizes his self.

In this paper, I will first discuss Johnson's unusual combination of influences and genres before exploring one of the book's central issues—Andrew's relationship with women. Johnson's attitude towards women tends towards a glorification of the Eternal Feminine, an attitude which can (and, in this book, several times does) flip over into the concomitant terror of women as all-encompassing and all-powerful. The fact nevertheless remains that Johnson makes a strong attempt to understand feminist issues and to inscribe them in his book. And his technical innovations—particularly the shifts in narrative and temporal perspective—help break the bounds of canonical (Western androcentric) literature.

Andrew's introduction to his tale recalls the conventional opening of the slave narrative: He inscribes his place of birth and his genealogy. Instead of providing a date of birth, though, he invokes a legendary time “before the Civil War” (3). This uncertainty echoes the temporal blankness with which most slave narratives begin, while Andrew's genealogy recalls, and inverts, the conventional paradigm of a protagonist of mixed blood, split between house and field, with an absent or repudiating (white) father and an all-powerful and supportive (black) mother or grandmother. Andrew's birth mother, plantation owner Anna Polkinghorne, refuses to acknowledge him; his adoptive mother, slave Mattie Hawkins, seems almost equally distant; on the other hand, both his master Jonathan Polkinghorne and his father George Hawkins claim and nurture him.

Another important slave narrative trope is the role of education in the slave's quest for freedom, and again Johnson twists the paradigm to signify on tradition. When Andrew is five years old, Jonathan Polkinghorne, childless himself and frustrated by Anna's refusal to have anything to do with the son (Andrew) she has never acknowledged, decides to hire a tutor, “the best that money can buy.” And so Ezekiel Sykes-Withers arrives. Ezekiel's system inculcates self-consciousness, the inability to communicate on an everyday level, and morbidity. Karl Marx's visit to Cripplegate confirms Andrew's increasing suspicions of Ezekiel's shortcomings: The contrast between Marx, a modest, cheerful family man who achieves a great deal, and Ezekiel, a deadly serious but ineffective aesthete, makes explicit the danger of taking oneself too seriously. So although Johnson reinforces the importance of education as a crucial step towards achieving “freedom” in whatever sense, he also comments on the unsuitability of the white educational tradition for blacks with very different needs and historical imperatives—as well as underlining the unbridgeable gap between the tenets of Western education and the institution of slavery. As a direct consequence of Ezekiel's guidance, Andrew is forced to realize that he “owned nothing. My knowledge, my clothes, my language, even, were shamefully second-hand, made by, and perhaps for, other men. I was a living lie, that was the heart of it” (17).

The tale also draws on the Afro-American naming tradition, which reflects a strong belief in the power of language. African and West Indian tribespeople may have two names, one for strangers, the other, the “real,” only for close friends and family; be named for some event associated with their lives, either at birth or later; take new names at different life stages. These practices survived in America in the ritual renaming slaves underwent when freed, to displace the slave owner's hold on their lives; and they survive to this day in, for example, the associative names of blues and jazz artists: T-Bone Walker, Luke Long Gone, Fats Domino, Jelly Roll Morton, and so on.¹ Ralph Ellison discusses the difficulty, for blacks, of achieving identity with their names:

For many of us this is far from easy. … we bear, as Negroes, names originally possessed by those who owned our enslaved grandparents, we are apt, especially if we are potential writers, to be more than ordinarily concerned with the veiled and mysterious events, the fusions of blood, the furtive couplings, the business transactions, the violations of faith and loyalty, the assaults; yes, and the unrecognized and unrecognizable loves through which our names were handed down to us.

