Oxherding Tale Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHARLES JOHNSON AND

  OXHERDING TALE

  “Johnson is one of the most daring and comic writers of this generation.”

  —Ishmael Reed

  “I’ve had some quibble with just about every novel I’ve read of late. A book will have style, but no plot. Or both, but no meaning. Oxherding Tale, however, has everything. This includes laughs.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A wonderfully funny, erotic, bittersweet story of the hero’s travels from slavery to freedom….Johnson presents a fable about racial difference and what it needs to be and needs not to be….[He] doesn’t make light of the load, but makes the burden of its telling sweeter with Dickensian twists of plot and with outrageous characters.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A true storyteller…Oxherding Tale is a ‘classic’ in the noblest sense.”

  —John Gardner

  “Oxherding Tale is a parable that at once creates anger within enlightenment, delight within dismay, and tempers it all with a wry humor. Charles Johnson shows great skill.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  “Johnson’s second novel shows a large talent under superb control.”

  —Library Journal

  “A work of courage and compassion, virtuosity and intelligence…Johnson skillfully avoids melodramatic platitudes while creating suspense and comedy, pathos and nostalgia. In the process he invents rich variations on questions about sex, race, and class.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Utterly original and often hilarious…Johnson masterfully explores the relationship between identity, freedom, and personal responsibility.”

  —Newsday

  “[A] daring, extravagant novel….A memorable book.”

  —The New Yorker

  “I laughed. I cried. I thought. I marveled. Oxherding Tale is a beautiful book. Its language is extraordinary, its writing is crisp, clean, smooth, even in its complexity, and terribly affecting. It is masterful craft of the highest order.”

  —August Wilson

  Also by Charles Johnson

  Fiction

  Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories

  Soulcatcher and Other Stories

  Dreamer

  Middle Passage

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Faith and the Good Thing

  Philosophy

  Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970

  Nonfiction

  King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.

  (with Bob Adelman)

  I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson

  (edited by Rudolph Byrd)

  Africans in American

  (with Patricia Smith)

  Black Men Speaking

  (with John McCluskey Jr.)

  Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing

  Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson

  (edited by James McWilliams)

  Drawings

  Half-Past Nation Time

  Black Humor

  SCRIBNER

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1982, 1995 by Charles Johnson

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Charles Richard, 1948-

  Oxherding tale / with an introduction by the author, Charles Johnson.—1st Scribner trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. African-American men—Fiction. 2. Slavery—Fiction. 3. Slaves—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.O3735O96 2005

  813′.54—dc22

  2004059132

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7741-9

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-7741-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To the memory

  of

  Ruby Elizabeth Johnson

  Portions of this novel, in slightly different form, have appeared in Antaeus and Nimrod. Acknowledgment is made, gratefully, to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant to finish the work, and I must also thank my novel-writing students (spring 1980) for their merciless criticism, especially G. W. Hawkes for one of his jokes, and Cheryl Mathisen for her hours spent typing the manuscript.

  INTRODUCTION

  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.