Faith and the Good Thing

Interweaving the real and the surreal, Charles Johnson spins eight fantastic tales of transformations and metamorphoses. An Illinois farmer teaches a young slave everything he knows — yielding fatal consequences. A young boy growing to manhood as a country sorcerer’s apprentice learns the difference between power and strength. These stories capture human experiences in a new and startling light.

It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly treed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a daring voyage of horror and self-discovery.

Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative, and philosophical novel.

Twelve stories about the African experience of slavery in America, by the National Book Award-winning novelist.

Nothing has had as profound an effect on American life as slavery. For blacks and whites alike, the experience has left us with a conflicted and contradictory history. Now, famed novelist Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award, presents a dozen tales of the effects and experience of slavery, each based on historical fact, and each about those Africans who arrived on our shores in shackles. From Martha Washington's management of her slaves, bequeathed to her at the death of the first president, to a boy chained in the bowels of a ship plying the infamous passage from Africa to the South laden with human cargo, from a lynching in Indiana to a hunter of escaped slaves searching the Boston market for his quarry, from an early Quaker meeting exploring resettlement in Africa to the day after Emancipation-the voices, terrors, and savagery of slavery come vividly and unforgettably to life.

These stories, told by a master storyteller, transcend history even as they present it, and retell the mythic proportions of a historical period with astounding realism and beauty, power, and emotion.