(148)

The importance of naming is reiterated throughout Oxherding Tale. Andrew Hawkins is not named after his white mother lest people guess that he was a result of that horror, sex between a white woman and a black man; becomes James when denying his blackness to the Soulcatcher; is associatively named Freshmeat by Reb when he arrives to serve as gigolo on Flo Hatfield's estate; becomes William Harris (and invents a biography to accompany the new name) when at last he runs away. Andrew repeatedly invokes the African tribes from which he or his fellow slaves are descended: the Wazimba, Wolof, Fulah, Maraboui, Griffe, Zeudi, the ancient “clan-state of the Allmuseri” (116). And he is finally forced to acknowledge the ineluctable power of “the veiled and mysterious events … through which our names were handed down to us” (Ellison 148) when Minty, a slave and the first woman Andrew loved, stands outside the cabin Andrew now owns and calls him by his slave name instead of the “free” name he has chosen for himself, “and, in her speaking the name I was called in the quarters, she gave me a nature that broke my mastery over the cabin forever. I stood stock-still: the sweaty fieldhand, a machete between his teeth, who has crawled through his master's window” (159-60).

The slave narrative thrust of a slave's progress from servitude to freedom is central to Johnson's retelling; again, though, he simultaneously invokes and signifies on the tradition. Oxherding Tale's concept of freedom (which I will explore more thoroughly later) is at once intertwined with and challenged by a concomitant figuration of women and of Buddhism. It is important that Minty, Andrew's icon of Black Womanhood, first awakens his desire for freedom; in fact he doesn't even seem conscious of his slavery until he realizes that, as a slave, he cannot possess Minty. Here the black slave-white master dichotomy becomes entangled with the female object-male subject split; here Andrew becomes implicated in the very oppression he seeks to escape. At this point we hear, for the first time, of Andrew's status as one “forever poised between two worlds. … I owned nothing. My knowledge, my clothes, my language, even, were shamefully second-hand, made by, and perhaps for, other men. I was a living lie, that was the heart of it” (17). Having realized this, he asks the kindly, concerned white father, Jonathan Polkinghorne, for his freedom—and is promptly sold downriver, into the service of a sexually insatiable white woman.

So the tale opens with clear reference to its Afro-American precursors. At the same time, it rewrites the introductory pages of Tristram Shandy. Andrew's father, a black man and a slave, was spurred on to Anna Polkinghorne's bed by a “great Swiss clock” which “chimed twice” (5); the miscegenation which resulted in Andrew's birth also predetermined his exclusion from both the world of the masters and the world of the slaves. He might well say, with Tristram,

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

(Sterne 5)

Tristram's words, intended to refer to the existential human condition, reverberate in even more complex ways when reread as signifying on the historical difficulties experienced by the child of a black father and a white mother.

Andrew continues to echo Tristram throughout the novel. He draws attention to his own limited omniscience, emphasizing the anecdotal, secondhand nature of much of his material; he occasionally brings the reader into the text by invoking a diverse audience (addressing us as “good folks,” “Sir,” “Madam,” “You,” plural or singular, as Sterne's Tristram does also) and by including putative readers in asides concerning the mechanics of telling a story. Johnson's self-reflexivity works through frequent use of interruptions, such as “—but wait; this had best commence a new chapter,” followed by the heading “A NEW CHAPTER” (66-67); direct anticipations of the reader's response, such as “you will understand me when I say. …,” “bear with me,” or “I ask the reader to ride in with me, and see how the case goes” (117); as well as the intermissions “On the Nature of Slave Narratives” (118-19) and “The Manumission of First-Person Viewpoint” (152-53), which will be discussed later.

By using a rhetoric which brings the audience within the bounds of the fiction itself, Johnson follows Sterne in creating an active audience, breaking down the “objectivity” of the fourth wall to demand a reader participation which is as central to his project of self-explication as the story he is telling. As James Swearingen explains the role of the audience in Tristram Shandy, “It is within this complex texture of self-relatedness that the phenomenon of understanding oneself through speaking may be explained. [The narrator's] consciousness is ecstatic; it is outside of or beyond itself in the exchange with the reader, and only from that point beyond itself can new understandings arise” (92). Johnson understands the intellectual advantages to be gained by creating a “writerly” text; he also understands the spiritual advantages, perhaps better than Sterne. The call-and-response format is central to Afro-American culture, where it has a clear religious origin, and the idea of needing many voices to create a whole completes the philosophical polyphony of Sterne. Also, the radical diversity of the reader implied in Johnson's shifting modes of address serves to reinforce the miscegenation of the narrative itself.

