Soulcatcher and Other Stories. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by Ashraf H.A. Rushdy

Charles Johnson. Soulcatcher and Other Stories. San Diego: Harvest Original, 2001. 125 pp. $12.00

Charles Johnson's first collection of short stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986), contains eight "tales and conjurations." The stories had been published in several venues over the course of seven years (1977-1984) and differed significantly in their subject matter. Two stories are set in slavery-one involving a slave who acts out his benign master's unspoken and most violent desires, and the other involving two former slaves, a father and a son, who learn to fight the "old slave reflex" against emotional investment and to "surrender" to the sorcery of familial love. Two other stories are dystopias: one about two brothers who are ensorcelled by the money they find in the apartment of a dead, miserly housemaid, and the other about the breakdown of a community of pet shop animals who fail to value their commonalities while insisting on their species-and specious-differences. The remaining four stories deal with individuals who are in some way discovering either the complexity of their identities or the il lusory nature of personal identity itself. Whatever differences there are in their overt subject matter, the stories are connected in raising philosophical issues that had long been and remain deeply important to Johnson. These are stories about what happens when we do not discover and revel in what Johnson calls the "complex skein of relatedness" that connects us; they are stories about the various symptoms of that incurable state of illness Johnson describes as "selfhood."

Johnson's second collection of short stories, Soulcatcher, differs from the first in terms of subject and process of composition. All the stories are about slavery, and all were written in one month. The reason behind both the choice of subject and the impressive speed of composition is that the twelve stories in the volume were originally composed for and published in Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery, the companion volume to the PBS series produced by Orlando Blackwell. The circumstance of their original publication explains much about the stories themselves. Because they were meant to complement the narrative account of American slavery in Africans in America, the stories are arranged chronologically. The first two are set in colonial America; the next three concern figures associated with or living during the American Revolution. The following four stories take up events from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and the final three stories look at the intellectual and social ferment of the 1850s.

What marks the most obvious difference between the first and second collections is the attention Johnson gives to form in the second volume. Let me begin by noting that anyone who has read Johnson's novels or criticism knows that he is a craftsman who values and eloquently defends the profound importance of literary form. No form, he writes in Oxherding Tale, "loses its ancestry." The meanings particular forms evoke continue to "accumulate in layers of tissue as the form evolves." The role of the writer, he comments in Being and Race, is to "honor" the form and to "move the form forward" through the possibilities made real by the author's historical period. A writer as committed as Johnson to recognizing the significance of form, then, is certain to be concerned with form in all published work. So let me be clear that I am not denying Johnson's attention to form in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but merely noting that he brings more focused energy to formal play and innovation in Soulcatcher.

In fact, as he states in the preface to the collection, one of the primary goals he set for himself in writing these stories was to deploy "a repertoire of formal variations" as he attempted to create a "diversity of narrative styles that would make each story aesthetically vivid." Using voices ranging from "authorial omniscience (third-person-limited)" to "alternating first-person monologues," and techniques as different as fictitious diary entries and mock-newspaper articles, Johnson has certainly succeeded in his task of making these stories formally diverse.

But it is more than just the author's attention to form that makes this collection memorable and worthwhile. The stories in Soul catcher are not so consistently magical and bristling with philosophical energy as are those in The Sorcerer's Apprentice but they do bring to the fore other aspects of Johnson's rich meditation on American history and culture. The first two stories give us insight into different modes of resistance. In one story, the young boy Malawi becomes a griot during the middle passage when his older brother passes along his people's history. The title of the story, "The Transmission," puns on two different kinds of transmission, physical and cultural, one into slavery and the other beyond it. The second story, evoking Nat Turner in its title, "Confession," describes the actions of those who participated in the 1739 Stono Rebellion. One mode of resistance, Johnson suggests, is to fight physically, another to keep alive the cultural traditions that give meaning to those who fight enslavement.