Oxherding Tale Read online

  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 m
ight 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

  Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.

  Saint Augustine

  I do not know what I am like here, I do not know in relation to what I can say, “This I am.” Bewildered and lost in thought, I wander.

  Rig Veda

  Desolate through forests and fearful in jungles, he is seeking an Ox he does not find.

  Ten Oxherding Pictures

  There exists in the same human being varying perceptions of one and the same object which differ so completely from each other that one can only deduce the existence of different subjects in the same human being.

  Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China

  OXHERDING

  TALE

  PART ONE

  House and Field

  I

  MY ORIGINS.

  PRÉCIS OF MY EDUCATION.

  MY LIFE AT CRIPPLEGATE.

  THE AGREEMENT

  Long ago my father and I were servants at Cripplegate, a cotton plantation in South Carolina. That distant place, the world of my childhood, is ruin now, mere parable, but what history I have begins there in an unrecorded accident before the Civil War, late one evening when my father, George Hawkins, still worked in the Big House, watched over his owner’s interests, and often drank with his Master—this was Jonathan Polkinghorne—on the front porch after a heavy meal. It was a warm night. An autumn night of fine-spun moonlight blurred first by Madeira, then home-brewed beer as they played Rummy, their feet propped on the knife-whittled porch rail, the dark two-story house behind them, creaking sometimes in the wind. My father had finished his chores early, for he was (he says) the best butler in the country, and took great pride in his position, but he wasn’t eager to go home. He stayed clear of his cabin when my stepmother played host for the Ladies Prayer Circle. They were strange, George thought. Those women were harmless enough by themselves, when sewing or cleaning, but together their collective prayers had a mysterious power that filled his whitewashed cabin with presences—Shades, he called them, because they moved furniture in the cabin, destroyed the laws of physics, which George swore by, and drove him outside to sleep in the shed. (Not that my father knew a whole lot about physics, being a slave, but George knew sorcery when he saw it, and kept his distance.) He was, as all Hodges knew, a practical, God-fearing man who liked to keep things simple so he could enjoy them. He was overly cautious and unnerved by little things. So he avoided his cabin and talked about commonsense things like politics and the price of potatoes on his Master’s porch long after the last pine-knot candles winked out in the quarters. Whiskey burned, then exploded like gas in his belly. He felt his face expand. His eyes slid slowly out of focus. Hard old leaves on magnolias overhanging the porch clacked, like shells, in a September wind sprinkled with rain.

  Twelve o’clock. A typical Saturday night.

  “George,” said Jonathan, his voice harsh after consuming forty-eight ounces of Madeira in what my father figured to be half an hour, “if I go up to bed at this advanced hour, smelling of spirits, my Anna will brain me with a milkstool.” Low and deep, George laughed, then hiccoughed. He rubbed his legs to start blood circulating again. “And your wife, Mattie,” Jonathan added, passing his bottle to my father, “she’ll chew your fat good, won’t she, George?”

  Because he had not thought of this, my father stopped laughing, then breathing for a second. My stepmother frowned on drinking—she frowned, in fact, on most things about George. She was no famous beauty, fat as she was, with brown freckles, a rich spangled voice, and more chins (lately) than a Chinese social register, but my stepmother had—or so George believed when Jonathan arranged their wedding—beautiful ways. Her previous owners, friends of the Polkinghornes, were an old New England family that landed with the Pilgrims at Cape Cod Bay. Mattie, their servant, was sure some days that she had married below herself. She was spiritual, high-strung, respected books, and above all else was dedicated to developing George into a real gentleman, even if it killed him—she selected his clothes for him, corrected his speech, and watched him narrowly for the slightest lapse into Negroness, as she called it. Added to which, and most of all, George liked his women big and smart (you could have cut two good-sized maids out of Mattie and still had leftovers). As he uncorked a bottle of gin, poured a glass for Jonathan, then toasted his Master’s health, he could not bear the thought of disappointing her by stumbling into their cabin reeking of liquor—it would destroy her faith that he was not, after all, a common nigger with no appreciation for the finer things; she would be waiting, he knew, turning the tissue-thin pages of her Bible, holding her finger on some flight of poetry in Psalms, which she planned to read to George for his “general improvement.” She made him bend his knees beside her each night, their heads tipped and thighs brushing, praying that neither jealousy nor evil temper, boredom nor temptation, poverty nor padderolls, would destroy their devotion to each other. “You have me, I have you,” Mattie whispered, “and we both have Jesus.” It made George shudder. Why were black women so mystical? Religion was fine, but if you carried on too much about it, people were liable to think something was wrong with you. “No,” he said, shaking his head, glancing left at Jonathan, “I’d best not go home tonight.”

  “Nor I.” Jonathan sat back heavily on his cane-seat chair, crossing his knees, and lit a cigar. “But there must be some alternative.”

  My father raised his shoulders in a shrug.

  They drank on in the darkness, grinning more and more now under the influence of gin-and-water. The porch fogged with smoke. At length, Jonathan lifted his head and touched my father’s knee.

  “George, I have it.”

  “Yessir?”

  “I can’t go upstairs to face my Anna. And you can’t return to the quarters.” Thoughtful, he picked at his lip. “Are these premises correct so far?”

  “Yessir,” George rocked his head. “I think so.”

  “But there’s no harm in switching places for one night, is there, with me sleeping in the quarters, and you upstairs?”

  George gave him a look. He was sure it was the gin, not Jonathan, talking.

  “George, whenever I advance an idea you have a most annoying way of looking at me as if I’d just suggested that we strangle a child and sell its body to science. No good will come of this. Goodnight,” Jonathan said, steadying himself with one hand on the porch rail as he stood. He rocked off for George’s cabin. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  How long George w
aited on the front porch, sweating from the soles of his feet upward, is impossible to tell—my father seldom speaks of this night, but the great Swiss clock in Jonathan’s parlor chimed twice and, in perfect submission to his Master’s will, he turned inside and walked like a man waistdeep in weeds down a hallway where every surface, every shape was warped by frail lamplight from Jonathan’s study. His Master’s house was solid and rich; it was established, quiet, and so different from the squalid quarters, with vases, a vast library, and great rooms of imported furniture that had cost the Polkinghorne’s dearly—a house of such heavily upholstered luxuriance and antiques that George now took small, mincing steps for fear of breaking something. In the kitchen, he uncovered a pot of beef on the table, prepared a plate for Mattie (he always brought my stepmother something when he worked in the house), wrapped it in paper, drained his bottle of gin, then lit a candle. Now he was ready.