So Johnson signifies on Tristram Shandy in order to draw on its network of philosophical assumptions. On the other hand, this troping on literary forefathers also emphasizes the historical and temporal construction of fictions by drawing attention to the difference among the story Tristram can tell in the eighteenth century, the one Andrew is restricted to in the pre-manumission South, and the actual 1980s time of the tale's (re)writing. Johnson's postmodern approach makes explicit the text's distance from itself by including anachronisms to emphasize its status as just that—an historical novel, written in the present time about the past. He forces us into a writerly consciousness of the discrepancy between the story we are ostensibly reading and the one that has actually been written.

One such anachronism is Ezekiel's explicit modeling of Andrew's education after John Stuart Mill's (despite the fact that Mill's Autobiography detailing that education was not written until 1856, thirteen years after Ezekiel's arrival at Cripplegate). Other, more blatant historical jokes are Marx's visit to the plantation; the historical hindsight of the footnote encapsulating the fate of James Travis, Jr., the toll guard; the use of contemporary literary terminology such as race and gender; the wedding reception racial slurs and jokes, my favorite of which is the bridesmaid's saying “‘My problem is that whenever someone gives me a quick feel in a crowded room, I wheel round, naturally, and slug him, then I realize he's Indian, black, or Mexican, and I feel simply dreadful for the rest of the day because I've hurt someone disadvantaged’” (141). These anachronisms jolt the reader out of Andrew's antebellum milieu and force awareness of the tale as a parable for man's—not just a slave's or a black man's, but any man's—search for himself.

All these technical innovations appear to be postmodern, but in fact they are more closely tied to the organizational principles of the Afro-American literary tradition. In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson identifies among the characteristics of African music: a percussive performance style (which Thompson describes as “attack and vital aliveness in sound and motion”); a tendency towards multiple meters, all competing at once; a “metronome sense,” or ability to maintain a common denominator beneath these meters; interlocking call and response of solo and chorus, voice and instrument; and, subsuming all these, a metacritical thrust within the music itself which pushes it beyond simple performance into “songs and dances of social allusion (music which, however danceable and ‘swinging,’ remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living)” (xiii).

Johnson's literary technique encompasses many of these musical principles. He incorporates quick cuts in point of view (from omniscient third to limited first to plural first), in time frame (from historical realism to postmodern awareness), and in action; and these ensure the “vital aliveness” of the text by demanding the reader's active participation. Beneath these cuts and multiple shifts of writing style, tone, and time, he “keeps the beat” of the basic philosophical thrust of the novel. Andrew is searching for freedom, and although his definition of that term changes many times over the course of the novel, the song remains the same. As I have already mentioned, Johnson also incorporates the call-and-response paradigm, since Andrew is the chief but by no means the only voice in the novel and is echoed, responded to, and challenged by other voices. Furthermore, the tale proceeds as call and response does—by indirection, not stating but accumulating meaning over the process of its writing, progressing through an intertwining network of voices to reach a conclusion which echoes and reverberates through each one of these voices. As Houston Baker says of another Afro-American novel, Invisible Man, “All these stories reflect, or ‘objectify,’ one another in ways that complicate their individual and composite meanings” (176). Finally, the tale “remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living” (Thompson xiii) in its deliberately transhistorical exploration of the subjugation of black men, of women in general, and of the individual to the needs of the group.

Swearingen sees Tristram Shandy (and, indeed, eighteenth-century fiction in general) as concerned not with the individual but with the individual's relation to the group. Tristram purports to tell the story of himself, but in fact explores the lives of everyone but himself, save at those nodes where his life touches theirs. And “… through his examination of his family and their relation to the structure of his own being, he reaches an understanding of ‘intersubjectivity’ or the social character of the self that contrasts markedly with the individualism presumed to be normative in the work” (76). Andrew is initially involved in a close network of family and community ties, but from adolescence onward he repeatedly finds himself alone, running from those who would enslave him. His isolation seems to reflect not only historical conditions but also contemporary alienation.

