'Sorcery is dialectical:' Plato and Jean Toomer in Charles Johnson's 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Frederick T. Griffiths

"The Education of Mingo"

To complete this sketch of the averted allegories and unfolding arguments of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, I need to go back to the opening and earliest story in the collection, "The Education of Mingo" (1977). This ante-bellum parable about education and slavery is one bookend for the collection, with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as the other, and six contemporary tales in between. Paralleling and reversing the aging Allmuseri sorcerer Rubin and his overeager apprentice Allan are an all-too-astute Allmuseri apprentice, Mingo, and an aging Illinois farmer who, like Allan, attempts to kilt too many birds with one stone. For the childless and lonely Moses Green attempts to give himself a helpmate, companion, son, heir, and alter ego in the single person of his slave and pupil Mingo. Like Allan, he has all the best intentions in the world, perhaps even emancipation (he is a Moses), not to mention great innocence (Green). His missing sense of boundary and distinction puts him at a polar remove from the over-distinguished, over-distinguishing Chicago professor in his ivory tower. And thereby hangs a creation tale, in which Moses the lonely Monad supplies himself with an Other to be shaped in his own image much as God shapes Adam, or Frankenstein constructs his monster, or a writer plants his "spitting image" on the page. From Moses's primordial confusion the burgeoning Mingo brings alive linked distinctions: slave and master, black and white, mind and body, ultimately self and other ("'Mingo, you more me than I am myself'" [22]). Mingo learns rapidly by imitation, though with his own slight category confusions, such as in revering hawks and killing strangers. Leaping over Eve and the issue of sexual difference, the parable confronts the advent of violence in Cain and Abel. The innocently compliant Mingo twice acts on Moses's own murderous and unadmitted thoughts, which Moses finally owns up to: "'It was me set the gears in motion'" (22). In this Fall, it is master and slave who together are fugitives from the garden - to Missouri, as it happens.