Faith and the Good Thing by Charles Johnson

First published: 1974

Type of plot: Philosophical novel

Time of work: The 1930’s or 1940’s

Locale: Rural Georgia and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Faith Cross, the protagonist, a young black woman from rural Georgia
• The Swamp Woman, a werewitch
• Todd Cross, Faith’s father
• Lavidia Cross, Faith’s mother
• Dr. Richard M. (Red-Eyes) Barrett, a thief and a philosopher
• Arnold T. Tippis, Faith’s first client when she turns to prostitution
• Isaac Maxwell, Faith’s husband, a newspaper editor
• Alpha Omega Holmes, Faith’s girlhood love

The Novel

Lavidia Cross, a black widow in rural Georgia, had little to leave her only daughter, Faith Cross, except a mysterious injunction: Faith must get herself a “Good Thing.” In Faith and the Good Thing, Faith Cross goes to Chicago, first to discover what this Good Thing is and then to acquire it.

Before her mother’s death, Faith had been “saved,” and for a time she had thought that God would bring her happiness, but the idea of the Good Thing supplants salvation as her guiding force. Puzzled, she consults a mysterious werewitch, the Swamp Woman, who sends her to Chicago.

In Chicago, Faith’s pursuit of the Good Thing does not begin auspiciously. A thief steals her money; when she turns to the friendly stranger Arnold T. Tippis for help, he takes her to a hotel, rapes her, and starts her in a career as a prostitute. Faith becomes increasingly dependent on drugs and gin in order to detach herself from the body which she is selling. When she realizes that, in telling the stories of her beloved father, Todd Cross, to her customers, she is also selling him, she knows that the Good Thing is receding beyond her reach. Yet Faith rejects the easy answers of the mission. The Good Thing, she insists, must be in the street, not in the Church.

At this point, the thief who stole her money reappears, identifying himself as Dr. Richard M. Barrett, a philosopher, who is also looking for the Good Thing. In his Doomsday Book, which is empty, Faith can see her own lost childhood, her own home, and all the good of the past, which is all the more precious because it can never be relived. Even after Barrett dies, he haunts Faith, a habit which seems rather a mixed blessing to her.

When Faith meets Isaac Maxwell, a young assistant news editor who is hardworking and ambitious, she thinks that he may be the Good Thing. After all, he is paid regularly and he will do whatever pleases her. Their marriage seems to be the end of her search. A year later, however, Faith feels that she is in bondage to her insecure, chauvinistic husband. When her girlhood love, Alpha Omega Holmes, an ex-convict and a painter, comes back into her life, Faith visits him regularly, supports him, and at last becomes pregnant by him. After Holmes refuses to give up his freedom to commit himself to Faith, and after Maxwell turns her out, Faith finds herself back in the cheap hotel where she had been a prostitute. There is a fire, and both her newborn baby and Faith herself die of burns. Returning to Georgia after her death, Faith tells the Swamp Woman that she is ready to give up her quest. The Swamp Woman convinces Faith that there are elements of the Good Thing in every part of life, and Faith becomes the Swamp Woman, while Faith’s story becomes a folktale.

The Characters

Because Faith and the Good Thing is a philosophical novel with an element of folktale, the characters are less clearly developed than they might be in a realistic novel. Dr. Richard M. Barrett, Arnold T. Tippis, Isaac Maxwell, and Alpha Omega Holmes all represent different versions of the Good Thing, and therefore their personal qualities are subordinated to their almost allegorical significance.

Furthermore, the folktale element of the novel, which is the source of much of its charm, nevertheless permits characters to escape from the normal requirements of realism into unexplained motives and actions. Lavidia Cross is persuaded to die because she hears that a human being is permitted only a preordained number of breaths. Similarly, Dr. Richard M. Barrett, the thief and philosopher, rather surprisingly returns Faith’s money and stays to become, for a time, the center of her life, with his empty Doomsday Book, in which Faith can read the story of her childhood.

As for the Swamp Woman, whenever she appears, she delivers oracular truths and performs magic; one cannot, however, explore her motivations any more than one can those of Dr. Barrett. At the end of the novel, when the Swamp Woman delivers her identity to the dead Faith, it is clear that Johnson is making a philosophical point rather than revealing the psychology of a real character. The storyteller who reappears to speak the last sentences in the novel refuses to deal in truth. If it is good, and if it is beautiful, that is enough. This point applies not only to the plot itself but also to the characters who act in the story.

The most fully developed characters in Faith and the Good Thing are the three members of the Cross family, perhaps because they have the idiosyncrasies of real people, rather than representing philosophical stances. When the story begins, Todd Cross is dead and Lavidia Cross is dying. In Faith’s memory, however, her father’s storytelling magic persists long after his death. She also recalls the meekness with which he took abuse, both from his disappointed wife Lavidia and from insulting men, yet Johnson suggests the resentment and the wounded pride beneath Cross’s self-control, and it is not surprising that at last he snapped, struck out, and was killed. Lavidia Cross, the woman who thought she was marrying a rich man but found herself sentenced to life in a sharecropper’s cabin, is a woman who clings to objects. Her rocking chair, her pipe, her newly baked bread are part of her. Above all, her words chain her to that everyday life which is her reality. Having once been tricked by tales, Lavidia intends to resist all magic such as that of Todd. She warns Faith to watch out for love, a mere trick, and Todd is angry, afraid that Faith will forgo the life of the imagination which he finds so rich. It is ironic that practical, talkative, skeptical Lavidia dies because she believes the “fact” that each person is allotted only a certain number of breaths. At 400,000,000, she dies.

