JOHNSON, Charles | Middle Passage

New York: Atheneum, 1990.

8vo.; maroon boards quarter-bound in black cloth; stamped in blind on front cover and gilt on spine. In original illustrated dust jacket. 

First edition, first printing. Signed by Charles R. Johnson on the half-title. 

Middle Passage is a historical novel by American writer Charles R. Johnson about the final voyage of an illegal American slave ship on the Middle Passage, the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. Set in 1830, it presents a personal and historical perspective of the illegal slave trade in the United States. In a savage parable of the Black experience, Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave eking out a living in New Orleans in 1830, hops aboard a square rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic turns out to be a slave clipper bound for Africa. Calhoun, whose master educated him as a humanist, becomes the captain’s cabin boy, and though he hates himself for acting as a lackey, he’s able to help the African slaves recently taken aboard to stage a revolt before the rowdy, drunken crew can spring a mutiny. The novel won the 1990 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.