Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson

First published: 1982

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1843-1865

Locale: South Carolina

Principal Characters:

• Andrew Hawkins, the narrator, a slave
• George Hawkins, Andrew’s father
• Mattie Hawkins, George’s wife and Andrew’s stepmother
• Jonathan Polkinghorne, Andrew’s first owner
• Anna Polkinghorne, Jonathan’s wife and the biological mother of Andrew
• Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, a Trancendentalist and Andrew’s tutor
• Flo Hatfield, Andrew’s second owner and lover
• Reb, an older slave who befriends Andrew
• Horace Bannon, the “Soulcatcher,” who captures runaway slaves
• Peggy Undercliff, Andrew’s white wife

The Novel

Oxherding Tale describes the education a young slave, Andrew Hawkins, receives from a variety of people. It is through synthesizing the different views from these people that he becomes a complete person.

The novel itself opens with “the Fall,” which is how Andrew describes his conception. During a bout of heavy drinking, Jonathan Polkinghorne, the owner of a South Carolina plantation named Cripplegate, and his favorite slave, who is also his butler, decide to swap wives for one night. The master slips into the slave’s quarters, while the slave (George Hawkins) goes to the Polkinghornes’ bedroom. The deception is uncovered by Anna Polkinghorne during the act of intercourse, and although she immediately screams, causing George to run from the bedroom, Anna has been impregnated. This act forces her husband to send George to work in the fields, thus causing him to fall in stature from a house slave to a field slave. George’s new occupation is that of an oxherd.

Even though Jonathan would like the baby to be brought up as the Polkinghornes’ own son since they are childless, his wife insists that Andrew be placed in the slave quarters as though there is no connection between the master and his slave. Consequently, Andrew is reared by George and his wife, Mattie, though Jonathan allows the boy to receive an excellent education with the promise of someday being free.

To tutor Andrew, Jonathan hires an itinerant philosopher named Ezekiel Sykes-Withers. Ezekiel professes to be a Transcendentalist, which means that he is more interested in theory than in real life. Andrew learns his lessons well from Ezekiel— mathematics, languages, abstract reasoning—but something is missing. Andrew finds what is lacking from his life in the person of a girl named Minty. When he asks Jonathan for his freedom so that he may purchase Minty and marry her, however, Andrew is sent to work for a woman, Flo Hatfield.

Flo, owner of a mine named Leviathan, takes the handsome boy as a lover and teaches him the philosophy of hedonism. Andrew enjoys the privileges of being Flo’s lover for a year before he sickens of it. He escapes with another slave, Reb, a coffin-maker, who has become a father figure to him. On the road north, they meet Horace Bannon, the “Soulcatcher,” who captures runaway slaves by emptying his own soul to allow the essence of the runaway to fill it. In other words, Horace—who is also a psychopathic killer—becomes “black” himself, taking on the characteristics and personality of his prey. He does not kill the runaway, he tells Andrew and Reb, until the slave begs for death because he can no longer stand the pressure of being on the run, of never fitting into a white society.

At Spartanburg, South Carolina, Andrew takes a job as a teacher. This is possible because his light complexion allows him to “pass” as white. Reb stays with Andrew for awhile, but finally he leaves for Chicago. Meanwhile, Andrew finds himself trapped into marrying the daughter of a local doctor. He comes to love Peggy Undercliff, however, and seems to be settled into Spartanburg as a respectable member of the white community.

Ironically, just as he feels safe, Andrew learns that Horace has set off to catch and kill Reb. Further complicating matters, Andrew attends a slave auction and discovers a very ill Minty. He buys her, but she soon dies. As he stands by her deathbed, Andrew feels forlorn and wonders how long he can continue the charade in Spartanburg. It is then that Horace appears. Andrew willingly accompanies the Soulcatcher to the woods, expecting to be killed. Instead, Horace tells Andrew that he could not catch Reb because the coffin-maker had gradually emptied his soul during his captivity; he had learned to expect nothing and to desire nothing. Reb had freed himself, literally and figuratively, by never attempting to fit into white society. Because he had finally encountered a slave he could not capture, Horace tells Andrew that he has retired from the slave-catching profession, leaving the schoolteacher to return to his life in Spartanburg. Andrew does just that, but he is wiser having learned from all his teachers—George, Ezekiel, Flo, and especially Reb.

