'Oxherding Tale' and 'Siddhartha:' philosophy, fiction, and the emergence of a hidden tradition

African American Review, Winter, 1996 by Rudolph P. Byrd

While Hesse is engaged in a selective retelling of the life and experiences of the Buddha, Johnson is engaged in a selective reconstruction of an epoch through the creation of a fictionalized antebellum slave narrative. The narrator of this metaphysical slave narrative is Andrew Hawkins, who assumes the identity of William Harris by the novel's conclusion. In contrast to Siddhartha, Johnson's questing and questioning narrator is a mulatto fugitive slave in whose life we apprehend patterns that recall the lives of such fugitive slaves as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Hawkins's dense narrative is the vehicle for a journey whose destination is not Hesse's fabled East, but the world of the antebellum South of Spartenburg, South Carolina. Like Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and most recently John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Johnson has created a fictional universe set in motion by the paradoxes and actualities of slavery in a purportedly democratic republic.

"Although nearly anything you said about slavery could be denied in the same breath," muses Andrew Hawkins in a state of freedom, "this much struck me as true: the wretchedness of being colonized was not that slavery created feelings of guilt and indebtedness, though I did feel guilt and debt; nor that it created a long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, which it did indeed create, but the fact that men had epidermalized Being" (52). This important passage, which is an example of the fine writing everywhere in evidence in Oxherding Tale, is a kind of expansive synecdoche in which we apprehend the various ways in which slavery has shaped the life and sensibility of Andrew Hawkins.

Certainly, Hawkins feels "guilt and debt" because he fails to realize the important goals to which he had committed himself when setting out from Cripplegate to Leviathan: to earn enough money to purchase his own freedom as well as that of his father George Hawkins, his stepmother Mattie Hawkins, and his betrothed Minty, all of whom make certain sacrifices in order to make his slave existence endurable. Certainly, Hawkins is immersed in a "lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness," for with the exception of the friendship he establishes with Reb, Leviathan's Coffinmaker, he remains, for significant periods, either a sexual slave or a fugitive slave seeking meaning and safety in a culture and economy that would deny him, at every turn, such fundamental needs of human existence. And in Hawkins's use of the rich and resonant phrase epidermalized Being is expressed the ultimate paradox of slavery in a democratic republic which values, theoretically, the humanity of each individual. The sole objective of slavery in the United States, and more specifically the slavery so deeply entrenched at Cripplegate and Leviathan, was the grotesque reduction of human beings into matter, into chattel for personal profit. In the writing of this historical novel, Johnson remains faithful to his artistic goal of fully illustrating the dispiriting actualities which supported and advanced this capitalistic enterprise.