How can a writer of realistic fiction, intent on dramatizing the ordinary experiences of plausible persons, succeed when his characters are living a bizarre nightmare? In Soulcatcher, as in his novel The Middle Passage, Seattle author Charles Johnson takes up the challenge of writing realistic stories about persons caught up in the most surreal institution in American history.

Soulcatcher is a newly published collection of the historical short fictions that Johnson (who won the National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage) originally wrote for inclusion in Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery, a companion book to the PBS series co-authored by Patricia Smith, Johnson, and the WGBH Research Team.

After long immersion in primary and secondary sources behind the PBS project, Johnson started drafting these stories. He says in his preface to Soulcatcher that a dozen narratives “flowed from me in a dreamlike rush.”

His almost spiritual merging with his subject takes him into lives very distant in time and culture—into the earliest years of slaves on this continent, when public attitudes, laws and practices had not yet developed into the institution of slavery most of us learned about in school.

The first Africans chained and carried across the Atlantic were treated as inferior less because they were black than because they had been sold into slavery and weren't Anglo-European Christians.

Racism, or the division of human beings into alien, superior and inferior species based on physical features, only later hardened into a guiding ideology for whites.

In Johnson's story, “The Transmission,” a blond sailor on a slave-vessel feels instant, easy kinship with the boy Malawi, whose brother has died. “I've lost family, too,” says the sailor to the black boy who understands no English. “I know how you feel.”

STORIES OF REBELLION

In these tales, as in history, the route to emancipation neither began nor ended with the efforts of well-meaning whites who decided to free the slaves.

From the first, slaves made active, strategic, organized efforts to free themselves and each other. Nat Turner's Rebellion is often considered the story of slaves plotting a communal flight to liberty, but many others exist. Johnson's “Confession” draws on the historical account of slaves owned by English settlers, who planned a secret mass odyssey to a Florida fort where, under the rule of the Spanish king, they would be free.

During the American Revolution, blacks fought for their freedom on the side of the British. After George Washington's victory, groups of them emigrated, like the siblings in “A Soldier for the Crown.”

The legions of African Americans involved in the Underground Railroad continually laid shrewd plans (as in the title story) that saved many of their own from bounty-hunters spurred on by the Fugitive Slave Law.

OWNER AND SLAVE LINKED

The stories dramatize, too, how slavery changed everyone involved. Slave owners, as George Washington's widow says in “Martha's Dilemma,” were chained to their slaves, “shackled to their industry, the knowledge they'd acquired” in doing so much of the work.

Johnson's tales vary widely in technique. Characters are black and white, male and female, old and young, mute and eloquent, enslaved and elite; and the genres include dramatic monologues, personal letters, diary entries, and traditional omniscient storytelling. Yet something gently draws this diversity into harmony.

It might be called a spirit of good will—a curious phrase, perhaps, for a book about slavery. But although Johnson faces history's horrors squarely, and his characters have righteously indignant moments, his book transcends indignation and blame. There's a peacefulness about Soulcatcher. Whatever spirit the stories flowed from, the world needs more of it.