The Characters

Andrew Hawkins, the narrator of Oxherding Tale, is an extremely intelligent, pragmatic man. He is always eager to experience all aspects of life and to learn from others. Although he comes across as a prig early in the novel—he feels himself superior to all the slaves and most of the masters—by the end of the story he has grown into a character with whom a reader can empathize. Charles Johnson certainly intended this feeling of empathy, as the readers of Oxherding Tale are to learn from Andrew’s experiences just as Andrew himself learned from them. Andrew is not to be seen as a “real” character, however; instead, Johnson intends his protagonist to stand as a metaphor, a character whose adventures are allegorical. Woven into the character of Andrew are various philosophical threads that reinforce points Johnson wants to make in his novel. All this taken together means that Andrew never comes to life or seems like a real person.

George Hawkins, Andrew’s father and first teacher, is nothing more than a stereotype in the novel. A radical black nationalist convinced that all whites are evil, he eventually leads a slave revolt at Cripplegate. Horace Bannon tracks him easily because George’s soul is so full of hate that he can never hide. In the end, he begs Horace to kill him because the hate he bears is too much to carry any longer.

Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, Andrew’s second teacher, is portrayed as a fool because he lives only for the abstract. He is devastated, for example, when he meets Karl Marx and finds that the German philosopher fails to share his own pessimism. Marx tells Ezekiel to enjoy life, to find a woman with whom he could be happy. Ezekiel, however, is “happiest” when miserable because he is convinced of the stupidity of the human race.

Flo Hatfield, Andrew’s lover and third teacher, is a stereotype as well. Her only interest is in seeking all forms of pleasure. She indulges in excesses of food, drugs, and sex in an attempt to kill the pain of existence. For a time, this sort of life seems appropriate to Andrew, but he soon realizes that it is ultimately just as empty as the life led by Ezekiel.

Reb, a father figure for Andrew and his fourth teacher, is a member of the Allmuseri tribe from Africa. The Allmuseri, apparently a creation of Johnson’s, believe that it is the duty of each individual in a society to immerse himself in the society as a whole, that individuality is, if not an outright illusion, at least an act of selfish egoism. Reb has learned that to survive in an alien culture he must eliminate his individuality through self-denial; he lives for each moment and for himself, in contrast to the other characters in the novel. Through the way he leads his life, Reb serves as an exemplar for Andrew. By the end of the novel, Andrew has learned his lesson well; it is understood that he, just as Reb had done years earlier, has freed himself.

Horace Bannon, the “Soulcatcher,” represents the sum of all the people Andrew has met and the sum of all the lessons that Andrew has learned. Horace has a tattoo on his chest and arms, revealed to Andrew at the end of the novel, in which the entire story is seen in microcosm. It is through viewing this tattoo that Andrew realizes how Reb freed himself, for it is in the tattoo that Andrew sees the meaninglessness of physical life.

Critical Context

Charles Johnson started his career as a cartoonist and published his work in newspapers and magazines. Two collections of his cartoons and drawings were subsequently published, Black Humor (1970) and Half-Past Nation Time (1972). Eventually, however, he turned to fiction as a means of artistic expression. As he completed his master’s degree in philosophy at Southern Illinois University in the early 1970’s, Johnson studied with novelist John Gardner. He wrote and rewrote under Gardner until he produced what would become his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing (1974). That novel can be read as a folktale in which a woman named “Faith” sets out on a literal and figurative journey to find the meaning of her existence.

Following Faith and the Good Thing, Johnson published Oxherding Tale, which received favorable reviews from both popular magazines as well as from literary journals. He followed his second novel with a collection of short fiction, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1986), and with a book of literary criticism, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (1988). His growing reputation as one of America’s most important writers was solidified in 1990 when he published Middle Passage, which was accepted by most critics as his best novel and which won the National Book Award. Middle Passage is the story of Rutherford Calhoun, a thief who meets members of the Allmuseri tribe who are being taken into slavery. He comes to admire their fortitude in the face of captivity and wants to learn how they deal with adversity. The novel then shows Rutherford’s slow progress toward renunciation of materialism in favor of self-negation under the guidance of the Allmuseri.