I suggest that, in this respect, the book perhaps escapes its postmodern self-ironicization and pursues unconscious American imperatives, because after the appearance of the Soulcatcher, the method of man's (and I deliberately limit myself to the masculine possessive) search for himself becomes the archetypal American solitary journey into the wilderness—this in spite of Andrew's reiterated yearning for a community and his apostrophization of women. Even after his marriage, Andrew's wife has no part in the dark struggle of his soul, and the novel ends with Andrew's leaving wife and friends to face the forest and single combat with the Soulcatcher, the primordial Enemy. Only then does he achieve the strength and independence—the freedom—he has been seeking.

Andrew's role in Oxherding Tale parallels the slave's role in society. By rights the hero of his own tale, he seems at times its victim and object. His racially and existentially determined sense of “otherness,” of being merely a pawn in the workings of history, is reinforced by Johnson's two “intermissions,” short chapters which remove the reader to the level of the author, above or beyond or behind Andrew's handiwork, and which discuss the progress of the tale so far while calling attention to its techniques. The first intermission emphasizes the affinity between the slave narrative and the Puritan salvation narrative, then discusses Johnson's own “worrying” of these conventions; the second, “The Manumission of First-Person Viewpoint,” informs us that a first-person narrator “is, in fact, nobody; is anonymous. … the I—whatever we call the Self—is a product of experience, and cannot precede it. … The Subject of the Slave Narrative, like all Subjects, is forever outside itself in others, objects. … a narrator … is less a reporter than an opening through which the world is delivered …” (152-53). In case we had missed the extratemporality and the shifting sense of self-identity that permeate the book, Johnson calls our attention to them here. The narrator is neither Johnson nor Andrew Hawkins, but an aporiatic gap through which the central questions of the text can be investigated and dismantled. This intermission concludes, “Having liberated first-person, it is now only fitting that in the following chapters we do as much for Andrew Hawkins” (153).

The structural principles so far discussed recreate, in form, the content of the tale's discussion of the nature of the Self as composed of many Selves—or, alternatively, of nothing. But that “nothing” is exactly what becomes problematic in Oxherding Tale. In a way, and I will come back to this later, “nothing” is the ideal towards which the narrator strives. Women represent the necessary positive to this negative; they are the all-inclusive Being into which nothingness disappears. Anna, Minty, Flo, even Fruity—all are more (and thus simultaneously less) than human. Andrew's education reinforces his tendency towards glorification of the eternal feminine, since Ezekiel teaches that “‘It is not easy to be a full-grown man, Andrew. We are not like women. … We are weaker’” (30). Women are more essential to Being: “‘All our works, male works, will perish in history—history, a male concept of time, will vanish, too, but the culture of women goes on, the rhythms of birth and destruction, the Way of absorption, passivity, cycle and epicycle’” (31). The choice of nouns is particularly interesting here: not birth and death, but birth and destruction—which rewrites the role of women from passive objects of fecundity to deliberate agents of doom.

As I have noted above, Johnson significantly reverses the classic slave narrative by giving Andrew two strongly supportive fathers and no mother. This is just one indication (and, perhaps, partial explanation) of Andrew's (and Johnson's?) conflicted attitude towards women. Early in the book, Johnson repeatedly enforces awareness of the insidious power of gender and race constructs. Reb compares Flo Hatfield's need for a man with slavery, saying, “‘Some women learn, like slaves, to study men. They learn to think like men. … They have to keep one step ahead. If you got no power, … you have to think like people who do so you kin make y'self over into what they want. She's a slave like you'n me, Freshmeat’” (62). Andrew, on the other hand, realizes that “‘again and again, and yet again, the New World said to blacks and women, “You are nothing”’” (75). The woman Andrew marries, Peggy, is a thin, androgynous being with lesbian tendencies whom her father scares Andrew into marrying her to short-circuit those tendencies. “Fruity,” as Andrew calls her because of her Transcendentalist, perhaps Pierre-inspired obsession with gnawing on fruit, was a lonely child who at age six wrote a fantasy which justified her own sense of exclusion by reinscribing herself as a Negro boy. Peggy intuits the connection between women and other oppressed peoples, but her childish awareness of marginalization gives way to adult resignation: On her wedding night, thrilled to feel herself doing the “right” thing at last, she says, “‘You start feeling that goodness and beauty are for other people. For men, if you're a woman. Whites, if you're nonwhite’” (143). Peggy provides insight into the position of women within a society that purports to idealize women: She is shy and awkward, knowing her intelligence and aggressive impulses have no place in a patriarchy.