Faith herself is an innocent, asking questions, considering answers, surviving evil with a certain wonder. She accepts Lavidia’s death and the 400,000,000 breaths theory; she accepts her rape by Tippis and later spends hours listening to his troubles; she accepts her Friday visitations by the dead philosopher; finally, she accepts her death and her transformation into the Swamp Woman. In Faith, one can see both Todd Cross’s capacity to live in a world which is not logical and Lavidia Cross’s ability to defy the world and get on with the business of surviving.

Critical Context

Although Faith and the Good Thing is rich in allusions to philosophy, to literature, and to the major elements in the black experience, and although it has elements of the folktale, essentially it falls into the genre of the philosophical novel. The pattern is familiar. A young person, discontented with his surroundings, travels in search of the secret of happiness. On the way he has various adventures, but, more important, he meets a number of people. Generally, none of them has found the secret. At the end of the story, the seeker may, like Rasselas, still be uncertain of the answer. Faith has at least redefined the Good Thing as being composed of fragments, but then, she has had to pass through death in order to attain the wisdom of the Swamp Woman.

Among the other elements of the traditional philosophical novel which are evident in Faith and the Good Thing are the lost-paradise motif and the acquisition of a companion in the quest. While sometimes the companion (or several companions) is with the quester throughout the story, on occasion he accompanies the quester only part of the way. In this novel, Dr. Richard M. Barrett offers to search with Faith, and she thinks that a coworker would be helpful. For some time, they explore the philosophical world together, and even after his death, Barrett returns to haunt—and presumably, to help—Faith. When she decides on the marriage to Maxwell, Faith must reject her ghostly companion, who is trying to dissuade her.

Finally, there is a lost-paradise motif in the novel. Even though the sharecropper’s farm in Georgia is no Happy Valley of princely luxury, when she looks in the Doomsday Book of Dr. Barrett, Faith sees all of the beauty of her lost childhood—a beauty that is perfect, she realizes, because she can never return to it. That experience of fragmentary memories, which create a paradise from what was in reality a mixture of happiness and misery, suggests the wisdom at which Faith will arrive at the end of the novel.

Bibliography

Davis, Arthur P. “Novels of the New Black Renaissance, 1960-1977: A Thematic Survey.” College Language Association Journal 21 (June, 1978): 457-491. A thematic and historical survey of New Black Renaissance writing. Places Faith and the Good Thing squarely in the heart of this resurgence of African American fiction.

Johnson, Charles. “An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Interview by Jonathan Little. Contemporary Literature 34 (Summer, 1993): 158-182. A discussion with Johnson about the structure and intertextuality of his novels. He agrees with the interviewer’s assertion that many of his novels, including Faith and the Good Thing, reflect a progression from ignorance to knowledge. Johnson also emphasizes the importance of black folklore in the novel.

Johnson, Charles. “An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Interview by Michael Boccia. African American Review 30 (Winter, 1996): 611-618. Covers Johnson’s childhood and his career, which he began as a cartoonist. He later developed an interest in Western and Eastern philosophy. He states that Faith Cross is patterned on his wife, Joan, whom he met in 1972 when he began writing Faith and the Good Thing. Johnson states that he became a writer specifically to develop black (and thereby American) philosophical fiction.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Within a broad and sophisticated discussion of African American writers, Johnson talks about Faith and the Good Thing. Comments on the dramatic structure of the novel, a structure fed by the tension felt by Faith as she moves between the beliefs of her father and of her mother, and between the beliefs in magic and in science.

Little, Jonathan. Charles Johnson’s Spiritual Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. A book-length study of Johnson’s work offering an account of Johnson’s artistic growth and the increasing spirituality of his imagination.

O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers. Seattle: Madrona, 1987. Contains an interview with Johnson in which he discusses the nature of the artist, a figure almost naturally infused with a sort of passion. He also dissects the intricate relations between philosophy and literature, defining himself in the process as a philosophical novelist.

Olderman, Raymond M. “American Fiction 1974-1976: The People Who Fell to Earth.” Contemporary Literature 19 (Autumn, 1978): 497-527. Examines Johnson as part of a generation of writers who share a “mutuality of concern” in their fiction. Identifies Johnson as an eclectic writer, as one who partakes of various modern and postmodern elements in the shaping of his fiction. Like other writers of this generation, Johnson evinces in his fiction an impulse toward change and toward movement. Olderman describes Faith and the Good Thing as a “new-style fable” that fashions a model world replete with soul as well as with sorrow.

Schultz, Elizabeth A. “The Heirs of Ralph Ellison: Patterns of Individualism in the Contemporary Afro-American Novel.” College Language Association Journal 22 (December, 1978): 101-122. This study of Faith and the Good Thing discusses Johnson’s debt to Ralph Ellison. Johnson’s work is considered part of a tradition that began with Ellison: the conscious exploration of philosophy from the African American perspective.