A common thread throughout these novels is an interest in exploring the limits of human knowledge. Johnson, with his training as a philosopher, wants to know what is possible for people to understand about their own existence. Exactly why, Johnson asks, do we act and think the way we do? Although answers are not always readily available, Johnson argues persuasively in his fiction that to neglect to ask such questions, to go through life always accepting the way things are, is to live with blinders. According to Johnson, it is up to each individual to question his own existence in order to lead a full, free life.

Bibliography

Byrd, Rudolph P. “Oxherding Tale and Siddhartha: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Emergence of a Hidden Tradition.” African American Review 30 (Winter, 1996): 549-558. Byrd shows the connection between Oxherding Tale and Siddhartha and demonstrates how Johnson was influenced by Hesse’s novel. Both books share similar structure and intellectual concerns.

Coleman, James W. “Charles Johnson’s Quest for Black Freedom in Oxherding Tale.” African American Review 29 (Winter, 1995): 631-644. Coleman asserts that Johnson attempts to achieve freedom from the dominant and narrow tradition of written black texts. Johnson has stated that he centers his own writing around phenomenological theory. In this article, Coleman links the theory with Johnson’s attempt at black textual revision.

Crouch, Stanley. “Charles Johnson: Free at Last!” In Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Crouch’s insightful review of the novel shows that Johnson has created, using the nineteenth century genre of the slave narrative, a fascinating protagonist in Andrew Hawkins. Crouch finds Andrew and his search for some truth in his existence to be reminiscent of characters created by authors such as Herman Melville or Mark Twain.

Davis, Arthur P. “Novels of the New Black Renaissance, 1960-1977: A Thematic Survey.” College Language Association Journal 21 (June, 1978): 457-491. Analyzes the work of twenty-four modern black writers, including Johnson. A useful introduction to the major African American fiction of the period.

Gleason, William. “The Liberation of Perception: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Winter, 1991) 705-728. Gleason argues that Oxherding Tale is an explicit response to Johnson’s own call for a rebirth and a rebuilding of African American literature.

Harris, Norman. “The Black Universe in Contemporary Afro-American Fiction.” College Language Association Journal 30 (1986): 1-13. Claims that Johnson, like Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, moves beyond the naturalism and realism that characterized earlier African American fiction.

Hayward, Jennifer. “Something to Serve: Constructs of the Feminine in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale.” Black American Literature Forum 25 (Winter, 1991): 689-703. Hayward attempts to demonstrate that Oxherding Tale can be read as a metaphor in which polar opposites (white/black, master/slave, male/female) are reconciled through Johnson’s use of metafictional techniques and African American tradition.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Johnson discusses the development of African American literature and his own theories of fiction. He asserts that the best literature is a blend of imagination, invention, and interpretation.

Johnson, Charles. “Reflections on Fiction, Philosophy, and Film: An Interview with Charles Johnson.” Callaloo 1 (October, 1978): 118-128. A wide-ranging discussion of the author’s varied areas of interest.

Little, Jonathan. “Charles Johnson’s Revolutionary Oxherding Tale.” Studies in American Fiction 19 (Autumn, 1991): 141-151. Little’s excellent essay argues that Oxherding Tale breaks the constraints usually placed on African American fiction by dealing with issues, such as one man’s struggle to find meaning in his own life, not normally seen in works by African American writers.

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. Along with a discussion of Oxherding Tale, there are examinations of each of Johnson’s major works.

Parrish, Timothy L.“Imaging Slavery: Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson.” Studies in American Fiction 25 (Spring 1997): 81-98. Parrish asserts that although they offer differing views of the present, both authors understand that slavery’s meaning cannot be recaptured, but only re-seen. Parrish compares the two works and the authors’ philosophical approaches to them.

Shultz, Elizabeth. “The Heirs of Ralph Ellison.” College Language Association Journal 22 (December, 1978): 101-122. Useful for gauging Johnson’s significance in the context of post-World War II African American literature.