But Andrew's women repeatedly break the bounds of this politically correct racial/feminist parallel. His mother, Anna Polkinghorne, is first described as “a whole landscape of flesh, white as the moon, with rolling hills, mounds, and bottomless gorges. … George had never seen the old woman so beautiful. … Wouldn't man rise new-made and cured of all his troubles after a night in this immense bed?” (6). Anna seems to have become the earth itself, with a planet's nurturing capabilities. Minty, who impels Andrew's transition into adulthood, represents “all the highbreasted women in calico and taffeta, in lace-trimmed gingham poke bonnets and black net hose, that I had ever wanted. … her eyes … with a hint of blue shadow and a drowse of sensuality … made her seem voluptuously sleepy, distant, as though she had been lifted long ago from a melancholy African landscape …” (15). This woman has become an icon; the portrayal seems to be intended positively but is in fact reductive as well as patronizing.

The narrator's equation of women with Nature becomes clearer during Andrew's service to Flo Hatfield. Flo herself is presented ambiguously: She is beautiful, fascinating, but also deadly; her identity collapses into an identification with Nature (she wears a dress like a landscape and has a spidered face, vegetable sensuality, and a deep, steamy, deer-like voice); she eats only candy (which is interesting in view of Peggy's equally singular, though ethereal rather than sensual, diet); has childish ways but a relentless sexual appetite; jumps from forty years old to eighty-three and back to fifty. And after she transfers her affections to Andrew, causing Patrick's suicide, Andrew questions the relentless indifference of Nature (and Flo?) to Patrick's death:

… the voice of my education sang the earth as man's home, Being as a vast feminine body. … These rolling hills, these timeless trees and vegetation we genderized … without asking whether Being, like Anna Polkinghorne and my stepmother, bore an ancient grudge against men. … That morning I thought this vision contained the menacing idea that men, not Man in the abstract, but men were unessential, and in the deepest violation of everything we valued in Woman.

(55)

By this point in the novel it has become clear that women are Other, irreversibly opposed to men. Andrew perceives his marriage with Peggy as transcending conventional male-female relations; in fact, Peggy is utterly subordinated to Andrew. Peggy first appears as an independent, intelligent woman with a highly developed sense of irony. All this changes after her marriage, which Andrew presents as her salvation since it (he) rescues her from the “metaphysical outrage” (138) of lesbianism or old-maidenhood. Immediately after the ceremony, Peggy acquires the habit of crying, happily, at the drop of a hat, as if this is a positive sign of femininity she has long been obliged to repress; what is more, she adores Andrew unquestioningly, while he accepts her adoration as a given and reserves his passion for someone else.

That someone else is Minty, who reappears at a nightmare slave auction which Andrew attends in his new role as white citizen. He watches in horrified fascination as the girl is hauled up onto the block, like a reproach from his past. (Johnson here seamlessly introduces one of the anachronisms at which he excels and which emphasize the tale's relevance to our own time: Minty is compared with “the token black girl at the beauty contest, forever told, ‘Maybe next year’” [154].) After buying Minty, Andrew takes her home, where Peggy of course does not question her arrival: “‘I don't know what she means to you, William, but if you care, I care, and I will ask Daddy for the money’” (162). This is hardly the sort of response an independent woman with a highly developed sense of irony would be likely to make under the circumstances. Minty soon dies, and Johnson's description of her death reveals the terrifying underside of his apostrophization of women:

She was disintegrating. Sugar in water. Form into formlessness. Her left leg had separated from her knee, flowed away like that of a paper doll left in the rain. … She had bitten off her middle finger. … The envelope of her skin expanded, stretched, parted at the seams.

(166-67)

I would hesitate to dismiss this as intentionally misogynistic, but there is certainly something very disturbing in the violence of the images chosen, an indulgence in detail which cannot be excused as simply a graphic portrayal of the consequences of slavery. That American horn of plenty, the Eternal Feminine, here bursts its bounds to reveal the putrification underneath—or, conversely, the sodden and commodified two-dimensionality of “a paper doll left in the rain.” What does it mean that Minty has to disintegrate before Andrew can become free? How is it that manumission leads not to the whole body but to decay—a decay inscribed on the body of a woman, a decay out of which springs the reborn figure of “her” man? This scene speaks to the difficult debate over the respective positions of black man and black woman in a white man's world.

By the end of the book, Andrew does seem to have overcome the dichotomy of black versus white, but only by figuring both black and white men, as opposed to women. He feels “an ancient war” or “crisis in the male spirit” unfolding equally in his father's cabin and his master's house, with the women, somehow, perceived as coming out on top:

This frightened me, I confess. … Men had glimpsed, as my stepmother claimed, the algebra and alphabet of Nature, but knew nothing of feeling; men had charted Being and knew its mutations like the Periodic Table, but men were as children when it came to the heart. … All the more urgent, then, was it for me to know, in this age of sexual warfare, my heart, make it my meditation, and be forever creating some meaning for what it meant to be male, though with what real satisfaction, and with how much resemblance to the promise of my gender, I did not know.

(28)

So Andrew's solution will be an attempt to develop his heart, to learn to control it—and this he does, I think, by attempting to remove himself, as Buddhism teaches, from the world. After Patrick's death, he entertains

nervously … the possibility that the sexual war was a small skirmish—a proxy war, with women as the shock troops for a power that waited, mocking the thoroughly male anxiety for progress, ready to (s)mother the fragile male need to build temples to the moon; ready, as in Patrick's case, to remind us, without hope of redemption, that though men were masters—even black men, in the sexual wars—we could not win.

(55-56)

The postmodern (s) forces the reader's awareness that Oxherding Tale is not an attempt to recreate an historical era but is, rather, a parable into which contemporary issues are inscribed. But the (s) further confuses the issue of how we're meant to take Andrew's mystical mutterings about the nature of Womankind, as well as his final brutality to Flo. Is it Andrew who deifies women, or is it—as the (s), as well as words like genderize and racialize, by insisting on the narrator's distance from his pre-Civil War milieu, would seem to confirm—the narrative aporia, into which Andrew himself sometimes seems to disappear?

Andrew's final response to Flo will serve to clarify another disturbing aspect of the tale's portrayal of the feminine. Granted, Flo is abnormally demanding; but Andrew does not seem to mind—seems, in fact, to admire her immensely—until she actually says, “‘I love you’” (71). This statement pushes him over the edge; his fear and anger overwhelm him. He seems to feel that, by loving—or “serving”—her, he is losing his Self; his reaction to her confession is to withdraw from her, asking her repeatedly for his wages and attempting to reconstruct Minty's face in place of Flo's as they make love. When she, in turn, reacts to his alienation by “using me as a kind of scratching post,” he succumbs to fury and self-hatred, feels that he “d[oes] not … truly exist” (73) and ends by smashing her. Andrew's fear of women seems to be tied into his attitude towards slavery: Both threaten a loss of Self. Love of a woman is in fact explicitly paralleled to slavery. When Ezekiel decides to devote himself to Shem Moses' (nonexistent) crippled daughter, he does so because he feels himself nauseatingly free-floating: “Even Cripplegate's bondsmen possessed, it struck Ezekiel, a greater sense of purpose than he …, the thing that, once the furor over freedom died down, made real freedom intelligible: Something to serve” (91). That something is, of course, a woman. Again, when Andrew believes himself about to die he cries “because the woman I had sought in so many before—Flo Hatfield, Minty, Peggy—was, as Ezekiel hinted, Being, and … I … became unworthy of her, having squandered to a thousand forms of bondage the only station, that of man, from which she might truly be served” (172). Again, the narrative privileging of the Eternal Feminine does not seem to be intended misogynistically. Nevertheless, the equation of women with Nature (and with terror) effectively reinscribes the oppression of women within another rhetoric. True, this is a rhetoric which valorizes women, rather than denigrating them; but it is oppression nonetheless.

One solution to the complex conundrum of freedom from oppression is personified in Reb the Coffinmaker, whose cabin shows no traces of his presence and whose soul is a kra he sends freely out into the world. Reb becomes Andrew's ideal. He wonders “if Reb hungered for freedom as I did. What did he want?” (75) and eventually decides that Reb wants nothing, has learned to renounce desire and has thereby become free. Reb cannot be killed by the Soulcatcher because he has no soul to absorb, no desire or emotion pinning him to the world. Johnson offers Reb's absence of desire as a positive quality, and reinforces the message by incorporating African and Buddhist parables which repeatedly enact the freeing of Self from World.

Andrew, though, is not yet free of desire. At the slave auction, Minty becomes “a distant Call I could not but answer, the final knot of the heart that is broken—as Bannon said—from inside, … delivering destiny as your deepest wish” (151). Again the implicit relation between a woman and slavery is projected; and Andrew's deepest wish, as well as his deepest fear, is finally revealed as just that loss of self represented, for him, by both terms of the equation.

When first leaving the comparatively safe haven of slavery, Andrew, whose experience of fragmentation and alienation marks him as a postmodern man displaced into this contemporary rewriting of history, steps outside the bounds of both history and the text, and addresses the reader directly: “Sir, we were already in the midst of Civil War. Blacks and whites. Blacks and blacks. Women and men—I was in the thick of diversity, awash in the world's rich density. But things were becoming too dense. Everything seemed to create its own cancellation. I wanted this movement to go no further …” (50).

Things becoming too dense—in a sense, this phrase applies to Oxherding Tale itself. The novel's conflated vision of women, slavery, and the self establishes a peculiar relationship between the first term and the last two—which, when coupled with the novel's simultaneous threat and promise of cancellation, inscribes within the text a desire for that total merging which is equivalent to death. Johnson raises crucial questions; he offers only partial answers. His response to the irreducible fragmentation and multiplicity of the postmodern world is a Zen-inspired annulment of all differences beneath one “‘Way of absorption, passivity, cycle and epicycle’” (31). Ultimately, the novel perhaps deconstructs not only racial and sexual strife but history and time as well by saying, through Andrew: “I want this movement to go no further” (50).

In accordance with Johnson's view of Oxherding Tale as “‘a modern, comic, philosophical slave narrative’” (Stefani 235), its final symbol is the Many-into-the-One of the Soulcatcher, who both in his biography and in his tattoo encompasses all of life and death, neutralizing all contradiction into a single amorphous Whole. The dense, carnivalesque language which images the tattoo as “an impossible flesh tapestry of a thousand individualities no longer static, … where behind every different mask at the party—behind snout beak nose and blossom—the selfsame face was uncovered at midnight” (175) recalls Houston Baker's “black (w)hole,” a collapsed, deconstructive, powerfully expressive reappropriation of (white) dominant schema of perception and discourse.

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon forges such a (w)hole out of the American dichotomy of white and black. Milkman is essentially a white man, a product of his middle-class family's attempt to deny their blackness; Guitar is a black man so conscious of his difference that he has become a killing machine. Over the course of the book, Milkman learns to reappropriate his blackness, and is finally able to join with his militantly black brother to create something stronger than each, something that will fly. Oxherding Tale dares even more, attempting to reconcile not only the white-black but also the male-female and master-slave splits. While the novel may not entirely succeed in its apocalyptic task, its complex call and response between divergent literary and philosophical traditions is both thematically pertinent and technically successful; and its irreducible complexity and self-contradiction (and even, in a sense, its collapsed vision of women) can be read as strengths, adding to the evocative power of this strange and fascinating book.

Note

1. This paragraph is indebted to Dillard and to The Book of Negro Folklore (Hughes and Bontemps).

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983.

Dillard, J. L. Black Names. Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random, 1953.

Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps, eds. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, 1958.

Johnson, Charles. Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

Stefani, Susan. “Johnson, Charles (Richard).” Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers. Vol. 116. Ed. Hal May. Detroit: Gale, 1986. 234-35.

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. 1760-67. London: Oxford UP, 1936.

Swearingen, James E. Reflexivity in Tristram Shandy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random, 1981.